Why We Do What We Do

Hi Readers!

By now, most of you have been getting to know us for at least a couple of months. To our new readers: we are so happy you’ve jumped on board! We can’t thank all of you enough for your love, support, and kind words. It drives us to push forward on days when life is busy and the web already feels too overcrowded and we wonder, “Does any of this matter?”

You’ve probably seen our feature on NBC News from earlier in the month. We’ve been obnoxiously shouting it from the rooftops because we still can’t believe anybody would be interested enough in our story to write an article about it in such a publication. The wonderful Monica Luhar did a great job asking questions and getting to the heart of our story. Actually, she did a little too great of a job. To be honest, we didn’t know how to answer some of her questions! Our interview with NBC spawned a lot of discussion between us. It made us consciously consider, “Why are we putting all of this work into the blog? What are we trying to accomplish? What is our mission?” We’d previously had kind of a fuzzy general idea about our goals, but Monica’s great journalistic skills made us really dig deep in search of concrete answers.

The short, sappy answer is: we do it for you. Really and truly! We do it for you individually, wherever you are right now reading this. Sitting in a cafe on your phone in Seattle or reading from your laptop at home in Sweden or sitting on the subway in Seoul. We are doing this specifically for you. Because you are important and you matter to us. Because we never want you to feel alone, like we sometimes have. Because we always want you to know that you have somebody who will listen. Because sometimes life is hard and you need to be reminded that others have experienced those hard times too. Because you need to know that there is light on the other side and the tough times will not last forever, despite how it may feel right now.

Together, we have felt lonely living as Korean adoptees in the South. There are not many of us down here and we sometimes feel alone when we see all of the great adoptee communities that exist in California and Baltimore and New York. That’s part of why we started this blog. Because we wanted to be a part of those communities as much as we possibly could from Nashville! Even if that just meant seeing your Instagram posts of all your beautiful faces at a table full of bulgogi and kimchi.

More than that, we have felt alone individually at different times in our lives. I (Whitney) can remember 2011 – what I refer to as “the dark days.” The days I couldn’t bear the thought of getting out of bed to face the world. The days I literally hid in my closet weeping into a pillow in an effort to not disturb my housemates. I’d never felt so alone. I had just come off a whirlwind year of teaching/living/exploring/eating/loving Korea. I’d reunited with my birth family and then one day, they just weren’t there next to me anymore. I returned to the States completely unprepared for the reverse culture shock I would experience. I was back to “life as usual” in the U.S. but it was anything but normal. I was suddenly aware that I wasn’t Korean enough in Korea but not really American enough at “home” either. My heart was aching and I didn’t know who to talk to because I had no one with that shared experience. I scoured the internet, read every blog I could find. It truly seemed like I was the only one in the world to experience what I was experiencing. I just needed a reminder that I wasn’t alone.

That is why we exist. We openly share our experiences so maybe you can find something that you relate to. And we are not experts by any means, so we love learning from you, too! The KAD community is a special gift, but we get as much out of it as we put into it. You’ll never know how much we value your input and comments and stories. By each of us sharing those little parts of ourselves, we are creating something magnificent — and much bigger than any of us could accomplish individually. We hope you will join us on that journey.

We love you. Individually. As a person.

You are valued. You are important.

You are not alone.

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We are always accessible to KADs via these outlets:

• Facebook 
• Twitter
• Google+
• Instagram @wetheleesblog
• wethelees2013@gmail.com

© We the Lees, 2015. All Rights Reserved.