Michelle MiJung Kim (00:00)

Let's face it, life is feeling pretty weird right now. Every day, I oscillate between planning for the apocalypse and scrolling through dance videos on TikTok. One moment, I'm watching bombings and children screaming for help. The next, it's a video about what's new at Trader Joe's this week. Our neighbors are getting rounded up by ICE and being disappeared.

As we get ready to show our faces on Zoom for our nine o'clock meeting, we carry on despite this gripping sense of panic and fear because, hey, we still gotta pay our bills, right?

And then there's LinkedIn, the ultimate dystopian nightmare where we're all professionalized robots conversing in corporate speak while the world burns in the backdrop. What are we so excited to announce that's more newsworthy than talking about the rise of fascism or the ongoing genocides? The cognitive dissonance is becoming much too great to bear. Like, I just want us to shake off all the bullshit and just get real with each other, you know?

I wanna yell into the online abyss and say, I'm not okay, are you okay? I mean, are we okay?

Hey, welcome to I Feel That Way Too, a podcast where we ask some of life's trickiest questions and together find the courage to unpack them one story at a time. If you've ever wondered how life could be different but didn't know where to turn, I'm here to tell you, you're not alone. I Feel That Way Too.

The truth is, not that long ago, I was the one writing those I'm excited to announce posts on LinkedIn. I had a lot to celebrate, my ever-growing career, fancy awards, coveted projects, clients, and stages, and I made sure it was all seen publicly. That was all part of the game of being a successful entrepreneur, nurture maximum visibility, garner external validation, and use it to compound the momentum.

And you know what? I was damn good at it.

Michelle MiJung Kim (02:40)

After spending years in survival mode as I sprinted my way to the top, I felt like I finally made it. Being invited to give talks about social justice and getting paid to create change inside powerful organizations, it was the kind of life my younger self only dreamed of.

As a kid, I was always hungry to prove myself. Growing up low income, I remember staring at the calluses on my mom's feet after she got home from a long day at work. As a new immigrant, I remember watching my undocumented dad get belittled for his thick Korean accent at service desks. I always felt so powerless and angry that I couldn't do anything to protect him from the humiliation. Not unlike other children of immigrants,

I always imagined that becoming successful with money and power was the way that I could protect and care for my family. I thought, this is how I earned the dignity and respect that we deserved. So I chased the so-called American dream with everything I had. In corporate America, I learned how to be useful, how to be praised, how to prove that I too am worthy of belonging. Working long hours was my badge of honor.

And people pleasing was an essential part of my survival strategy.

Kelsey Blackwell (04:20)

I have my own experience of this, I also am very wired to perform.

Michelle MiJung Kim (04:28)

Meet Kelsey Blackwell. She's a black, biracial, queer, somatic coach who knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Kelsey Blackwell (04:35)

And I'm, like, you want me to tap dance over here? Let me tap dance over here. Oh, you want me to do this– okay, let me do it. Is that – you like that? You don't like that. Okay. Like I can be a chameleon to meet whatever I perceive are the desires of whoever it is that I'm wanting to impress. And because of my own history, I have a very finely tuned antenna to perceive what I think is receiving applause and what is missing the mark and adjust.

Michelle MiJung Kim (05:10)

Just like Kelsey, I knew all too well how to shape shift to survive. And I learned early on that being accepted as an insider, as someone who belonged, was the key that would grant me access to the institutions I so desperately wanted to be both accepted by and also change. Let me explain. Growing up, I was praised for being a good kid.

Even when I started becoming politicized in high school, staging protests, challenging school policies, organizing petitions, I did it all while being a straight A student, a favorite among teachers and administrators alike. I'd figured it out. If I was seen as being exceptional, I could get away with being bold. That same pattern continued in the workplace. If I over delivered on the job, I earned just enough room to start a DEI initiative to fundraise for a cause or to push for change without being seen as a threat. I had no problem working 80 hours a week if it meant I could sneak in more of myself through the side door. And more of myself meant challenging the very things that I confronted growing up. Racism, sexism, homophobia, white supremacy, injustice. Over the years as a good student, a star employee and a respected entrepreneur,

I'd mastered the delicate dance of being bold enough to be edgy, but safe enough to stay in the room. Be daring, but also palatable. Be honest, but also professional. Be principled, but also profitable.

For years, I managed to hold these contradictions in careful balance. And then, I started posting about Palestine.

Very quickly, my speaking engagements started getting canceled. Deals I'd been working on for months started falling through. They said the higher-ups weren't comfortable having a speaker who posts about genocide. They said I'd crossed the line, or that now wasn't the time. One company even said I violated their code of conduct by engaging in anti-Semitism.

My inbox kept getting lighter and lighter, and soon my calendar was empty. No meetings, no events, no nothing. The message was clear. I was suddenly, officially unhireable.

Looking at my empty inbox, I felt hollow. The applause, the institutional belonging, the safety I'd once enjoyed, all of it just disappeared, just like that. And I started to wonder, was any of it ever real?

Kelsey Blackwell (08:18)

What do you do with that feeling?

Michelle MiJung Kim (08:33)

Which feeling?

Kelsey Blackwell (08:34)

The void that you're naming, like how do you work with it?

Michelle MiJung Kim (08:39)

I think I tried to... look for other sources of external validation. I think external validation for me is kind of like the drug that I'm always choosing to feel better. I'm always looking to other people to soothe me and to remind me, and it's my friends, it's my community who remind me like, no, you are still that badass, you are amazing. When you decide you want to get back up and do these things you'll be able to. Sure, that's very really kind and I, I hear it, but I don't know that that is a long-term sustainable fix you know and I hate saying that I feel like sometimes I'm broken but the imagery that I have it's just a bottomless pit

Kelsey Blackwell (09:25)

Yeah.

Michelle MiJung Kim (09:38)

Right? There is a crack somewhere that is leaking and I am unable to feel truly at ease.

I often say that back in my girl boss era, I lived my life from the neck up. I didn't feel the need to pay attention to what the rest of my body was saying. In fact, any negative manifestation of my stressful life felt like an inconvenience and I just pushed it away. It's no wonder I didn't notice the anxiety and depression creeping in until one day I couldn't get out of bed.

My brain told me to get up and open my laptop, but my body refused to move. My body had gone on strike and I didn't know how to even begin to understand what it was trying to say. It was as if I needed to learn a whole new language. This language is what Kelsey might call somatics.

Kelsey Blackwell (10:47)

Yeah, somatics is a funny word and it is a word that it's like, sounds kind of elevated, but I think the simplest way to think about somatics is thinking about the body and what supports wellbeing, what supports our wholeness. And I was doing somatics before I knew that somatics was a thing. And I just called it embodiment. How do we inhabit ourselves? So… yes, we all have bodies, but we also have our relationship to land. We have a relationship to that which is larger than us, which we might call spirit or universe or mystery. We have a relationship to the collective. Welcome in that we aren't just here to think and do and get places, but that we have all these other aspects that are part of who we are.

Michelle MiJung Kim (11:46)

So much of my life, my body has been driven by fear. Fear of scarcity made me chase bigger and bigger goals. Fear of becoming irrelevant kept me visible even when I was drowning. Fear of abandonment turned me into a shapeshifter, always scanning for the edges of acceptance. But something shifted with Palestine. The cognitive dissonance that I'd learned to carry talking about justice while staying profitable and critiquing systems while benefiting from them was imploding from the inside and there was no quelling it. Maybe it was the gruesome videos of children under rubble or the desperate messages from journalists in Gaza, but whatever was shooting up from my chest had to be vomited out right then and there. There was no time to make it pretty or palatable and maybe I already knew that no amount of polished words or corporate maneuvering would protect me from the choice I was about to make.

The calculus was over, and so was my career as I knew it.

Speaking out cost me a whole lot, literally. I lost 90% of my income and countless opportunities. But more than that, it shattered the illusion I'd held onto for so long. That I was actually valued for what I believed in. And that we all believed in the same thing.

These days, I lie awake wondering, was I foolish to believe I could actually make a difference inside these systems? What if my best years are behind me? What if I can't make money anymore?

What if I never recover?

Kelsey Blackwell (13:57)

That's brave, that in and of itself, because we can spend a lot of time ignoring that. taking a moment to just, you know, acknowledge that. And then this is maybe also not a great answer, but can you build your capacity to be with discomfort? Which means that you're feeling that question, you're feeling that uncertainty, and we're grasping for a way to fill it.

and we just sit with ourselves in that process.

Michelle MiJung Kim (14:36)

After nearly 18 months of being expelled from the institutions I once thrived in, 18 months in this liminal space alone with my thoughts, I've realized I don't have the same kind of ambition I once had.

Tired of proving myself to be given permission to speak. Tired of waiting for gatekeepers to hand me the mic. Tired of systems that promise transformation but always disappoint. And tired of the disappointment I carry toward myself.

Looking back, my heart breaks for my younger self, the one who juggled respectability, survival, family, integrity, spinning a plate on every finger, every toe, her body contorting to keep them from breaking. These days, I don't have the wherewithal to perform anything but the truth. I just don't have it in me to constantly compartmentalize or to live with any more cognitive dissonance, not at work and definitely not within myself.

Maybe that's part of the reason why I made the leap when the call to show up for Palestine came. Maybe my body knew it was time. It was finally time to drop the balancing act because the cost is and has been much too high. Maybe that's why instead of taking calculated risks like I always have, I decided to dive in head first, burning to the ground my hard-earned seat at the table.

I don't regret my decision to spring off the path that I was on. Though ambition is quieter now, my clarity is louder. But time's ticking and my savings are shrinking. I know I can't go back to who I was, but I don't yet know who I'm becoming. I want to trust the path, but I'm nervous. How do I live in this world ruled by institutional power and capitalism… and still be free?

Kelsey Blackwell (16:59)

Yeah, yeah, thanks for bringing that in. Yeah, I mean, we live in paradox, right? So when you're talking about the needs of we gotta pay our bills, what's happening politically, the horror story that we're living in, all of that is true, right? Like that is undeniable, but it's not the only reality.

So one way to imagine this is like, if you think about a horizontal line, you could think about that horizontal line being the finite self or the finite reality. And finite meaning like the relative world, the everyday, the kind of grind that we live in. That is one expression of existence. But then we also have the infinite self. And you can think about the infinite self being a vertical line that intersects with the finite. And that vertical line is connected to the mystery. It's connected to our own life force. It's connected to our ancestors and the sort of lineage that we come from and the brilliance and the gifts that reside in us from who came before. And so I think really for all of us humans, we're in this question of… how do I hold both the truth of the finite and the infinite? How do I live in that intersection? Because if I just collapse one, I'm collapsing a huge part of what I actually need to survive and to thrive on some level. So if I'm only living in the finite and we really, like that's the realm that we're encouraged to center and prioritize. Because that's ultimately what keeps the wheels of capitalism going.

It's the systems at play, right? And yet I think we can all, hopefully we've all had experiences where we've connected to something bigger, something deeper, something that actually does feel also true. And when these two realities are sort of present, what we're trained to do is discount the one that's not the finite. So it's like it becomes woo, it becomes impractical, it becomes unreliable, and yet there's a cost when we do that. And we feel that cost in our own relationship to ourselves and our relationships to others, and ultimately like our relationship to life itself, like it loses that aliveness quality.

Michelle MiJung Kim (19:41)

I want to feel alive. I want to experience joy and live a life filled with purpose and meaning and connection. I want a world where we get to speak our truths without having to sanitize our words or cater to the comfort of the most powerful. I want a world where we don't have to prove our worthiness again and again, a world where we don't have to earn our safety, freedom, and dignity.

I'm sick of being served with bad and worse choices over and over as if those are my only options. I hate that we're constantly being asked to choose between our future and our integrity, our comfort or the suffering of others. I'm so sick of being bound by these institutions defining who we are and how to live. I don't want to live like that anymore. I want to let go. But...

What is on the other side? Will I be able to find it? How do you even begin to rebuild a sense of self that's been shaped by what you've now let go of?

Kelsey Blackwell (20:56)

I love this question so much. This feels like soul work. This feels like a question of belonging. What is it to know within your essence that you are enough and that you belong? And these are things that we can tell ourselves, but what is it to actually know it, to feel like you can rest there and still come back to, and I'm enough and I belong and I have nothing to prove?

And that to me is a soul question. I want to say that you deserve to feel that there's not something wrong with you, that you're looking to friends and colleagues to answer that. Like that's not a drug. It's what your system is doing to get that need met. And the fact that you have that need, there's nothing broken about that. Like, you deserve to feel that and I deserve and everyone deserves to feel that. And yet we do live in a world that does not condition us to rest there. So there's a lot of causes and conditions that we can point to of why so many of us look outside ourselves to meet that hunger. And what's the path to coming to a different embodied understanding?

Which to me is like coming into the truth, which is the truth is that you do belong. Like you are of this earth, right? You are of these elements and that you are enough.

Michelle MiJung Kim (22:55)

I wanna rest in those words. You are enough, but I don't know how. Maybe you felt it too, that restless urge to know your next move. Even as you're still processing what exactly it is that you're moving on from.

I scroll through celebratory posts on LinkedIn and I feel small, insignificant, invisible and irrelevant. I feel resentful watching people zoom past me while I'm left behind. Even as I criticize the callousness of capitalism, a part of me still longs to be that sought after person that I once was.

I hate the game, but if I'm being honest, a part of me still wants the winning hand. I wanted to walk away on my own terms, not pushed away like this. Have you ever felt torn like that? Like, you know there's so much more to life, so much to fight for, feel, imagine, and yet you still catch glimpses of yourself craving material success, institutional validation, and mainstream belonging?

And then I catch myself shaming myself in disgust, how I'm still managing to center my ego amidst all the pain and suffering in the world. Even still, I feel this urgency to land somewhere new, to launch again, to start living my life instead of wondering about my next steps. But why does it feel so hard to lift this fog in front of me?

Kelsey Blackwell (24:43)

What it feels like is a death of a part of ourself. Because as we're grasping and we're noticing, nothing is actually quite actually filling this. We'll do that enough that we'll kind of run ourselves into the ground. And then we're in a place of surrender. Okay, I give up. I don't know. I don't know the way. I don't know how to fill this. What do I do? Okay, sit with it. I surrender. Mea culpa. I don't know what to do.

And that place is fecund. That place is a place of loss. It's a loss of an identity and it's an identity that fits very well into our culture. It's disorienting. And so inside of that, it's very appropriate to actually let ourselves be in the grieving process of that. We're shedding something. We're losing an aspect of ourself that some part of us realize actually wasn't serving us, even though we really wished it would. And so can we recognize and be in the letting go of that, which a grieving period can look like being with yourself, crying, being with friends, if you have a ritual, doing a ritual. And that grieving period can take as long as it needs to take.

Our mind wants it to take a day. 15 minutes to grieve. Then I need a new agenda. I need a new identity. I need a new plan. So also recognizing it's an organic process and because nothing is constant, something will emerge, but it will emerge on its own time. And what emerges makes room for more of who you really are.

That's what you're in the listening. And you'll know when it's happening because you'll feel authentically pulled towards something. And that thing that you're authentically pulled toward, it may or may not make sense to your rational mind. But hopefully, because you've done the work of shedding that part of yourself or loosening the grip of that part of yourself that says everything has to fit into my master plan, maybe there's enough trust to follow what's emerging. And then you're in a different relationship with yourself and you're in a different relationship with life.

Michelle MiJung Kim (27:31)

The truth is, I'm still grieving.

I'm grieving the life that I thought I wanted. I grieve the version of me that was praised for being savvy and ambitious, the person who prided herself for pushing up against the edges without getting kicked out of the room.

I grieve the part of me that craves to be seen, celebrated, and rewarded for being a good kid by other people's definition. I grieve all that I traded to belong, to feel worthy through the eyes of others. I think about all that I lost along the way, what it really cost me.

I grieve the world we live in, the world that forces impossible choices between our integrity and our survival, between speaking our truth and providing for our loved ones. And I grieve the futures that we never got to build, the ones in our children's imagination, the ones we desperately need. And I wonder in awe how this time of collapse in my life is somehow offering me both the place of shadow and light at the same time. How it's allowing me to build a different kind of foundation than the one that I had spent my entire life building to finally, at last, begin anew.

Sometimes I replay the last two years in my head, the rage, the disappointment, the betrayal, the depression, the loneliness, and the shame. But the thing that I keep coming back to, the thing that keeps me grounded, is that I don't think I would have done anything differently. I couldn't have done anything differently. It never felt like a real choice. And that knowing – the embodied knowing that I couldn't have done anything differently is what helps me to feel amidst all the unknown that I'll be alright.

What I want today is to build a space where I get to just be. To honor my deepest truths and to be whole. I want to make room for my fears and shame and longings and questions. And I want to do it with people who feel that way too. I want to be in community with people who have been scraped hollow, burned and discarded by the toxic systems they devoted themselves to and bear witness as we journey on to rebuild the parts of ourselves we've had to let go of. I want to build my own stage without waiting for permission, without having to dance for the gatekeepers, without having to labor endlessly to be seen as useful. I now know there is no dignity in that for me. And I want to aid our collective healing and reclamation because your healing and mine – they're all connected. Maybe I don't need to prove myself for you to hear me. Maybe I just need to say what I want to say and see who comes and who stays. I've never believed that courage is about being fearless. As Mia Mingus says, we can only truly practice courage when we are afraid. So here's me betting on you and me, fears and all. I want to be held by the people, not institutions. I'm not gonna lie, I feel exposed, naked, and scared.

But I am here, fully here. And in this moment of discomfort, on the precipice of possibility, I'm paying attention with my whole being for what is emerging.

Listener 1 (32:00)

Hi, this is Amy calling from Los Angeles. Knowing I have so much love and support from my friends and family is what really grounds me. It helps me feel okay about making mistakes along the way because I know I'll always have someone to talk to and someone to guide me if I'm lost.

Michelle MiJung Kim (32:04)

Liked what you heard today? Leave us a review and tell everyone you know how they can subscribe to join the conversation.

Listener 2 (32:06)

Hi Michelle, my name is Paula. Calling in from the unceded territory of Huchin, AKA Oakland, California. I used to feel a lot of shame and grief when I compared my timeline to that of others, but once I started focusing on my journey and continuously reminding myself that I'm okay as I am, it's helped me stay grounded and keep moving. And now when I look back, those extra years of the windy path took me where I am today. ⁓ and I'm so grateful.

Michelle MiJung Kim (33:00)

Check out I Feel That Way 2 on YouTube to watch or hear the full interview with Kelsey.

Listener 3 (33:11)

My name is Cornell and I'm calling from San Leandro, California. When I need to sort of determine where I go from here, I return to my values and ensure that whatever decisions that I'm making are aligned with those values and the type of person that I want to be. Thanks so much for taking these and I can't wait to listen to the show.

Michelle MiJung Kim (33:31)

A full-bodied thank you to our guest, Kelsey Blackwell. To learn more about Kelsey's work, check out her book, Decolonizing the Body, and find more on her website at kelseyblackwell.com. This episode was produced by Geraldine Ah-Sue, Eunice Kwon, and me, Michelle MiJung Kim. Written by Michelle MiJung Kim and Geraldine Ah-Sue. The sound designer is Katie McMurran. Music by Katie McMurran and Jiyeon Park.

This podcast is brought to you by Asian American Futures. Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time on I Feel That Way Too.