[K-drama therapy] The comfort of shared survival

by Guest Beanie

By @cu2701 (“Dramaddictally”)

In 2019 I left my home of six years due to social unrest. The ongoing violence between the protestors and the military had made my neighborhood unlivable and, without a plan in place, I packed two suitcases and left the country.

I landed in a town that should have felt like home — given that I’d grown up there — but it didn’t. I’d been away so long that it felt as foreign to me as the country I’d just come from. The trauma of what I’d witnessed over the prior weeks left me feeling afraid and alone. And worse, guilty. I’d left a home, a business, a relationship — all things I’d worked hard to build — and I felt like I’d failed at life by ending up right back where I started. One event had knocked everything off course, and I didn’t know if I had the will to start all over again, or even the desire to try.

I was surviving. But I struggled to understand what that meant and whether or not survival was worth it.

K-dramas had been a part of my life since 2014, when I’d steal away to a corner of my apartment for two days to binge a drama and then return full of hope: for love, romance, beauty, opportunity, and improvement. They gave me a way to escape and feel refreshed in the world I lived in.

Some months after leaving my home, I attempted to return to dramas, hoping the escape would help. But I found the salve no longer worked. The cheesy rom-coms I usually liked felt empty and increased my feelings of failure for living in such an ugly world.

And then, with no prior knowledge of its existence, I stumbled on Just Between Lovers. I liked the subdued colors in the cover image, and the short description about a building disaster felt right and true when I pressed play on Episode 1.

As the episodes passed — through that day and into the darkness of night — I cried. But for the first time in months, I wasn’t crying out of sadness or despair but for the strange feeling that came from a shared sense of total defeat in a world you can’t control. I felt connected to something again. It was a kind of hope — one that didn’t look toward the future, or an escape, but stared the present in the face for what it was.

All the characters in Just Between Lovers, not just the leads, are struggling. The drama presents those struggles with both diversity and nuance. There is the big disaster (the building collapse) and all the ongoing disasters that branch out from it (mental and physical health problems, alcohol addiction, perfectionism, PTSD, suicide, divorce). And then there are the systemic hardships we are born into and struggle to handle (poverty, abuse, war, levels of ability and responsibility). No one has it easy. No one deserves the circumstances they fall into. No one is really acing life.

I watched as Kang-doo and Moon-soo and everyone else in the heartbreaking realism of this world endured trauma and pain and discrimination and blight until the day when they achieved acceptance and finally hope. They survived for ten years, wishing that they hadn’t. Wondering what it was worth if it was all going to be so hard. What they found was each other. Other people who survived too. Recognition that they weren’t alone in their suffering. And in the end, that’s what they needed most — more than making the past disappear or dreaming of a perfect life. They needed a mirror in each other to know it was okay to survive, and even thrive, and that their pain wasn’t a punishment. It was life, as it is.

Their story gave me the mirror I needed as well. I began to see trauma as implicit, rather than abnormal. A part of life, rather apart from it. And I saw that it’s the bad things — the ones that hurt — that give us the deepest connections to the good people, the ones that help. Through the emotional wisdom of this drama, I began to find comfort within my seeming failure to be doing better than I was. And by the time I got to the closing line, I felt included in its sentiment. The voiceover says, “Because we survived. 다행이다.” It’s a relief. And I realized I was relieved too. Because I no longer felt so afraid or alone.