My Mid-life Crisis Addiction

Autumn Green
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

“Midlife Crisis”. Is that even real? Do people really even have them? What is a “midlife crisis” anyway? I didn’t know for sure, I’d only heard, but if I was going to have one, I thought I should first plan ahead so that I could figure out how to “observe” mine. I didn’t have to look too far. Nearly a year ago, I watched my first K-drama. One tear-jerking, laugh-until-you-cry, K-drama after another, and I was hooked. When you can watch twenty five one hour long episodes in four days, you can quickly determine that you have an addiction. Oh, by the way, K-drama is short for Korean Drama, the amazing addictive media in which viewers globally have found themselves caught.

K-drama addiction, so what? That’s not a bad thing, right? It’s good clean fun, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, and then you’re happy when the guy gets his girl. {heartfelt sigh} However, K-drama addiction can be bad when it causes you stay up late, so late in fact, that you stay up watching “just 15 more minutes”, “just 10 more minutes”, “just until this episode is over”, “just for the first few minutes of the next one”, and you get the picture. Until, finally night becomes morning, you reluctantly go to bed, and four or five hours of sleep later, you get up, look into the mirror and see dark circles under your eyes. The addiction is really bad when you don’t care about the dark circles. Fortunately, my addiction never got that bad. I did get the dark circles, yes, but I also cared. However, though it curbed my addiction, it did not stop it. In fact, my addiction took a turn, and from what I have read in several articles, a not too unexpected turn…

After watching several K-dramas, well maybe more than several, I realized I was remembering and recognizing Korean words. This little “phenomenon” occurred enough times, that it finally came to the point in which I convinced myself that I could learn this language. Thus my “mid-life” crisis “gave birth” to a new addiction, and my Korean language journey began. And yes, for me, learning Korean is addictive, but definitely in a good way. Unlike most addictions, this has been and is, very beneficial. Through my quest to learn another language, I have learned about another people group and their culture, and in doing so I have learned more about me and mine. It’s a fascinating and beautiful journey, and it’s not through yet, it’s just beginning…