Where your daily spending becomes earning

In 2021, I was diagnosed with tennis elbow. I want you to sit with that for a second, because here's the thing, I've never played tennis. Never played golf. Never even picked up a ping pong paddle seriously in my life. And somehow, I still got tennis elbow. At first, I brushed it off. Just a little pain, I thought. I'd massage around it and move on with my day. But then the pain sharpened. It got so bad that I genuinely thought I might lose the use of my arm. And of course, it had to be my right arm. The one I use for everything. I was stressed beyond words. I started seeing an acupuncturist. Rehab, three times a week, two hours at a time. They tried everything needles, stretches, treatments I couldn't even name. I'd walk out so exhausted that I needed another hour just lying down to get my energy back. Two months of this. Back and forth, back and forth. And the pain? It never left. So I made a decision I'd later regret: I got a steroid shot. That's...

I came back to South Korea in 2020 thinking I'd feel like I belonged again. I was wrong. The plane touched down and I stepped out as an American citizen—my passport now foreign to my own country. It sounds dramatic, but it's the only way to describe that feeling. Everything looked familiar. The language was mine. The streets, the food, the culture—I grew up here. But the moment I tried to exist in this place, everything turned bureaucratic and unwelcoming. Six months. That's how long I had to wait for health insurance. Six months of being sick without coverage, of not knowing what would happen if something serious occurred. I needed a bank account—couldn't do it without jumping through hoops. An ID? More documentation, more waiting, more proving that I deserved to be here, even though I was born here. As a foreigner on paper, I wasn't quite welcome. The anxiety started small and then grew into this constant hum in my chest. I was a single mom. I needed to work....