Purpose for the Sake of Purpose

Beseu
Beseu
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

I came back from teaching in South Korea twice.

The first time, I left after having invested two years of my life pretending to be a teacher, knowing the entire time that I was bookmarking my life in Toronto. I had just graduated from university when I moved to Korea, and I never added a course involving an exit strategy to my curriculum vitae. The panic in the months before my impending graduation and umbilical cord severance from education had me clawing for purpose. After school comes work, but I couldn’t think of a career opportunity where I could craft an academic paper overnight, on a book I absorbed from a combination of Wikipedia, Sparks Notes, and/or a film adaptation. I went to teach in Korea, knowing I never wanted to be a teacher, expecting to only be in the county for a year to save up for my literary master degree, because it was some purpose in the interim. That, and Asia has always been my one great dream, and the most amount of international travel I had experienced prior was two short stints on an all-inclusive Cuban vacation.

When I returned, two years later, my desire to not teach firmly cemented in my brain, the fear I had been fearing of post-graduation began pumping collagen into my nerves. I talked endlessly, while in Korea, about this post-graduation fear, my friends and I were all clearly running from the same lack of purpose our post-secondary education taught us. Post-Korea exposed how much I had postponed, most of my friends at home struggling in their minimum wage jobs or pursuing an education to validate their prior education. I was supposed to come back for grad school after one year, but I spent two being too drunk to fill out an application. I was back in Toronto with money but still without purpose.

Also came back with a broken heart, which was torn by geography and a sense of “being practical.” Returning home did not feel practical; in Korea, you had your job and apartment handed to you, but here, the work was in finding and keeping those qualities. Playing into each other’s insecurity of purposelessness, we rekindled our flame to justify another run at an experience we knew was a ‘pause’ button on reality.

Six months passed from when I left to start my life anew in my old home, and I was in South Korea again. Knowing full well that I didn’t want to be a teacher, I was instantly overcome with a debilitating case of depression. This wasn’t the purpose I had been searching for, I was living a life I had let go of to try and create something. I had gone back, I wasn’t doing something different or exciting. It was the same as returning back home, I was faced with fractions and fragments of a life that was hollow and had been drained of all purpose.

My second stint in Korea lasted eight months. Normally, you stay the duration of your contract, which is a full calendar year. I was fired from my job; a job that we had worked together, an apartment in which we had lived together. I didn’t have the option to quit like he did two months in, I had been torn away from all the money that I had from before. The idea of having to do the whole ‘going back without a purpose,’ but as a pauper, was only feeding the growing shadow being cast over my life. The shadow that eventually became a black hole, and began pulling me from reality, a reality where I was a teacher. I hated teaching. I was no longer able to hide it, and my job was directly tied to my Korean Work Visa. They gave me one month to save for the flight home. I left defeated, a small amount of money in my pocket and a small amount of myself intact.

According to my calculations, as much time has passed between then and now, as I had spend in Korea. I have not figured any more out. I have, however, begun caulking in some purpose into my life. I’ve been watching a lot of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’, and RuPaul ends every episode with the aphorism “if you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love anybody else?”

My purpose is to be someone that I love.

To start, that person is someone who fucking writes.

Beseu

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Beseu

when I grow up, I want to be a juggalo