The Day My Gut Feeling Became Certainty — A Personal Essay
The Day My Gut Feeling Became Certainty
This piece touches on childhood abuse and sexual assault. Nothing graphic is described, but I wanted you to know before you start.
I've Spent My Life Cutting People Off
I've spent my life walking away, the moment I sense narcissism or something closer to psychopathy in someone. I don't call back. I don't see them again. It's cost me — real losses, more than one move, more than one restart.
Not long after I graduated from drama school, I spent some time back in Korea. I worked briefly on a film audition as an assistant director — the kind of role that does a bit of everything. The actors were auditioning with improvised scenes, no script. One of the people on the judging panel was a psychiatrist. The improv scenario that day was a young woman confronting her parents about childhood abuse and sexual assault.
The actress auditioning had actually lived through something like it. It wasn't performance anymore — it was her real story surfacing. The psychiatrist noticed too. And instead of stepping in to help her, he began drawing her past out of her, piece by piece. If you open a wound like that, you owe the person care, or a path to actual treatment. What came out of his mouth instead was that this could be used as material for the script.
I got up and left. I never worked in that world again. I came to the United States.
What I saw that day was someone's deepest wound being treated as material, in the name of art. The person who was supposed to protect her instead helped tear her open. I turned my back on that entire world in that moment.
Going a little further back, this instinct had already been growing in me for a long time.
The Day It Became Certainty
At sixteen, I traveled through the former Soviet Union and fourteen countries across Europe, ending in London. In those four weeks, I saw, in person, the world I'd only known from books. And I was certain: this wasn't the place I was meant to live. Over my father's strong objection, and with my mother's support, I left for Australia. I landed in Sydney and did everything myself — finding a place to live, buying furniture, setting up electricity and gas. From then on, I lived by instinct. If it didn't feel right, I didn't go. I didn't meet the person.
That instinct turned from a vague feeling into certainty later, at drama school in London. Through acting, through the work itself, I started looking directly at myself — and found memories I'd scattered into thousands of pieces, hidden even from myself, and pieced them back together one fragment at a time.
After that, the fog in my head started clearing. And I learned, for the first time, that I was actually left-handed. My left hand started moving as naturally as my right.
I remember a bench on Oxford Street. I sat down, and there was no background noise in my head at all. Just quiet. Comfortable. The most at peace I had ever been in my life.
After that, I could finally see my own thoughts — and once I could see my own, other people's words and actions started reading clearly too. I could tell who someone was. I knew who to avoid, who to cut off. In business, I still give people my full effort at first. But the moment something in their words or behavior tells me "this isn't right," I leave — even at a cost. I've learned that the cost of leaving late is always higher: in time, in emotion, and eventually, in money.
This is why I can say the ability to recognize good influence matters — not as theory, but as something I've lived.
So, Here I Am
By most measures, this might not look like a successful life. I've spent a lot of energy reading and analyzing other people's minds, but I stopped watching how I looked to others a long time ago — from childhood on. I've only ever focused on one question: what makes me happy.
I'm happy.
It's not a big house, but I have moments of real rest. I have a partner who jokes around with me even in the hardest stretches, who I call my other self. I have two daughters who came into my life. And I'm happy simply because I choose to be.
I've taken losses, had to start over more than once, and missed out on plenty because of it. I don't regret any of it. Leaving early has always been cheaper than staying too long. That's exactly why I'm happy.
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