Today is my birthday.
And I want to begin this new year by telling you about a version of me you have never met.
She is twenty-something, living abroad for the first time, in a country where everything is different.
The food. The language on the street. The way people greet each other. The silence of her room at night.
She calls her mom almost every day.
Not because anything is wrong.
Just because hearing a familiar voice makes the distance feel smaller.
It takes her six months to stop feeling homesick.
Six months of pretending she was fine during the day and missing everything at night.
The work is not easy. The hours are long. Some days she is so tired she doesn't know how she will get up the next morning.
She gets up anyway.
There are days she gets sick, and there is no one to bring her soup or check her temperature or tell her to rest.
So she makes her own meals. She eats them alone. She takes care of herself because there is no other option.
And somewhere in those two years, without ever deciding to, she starts building something.
An armor.
Not made of metal. Made of feelings she learned to fold away.
Don't cry now. Cry later. Don't ask for help. Figure it out. Don't show anyone it's hard. Just keep going.
That armor carried her through.
It carried her home, and then carried her abroad again, to Qatar.
It carried her through the early years here too, when life was harder than anyone back home ever knew. When she was doing work far below what she knew she could do. When she spent her only day off each week working quietly toward a way out.
She found that way out.
The armor helped.
I want to be clear about that.
I am not ashamed of the armor.
It is the reason I am here.
It taught me resilience. Discipline. The ability to stand in a hard place and stay standing.
It taught me I could take care of myself in a way no one else could.
During those years I also started reading books that changed me. The first was The Alchemist. I carried it with me across two countries. It is on my shelf in Doha right now.
So when I talk about setting the armor down, I don't mean throwing it away.
I mean noticing that I still wear it in places I don't need to anymore.
I wear it when someone offers to help and I say I'm fine before they finish the sentence. I wear it when I am exhausted and still act like I have endless energy. I wear it when something hurts and I immediately turn it into a lesson so I don't have to feel it. I wear it when I am safe, but my body still behaves as if I am alone in a foreign room, waiting for the next hard thing.
Armor is brilliant for surviving.
It is terrible for being close to anyone.
You can't hug someone properly through it. You can't fully rest in it.
And after enough years, you start to forget there is a softer person underneath it.
So this birthday, I am not making a list of resolutions.
I am making a list of things I am ready to set down.
The belief that needing someone makes me weak. The habit of bracing for something to go wrong just because things are going well. The idea that I have to earn rest by being completely depleted first. The need to prove, every single day, that I can handle everything alone.
I can handle a lot.
I just don't want handling it to be the only way I know how to live.
What I am keeping is the strength.
What I am setting down is the need to be strong all the time.
There is a difference, and it took me years to feel it.
If you are reading this and you built your own armor somewhere along the way, in a new country, a hard family season, a job that drained you, a relationship that taught you to stay guarded, I want you to know something.
You were not wrong to build it.
It kept you safe when nothing else did.
But you are allowed to check whether you still need to wear all of it, everywhere, all the time.
What did your armor protect you from? And is that danger still here, or are you only still bracing out of habit?
To the girl eating alone in that small room years ago:
Thank you. You got us here. You can rest now.
I'll take it from here, a little softer than before.
Happy birthday to me.
Until the next page, — Miss Joo