Although I loved living in Korea, I have two regrets about my time there.

Blogging but Not Journaling

I didn’t keep a personal journal while I lived abroad.

I started journaling when I was in second grade, and within a few years, I was journaling most days of the week at home. (This was in addition to the writer’s notebooks we kept at school, which were all the rage at the time.)

But I fell out of the habit when I was in college, and I didn’t get back to it when I started teaching.¹ During that time, I’d kept travel journals. But being in Korea wasn’t traveling, it was living.

While in Korea, I did keep a blog, because I wanted my family to be able to keep up with my adventures. I loved writing, and I got to the point where I was posting nearly every day. It felt a lot like journaling.

But unfortunately, the website is long gone. I have parts of it backed up, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to access all of the posts I wrote.²

A major difference between journaling and blogging is the public nature of it and a comment section. I got to know quite a few other bloggers and we’d read and comment on each other’s posts. Unfortunately, those comments weren’t backed up, so they’re lost forever. (It really was the golden age of blogging, when people had conversations in the comments area, followed each other, and developed true friendships.³)

Also, because the blog was public, I was writing with a public voice. I was honest, and I wrote about the good and the bad, but a polished voice is different than a gut-spilling journal voice.

And typed words on a screen, even stylized ones simply don’t have the same impact as actual handwritten words, especially since handwriting that can change with your mood.

I’ve been journaling again for several years now. I tried getting into Julia Cameron’s morning pages idea a few times when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, but I didn’t keep it up very long. Things would get hard (in my life) or I’d miss a day (or two) and then just give up.

But morning pages found me again.

In September 2017, during the first week of my second year of my PhD program, I woke up one day feeling like I needed something for me, something that had nothing to do with my doctoral program. I’ve written morning pages nearly every day since then.

The odd thing about this wish I’d kept a journal? I almost never look back on my journals. I’ve got my childhood journals and approximately 50 spiral-bound morning pages notebooks packed away in boxes in the basement. I think my travel journals are on bookshelves. I can’t remember the last time I’ve needed, or wanted, to look back on one.

Still, I wish I could look back on old journals. And I simply can’t.

Shooting Digital but Not Film

I also didn’t take a single film photograph of my life in Korea.

At some point before I moved, the guy I’d been dating gave me a small point-and-shoot style digital camera (an Olympus of some sort, and it may have been a holiday present).

I wasn’t interested in shooting digital, and I wasn’t interested in a point-and-shoot camera, but it was right around the time that digital was starting to outsell film, and there was definitely a feeling of “digital is inevitable, need to get used to it or get left behind.”

I wasn’t sure how expensive film or processing might be in Korea. And I couldn’t afford a digital SLR camera at the time. So even though I wasn’t really excited about it, that Olympus seemed like the easiest, lightest weight way to go. I left my trusty Canon AE-1 at home.

The first year I lived in Korea, I only had that lower-quality camera on hand. I used it frequently, but I was very limited in what I could do with it and the control I could have over settings.

Shortly after we started dating, my husband helped me purchase a grey-market Nikon D80 DSLR in Dongdaemun, and that was fun to use. I had control over my settings again. I was really excited to feel like I was practicing photography again.

I carried my D80 everywhere. One of the trends at that time was a photo a day, which covered my last few months in Korea. I also had fun creating 12 postcards, one for each month of 2007. I sent these out to my family and friends back in America as a sort of “what I’ve been up to” holiday card.

So I have photos from Korea.

But.

I don’t know exactly where the original files are. (I think they’re on an external drive somewhere in my basement.) This problem isn’t unique to me, but it is frustrating.

I am currently drafting this post on a computer my spouse built for me in 2009. I have some photos on this computer, but they were optimized for a web that existed nearly 20 years ago, so they’re a little small and fuzzy by today’s standards. And since printing standards have changed, I’d have a hard time getting decent print quality out of the files I have.

Perhaps this was why I was so excited to find the beautiful coffee table book, Korea: As Seen By Magnum Photographers. All of these photos were taken as part of a special yearlong project that happened in 2006–2007. So no, they’re not my photos, but they are photos of the Korea I knew.

The last two times I’ve visited Korea, I’ve brought film. I’ve used several of those photos for the postcard project. Still, it’s not the same as having film photos from 2006–2008.

Of course, even if I had my photos, the negatives would likely be fairly unorganized. I could have lost them in a move—or over the ocean, as I lost at least one of the boxes I shipped home, never to be seen again.

But assuming the best, a 35 mm negative is a 35 mm negative. And I wish I had physical negatives.

Postcards that Combined Photography and Journaling

At the end of 2007, I had a set of photos printed, one for each month of the year. I turned these into postcards and sent them to some friends and family. I sent them a few days apart, in no particular order. I hoped that they would notice the letter on each photo spelled out “happy new year.”

Looking at these photos now, I’m amused that I appear in three photos wearing three different pairs of glasses. Glasses were so cheap in Korea, even for my heavy prescription, and I would pick up glasses on a whim.

1. In retrospect, I think I stopped journaling was because I didn’t want to closely examine the relationship I was in. If I’d been journaling, I would’ve ended my college relationship much sooner. ↩︎
2. For this blog and my monthly newsletter, I keep my drafts in Scrivener, so I have a backup that isn’t website dependent. ↩︎
3. I’m stubbornly trying to blog as if it’s still the golden age. Comments open, no ads, no worries about “niching down,” no posts behind a paywall. I refuse to even use SEO tools (because it changes my voice in a way I don’t like). I’m just writing and hoping to find my people. ↩︎