The thing with English is that, if I talk like this, nobody knows if I’m talking to myself or to someone else. Not even I know. This is why you could say that I talk more freely when talking in English.
Nobody is hearing me and everyone is. It doesn’t matter.
This is why I think this will be my fiction name. I am not sure if I can write fiction in Korean anymore.
I want everyone to hear me and no one at all. Fiction is for me alone and also for the entire world. It is different from nonfiction essays and letters. I adore fiction infinitely because it is private and public in ways that nonfiction can never be.
What I think about these days are compromises and dreams.
In this world, there are so-called human rights advocates whose only internet home is on Instagram and Facebook that compel millions of people to waste electricity on their little cell phones while being brainwashed to dizziness with fake positivity and general bullshittery.
I don’t want that.
Then there are the so-called ivory tower intellectuals whose only real contribution to the world was what they said to the mainstream press that suffocates people with garish advertisements on their unreadable “news” websites.
I don’t want that.
Kill me the day I vote for the “lesser evil” because that is the only way to prevail against the “primary evil.”
I want to do as I say and think. Or at the very least, I want to fail miserably.
While I do think that most failures aren’t failures in the long run because you eventually figure out a way to use them somehow, heck, the ability to take a momentary failure is in and of itself a success. I don’t want to take pride in having ensured my eternal and total success by never having tried at all.
I am trying to go back to writing fiction. Talking too much in nonfiction-y ways is unhealthy for me.
I hope you, too, find is what is healthy for you.
Love, Ithaka.