When I was child, I was never the type that thought much into the future, worried about what I'd grow up to be......I really just cared where I was going to play and who I was going to play with. I was consistently a bad student in school, rarely doing homework and performing poorly on tests. Like many kids, I gravitated towards things that were fun. Unlike other kids, I took this notion of living to play further. Even as elementary school turned to middle school and kids started actually trying to learn and began thinking about their future, I only really cared about playing sports, playing video games, and listening to my favorite music. As high school came around, many things changed.....life became a little bit more serious. I crashed my parents car after joy riding it in the streets for nearly 2 weeks. My grandmother passed away when I was 15 (who had raised me since I was a born). I was arrested and booked into a police station and juvenile hall for the first time. And then a second time. Drugs entered my life. Sports become more than just a fun past time. All the kids around me started to really think about their future. I still really had no idea.
During high school, my parents also decided to move back to Korea, leaving my brother and I to live in an apartment together while we finished up high school. During that time however, my parents lost their entire life savings and left us in a somewhat tight predicament. I decided that I would start working at Fosters Freeze to make a little money just to be safe and make sure we didn't have to worry about getting food. I had also decided to start community college where I planned to attend without knowing if I was going to really pursue a degree or not. I drove my brother to school every morning, went to college, then went to work immediately after. It was a simple and easy to maintain life, as non-traditional as it may sound. When I think back to that time in my life, I think fondly of it.
Nearly a decade later I had transferred from community college to a university then continued my studies at graduate school and then did research at another university before moving into a corporate job. Life had been generally easy for me up to that point, obstacles and unfortunate events aside.
In 2008, the stock market crashed in an epic fashion, taking with it nearly all the money I had every earned. It wasn't life-changing money but it was all the money that I had every saved. It's funny, I always told myself that my life was about more than money - and that's the way I lived as well. However, your perspective on life and your future significantly changes when all the money you have, all the money you set aside, all the money you imagined would lead to a somewhat better life one day....evaporates. My wife and I were to be married in May of 2009, so the timing of the market crash and my monetary debacle couldn't have come at a worse time.
In late 2010 (about 18 months after the market crash) still being shell shocked about losing so much money and starting from scratch with a mortgage on a home, I discovered that my father had defaulted on a home he purchased under my brother and my name, leaving us with a credit score that would make a bank likely reject us for a $10 loan. At this point, I didn't have much money saved and, now thanks to this default from my father, I had no credit either.
In 2011, an aunt of mine in Korea passed away from colon cancer, and while I was not very close to her, I had recently spend considerable amount of time with her just 2 years before, spending the equivalent of "thanksgiving" in Korea with her. Later that year, her daughter committed suicide as a result of depression stemming from her mother's untimely death.
In late 2011, my wife and I decided to we wanted to have children. In April of 2012, we discovered a medical condition in me that would send us on a tumultuous and exhausting journey dealing with infertility, adoption, and depression.
In the first 4-5 years of our marriage, I think it would be a fair statement to say that I feel my wife and I have been thru our share of struggles. And while I stayed determined to get thru these events, they left a damaging scar on my outlook on life. I realized I had become to expect bad things to happen, so much so that I was the type of person that would expect stormy events even during the sunniest of times. It was a sort of philosophy and protective layer I created to make myself feel better when things didn't work out. I was guarded and pessimistic about my future, hoping that would make it me more resilient to tough times.....which it did. But it also made me lose hope in things.....I took less chances, I worried more.....I kept my guard up at all times and found it genuinely hard to find the silver lining in even the most positive of events.
It's now 2015 and I still find myself afraid to think positive about the future as I feel there is still a jinx in the atmosphere above me. But I've slowly come to realize that a positive attitude is much more powerful and tangible than I give it credit for. Not because it can affect the outcome of some events in your life, but because it changes the way you can handle and interpret those situations as well as providing motivation to move on with your life. As my son starts to learn and absorb things from my personality and mentality, my predisposition to depression and pessimism is something I want to minimize. He and my wife will be the reason I learn to gain optimism (again), freely and without regard to events in the future that I have no control over. Maybe one day I can revert to my younger days when I could so easily live in the current moment. And if I'm lucky (and to draw some strength from the people around me) perhaps I can see the clouds that inevitably make their way into my life not as bearers of rain and storms, but rather as contrasting objects in the sky, making the sunsets of my life all the more colorful.
