Writing

Exploring an outlet of company, creativity, and a lifelong journey to claim it

This is going to sound a little bit glib, but I’ve been writing since I could write.

Starting in about the third grade, I kept a daily journal that would follow me up through grade 12. A couple of years ago, I did a bit of excavating into my past, trying to sort out who I was back then, where I’d come from, what I was thinking, and if I was as confused as the residual feelings from that time led me to believe.

(I was.)

This was the era of watching an aftermath of footage from the wreck that killed Princess Diana, Columbine, and 9/11. This was the time of being recently introduced to the internet and a portable mobile phone while living in the isolation of rural Pennsylvania as a chatty, expressive extrovert. This combination was like shaking up a bottle of seltzer. The insecurities, restlessness, and confusion of a teenage girl back then were just as real as any other time period. And it’s all there documented with perfectly smooth black or blue ballpoint pens pressed into the lined pages of faux leatherbound journals: Four during senior year alone.

Reading them as a middle-aged mom of two, I turned the pages like I was consuming a young adult novel, genuinely engrossed and curious about what was going to happen next. Even then, I had a propensity for details, writing as though a future reader - me - would want to know about the setting, what everyone said, what they were all wearing, and what I was feeling.

I did then. I do now.

Words and sentences came easily to me. From a young age, any situation unfolding before me was actively transcribed into detailed descriptions and chapters in my brain, like a friend making observations while I watched scenes play out in real time. “I felt the tension as she walked into the room wearing her leggings and zip-up hoodie. I knew she was in a bad mood. I glanced at the clock and noticed the time.”

I assumed everyone saw the world in this way.

In the days when I didn’t always have an immediate confidante or company in the form of a person, I found emotional comfort in being my own sounding board and companion. I was my own reader of one.

… This is about as wistful and lonely as it sounds.

In elementary school, while everyone else was playing baseball and running around the woods and streams of the school district, I was inside at the family PC writing stories about witches and vampires, friends named Jessica and Jennifer (I didn’t say I was especially creative), and leprechauns, illustrating the stories with a set of perfectly sharpened colored pencils. My grade school teachers would read my stories out loud to the class.

By middle school, along with journaling, I was writing lengthy novellas about my love life and friend troubles to pen pals I’d met at Korean adoptee heritage camps, which increased my social circle of those reading my writing from one to a few. I’d drop a masterpiece of storytelling in the mailbox, and a week later, I’d receive a reply, like a magic portal of connection. Soon, letters turned into emails. I was JTaeHeeKimF@hotmail.com. My dad would smile at our computer keyboard, the s, d, f, g, j, k, and l worn off from all of my typing. Learning ‘home row’ is still one of the best skills I ever acquired from my public school education. By high school, English teachers were praising me for my essays and creative ventures on the page.

But then.

My formal creative writing training in college made me feel less-than, diminishing my confidence in a slow and tedious, painstaking way. My professors approved of one style of nonfiction, and I didn’t have moody topics to write about like my peers. I’d had a happy childhood. Sure, I had my fair share of dramatic boy and friendship issues, but nothing that seemed worth writing about.

There’s a point in your life when everything is just regular because it’s all that you know. I wasn’t yet at a point of looking in the mirror or my past in a way that would lead to critical thinking or analysis.

For this reason and a variety of others, I was never published in any of the college journals or recognized by my faculty or peers as one of the standouts.

It was clear I wasn’t going to make it as “a writer.”

I put it aside, turning my attention to crafting policies, procedures, and programs for work. I spent quite a lot of years not journaling. Life was going along as planned. Only once in awhile did I take out a little moleskin I had a habit of carrying around to jot down a thought. The area of my brain set aside for self-reflection and connections grew a little bit rusty. For almost 2 decades, I occupied myself with other things. Other outlets.

Until one day I found myself on an unexpected journey of returning to Korea.

Before then, I’d been on other random and great adventures - three times to South Africa, once down the wedding aisle, another to London and Prague, two journeys through pregnancy, and one eventful and hilarious path to the mayor’s office.

But when I knew I was going back to Korea, a part of me knew it wasn’t going to be “just” a vacation. In the very least, I didn’t want to return home and think, Damn, I should have gone up to Namsan Tower and now it’s too late.

I began journaling. And sharing updates on social media both personally and through the audience I’d gathered in Royersford, where I had become a B-list local celebrity.

I blogged during my trip to Korea to meet my birth family and as I spent time with my feet on the ground in Mokpo, the city where I was born, and around the streets and hof (bars) of Seoul, the city I would come to love.

It turns out, there was something I could have been writing about that entire time I was in college.

And when I returned home to Royersford, Pennsylvania and no one - least of all me - knew how to ask questions, check in properly, or support me in understanding all I had and was about to experience, I found my way back to this laptop.

Once again, I was in a place of isolation, but this time, in my own mind.

I began endlessly writing again - first to myself in a journal. Then in therapy notes. Eventually in emails and messages to other adoptees which increased my social circle of those reading my writing from one to a few.

I found comfort in them during a time when I - and the renewed narrator in my brain - watched as I had the slowest and most deliberate psychological breakdown anyone’s ever seen.

I’m nothing if not an overachiever.

It didn’t look the same as others’ and certainly not what you’d see in the movies. But there were clues: Bursting into tears after leaving my Korean drycleaner. Collapsing into myself in quiet ways. Suddenly having limited tolerance to be accommodating with loved ones, and not immediately jumping to put myself last, as usual. Arguing with almost every person in my life. Deciding to plan and start a Farmers Market in the midst of packing up and preparing to move my young family across the planet.

Thinking every single day how it would be easier to get into my Subaru Outback, drive away, never return, and not have to start over in order to figure out this person I didn’t recognize, who I’d avoided and suppressed for almost 40 years.

All the while, I found my voice again through my fingers on a keyboard. Because I can type something like 90 words a minute, I can often figure it out quicker this way than speaking it out loud.

Still.

If anyone would ask, I never called myself “a writer.”

Writers have agents. They get published. They win awards. I’d never even been published in my college literary magazine.

So, when it was suggested I begin a blog or, perhaps, start a memoir, I balked.

Only writers do that.

I sat down in cafes that first autumn on Jeju Island and I struggled. My sentences were clunky and forced, flowery and shallow. What was I doing? I could write a Facebook post in 6 and a half minutes that people read and responded to, and I couldn’t write half a page about meeting my birth father?

What was going on?

Slowly, like about everything else in my life, I began to change the narrative in my brain, the story I’d been telling myself about what “a writer” is and what writing “should be.”

It’s different for everyone. And for me, it wasn’t what I was trying - and failing to do - when I sat down to write “my memoir.”

Writing for me is - and always has been - something else. It’s been just for me. And once in awhile, I’m lucky if someone else decides to read and get something out of it, too.

Exactly one year ago, I rolled out this Substack account. Starting with about 30 readers, I’ve published 20 essays which have been read about 8,000 times across all of them. I have 435 subscribers, about 65% of whom open each email. And I have 40 dedicated subscribers who actually pay to read what I have to say, supporting me during a time when I’m never quite sure how I will pay my rent in the future or if I should spring for that next cup of coffee.

Here’s what I want to say: Something as simple as calling myself a writer has been a lifelong journey. I wish I had the self-confidence to own pieces of my Self that I have always known to be true, but that’s not generally the way life has unfolded for me.

So, if you’re reading - or listening to this essay on my podcast - thank you. Thank you for every comment, every share, every word of encouragement, and for helping me reach a place I’ve been working toward my entire life.

I’m Jenna Lee Kim. I’m a writer. And so much more.

Questions? Comments? Leave a comment here and I’ll respond to it on my Spotify Podcast: Exploring with Jenna Lee Kim in an “unplugged” and unscripted way! You can also email me at jenna.tae.hee.kim@gmail.com