Above the surface, we cannot see what hides below. Though as we learn to swim ourselves, we begin to sense the rhythm of legs treading water with nowhere to stand; and catch glimpses of familiar hands reaching for somewhere to land - only to hold, for just a moment’s rest… The same moments that we encumber, with heavy heads that lay upon their shoulder.

The names of our parents are to be etched in the bark of the family tree. We do not know the extent of their sacrifices. For some: to leave all that they know, sometimes without choice - though most times out of desperation - in order to live a better life for themselves; and, inevitibly their children. Indeed, I am a child of remarkable parents, and I imagine you may be too. Thus, you may be familiar with the unscalable wall.

I was working door-to-door pitching my new business to food vendors across Koreatown in Sydney, Australia. My phone caught me off-guard as I was peering into the bright, reflective street windows of the next grocer on my hitlist, so I reached for it quicker than a western showdown.

A MISSED CALL from 엄마 - Mum had just grazed me. And in the blink of an eye, her photo portrait on my screen shot passed a second time, and vanished. Of course, I sat my esky down on the pavement then - with one boot tapping alongside the ring-pause cadence of a call that didn’t seem like it would end without me hanging up. I shot a few calls that riccocheted, and instead sent through a final text— and the gun went back in the holster.

After a day of kicking rocks, zero sales and no follow up from family nor prospective local businesses, I was grinding my teeth processing the day. Until, the video message hit my phone:

Pixelated black clouds engulfing the air between the ceiling and floor of a familiar room, with a fireman stomping onward with a torch that shone through like lightbeams. The shaky footage, tracked the fireman’s steps idly as did my mind, until I realised what this was: my mother’s business; and heartbreakingly again: a hand-held recording from my mother.

Rushed into hospital in the ambulance after-the-fact, I spoke with her at around midnight for the first time as she laid in cold, sterile sheets due to carbon monoxide poisoning. She’d called six hours earlier, yet couldn’t reach me. Instead, my father, who was bedridden with a chest infection at the time had gone to the shop and helped close up - thereafter returning home to rest without word.

Today I reflect on this moment, staring down not into a pool of regret, nor one of sadness, but something more difficult to name. Perhaps you would know the feeling; of knowing how much has been given, and how little has been returned. I think about the life I live - or rather, the one I cannot give.

And so once again, I find myself standing before the unscalable wall.

A foundation built so high, through sacrifices I will never completely know. Two people whose lives have been spent treading water so that I might one day have somewhere solid to stand, and find my own footing. From down here, it’s almost impossible to understand how it was built. I can only look up and try to make sense of how far they’ve come.

Perhaps this is the intrinsic experience of the child: by the time we are old enough to understand the weight our parents carried, much of it has already been buried, and laid beneath our feet.

The kind of debt that cannot be repaid. And so, I figure, we must build from what was given. We must climb higher still, and make something of the blood that has trickled down.

This way, if we are fortunate enough, we can continue that legacy: building a foundation for others - until their heads rise beyond water, and into the clouds.

If any section of this article resonates, feel free to subscribe, reply, or simply sit with it.

For the past year, I’d taken some time off writing due to work and life. Though I hope to write more again. I sincerely appreciate your kind patience + understanding.

Thank you for reading.

And so I must ask…

“이 한을 누구에게 말하리오”
To whom can I speak of this han?

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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In this short life, times of grief, celebration or idle retrospection often resurface pivotal memories from your past. There are moments you return to unwillingly. It is not because the moments were particularly special but because something within them rearranged you, or at least began the process.

During the early years of high school, my older brother interrupted me at my bedroom desk to show me a painting. A hulking white ox, mid-charge — with bold and unrelenting strokes as if the artist aimed to trace even the twitching of its muscle fibres.

“This is you”, he said.

I smirked with fascination — scanning the grotesque interpretation of a cow — searching for a clear answer as to why. Something about the way he said it stuck though. Accompanied with an imposing gaze: it felt as if he was peering into some part of me I hadn’t yet discovered on my own.

“It’s an ox”.

My brother: always tying me back to symbols. Growing up in a household of five kids meant our Chinese zodiac signs were quickly established but even moreso all the possible jokes that came with them. I didn’t know then that this painting and the story behind it would live inside me for years.

The white ox still charges.

It charges through my memory, through newfound meanings and experiences, through han — that distinctly Korean, but deeply human word for what remains unresolved in us.

This is a story about a brother’s gaze, a painter’s soul and an ox that keeps going.

Korean painter born under Japanese rule, best known for his powerful ox paintings. Studied art in Tokyo, where he met and later married Yamamoto Masako, a Japanese woman who crossed wartime Japan in 1943 to be with him. Their first son died of a contagious bacterial infection (diphtheria).

The Korean War made them refugees - fleeing south to Busan, then Jeju, through hunger and illness. In 1952, unable to support them, he sent his wife and two sons to Japan for survival while he stayed behind. He never saw them again.

Alone and impoverished in Seoul, he painted on whatever he could find - cigarette foil, matchboxes, scraps - his work saturated with longing for the family he’d lost. He poured that same longing into illustrated letters he sent to Japan. His exhibitions brought no recognition; he turned to alcohol, his health collapsed, and he died of liver failure (hepatitis) in 1956, alone and unknown, at 40.

Only decades later was he revered - his letters and sketches now held in museums, with massive depictions of energetic bulls still charging across gallery walls, and more importantly: his art central to Korean modernism.

Tomorrow my brother turns 30. I’ve been thinking about that moment in my room - and how quickly time has passed.

We’ve butted heads our whole life. Ox versus ox, with neither of us fair in conflict and both of us always trying to push something forward... Often out of love without restraint. On his birthday however, I’m not thinking about our fights. I’m thinking about that painting and how he saw me in it; tenacious, unmoving, and full of fire despite the world still not bending at the force I try to impose upon it.

I sit alone at my desk now, realising that such a small moment shaped my perspective toward life today. Small words of endearment eased the grasp of hardships I hold, and in times of challenge and celebration — I can return to our memories with gratitude as a cornerstone of motivation to march on.

Lee Jung Seob never lived to see what became of his work, but his presence lingers through his ox: still charging forward despite the weight of suffering. His life, an art story in itself, reflects the beauty of sorrow. His paintings reflect his han that surging within us as we find resonance on the enduring human spirit and our inextinguishable desire to create.

My brother has always shared a similar philosophy toward art and life: with his own life testifying to human resilience and with his own work: reflecting the enduring meaning and value of art. I am reminded of his guidance to carry what feels heavy with grace and intention — remaining stubborn and living a life true to me.

Perhaps to keep creating, even if no one ever claps or recognises it.

And in a similar vein: somewhere in the world, perhaps someone is quietly reading these words about a tenacious ox—

And to them I say, “This is you”.

If any section of this article resonates, feel free to subscribe, reply, or simply sit with it.

This is only the beginning.

And so I must ask…

“이 한을 누구에게 말하리오”
To whom can I speak of this han?

Leave a comment

Han figuratively means: a heart that has been blocked or stopped.

In dissecting the wordform and its origin, its histories and evolving meanings across time and place, we gain more than an edge-up in academia. Rather, we recover the emotional and human imprint carried within languages.

When Chinese characters were first developed and later integrated into Korea’s linguistics, the resulting systems of Hanja and Hangul became bridges across generations. The fact that we still use these scripts to express our interior worlds links us to ancient lives and stories far beyond our own - which is quite a humbling thought.

Now, we find ourselves doing something similar with English. Attempting to grasp the meaning of han - a word untranslatable in its fullness - in a language with entirely different roots, systems, and ways of feeling.

Some Chinese commentators argue that han belongs to them, as Korea originally used their writing system. Meanwhile, today - han is uniquely Korean - shaped by Korea’s historical sorrow, and ultimately unfeelable by a Western audience.

Something happens however, when you bring han into English - when you hold it up to the light of another lens, or listen carefully to how a word is encapsulated within foreign tongues. It changes. And that change lets more people recognise it — to then evolve with meaning and application.

Although we don’t share the same histories, we do share what is inherently human. Etymology goes beyond linguistics, and it most clearly reveals a sense of connection.

What to Expect in This Article:

1. Straight From The Heart:
   A breakdown of the character 恨, and how its components of Chinese characters (something like 200 of them) contain the emotional essence of han.

2. From Hatred to Han?:
   A visual and linguistic comparison between Chinese and Korean usages of the term.

3. The Cultural Emergence of Han:
   How Korea shaped han into something collective, generational, and distinct.

4. Han as a Moral Emotion:
   A look at han not just as feeling, but as a response to injustice, silence, and memory.

惨 (Han) = 心 (Heart) + 艮 (Halt / Withstand)

Surprisingly, the literal meaning of han provides a sort of self-diagnosis…

Read more

There is an enduring ache that flows through you — through every fibre of your being, traced even within the vapour of your breath. Remnants of unspoken emotion yearn to unravel within your chest and escape through your voice box. When memory strikes, your gut reacts in symbiosis. Unresolved nerve endings return up the same channel of the body, and the brain is rewired - just for a moment - thrust into a familiar survival instinct passed down so long ago we forget where it began.

I see the pockmarks on your heart. Koreans have a name for it - we call it han (한).

Born in Korea - yet felt everywhere - han isn’t just a Korean thing. The universality is what we are unpacking here: an emotion that lives in anyone whose heart and desires have met immovable obstruction - forcing unwanted change, and the aftershock of it. Change that causes ripple effects; affecting people as they’re coerced to move on, or cornered into biting their tongue and smiling through unshareable conflict.

Was there ever such a time for you?

Historically shaped by conflict, han was cultivated through centuries of invasion, colonization, hierarchy, and suffering in silence.

In ancient Korea, life was hard and expression even harder.
Under Confucianism, emotions were suppressed in service of duty. The poor, the women, the lower castes swallowed injustice and sorrow with no room to dare release it. Later came the Japanese occupation, where Korea’s language, names, and spirit were stripped away.

Add to that: war, division, dictatorship, and family separation. Han became a collective muscle memory. A cultural wailing, and for hundreds of years, what was cried out into the world without response has been witnessed. Not as pain alone, but as a thread that connects us.

Most of us aren’t living under these kinds of extreme circumstances, though we are still human. And modern life is full of scarred, unresolved wounds: betrayals, regrets, what-ifs, and should’ve beens that never get fully seen or felt.

I believe han gives language to what we’ve been made to forget. It is a reminder to rekindle the embers that were preemptively extinguished without a chance to naturally burn out.

han teaches us that not every sorrow needs to be solved and perhaps that sorrowful moments can be honoured; as they deeply shape us to become whom we are, much like joyful times that are naturally tied to memory.
han reminds us that grief, if carried with care, can bind us closer - to one another, to the past, and to our own selves. Anger, resentment, and regret reflect how much we care, revealing how much we feel hurt or wronged, plus the impact of feeling that way.

So that’s why this newsletter exists. Slow writing to slow down, and listen inward. To say, “What you’re feeling… Even if you don’t know how to name it, is real and important.”

We can’t change the past, but we can choose how it lives within us. Let it give weight to you who are. Let it soften how you see others. Let it be fuel, and not a burden.

That’s the thing about han: it’s born from intense and unresolved emotion yet felt so deeply that it anchors you toward hope. A pain so strong, it creates a longing to feel whole again.

Only recently have I realized that naming and living through this emotion has given me an unexpected strength and sense of purpose — a quiet return to something essential within me. A feeling I recognize from childhood.

And so lately, I’ve been often asking myself:
Would the younger version of me — so curious and excited about the world and his unimaginable life ahead — be proud of who and where I am right now?

I believe that’s what han illuminates for me the most… A reminder to carry what once hurt with tenderness. It’s a call to become someone my younger self would not only look up to — but trust to hold a heart, pockmarked and imperfect, with the utmost care.

And not just for him, but for those whom came before us, the loved ones who now surround us, and even the strangers who briefly cross our path and leave something behind…

We are entrusted with fragile memories and stories that carry their essence. What we choose to do with that — is entirely up to us.

🔒 PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

Han isn't just a poetic sadness — its very name unveils a guide to the feeling itself.

In Thursday’s deep dive, we’ll explore the etymology of 한 through its Hanja (Chinese characters):

• 心 — the heart

• 恨 — resentment, remorse, lingering grief

By breaking it down, we uncover how han was never meant to be passive melancholy.

Join me in exploring the brilliance of the word — it doesn’t just describe an emotion, it fascinatingly teaches us how to feel it.

🕊️ This edition is exclusive to paid subscribers.
If you're curious how a single word can hold centuries of longing — you’re invited.

If any section of this article resonates, feel free to subscribe, reply, or simply sit with it.

This is only the beginning.

And so I must ask…

“이 한을 누구에게 말하리오”
To whom can I speak of this han?

Leave a comment

The human condition to live and die is one that we may all resonate with; to heal and be wounded, and to move on despite obstruction.

Indeed, this ancient letter reflects the perpetual nature of love and loss and acts as a tragic reminder of the human experience: the fragility of life and the devastation to have lived it.

Sandles woven with hemp bark and the widow’s own hair, placed beside the deceased’s head within his tomb.

Reflecting upon this ancient heartbreak brings us inevitably to the Korean concept of han, our guiding theme in which we focus on every week. It is a pillar of Korean identity that is felt as unresolved sorrow, anger, resentment and regret — residing within the soul. The widow’s letter is han personified.

When I first discovered this story years back, it called to me in an odd way. I remember being petrified with an overwhelming doom that time with loved ones will eventually run out. It may also have been a catalyst to write again, and live a life without regret or one with atleast a little less emotional restraint.

Today, I find myself returning to its words with fresh eyes, and resonate deeply in reflection of my own life: dealing with daily struggles to accepting change, challenges and the chaos that chases us in consequence.

Every morning for instance, as I leave home and greet my family goodbye - I feel a flutter of unease - a responsibility to come back and return, hoping they do the same. In that moment, the closed door behind me feels like a shield or barrier to the world in which I carry in my heart; and each step away feels like setting a part of myself adrift. Likewise, coming home is a passage from absence back into presence: reunited, momentarily, with all that I love.

In mind of the widow’s letter on seperation, I’ve heard and felt the same sentiment too. Half-joking and half-serious - two souls plead that they must die on the same day, or else the grief would be too immense to bear: “together until our hair turns grey, then die together”. In both cases, it is this shared vision of “always” that deepens the love, even if the loss of it casts a long shadow of sorrow.

Indeed, love and loss is a cycle like no other; and, it binds us to the human condition in learning to cherish the present and look forward toward the future with the greatest of endurance. Recently, I recall the passing of loved ones, family visiting from overseas to inevitably depart, or even bidding farewell to a childhood friend moving abroad. Feelings here are felt collectively across people, and before it is too late - it’s important to sustain a level of vulnerability and let han or at least glimpses of it, flow through you.

We often silence our deepest feelings: out of pride, fear of judgment, or a cultural expectation of stoicism (particularly in Korean and Asian societies). The widow’s courage in voicing heartbreak reminds us that vulnerability isn't a weakness, and more so that it's profoundly human and deeply connecting. We are reminded to feel.

Every departure could be the last. The thought itself always feels like a stroke of bad luck to even think about, but it’s certainly an effective call to presence. Knowing that every interaction could be the last infuses ordinary moments with urgency. The widow’s letter provokes us to live each interaction as sacred, precious, and with limited time… Or instead face a suffering like no other. We are reminded of life’s fragility.

Imagine, for a moment, that each farewell is indeed your last. How might this change your daily interactions? Might it allow us to live with fewer regrets, deeper gratitude, and warmth?

As practical reflections for this week:

• Express your love without filter: Choose one person (perchance that the feeling comes) - family, partner, friend - and articulate explicitly why you cherish them. Let your heart speak openly without reservation.

• Pause intentionally before leaving a loved one: Briefly imagine the moment as your final memory together. Notice the tenderness and appreciation that arises.

By allowing ourselves, even briefly, to dwell within our deepest vulnerabilities and fears, we cultivate a richer, more intentional life.

The widow’s 500-year-old letter is an archetypal tale of heartbreak that reminds us to embrace love to the truest value of which we feel it. We must honour life, and remember with han - sometimes things may be too hard to fix yet we must move on.

In doing so, we may then carry such emotional weight into emotional power that surges our every day.

If any section of this article resonates, feel free to subscribe, reply, or simply sit with it.

This is only the beginning.

And so I must ask…

“이 한을 누구에게 말하리오”
To whom can I speak of this han?

Leave a comment

고향은 먼 데 있어도 가슴에 있다
"Even if home is far away, it still lives in your heart."

"You're not even Korean..."

This is the most common sentiment second-generation Koreans often hear growing up. A phrase that rupture a feeling of displacement that is certainly felt throughout all children of migration. These are the words heard by those born between departure and belonging in whichever country they first opened their eyes.

It’s a funny contradiction though: to be told you are detached, to be stripped of your right to belong - even when your heart stirs at the faintest thread of these rather formative memories. Like a school day in your family kitchen, where the bubbling sound of doenjang-jjigae (it’s pronounced DWEN like Gwen with a “g“, and is a beautifully fermented soybean stew) has an uncanny rhythm that reaches a crescendo as it gets closer and closer. You see hands, and then the soft landing of a white porcelain bowl greeting your sleepy eyes beneath a shroud of steam.

천천히 먹어~ (“eat slowly”).

This is not Korean?
If not me, then who?

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Before I continue, I just want to take a moment to say thank you. On Friday night, I was at a friend's house, enjoying drinks with some of my closest people, when something completely unexpected happened: my first paid subscriber!!!!

$80 for an annual subscription.
Still feels surreal to even write that.

Thank you, to an old friend for believing in this space before it even fully takes shape. For trusting in these early words enough to say, “of course I have to support you”! This is a guy who has the purest of hearts, though I know deep inside he has the most han out of everyone I know…

The support lit something inside me that night. Not just hope, but a responsibility to keep writing, to keep remembering, to keep building a home for all the unexpressable feeling we carry.

Thank you for being the very first!

“Well, I’ll be damned. There’s actually someone who hates doenjang-jiggae."

Memory can tether us to who we are, but memory alone isn't enough to guarantee belonging.

Belonging on its own, is not han of course.
han brews when that belonging is questioned, denied, or bluntly taken away.

It’s not just the memory of home-cooked meals or warm words. It’s the dull pain when you realise that no matter how deep your memory runs: you will still be asked to prove yourself. Still judged to be not enough, not Korean enough, nor substantial within anything that follows thereafter the fact.

han therefore forms in the spaces where belonging is fragmented, where language falters on your tongue and self-frustration grows into a state of self-exile.

It isn’t just the ache of missing home. It’s the realisation that you don't fully belong anywhere! And you find yourself helplessly suspended between two worlds that both feel half-claimed. It’s funny writing this: as I think of close friends who are mixed - and I can only get a glimpse of how they must’ve felt at some point or another in their lives.

So many people are faced with this impossible choice, and many of us learn to survive the only way we know how…

By cutting away parts of ourselves, and having to assimilate ofcourse but going a little too far, it turns into a sort of alienation.

Loud and bright kids turn silent over facing the humiliation of not being "enough”.

As adults, we’ve realised that we’ve abandoned the very roots that once tethered us, roots that have kept us grounded in an unknown, frightening world in the hopes of finding peace, acceptance, and a safe place to feel whole.

And then when we turn our backs, han follows.

han lingers in the unspoken grief of what we surrendered, and it ferments in the guilt of what we left behind.

It reminds me of that Monday morning before highschool: pushing the bubbling bowl of doenjang-jjigae away and instead picking at stale, toasted raisin bread… Here I am more than 10 years later — writing a newsletter about fermented guilt.

han is heavy, and only those who have felt it can truly understand. It is an instinct, an undercurrent to identity, and a way of being.

Over the next few articles, I want to explore where han 한 (恨) erupts:
how it rises through grief, loss, hardship, heartbreak, helplessness, anger, and anguish.

Not just as memory, or ancestral link to history but as a living and undeniably true part of who we are.

If any section of this article resonates, feel free to subscribe, reply, or simply sit with it.

This is only the beginning.

And so I must ask…

“이 한을 누구에게 말하리오”
To whom can I speak of this han?

Leave a comment

“눈물마저 말라버린 자리에, 한이 남는다.”
Where even tears have dried, han remains.

Throughout my life, there’s always a Korean word I keep coming back to.
It has only one syllable, and it consists of only three letters — HAN.

In Korean, it looks like this:

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han 한 (恨) is a uniquely Korean word with no true English equivalent. It is often described as an amalgamation of unresolved sorrow, deep resentment, regret, grief, and helpless yearning. It is an emotion born from historical trauma, personal hardship, and a generational silence: felt collectively within a nation.

You’ll find it in Poetry by Lee Chang-dong, it is the very essence of The Revenge Trilogy of Park Chan-wook, in the quiet dread of Pachinko, or the harrowing sound of pansori.

I first encountered han not in a textbook, but through stories my father told me.

He spoke of Korea’s heavy drinking culture as a sort of coping mechanism as he poured his own shot glass of the distilled liquor. Supposedly, alcohol was a way of numbing centuries of loss, invasion, and stolen identity. He talked about our family history then.

I learned that my grandmother was born in Japan during the occupation and was forced a Japanese name - one that I did not know her by. That a great-uncle had been kidnapped, then likely killed by Japanese forces - a beloved relative never to be found again. Outside of school, I was learning history not as something so long ago and monochrome.

For the first time the past didn’t feel like a story, and more like a bruise I hadn’t noticed was mine; perhaps, more akin to the Mongolian birthmark that stained my left wrist blue as a child. Just facts, spoken in passing that stayed with me. And so did the way my father’s eyes would darken - not with anger, but with a kind of looming despair, like a sentence left without a final word… Until a clink of the shot glass broke the heavy silence and my glassy glaze. I was taken aback as he was smiling: perhaps in an attempt to hide a sort of anguish but more than likely - the fact that he can share such stories with his son.

If you ask someone in Korea about han - a ‘real Korean’ born and raised within the country - they might shrug or shake their head, often dismissing it as an artefact of the past or even a term not to be used lightly. Indeed, some feel it’s outdated, a word irrelevant today and even moreso, a word specifically irrelevant to ‘overseas Koreans’ - a name for ethnic Koreans born abroad in foreign countries such as America, Japan, Uzbekistan, Australia and so forth (Koreans be everywhere somehow). Funnily enough however: it is within these disconnected communities that I believe we may find han and its original meaning, feelings, and attitudes to have evolved into a new denomination - and one that diasporic communities from other countries often find great resonance within.

As a precaution - han brings forth contrary and strong opinions with some critics claiming it to be a form of self-victimization in not letting go: a useless negative concept and nothing thereafer. But that’s the thing about han, it’s not meant to be dissected like an academic term. It’s not something you can literally define - it’s something you feel. And once it hits, it lingers like a heavy sandbag within the soul of those who have felt it. Han is therefore catalyzed by experience; as it not only brings forth a sense of understanding but further provides the sole key in which to feel the weight of its brevity in modern contexts.

Why it’s my favourite Korean word:

1. It names the unnamable.
   han is a collective feeling amongst Koreans with emotions inherited across generations. Like many other Koreans born abroad - as well as children of diasporas - it is a feeling we have long experienced but couldn’t articulate. An accumlating ache of anger, anguish and regret after being wronged; the reality of soul-shattering helplessness; the feeling of displacement and a dissected lack of belonging. A vicarious feeling constantly reminded to us by our parents, in which we grow up and find ourselves feeling and experiencing similar emotions. It’s not always visible, but it’s always there. This word makes space for that.

2. It connects history to the present.
   Even though we didn’t live through war or occupation, han reminds me that my story doesn’t start with me. It stretches back: through our ancestors, through our unique family histories or shared national traumas, through migration, through stories and silence — and then finally showing up in the way we move through the world.

3. It bridges cultures.
   As someone shaped by multiple identities, han feels like a thread that links Korean roots to my lived experiences overseas. It explains how pain can be both personal and collective; as well as how art, music, and story become ways of release and connection. han catalyses a unique flow of energy, akin to the Korean Taeguki - or for the non-Koreans out there: Ying Yang.

4. It makes room for contradiction.
   In a world that pressures us to ‘move on’ and always stay positive, han says: “No. Some things are too deep to fix. And that’s okay.” It lets beauty and pain coexist. han honours life’s contradictions and our very human capacity to suffer or endure.

5. “Home is where the han is”
   han is the fibre of our identity, a cultural memory that ties us back to a distant motherland, as well as people displaced across the world. han provides a sense of belonging when you do not belong anywhere. It’s a collective suffering, where similar pains remind us that we are not alone. han is a recognition of the past that we carry, and through that process - we may utilise it to fuel an unrelenting motivation toward our future.

Burning (2018), directed by Lee Chang-dong.

Have you heard of han 한 (恨) before?

Have you felt it? Maybe you've seen it in a film that lingered longer than expected, in music that stirred something deep inside, or in a story that left a pockmark on the heart.

Whether han is something you carry or something you're just beginning to notice - I’d love to know what it means to you, as well as what you think.

If any section of this article resonates, feel free to subscribe, reply, or simply sit with it.

This is only the beginning.

And so I must ask…

“이 한을 누구에게 말하리오”
To whom can I speak of this han?

Leave a comment

Sometimes, what we call “peace” is actually numbness.

And what we call “quiet” is a silence we didn’t choose.

We often crave peace and ask for quiet as basic conditions of living, but what happens when the silence becomes too deep… and lasts for too long?

When stillness doesn’t soothe, but swallows. There’s a version of silence that isn’t calming. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. This version of silence is traced to a lack of outward expression - one that follows a lack of direction, burnout, heartbreak - disillusionment. I want to touch on silence that is not chosen, but something that has crept in without permission. Not silence as a sanctuary of sorts, but as a state to be direly extrapolated.

Cotard’s Syndrome isn’t just a rare psychological disorder (I’ll define this shortly).

It’s also a modern metaphor for the silence we internalise just to keep up with the struggles of daily life: until we no longer recognise who we’ve become.

I was overseas in Seoul, where the air bit at -15°C and my body was on survival mode. Numb fingers, rapid breath — then picture a red nose whizzing through a horde of black puffer jackets with a few of them wincing as I squeeze passed. (The imagery is really cute but very truthful). I boarded a bus, collapsing onto heated suede seats and unknowingly let out a wince myself. The warmth wasn’t just physical - it was congratulatory.

Beyond the fogged glass: people passed like echos. And while the world outside blurred into ghostly shapes — I scrolled into my Shazam history, searching for something to anchor me through the Hellish cold.

And then I found it: Cotard’s Syndrome by Kim Oki - a track I’d tagged and only briefly heard in a chic, heavily decorated Christmas cafe a few hours earlier.

A saxophone wails in sorrow, but there is also soul; full, trembling and alive.

In the moment, I couldn’t help but reflect on the exhaustion: from work, life, and freezing on the curb pretending it’s all fine. Complete and utter numbness. The way I’d been moving through days on end without really feeling. The song called out a version of myself that had been dormant, thawing a part of me and unveiling emotions gone cold.

As the melody drifted like breath across glass, I googled the title of the song.

What I found was uncanny — Cotard’s Syndrome: a rare mental disorder where people believe they are already dead.

It felt metaphorically accurate but not in a dramatic or derranged type of way.

But moreso in that slow, everyday kind of death…

when work depletes and takes more than you give,

when love feels transactional,

when friendships fade under the weight of inconvenience,

when we smile more online than in real life,

when we stop speaking… not because we have nothing to say, but because it seems our words are not worthy to be part of the discussion.

On the bus, we pulled into the next stop.

Dozens stood outside, shivering and silent.

And for a second, I wondered how many of them were feeling the same.

There is a stillness that isn't peace, in both sound and place.

It seeps in quietly…

between deadlines,

unread messages,

tasks and people we forget to come back to.

We move through days drained by the dull pull of:

• work

• relationships

• bad habits

• and something unnamed that keeps piling on.

Day after day… Week after week, and then it’s suddenly your birthday again…

And you scoff.

And with time, we quietly change as a focus on ourselves becomes less of a priority.
Until one day, we look up and barely recognize the person you've become.

Cotard’s — not as psychosis, but as a metaphor of death.

There’s a certain shift that happens slowly as we adapt to the obstacles of life… And only naturally so, many of us become quieter.

Quiet: not always out of sadness; but as a way to stay grounded when things begin to collapse. Stillness becomes a strategy, and a time for recuperation.

I’m certain that I’m not alone in this way of thinking.

Lately, I’ve noticed the same quiet settling across people I know. It’s not absence, but a sense of dullness. Like we’re all conserving energy, bracing for something, unsure when it’s safe to feel full again.

And in doing so, we’ve made joy something we feel we must earn, rather than something innate.

Now, watchful eyes have gleamed into the faces of those whom I love, as if the thief of happiness had such power.

Maybe you’ve felt it too… A Korean word called han.

You can:

• respond to this letter in the comment section below

• write it in a journal

• sit with it for a moment before letting the idea go

Thank you for reading… This letter was a preface to the han 한 (恨) publication.

Until next week,

Elias - han 한 (恨)