A few times this week, I’ve found myself suddenly at a loss for words while standing in front of students in class. Certainly, this is not the best timing—they are in the process of preparing for their final speaking exam assigned by me. Many of the first years especially strain to grasp the simple instructions or too lazy to read the directions written out in Korean, requiring me to be extra straightforward with my sentences.

The sensation during these tongue-tied embarrassments was acutely nostalgic, as if the grant year had already been finished long enough for the memory of it to crystallize into a rosy picture. Yet this was clearly not the case, and the kids’ confused expressions and calls of “Teacher, what do we do now?” shook me back into the moment.

It’s possible that the act of reflectively journaling the year’s experiences every week combined with the sight of the finish line has pulled these sentimental moments from the future into the present. Of course it’s natural to feel this way, and 11 months with the same 600 kids a week will do that to you. However, I can’t help but feel that it is a bit premature.

Not that this is a sign of impatience either; I’m in no rush to accelerate the departure process from a yearlong journey that could not have gone much better and evolved in unexpected and positive ways. Even still, I can feel myself beginning to rationalize to myself why this was all worthwhile in advance of the predictable questions about my “time off” when I return to the States. Even more so after seeing my parents and a few close friends from college come visit and ask me to summarize the year as if it were already over. For them, it’s summertime—graduation just happened, school’s out, and it’s time to move on. I’m just not quite done yet.

Was it worth it? Of course, and with no doubt. But why was it worth it? That’s more complicated. As one writer put it, “The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives.”

As this moment in life fades away—one, five, ten years from now—these set of 50 or so newsletters will become the primary source for how I formulate my memory and opinion of the year in Korea. I already suspect—and hope—that I will come to see it as more valuable than the stereotypical ‘gap year’ that some observers predicted it would be and that I actively sought to steer away from becoming.

So if nostalgia setting in during class time is a sign of impatience for the future, then this week’s writing is imagining myself in the future looking back at it all. Through this lens, the illusion of the rushed past starts to vanish.

But you didn’t answer the question. Why was it worth it?

Another author once said, “There is good in everything, if only we look for it.” I am thankful that I do not have to look hard to find it. Even the challenges, which seem laughingly insignificant in hindsight, can be viewed with a smile and spun as a learning experience.

There’s the obvious: I had the opportunity to teach English for native Korean students in the country of my ancestors and became more fluent in the language in the process. Furthermore, I confirmed for myself what I had always suspected—teaching as a career is not in the cards.

But anyone put in my position could have boarded a plane back to America in July with those takeaways. As one of my favorite authors puts it, “If you think it’s simply enough to take advantage of the opportunities that arise in your life, you will fall short of greatness.”

There was a set of false assumptions that I was handed during the six-week orientation for my grant year, some of which I carried a bit too long. The main one was that I needed to “Find a fourth point,” as in another hobby or activity to take up my time after the first three ‘points’ of prioritizing my host family, students, and other Fulbright friends.

The sentiment was in the right place: of course, it was good to look for a single hobby or two, such as Fulbright pre-approved activities of learning Korean or joining a Fulbright-approved extracurricular such as mentoring low-income students on Saturdays once or twice a month. What was false was to embrace this artificially low set of expectations and use them to justify periods of sloth and lack of motivation.

After the initial adjustment period subsided, this became the greatest temptation during the grant year—to waste away the free hours I that had fallen into my lap. Weeks passed where the most productive thing I would do outside the classroom was read the New York Times and watch Rick and Morty. Yet, as I have discovered during the second semester, it is the absence of challenges and activities that causes down periods, not the burden of being overworked.

Eventually, I simply set about collecting ‘fourth points’ like business cards at a networking event. Korean study, baseball, gym, soccer, reading, writing, web design, print design, dance, and a few other brief forays have cycled in and out of the daily schedule as time limits have allowed, until I reached the personal sweet spot: when all the hours between waking and sleeping have pre-prescribed and productive tasks planned while still allowing for flexibility to drop everything to head to Seoul for a weekend or Gwangju for a holiday hike. No longer was personal satisfaction wholly derived from the ups and downs of the classroom—it fully encompassed all hours of the day.

I’ve come to see that the first semester was an adventure in the classroom and in different cities across the country. However, the second semester has seen personal goals shift inward as I pursue rather arbitrary goals and benchmarks to reawaken some self-motivation that had fallen asleep post-graduation.

But I digress. I admit that this is somewhat self-serving, arrogant, and perhaps too hasty of me to draw conclusions about a time that has not already fully come to pass. There are many potential curveballs on the horizon. But these early signs of a reflective mood setting in needed to be addressed before it negatively altered my classroom teaching performance. Now I can roll up the sleeves and get to the next task at hand without distraction: 600 one-on-one speaking tests over the next two weeks.