Hello from Seoul!

Hi friends, this is my first blog post from Seoul and the first post of my new blog Kaylee’s Compass! I am so excited to get back to writing and creating!

For those of you who previously followed me over at Just A Coder Thing, thank you so much for being here! I stopped posting there as my life took on a whole new direction after I moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2022 and tech felt less and less like the main focus of my life. I was also growing increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry after the n-th layoff swept the industry and I was asking myself what the point of my job really was. Nothing against my job, in fact, as jobs go it was pretty much my dream job. But there were so many things I wanted to do in my life and after I got married in 2023, my partner and I finally looked at each other and asked the question: What do we want in life?

That’s a pretty terrifying question to ask a Type A eldest daughter of an immigrant who has had a 10 year life plan her entire life. I feel like I boarded the “American Dream Success” train sometime in elementary school and especially as a Korean American I felt like as long as I followed the formula I would “make it”. After attending boarding school in high school, finishing college in 3, not 4 years, going to work at Goldman Sachs in NYC and then Squarespace soon after, starting a blog, moving to Vermont during a pandemic, starting a podcast with my sister, moving to Colorado and then getting married my whole life has been “after ____ things will calm down”.

So to ask myself in 2023 what do I want in life? Terrifying. But it got me thinking, we always say we want to do these things but there’s always a better time for it. I had always wanted to live abroad and the idea of living in Korea and reconnecting with my family and my language seemed more appealing than ever. So my husband and I made a 6 month plan to sell most of our belongings, save up as much cash as we could, quit our jobs, and move to Seoul.

That’s a pretty abridged version of the journey, but for brevity that brings us here to today! I’ve been living in Seoul with my husband for 7 months and did the classic Type A planner thing where I committed to 2 breakneck pace semesters at the Hanyang Korean Language Program and this is now one of the first times in my life where I have nothing ahead of me. No deadline, no job, nothing. Just a whole lot of time and a lot of questions to go figure out the answers to.

The longer I’ve lived here the longer I’ve started to feel that itch to write and share and create again. Something I haven’t felt for a long time. If you’ve read this far, thank you so much! I realize this is more of a ramble than a post but I hope over the course of my posts you will find something relatable and maybe even inspiring? I have been on this journey figuring it out day by day but the few content creators I’ve found who have similar journeys have made me feel way less alone (parasocial relationships I know I know).

I plan to write here about my journey moving to another country, reconnecting with my culture and identity, not working, and figuring out the big life questions like what makes me happy, fulfilled, how do I have an impact, etc. If any of that resonates with you, please subscribe to my email newsletter where I will be letting you know when I put up a new post! Thanks again for being here and I’ll see you next time.