Author: Haiku Kwon

When Trying to Be Positive Brings You Down

“Serenity comes when you trade expectations for acceptance.” ~Unknown

How many of us have caught ourselves feeling as though we’re imposters when we’re trying to talk about a difficult situation in a positive light? We’re often fed the idea that how we feel is in how we decide to see life, which, I agree with; however, sometimes I think that idea gets taken to a deceptive extreme.

In the midst of one of my mini-meltdowns the other day, I called my friend and told her what had been going on in my head the last few months.

“It’s sounds as though you have some shame issues with your experience. It’s okay to admit that you’re disappointed and angry. You need to allow yourself to accept it. It’s the first step in healing…” my friend asserted as I was invalidating myself while I attempted to explain how I felt about the last year of my life.

“What a relief,” I thought to myself as she went back and validated every one of my thoughts and feelings.

Have you ever known something in the back of your mind, but you needed someone else to bring it to the front?

Any time I talked about my experience, I would always do my best to portray it in the best light possible. We’re supposed to be optimistic about how we see life and our experiences, right? The problem was that I was doing it at the cost of compromising the authenticity of my story.

I moved halfway across the nation, leaving behind my well paying (but miserable) job, friends, and family in search of finding work that filled instead of drained me. I accepted a one-year position as an intern counselor at a residential boarding school, working with adolescents coming from particularly challenging backgrounds.

I loved working with the students and learned invaluable lessons from them and their stories.

I hated constantly feeling as though I wasn’t (good) enough.

I poured everything I had into that year, and admittedly, there were definitely times I failed because I struggled to find the support I needed while carrying the weight of a massive life upheaval, trying to be “present” for my friends and family back home, and balancing helping to guide the students through their issues while trying to not retrigger my own.

Additionally, I couldn’t meet all the expectations coming from so many different people and places, so I did the best I could but it didn’t cover everything.

Though I would tell a friend that is all you can do and that is good enough, like so many others, I am my own worst enemy and consistently felt like a failure.

I returned to my home state feeling defeated not only regarding my performance at the school, but about returning without having found what I set out looking for.

I felt even more clueless and lost than before I left, and it was embarrassing. Who leaves everything behind looking for something, and then returns without it?

My friend continued to gently remind me that not everything is within my control when I’d protest saying things like, “but isn’t how we see life all about our perceptions? Aren’t we supposed to be able to go out and fix things if they aren’t filling our needs or change how we look at them?”

“So, it wasn’t what you were hoping it would be. That’s not your fault. You need to admit and accept that you feel the way you do, and it’s okay. Trying to cover up what’s really going on might be what’s holding you back from moving forward.”

Oh. Right.

When she said that it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. It’s okay to say that there were some flaws with the program that had nothing to do with me. It’s okay that the experience wasn’t perfect. It’s okay that I wasn’t perfect.

I was trying so hard to always put a positive spin on my story that I wasn’t really telling my story anymore, and that subtle lie was corroding my own sense of self-worth.

All that said, I do believe in doing our best to “look at the bright side,” so to speak, but not before we can honestly assess our experience and accept how we really feel.

It’s only when we can be truly honest with ourselves about how we feel that we will be able to find the positive lesson, heal, and move on.

December 17, 2013
Learning to Love and Live Again When Life Gets Hard

“The pain you feel today will be the strength you feel tomorrow.” ~Unknown

It’s when you’ve woken up with a full day ahead of you after only two hours of sleep.

It’s when there’s nothing for you to do but sit by your friends as they deal with tragedies and all the hard stuff life throws at us.

It’s when you don’t know how to handle the situations in your life that are anything but black and white.

It’s when you feel utterly helpless and powerless as you watch someone you care about aching with the deep soul wounds that only come from losing the person that comprised the other half of their heart.

It’s when your own heart feels as though it’s been crushed beyond recognition over and over again.

It’s when your path is entirely unclear and you don’t know if the next step is solid ground or off a cliff.

It’s when you’re not sure if the decisions you’ve made are the right ones.

It’s when sometimes you realize they weren’t.

It’s when it looks as though the world is irrevocably falling apart.

It’s when it seems like people are becoming more and more disconnected, lonely, and afraid.

It’s when you feel as though there’s no way you can even begin to help fix any of it.

It’s when you realize that, in spite of it all, you really are smart and strong enough to make it through step by agonizingly slow step.

It’s when you realize that just when you thought you had nothing left to give, you find you actually have everything left to give and more.

It’s when you want to give up on it all, but find that one thing that drives you to keep going.

It’s easy to love and give and feel happy and alive when things are going well, when we feel as though the world is our oyster. But what happens when life feels as though it’s caving in with a spirit crushing weight?

Over the course of forty-eight hours I found out a friend died, two of the people closest to me are supporting their moms as they contend with cancer, several friends are struggling with family issues, and all the while I’m attempting to balance out fourteen hour work days as a counselor at a residential high school, but just wishing I was home to be with everyone.

It reminds me a lot of when I was working out and training for hours on end. There would come times when I felt exhausted, burnt out, and desperately wanted to quit. But then I remembered my goal.

I remembered that the pain and discomfort were temporary, and the strength, endurance, flexibility, and functionality I was gaining were invaluable.

While working out seems like an insignificant comparison to major life events, the psychological training is the same. What you tell yourself in moments that seem unimportant is what reemerge when things get hard. As the quote goes, “You don’t rise to the level of your expectations, you fall to the level of your training.”

You don’t grow when things are easy and effortless. You grow when you’re being challenged—sometimes beyond what you think you’re capable of handling.

We carry ideas of what we think loving and living are until something comes along and redefines how we see it all. Sometimes it redefines it by making it appear as though it’s completely broken or entirely gone.

But you know what the beautiful part of it all is?

Just because we think something is broken doesn’t mean that it can’t be mended in some way.

And just because we think we can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. The world around us reminds us of it all the time. Even the sun, moon, and stars silently show us that they exist even when there’s too much in the way to see them.

It’s not easy. It’s really, really hard. In fact, sometimes it looks nearly impossible. How are we supposed to gather our scattered bits of resolve to rebuild the will to keep moving forward when all we really want to do is curl up and hide from the world?

It’s those times we have to step aside and heal in whatever way we can, and in that time, remember (or find) what it is that keeps us going.

It’s when we think we have no reason left to love, and sometimes when we question our very existence, that we have to allow ourselves to find and create a whole new beauty from what may have felt like (and maybe was) an end.

As Cormac McCarthy wrote in All the Pretty Horses, “…those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”

If we are open to the lessons from our hardships, misfortunes, and tragedies, they will inevitably build within us an increasingly unshakable compassion, understanding, and love.

Losing so much of what I’ve loved and watching as friends contend with their own losses, I’ve learned that when it seems things couldn’t be any worse, that’s when it’s most important to gather every last bit of will and heart and forge the faith to keep believing that love and life are worth every single moment.

Even those that break our hearts.

It’s in those moments when we have to learn how to love and live again.

“It’s times like these you learn to live again. It’s times like these you give and give again. It’s times like these you learn to love again.” ~Foo Fighters

October 13, 2013
Learning to Trust Again When You’ve Been Hurt in the Past

“The only way to know if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” ~Ernest Hemingway

In a world where it seems as though all we hear about and see is how one person betrayed another, how do we allow ourselves to trust someone to get close at all, let alone trust them to be near the most fragile parts of us?

Over the course of the last year, I’ve been working as an intern-counselor at a residential high school with around seventy teenagers. Many of them have come from unbelievably challenging backgrounds where they have had to learn to not trust anyone as a matter of survival.

Imagine having spent your entire life always having to watch your back literally and figuratively, not just because there are strangers who may want to harm you, but also because even those who are supposed to be close to you could turn against you in an instant.

How difficult do you think it would be to let down the defenses that kept you safe and in some cases, alive, for so long?

In my own world, I’ve struggled with allowing people to really know me because for most of my life, it felt as though I was burned every time I did.

Over time, I learned how to seem friendly but kept virtually everyone at a distance, and those who got too close I rapidly pushed away, sometimes completely out of my life.

I was already struggling to put my pieces back together after several major tragedies in my family, and allowing others in meant (the possibility of) compounding my heartbreak. I just couldn’t handle anymore at the time.

Eventually I began to open up, but each time found myself wondering why I had been so naive again.

Then there came a point where, slowly but surely, people began to enter my life who showed me what it meant to be able to trust—trust them to show up, trust them to listen, trust them with commitments, and the biggest one of all, trust them with my heart.

These people came in the form of friends who are now my family and have had my back in countless ways over the years, and the most surprising and recent of all, a man who is not only telling me, but showing me, what a man does to express his profound interest beyond just the physical.

If I wouldn’t have begun to take down my walls, I may have never found these amazing people. They didn’t appear because I had perfectly learned to trust already. They appeared because I was willing to learn to trust, even if imperfectly.

As I’ve been learning to trust and lower my defenses, I’ve been working with my students to do the same.

Their stories are different in that many of them have come from a history of abuse and/or gang related activities. But we share a similar outcome in struggling to realize that what once protected us is no longer needed, and in some cases, is actually hurting us further by isolating us from the love we need to heal and move forward.

It’s like taking too much medicine; sometimes a certain amount is necessary to get better, but beyond that it can break our systems down.

We each come to crossroads in our lives where we have to make the decision to let go of our old survival mechanisms in order to grow and make room for something better.

Sometimes what used to protect us becomes what harms us and stifles the capacity for our lives to be open and full of joy, love, and peace.

When it comes to trusting each other, we have to accept that our past is not our present. We have to be able to recognize that what hurt us before is not necessarily what is currently standing before us—even sometimes when the situation looks frighteningly similar, and sometimes even when it’s the same person.

Does this mean we won’t ever get hurt again? Nope. That’s a part of life. People will let us down, and we will let them down, but that doesn’t mean our efforts to disassemble our defense mechanisms are in vain.

If we never allow ourselves any vulnerability, we lose out on the opportunity to make incredibly deep and meaningful connections that open up our lives in ways that couldn’t happen any other way.

Those connections draw out the very best within and create a new reality—one where we learn that the only way to know if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

June 30, 2013
Find Peace Today: Stop Worrying About What You Might Lose

“The whole life of a man is but a point in time; let us enjoy it.” ~ Plutarch

Take a moment to think about the last time you stared up into a clear night sky, one that was gorged with stars and seemed to go on forever—one where the longer you stared, the more depth appeared.

How did you feel in that moment? Did you feel calm? Scared? Alone? Completely content? Did you wish you could stay in that moment forever?

Skies like that give me an incredible sense of peace and remind me to breathe deeply and contemplate how our lives are simultaneously overwhelmingly vast and incredibly finite.

Over the years, I have struggled with allowing people to get close to me for fear of losing them the way I had lost so many before.

After an adoption, the unexpected death of my adopted mother, my best friend, several family members, and the smattering of broken relationships, I built a solid wall against anyone who looked like they wanted to be near me.

I finally came to terms with the fact that in the end, most people who come into our lives will leave in some way or another—sometimes by choice and sometimes not, but their presence is what matters, not their absence.

What’s important is realizing that each moment we have with those we love is of infinite value, and we must enjoy the time we have with them while we have it instead of being so afraid we’ll lose them that we’re never really with them even when they are here.

If we’re so engulfed in the potential for loss, we’ll not only miss the lessons each experience can bring to our lives, but the joy it has to offer. Our happiness will sit in front of us waiting for us to recognize its face and we’ll look past it like a stranger.

People spend an exorbitant amount of time, energy, and resources on attempting to hold back aging as it is a reminder of our mortality. It reminds us that there is no permanence, so we frantically fight to find ways to extend the length of our lives, but how many focus on deepening the quality?

Why not slow down and realize we are immortal only in the moment we are in—this moment we inhabit contains our entire past and all of our potential and possibility for the future that may or may not arrive.

Let’s fill this time we have now with all that we are instead of fighting for more and never actually doing anything with it. It’s like collecting a bunch of empty jars but never putting anything in them.

I know it can be terrifying to let go and be present in the moment because we think we have to control everything; we have to be prepared for loss, for disappointment, for heartache. We don’t want it to creep up and take us by surprise, but here’s the thing: no matter what we do to prepare, we’ll never be ready for it when it comes.

The best we can do is fully embrace the only thing we know to be certain, and that is the current moment we inhabit. This very second as you’re reading these words, you know that you are alive.

And no matter what’s going on in your life, your life is a miracle. Right. This. Second. Your living is an amazing orchestration of a billion and one complex systems that enables you to breathe, to think, to have a heartbeat, to learn, to grow, and to love.

It’s hard to not fear losing others. It’s hard to not fear losing ourselves, but fear is what drives away our peace, joy, and love.

Learning to retrain our thoughts so we don’t dwell on our fear of the unknown future and grounding into the present will help us shift our focus from loss to abundance.

When we focus on loss, it feels as though we’re always lacking and we worry we’ll lose what we have. When we focus on abundance, we recognize that our lives are full and we cultivate the faith that each moment we’re alive, we will have what we need.

Additionally, when we focus on abundance, a sense of gratitude seems to naturally follow. How could we recognize how full our lives are and not be grateful?

When we are grateful for the moment we are in, we will find our lives are long enough—no matter how many years they contain.

Photo by pdam2

May 7, 2013
Finding What We’re Missing: Our Lives Are Already Complete

“Each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” ~Basho

What does family mean? Is it the people whose genes you share? Is it the people that you grew up with? Is it the people who love you unconditionally in spite of your faults and flaws?

Family for me has been an evolving idea. I was adopted from Seoul, Korea when I was four months old. After a few months in an orphanage, family started off simply as the people I grew up with.

Raised in South Central Pennsylvania with a Caucasian family in an area where diversity was lacking, to say the least, I remember receiving looks from some people when my older sister introduced me as her baby sister. They would tilt their heads to the side and say, “Are you sure?”

Adding insult to injury, my adopted mother passed away when I was thirteen after years of complicated health issues. She was the most vocal about how much she loved me, wanted me, and protected me when she caught anyone directing their fearful insecurities my way.

Losing her was one of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever had to deal with. Losing my best friend after a cliff diving accident in college was the next. The two people who embodied family and home for me were gone.

I spent many years angry, bitter, and confused as to why my biological family gave me away only for me to land in a family where I would experience a death nearly every other year from the time I was five years old, along with many other traumas and heartbreaks. (more…)

April 4, 2013