Mark Twain Saved My Life

On my first day in Daegu, when I met my new boss and co-teacher and toured the place that I'd be working at for the next year, I saw something in the teacher's bathroom that helped me and has continued to help me throughout these many months. I was grabbing a quick bathroom break before meeting my new principal, leaving Joe to make small talk with my new co-workers. As I shut myself into the bathroom stall and tried to calm, calm, calm myself down, I saw on the stall door a laminated quote in both English and Korean. Usually I think quotes or pictures on stall doors are super cheesy and give me flashbacks of dorm days, but this one was different. The quote is this: "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear." I don't know what it was--my nervousness at this whole experience, the thought that the day was almost over and soon Joe and I would finally be alone in our new home, or the fact that I finally got to pee after hours of holding it--whatever it was, I started to cry. I was crying out of gratitude and something like relief. That quote saved me that day. I had thought for so long that if I was fearful of something, that was a defect in myself. Why couldn't I be braver? Fearless? More spontaneous and experimental? More daring? A lot of things make me afraid. Coming to Korea made me afraid. It still makes me afraid from time to time. The amount of time spent here, and the amount of time left. The separation from family and friends. The language. I don't think I'm usually a sucker for quotes that have the ring of the self-help section at Barnes and Noble. But, man, this one killed me. It acknowledged my fear, my nervousness; it said I didn't have to give it up or say it didn't exist. But I did have to deal with it, to overcome it, and work through it. At that moment, I felt like I could do that.

I have since looked at that quote many a time, and each time it hits me as fully as it did on that first day. And each time, I am supremely grateful that some teacher or student decided to laminate it and stick it there. And Mark Twain--you rule.