Written in the 2nd month of my time in Korea, looking back on past experiences:
I’ve been in Korea for six weeks now, teaching English at an academy catering for kids aged between around 6 to 15. I’m living in a fairly central area of Seoul, a stone’s throw away from a major broadcasting hub, and a bus journey away from Hongdae, an area alarmingly described as ‘young’, though it’s actually been pretty fun in my experience (though I have heard stories of people not being allowed into clubs due to being ‘too old’, at 30: yikes). I’ve been having a really great time here, enjoying my job more than I honestly thought I would, and socialising as much as humanly possible. This is all very nice and pleasant of course, especially for me, but not necessarily particularly remarkable. ‘Person enjoys new thing’: hardly the most stimulating news of the day. For me however, this experience going so well does hold a special significance, for the simple reason that I attempted to do something similar 5 years ago, and ended up having one of the worst experiences of my life.
Now, a phrase like ‘worst experience of my life’ is a dramatic one, I will give you that. It suggests some awful traumatic event, maybe abuse or a horrible accident. Well don’t worry on that front, I’m lucky enough to have never suffered from anything truly awful like that. In many ways I’ve always shied away from talking about this time in my life specifically because it wasn’t, for all intents and purposes, a horrible thing at all. Not in the slightest. It still feels immensely embarrassing to say that I once tried teaching at a school in Italy, and hated it so much that I essentially had a breakdown and left, because teaching at a school in Italy is not inherently hard in any way. And it wasn’t some hell hole with feral children or a Dickensian boss either. It was fine. But it wasn’t for me. As weak a thing as it is to say, it really wasn’t fine for me.
As I start to write this, my hands feel shaky and itchy in the way that they do when I get really nervous (well I sincerely hope it’s nerves and not the new hand cream I just bought). Remembering the way I felt, how heavy my chest would be, how hopeless staring into the distance would seem, is enough to make me want to push that whole time period down into that part of the mind that therapists make their livings pulling back up. When I did come home after the experience, a doctor told me it was a mix of a bit of depression and a bit more anxiety. Having the way I felt named and explained was a comfort, but it was more importantly a real eye-opener into the way mental health actually manifests in a person. I wouldn’t say I ever doubted the veracity of mental health issues before- I’d already seen their horrible impact first hand more than once- though I will admit that I did harbour the residue of society’s ideas on the subject somewhere in my head. There was a small part of me, not a dominant or even important part, but still a part that existed, that did wonder, were these mentally ill people just not coping with the world properly? Could they not just suck it up and push through it? As backwards an idea as this is, I know it was in my psyche somewhere, slightly colouring all my perceptions of mental illness. If there was anything good that came from experiencing this myself, it’s that it showed me how monumentally wrong this idea is. It’s shameful that I needed it to affect me before I understood fully, but it’s the truth.
To actually explain what I’m going on about rather than vaguely saying things about having a hard time, we need to go back to 2014. I have no memory what films were big then and what songs were popular (Avicii? I feel like there was a lot of Avicii), but it was before Trump and Brexit, so the world was slightly less on fire. I was 21, I had just graduated from the University of East Anglia with a 2:1 in English Literature (all the cool kids get 2:1s, firsts are for nerds), and, as to be expected with those credentials, I had no idea whatsoever what to do with my life. As much as I resent jokes about the uselessness of arts/humanities degrees, I have to admit they often provide less clear career paths than other subjects (because of course all science degree students immediately become scientists and work in labs: it’s a fact, I don’t make the rules). I’m not creatively gifted with my writing in the slightest, so novelist was out, and I didn’t want to teach Literature to kids about 5 years younger than me in some further education college in the middle of nowhere. I also didn’t know what marketing was, and only really understood publishing as ‘you work where they make the books, but you don’t get to write the books’ (and honestly this is still pretty much my understanding). So what the fuck would I do? My degree was finishing, I wasn’t going to stay in my uni town (Norwich), and the most wonderful period of my life up to that point was drawing to a close. I truly had no idea, and at the time I thought this was a Really Bad Thing. One must have a plan, one is 21 for God’s sake! Queen Victoria was a monarch at that age (I think)! So I was working on a setting of low to medium panic from the months my studies were finishing. I needed something.
Then a friend of mine told me that she was planning to take a CELTA course in teaching English as a Foreign Language, so that she could go abroad and use the qualification to teach wherever she wanted. She explained that there was an institute in Norwich that offered this course at a good rate, and once you had passed, this particular qualification would be the best one for your CV in terms of getting employed. This sounded damn good to me: teaching English (hey, I speak that!) and travelling abroad (hey,I like that!). This could be my next step! Thank GOD there’s a next step now!
So I enrolled on the course in Norwich and studied 9 to 5 Monday to Friday for 4 weeks, teaching practice classes virtually every day and eventually passing well. I really enjoyed the training and learnt things I had never known about our own language (I can now be VERY boring on the subject of voiced and unvoiced consonants), and felt ready to find a place to put it into practice. I wanted to go to a country not too far away, with a native language that was easy enough to pick up (she writes, sitting in her new home in South Korea). Annoyingly, at that point the only foreign language I knew any of was French, and France is a bit of an exception in Europe in that they don’t have much call for English teachers in their country as far as I know. Probably something to do with the bitter thousand-year rivalry between the two countries or something. So my aim was for Spain, Italy, or possibly somewhere like Portugal or Germany. Somewhere with a language and culture that wouldn’t be impossible to pick up. I didn’t have to look for very long until I found a school in a quaint little town in the South Eastern region of Puglia in Italy, run by a very friendly Scottish woman, that wanted to have me. If you recall what I said earlier, this doesn’t sound like the setup for anything awful at all, and again that’s because it isn’t. This isn’t some horror story where the plot twist was that this woman turned out to be a psychopath, or that the town turned out to be a Satanic cult. It was a normal English school in a normal place. I accepted the position in the late summer, and got myself prepared to go in the month following.
During the lead up to my departure to live in a foreign country for the first time, I really should have acknowledged to myself how I was actually feeling. I really, really enjoyed telling everyone that I was moving away to live ‘La Vita Bella’ and feeling that everyone saw me as an adventurer, a globe trotter. A friend of mine had once called me unadventurous in an offhand remark, and it had really hurt me to be thought of like that: this was me challenging that directly. I enjoyed the vague notion of eating pasta in a ristorante and walking through olive groves in the sunshine- the Italian stereotypes. But I was never excited about the idea of actually going. The thought of leaving my family behind and going to a place I had never been to before (this trip to Italy was my first and thus far, only one) was causing no positive feeling. Hearing about Italian culture, and about the place I was staying in, was doing nothing for me. I don’t know if I was just not paying attention to this, or if I was actively ignoring it, but it was there. I wasn’t excited to go. I distinctly remember the day before I left, when my family had a special ‘going away’ dinner for me, feeling only incredible sadness at not being able to continue being with them. I even remember packing my sparkly-framed photo of them delicately in my case, and feeling my heart sink. I didn’t want to have only a picture of them with me. And I didn’t really want to go.
The day I flew out to Italy, my parents drove me to Bristol airport, and again I have a distinct memory of Meghan Trainor’s ‘All About That Base’ playing on the radio during the trip. I really don’t like that song anyway, but this specific memory gives me a particularly barbed feeling towards it. When we had to say our goodbyes at the security gate, my dear Mum broke down. As I’ve mentioned before, my mother is not good with being apart from her children at the best of times (she would cry every single time I got on the train to go back to Uni), but this time she really cried. Through her tears I remember her calling me ‘her little adventurer’, and I felt so happy she thought of me like that, but also like such a fraud. I wasn’t feeling adventurous, and I didn’t want to leave her and Dad. But I left, and got on the plane, telling myself that this was all perfectly normal for someone moving out of the country for the first time. It’s worth noting at this point that I actually travelled out with one of the school’s other new teachers, a girl called Jess who was similarly freshly trained, and happened to live one county over from me. For dealing with me at that point and all the points to come, Jess really was a bloody hero. Wherever you are now Jess, I salute you.
We arrived in Rome and got on a train to Foggia, a city in the South East of Italy, where our new boss was to pick us up. When she greeted us, she was friendly and warm, and she drove us to the small town we were to be living in. Again, I can distinctly recall my feelings of general shittiness being very much not gone at this point, and I can even remember marvelling at Jess as she chatted away to our new boss on the last leg of our journey. All I could do was look out of the window into the night thinking: is this it? Shouldn’t I be excited by now? How was she so happy? Didn’t she want to go home?
It was really late when we arrived in our flat, which was in the same building as the school itself, only a few more floors up. I had thought this would be a great help when I applied for this position, but when we got there I realised this would make things feel really claustrophobic day to day. The building was nice, fairly grand, and the flat was new, modern and clean. Nothing to complain about at all, and I hated it. It wasn’t homely at all, it was completely empty (looking back it was odd that our boss hadn’t thought to put in any basics for our first day- no food at all) and the night we arrived there happened to be a thunderstorm. For a recent English Lit grad this was pathetic fallacy come to life. Fucking great. I went to sleep feeling empty, unexcited, and desperately hopeful that I would feel different in the morning.
Wow, I have never examined that time in my life in this much detail since it happened. I’ve spilt over 2000 words on this nonsense and I haven’t even gotten to the bloody point. Again, classic English Lit student (also I wish writing over 2000 words had come to me this easily when doing my sodding degrees). It’s also an hour and a half since I started, and in that time I’ve done laundry, drank a bottle and a half of water and added a new friend on Kakao Talk (a Korean messaging app). Cathartic much? It looks like this bad boy will have to be a two-parter because baby, we haven’t even reached the break down yet. Sorry for telling only the dull half of a story which honestly doesn’t get any better, but I think I need to finish here for now. Whenever I feel ready for it I’ll write the next part, the bit with the crippling anxiety and depression and all the fun that comes along with that. I know I know, calm down, you can’t wait. Of course. But I’ll let you know soon. Getting this out seems to be a bit of a tonic for me, and we all know I love tonic. Until next time.
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