Seoul Emo

The Day My Gut Feeling Became Certainty Seoul Auntie · Personal Essay This piece touches on childhood abuse and sexual assault in passing, without graphic detail. 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 se...

Be a Clever Fox — A Letter to My Daughters Seoul Auntie · Letters to My Girls Personal advice from a mother to her daughters, written for anyone who might find it useful too. Watching what you two are dealing with at work lately, there's something I need to say. This Isn't Your Fault Let's start here. What you're going through isn't happening because you're not good enough. It's the opposite. It's happening because you're too good to let go of. People who work hard, who take responsibility, who figure things out no matter how hard the problem — some bosses attach themselves to people like that and never let go. They stall your promotion, keep piling on work, and quietly block your way out when you try to leave. Not because you're a pushover. Because you're too valuable to lose. Why You Can Never Quite Name the Problem Part of what makes this so hard is that you can feel something's wrong but can't put your finger on exa...

It's Time Companies Started Giving Leaders a Checkup — Not Just a Performance Review Seoul Auntie · Dark Triad Series, Part 3 This piece mixes cited research (leadership cascade studies, corporate psychopathy research) with my own predictions, interpretation, and personal experience. I've marked clearly, throughout, which is which. If AI Ends Up Closing the Skills Gap Young people are having a genuinely hard time at work these days. But here's what's strange: technology keeps getting better, so why does daily life keep getting harder? This is my own prediction, not a proven fact — but I believe that as AI advances, the gap in technical skill will keep narrowing. Good credentials, a good school, strong research output, clean code — these things won't stay as scarce as they are now. I think we're heading toward a world where an AI tool can close most of the practical skill gap on its own. If that happens, there's exactly one thing AI will never be...

The Boss Who Won't Let You Go — Surviving a Narcissistic Manager Seoul Auntie · Dark Triad Series, Part 2 This piece draws on a real situation (anonymized) plus published organizational research (Zenger & Folkman, Clive Boddy) and psychological concepts like intermittent reinforcement. Practical scripts are suggestions, not guarantees — adapt them to your own workplace and read your specific legal/HR context separately. Example: Same Employee, Different Boss There's an employee who was trained by one manager since her college years. Six months before graduation, that manager made her a formal offer, and she was hired the day she graduated. Less than eighteen months into the job, that manager went out of his way to say: "This employee deserves a promotion." He brought in three other directors to back it up, and the promotion went through. A year later, the manager changed. Under the new manager, she was doing the same work — arguably more advanced wor...

The Dark Triad, Part One: The Narcissist Seoul Auntie · Dark Triad Series, Part 1 This piece blends established psychology (self-esteem vs. narcissism, gray rock, narcissistic supply) with my own lived observations. Where it's research, I say so; where it's my own read, I say that too. This isn't a clinical diagnosis of anyone. There are people psychologists say you should avoid meeting at almost any cost — people who need to shrink their influence over your life, not expand it. We call this type the Dark Triad . These people are draining to be around because they consistently leave a bad influence behind. If you can avoid them, you should. They waste other people's time, energy, and emotional capacity, often without those people even realizing it — for their own benefit, whether they mean to or not. Narcissism vs. Self-Esteem There are three types: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Together, they make up the Dark Triad. What is narcissism, re...