The Practice of Care: An Interview with Yejin Lee

Conversations with Yejin Lee, from Jeong Coaching and Consulting, feel like sharing a hearty bowl of soup with a friend. Before our interview, we met several times to discuss its format and the questions I would ask. Those interactions were riddled with offerings of care, whether they were reminding me to drink water or us making space to calm our nervous systems of the excitement we felt. By the time the interview about the concept of care took place, we had spent time embodying the values and practices we aimed to discuss.

As we conversed, the visual of a rich, nutrient-heavy, vegetable-laden soup came to my mind. Each topic, like ingredients for a soup, contributes to building a practice of care. At different times in our lives, we may need to add a pinch of accountability or a dash of self-awareness to our care soup.

Through their coaching, Yejin walks with clients towards more liberated spaces created from self-centered goals. Together they explore strategies for navigating inequitable institutional systems, for interrupting default emotional responses, and for letting go of the guilt that often accompanies prioritizing one’s own needs.

Individuals should not bear the sole burden of surviving inequitable economic work spaces simply to sustain their livelihoods, yet this is often the reality they face. Consequently, Yejin extends their efforts beyond individual coaching to engage aligned organizations “to reduce the harm experienced by marginalized folks within institutions.” Together, they delve into methods of operationalizing equity and justice principles; of translating values and learnings into practice. Recognizing that mere awareness of social justice concepts is insufficient, Yejin emphasizes the importance of understanding how power operates within oppressive systems, and being willing to actively work to dismantle them. This requires a commitment to accountability, both at the individual and institutional levels — a process they view as communal rather than transactional.

What follows is the first of the two-part interview with Yejin.

Crystal: You have over a decade of experience in equity-based work and I’m wondering at what point you realized that centering care was necessary?

And then what was that journey from, ‘Centering care is something I need to do’ to ‘I am actively doing it now’?

Yejin Lee: My experience of the passage of time is super nonlinear. I wouldn’t say it’s a vast improvement, but the kinds of questions I ask and things I’m interested in have shifted. Some of this journey has been about being expansive in my understanding of care. When I used the word care in the beginning of my career, it was like, ‘I care about this thing. I care about these issues,’ meaning I have great passion for and will center these things in my work. As someone who worked in the nonprofit industrial complex for a while, one thing that was always true was I cared very much about doing a good job. I cared very much about the experience of my colleagues, particularly marginalized colleagues and the people we were serving.

The beginning of my career was largely around me expressing my care for something external. And what that often meant was I would put my everything into everything. I was raised in a way that trained, conditioned, and rewarded me for putting 150% into everything I do. If you love something and are passionate, you will do everything. That’s how I originally thought about care.

When I started doing more internal advocacy around [the] inequitable treatment of staff, I was caring deeply about the experiences of people who were being harmed by leaders and the institution. I wasn’t thinking about care in this expansive way. It was these sharp, acute, discreet expressions of care that weren’t about practices of community.

I was burning out in every single job. I didn’t have a typical millennial trajectory of hopping from job to job because I was disposable or got bored. I was literally getting in trouble in so many of my jobs. I was unstrategically sacrificing my job security and my experiences in the workplace. At some point, I was like, ‘this is not working.’ I was making choices in the way that I was engaging with change work that was not sustainable. I started thinking about what has to be true in the long term for me to be committed to this work forever. I started mid-career thinking about being more expansive in how I understood and practiced care.

The thing that was most tough for me, as someone who tries to be very principled, is self-care as an industry is very individualistic. It was very hard for me to think that practices of self-care would be liberatory in any way, because of how we’re sold what self-care looks like. Specifically in workplaces, I would be very irritated by organizations being like, ‘take a mental health day.’ I’m glad you have a mental health day, but my mental health is breaking because you’re deeply extractive in your labor practices. Maybe solve that.

Once I was able to leave the institutional world and start my practice, I had a lot more ownership over my time. At first, I flew to the side of like, ‘Oh, my god, I need to maximize my impact.’ I was not pacing myself at all, and that was not particularly caring. I started realizing in my departure from the institutional world that I might be neurodivergent, and I started having a greater understanding of my body’s limitations around energy. Care was introduced to the way that I treat my body and mind because it would just shut down from burnout. So I started asking the question, ‘What has to be true about my life, and what care do I need to sustain this work?’

That is really important, but also very emotionally, mentally, and somatically draining. That was the biggest shift for me. For me to do the things that I want to do, knowing that it takes so much from me, what is required of the life that I live and how can I approach care in a way that embodies my principles rather than going down this hyper-individualistic route?

Crystal: You were identifying the ways that care was available versus what was actually needed. You were seeing in these organizations that they had mental health days, but they were not addressing the root cause.

As you started working for yourself, it’s like, ‘Oh, now I am the person who has to actually put things in place to care for myself. I am the organization that has to set this up in a way that cares for myself.’

Yejin Lee: Yeah. What a rude call out. No, totally. Sometimes I would look at my calendar and be like, ‘I scheduled three workshops for this week. Who did this to me?’ I did it to myself. Sometimes I joke that I should unionize against my boss, who’s really bad at scheduling for me.

There’s something about the relationship between care and accountability. To your point, I really had to recognize that I was the sole reason. We also live under racial capitalism, right? So there are external systems that we are responding to, but the way that we internalize these things is super material and tangible.

What I realized when I started my own practice, because I wasn’t beholden to some external institution or person, I felt like I was free. I can do whatever I want and have the impact that I genuinely wanted to have all along. I went a little bit too intense when I first started, which I think is true for a lot of solo practitioners and entrepreneurs. There’s also pressure to “make it” because it’s really scary to leave things that are more steady and stable.

I did a workshop, maybe two summers ago, called DEI Despair. I was so despairing about the state of this work. I also recognized my participation in not pacing my approach. So I was constantly exposed to the limitations of this work, the backlash to this work, [and] the ways people and members of leadership would weaponize their understanding of this work to evade accountability. My lack of pacing and care in my approach led me to this place where all I had was despair. It became a lot clearer that I am accountable to myself and to doing that as part of a community of practice with other practitioners that I love and respect.

Part of the work that I do is community building and development. To be in community with multiply marginalized folks, particularly those who are neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disabled, I had to move differently. It invited me to be more spacious and understanding about my own limitations. One of the biggest shifts for me in being accountable to myself was being accountable to community that included people who have different relationships to their bodies and minds, and therefore also their labor.

Crystal: It seems these are things that will influence care and how you approach care. What other things have you seen that influence care as you’re trying to approach caring for yourself and others in community?

Yejin Lee: One of my favorite things about myself is my ability and willingness to be altered by the people around me. A lot of it is just about the humans that I’ve chosen to surround myself with, some of them being work-related.

Some of my coaching clients have been people who live at the intersections of race, gender, and disability. Learning in intimate detail, the ways in which the harm that they experienced in institutions, in relationships, and sometimes even in movement spaces was a lack of care. A lack of care around processing information differently. A lack of care around differences in how people might show up in meetings and ways in which that gets codified into the culture.

People were so generous with me in my work with them that it revealed to me all of the ways in which care is not demonstrated. That information has given me a lot to work with in identifying proactive ways of offering care. For example, I’ve shifted what I offer and how I offer my workshops. I didn’t turn on live captions or offer copies of the transcript. I didn’t offer more than two weeks of access to the recording. But, while working with people who are neurodivergent, I wanted to be a practitioner and a human who could respond to different kinds of differences. I started incorporating different practices. So now I also have a form for people if they have questions or wisdom they want to offer after the workshop because some people need time to process.

Even something like that, even though it’s logistical and operational, can be a real expression of care. That was ultimately born from the things that people shared with me. I ultimately realized, in retrospect, that I wish I had that when I was in institutions, or sometimes at a different point in my life and my friendships.

Crystal: It sounds like there’s a lot to be learned in disability justice about how providing access for people with disabilities also enhances access for everyone else.

Yejin Lee: Oh, 100%. I started exploring my neurodivergence a little while ago with support from my coach and therapist. I was really reluctant to hold that identity for a few reasons, but one of them was that I didn’t want to take up space and claim the identity of a marginalized group without having more understanding. Rather than focusing on the label and what that means, [I was] thinking about it as an entry point of the care that I need for my brain and nervous system to show up in the ways that I want to show up. It was a care-based framework for exploration.

One of the things that happened as I was exploring was suddenly things that used to feel “easy” were really, really hard. As someone who is hyper-attached to this identity as a very capable person, in this process of unmasking my neurodivergence, suddenly I didn’t feel capable anymore. But one of the shifts that I experienced in therapy was [that] I could still do hard things. I am now just more attuned to how my nervous system has always wanted to respond, but I was enduring, suffering, and pushing through it before. Now I get this sensory input that is really dysregulating and suddenly I feel like I can’t do anything.

The question became: ‘What is the care that I need to do things that feel hard?’ Sometimes that meant I could anticipate a particular facilitative meeting would be really challenging for me. I set up a care plan beforehand and an after-care plan. I changed my approach to scheduling. I’m like, ‘Okay, this is going to be a really hard meeting with people who are going to make me so, so mad.’ So I don’t have anything scheduled for the next day. Maybe I’ll do some admin work, but I don’t have meetings where I have to speak. It is an invitation for me to understand my neurodivergence. Rather than it being about the claiming of labels, it was about what care is required.

That’s an opening for anybody and everybody, regardless of whether they identify as neurodivergent. Why wouldn’t we want to offer ourselves the care we need to do things that are hard?

Crystal: It also reminds me a lot of BDSM, and the ideas of consent, care, aftercare, and the communication that is involved.

Yejin Lee: Oh, totally. There are so many things to love and adore about the approach to communication in kink communities and BDSM.

One thing that my therapist told me was that if you go too hard, too fast, too intense, without bearing witness to your body’s needs, that is a way that your body can experience trauma.

As someone who is very intense and hyper-focused, it’s really easy for me to lose myself. For me, one of my triggers for going too fast, too hard, or too intense without consenting to it, is when I care a lot about something. A lot of the work of care for myself, in community building, and in my relationships is to create the guardrails. I know that I’m about to go really intense because I care so much about this thing, but I also know that not breathing for five minutes is going to lead me to pass out.

So what are the things that I have to build? What is the container that I need? What are the things that have to be true for me to meet at the intersections between my passion and care, and also not pass out? That is not something we are trained to do or rewarded for doing because capitalism ultimately benefits from us not being attuned to what our body, heart, and mind need.

Thinking about this in isolation from other people makes it a hyper-individualistic and therefore sort of capitalistic expression of care. But if we’re thinking about how we live at the intersections of what we care about and what we need to sustain what we care about, it becomes a lot easier. Doing it as part of a community is always superior.

In a world that often prioritizes individualism, Yejin emphasizes the power of community care in fostering healing and accountability. Through workshops, coaching, and racial equity audits, they create spaces for collective healing and transformation, challenging oppressive power structures and promoting inclusive practices. they encourage others to disentangle themselves from capitalist frameworks and reimagine alternative pathways rooted in care and liberation.

Yejin’s journey is a testament to reliance and transformation. Join us in the second part of this interview as we delve deeper into topics like accountability in relationships, bodily awareness, planning for care, and untethering from oppressive systems, among many other skills.

Co-authored with Eli Marsh