I continued going to a Catholic church as a university student, albeit irregularly. Towards the end of my year abroad programme in North London, I was living in a houseshare doing a work placement. I felt lonely as my best friends had already left the country and I didn’t really have a chance to make new ones. To alleviate my loneliness, I started going to a nearby church every Sunday. The structure and method of the service were almost the same as what I’d experienced in Korea, but I’m actually still not sure if it was a Roman Catholic church or not. Maybe it was an Anglican church, but what does it matter? I just needed a place where I could find some solace, and the specific denomination of Christianity the church belonged to was of little importance to me.
I started out as a pretty pious Catholic, but my belief in Christianity didn’t last long. During my leave of absence from university due to burnout, I faced a major crisis that had butterfly effects in my life. I’d suffered from lower back pain despite having no structural problems, alongside some other non-specific symptoms. And as any hypochondriac would, I turned to the internet for solutions. At the time, I didn’t know better than to believe in everything presented in the media. I read a news article about Korea’s beloved figure skater receiving a Korean traditional version of chiropractic treatment for her back pain, which I now realise was the equivalent of today’s influencer marketing. Being a credulous young person who didn’t yet know the dangers of capitalist disinformation, I immediately looked up and went to a local clinic that offered the same practice. On top of the traditional chiropractic, I was also injected with bee venom in several spots on my body and poked with long, thick needles in my jaw, all in the name of a ‘cure’. I don’t understand how it never occurred to me that this sham ‘treatment’ would not only never resolve problems (which I didn’t really have) but create ones, even as I was experiencing all sorts of symptoms I’d never had before. What I do understand is that burnout and depression can make you do stupid things that put you in harm’s way, as demonstrated by my experience.
The consequences of my stupidity were grave, as all the side effects caused by the nearly lethal procedures executed by an evil, money-grabbing quack wrought havoc on me both physically and mentally. My life had turned into hell, and it was at this point that I found myself unable to rely on God any more. I’ve always thought that the biggest loophole in Christianity is that there’s no reasonable explanation as to the tragedies and agonies people suffer. Yes, of course there’s that ‘you’re born a sinner and hence the suffering, through which your belief in God would be tested’ bollocks. I didn’t and still don’t buy any of that. I was infuriated because a real bad thing had happened to me despite my sincere belief in God. My feeling of betrayal was as strong as my faith had been—and it was pretty damn strong. At one point, I found myself shoving both of my middle fingers towards the sky whilst crying my heart out, listening to ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay on loop. That’s how mad I was. I realise that I was too naive to think that I would be free from any suffering just because I was a daughter of God officially baptised by the church. But as a youth with a propensity for idealistic thinking, I’d had faith that God would protect me at all times.
As it turned out, it wasn’t God who could protect me. It was my instinct and intuition—or rather, my ability to listen to them and take heed when they send me warning signals. When I was going to the quack’s clinic that ought to be shut down for ever, my inner self sent me warning signals that were as clear as day; as I got ready to head to the clinic, I got all nervous, with my palms sweaty, and I kept having vivid, overdramatised dreams that were plainly cautioning against going to it. One of those dreams I can never forget is the one where a quack that looks just like the quack in reality claims that he can turn a male T-Rex into a woman through his massages. It’s funny how I didn’t get this message that couldn’t have been more overt. When it finally dawned on me what the dream symbolised, it was too late. As someone whose dad’s default mode is complete disregard for his family, I’d reproduced that unhealthy father-daughter relationship with my inner self, habitually ignoring the messages sent from her in the form of instinctive/intuitive feelings. The burnout accompanied by depression in my last year at university was a consequence of it, and the quack crisis that followed shortly afterwards was one too. Considering that I was depressed at the time, I sometimes wonder if going to the quack’s clinic over 10 times despite all the warning signs and newly developed symptoms was, in a way, a suicide attempt.
Misfortunes never come singly, and I soon made another worst mistake of my life, largely because I was defenceless against stress after the quack crisis. I forwent the opportunity to study film producing in America on a Fulbright Scholarship, the goal I’d worked so hard to attain. I’d been too clueless to think that securing the scholarship would be enough, which was the case for those embarking on integrated master’s and doctoral programmes in a practical field, but not for me, who got into MFA programmes. The financial issue was not something unresolvable since I could always take out loans and work part-time. But I was just too vulnerable at the time both physically and mentally, and the financial burden felt like an avalanche to me. Moreover, such a state left me scared and reluctant, rather than excited, to further pursue the path of filmmaking. During my undergraduate years, I’d already experienced how filmmaking could be physically challenging with all the heavy equipment lifting, long working hours and frequent midnight oil burning. And I was simply not in a condition where I could readily resume gruelling work. After the decision not to go to America, however, I quickly became an emotional wreck consumed with regret. And I remained so for a very long time. I couldn’t seem to ever recover from the double whammy. My life was filled and bursting with frustration, resentment and anger, and it too remained so for a long, long time.
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