Dear Mina:

I feel comfortable commenting in this thread because this is the only thread open at this time for me to communicate to and with you.

He said to you:

“With me, you can always be yourself. You do not have to try to be extra nice.”

“I feel really secure when I am with you.”

anita

Dear Mina:

I mean to acknowledge how meaningful his words are to you, how they mean the world to you.

To me, the first statement; “With me, you can always be yourself. You do not have to try to be extra nice.” means that you are safe to be you in his presence, in his company, that he will not turn against you. It means you don’t have to … hide behind looking and sounding “extra nice” so to avoid being criticized, disapproved of. You can drop that defense, that extra nice defense. It is a beautiful thing, to feel safe so to just be you, authentically you.

His second statement “I feel really secure when I am with you.” means to me that he too felt safe in your presence, which indicates to me that your acceptance of him as who he is was received by him and led to him feeling safe in your company.

anita

Dear Mina:

What a beautiful letter. A lovely letter.

I like you accepting reality (“I am accepting the reality that you aren’t here with me”).

I like your resolution to find yourself, realizing it is a process (“I will do my best to find myself as well … and being happy during the process as well”)

It is a loving letter: loving to yourself (most important), and loving to him as well.

Regarding your graded discussion for your academic English class tomorrow, I hope you relax and do your best, that is all you can do.

anita

Dear Mina:

You are welcome. Being “connected with reality” is the key to your (and anyone’s) mental health. When there is a fit between one’s thinking/believing and reality, there is mental health.

Hope you rest well. Looking forward to your next post, your next letter.

anita

Dear Mina:

I just googled a few things. I read that South Korea has the highest or second highest suicide rates mostly because of elderly suicide (Wikipedia). Regarding youth suicide, in a Voices of Youth website, from four years ago, it reads: “Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the country’s most prestigious university, lost four of its students…to suicide. For a high school kid who has been trained to constantly aim for academic excellence, getting into KAIST is a dream come true. But living this dream means a relentless struggle to survive the rigors of a highly competitive environment… ”

You wrote: “Do I have to disappear and end it all for real so people will UNDERSTAND how they should understand their children more? To realise that their children is more important than their pride and money?”

But Mina, I don’t think you can teach parents this lesson by suicide or in any other way. When parents do value their prestige and money more than their children’s feelings and quality of life, then these are their values and nothing will change that. On the other hand, I understand you because you are alive, posting, telling, communicating.

You wrote earlier in your recent post: ” I do not know why am I so angry or to whom am I angry at”. You answered your own questions in the same post, in the first quote I copied from your recent post: you are angry at your parents because  they value their pride and money more than they value you, Mina, your feelings and experience of life. They don’t understand, nor are they trying to understand you.

There is hope, Mina, hope in you communicating and promoting what you value, what you think is most important to you.

anita

Dear Mina:

Wikipedia has an entry on SKY: an acronym used to refer to the three most prestigious universities in South Korea: Seoul National University (motto: The truth is my light), Korea Univiersity (motto: Freedom, justice, truth) and Yonsei University (Motto: The truth will make you free). It reads: “In South Korea, admission to one of the SKY universities is widely considered as determining one’s career and social status. Many of South Korea’s most influential politicians, lawyers, physicians, engineers, journalists, professors, and policy makers (bureaucrats) have graduated from one of the SKY universities… Being admitted in one of these universities typically requires students to be within 1% of the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test which means that these universities have acceptance rates as low as 2%”

It also reads: “There have been a number of SKY university students who have dropped out of school to protest against South Korea’s overheated academic eliticism.”

* I wonder what these students who dropped out as a protest, how it worked for them… and I wonder, following the student’s suicide, did the university administrators offer any counseling, any help for students to deal with what happened?

I am also wondering why Truth is in the motto of each one of the three universities. What truth is referred to…?

anita

Dear Mina:

I don’t know about the quality of counseling offered at the SKY universities, but it may be something for you to explore?

I am not surprised young people in Korea (and foreigners, I suppose) study 5-6 years so to be accepted to a SKY university- it is considered such an honor, prestige, the road to success, or like your mother said: being a Somebody.

And there you are, Mina in Sky, and the only thing you yearn for is Love, to be understood, to be accepted.

From observing other students, do you notice their distress regarding the academic pressure, the competition, expectations: how they deal with it,  any open talk about it among students?

anita

Dear Mina:

I read that on the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test) day, the stock markets open late, buses and subways are increased to avoid traffic jams so that students won’t be late to the testing sites, planes are grounded so that noise will not disturb students. Members of students’ families gather outside testing sites to cheer on the students.

According to my go-to source of information, Wikipedia, 552,297 examinees took the CSAT in 2016, over half a million. If this is the year you took the test, then you were one of  5,523 top 1% students. In Sky, unlike high school, you are among the five thousand and a half population (the 1%). No wonder “college is a totally different thing than high school”. In high school you “used to #1 in almost everything but everyone here, they are as smart and as intelligent as me”.

Back to Wikipedia, it reads that South Korea is a top performing country in reading literacy, mathematics and sciences, has one of the world’s highest educated labor forces, and is “well known for its obsession with education, which has come to be called ‘education fever’“. It reads further that “Higher education is an overwhelmingly serious issue in South Korea society, where it is viewed as one of the fundamental cornerstones of South Korean life… Academic success is often a source of pride for families… Graduating from a top university is the ultimate marker of prestige, high socioeconomic status, promising marriage prospects, and a respectable career path… pressure to succeed academically is deeply ingrained in South Korean children from an early age. Those who lack a formal university education often face social prejudice… The top three universities in South Korea, often referred to as “SKY”… Intense competition and pressure to earn the highest grade is deeply ingrained in the psyche of South Korean students at a young age.”

It goes on: “The system’s rigid and hierarchical structure has been criticized … described as intensely and ‘brutally’ competitive. The system is often blamed for the high suicide rate in South Korea… Former South Korean hagwon teacher Se-Woong Koo wrote that South Korean education system amounts to child abuse…The system has also been criticized for producing an excess supply of university graduates creating an overeducated and underemployed labor force… in the first quarter of 2013 alone, nearly 3.3 million South Korean university graduates were jobless, leading many graduates overqualified for jobs requiring less education”,

This explains to me why you “have tried to talk to a few of my friends here but they seems like they are doing ok. Not so well but the stress is bearable for them” I understand better the pressure you experienced as well as your ex boyfriend (can I refer to him as Gyunnie, or is it your private word for him?)

I am thinking students are not likely to talk about their stress, they are just doing their best to ignore it and keep their focus on the studying, knowing they have no option but to keep going, study and study. Just like you feel there is no option, no way out. At this very point I have better understanding of why your ex boyfriend broke up the relationship, the pressure to succeed academically is just too intense to allow a love relationship. No, he didn’t reject you. He ejected you from his overwhelming life.

This is also leading me to think that the counseling available in SKY is going to promote the “education fever” mentality, aiming at you focusing on this fever and putting aside anything in its way.

anita