The verb they use in Korean — pogihada — translates as "to give up." But the characters underneath mean something closer to "to release your grip." I've been releasing my grip for a decade. My hands are still learning to open.

The first thing I quit was violin. I was eleven. I'd played since I was five — six years of daily practice, the calluses on my fingertips so deep they'd cracked and bled and healed into something that didn't feel like skin anymore. My mother had chosen violin for me the way Korean mothers choose instruments: strategically, as a line on a future university application, a credential that said this child is cultured, disciplined, worth admitting.

I was good at it. Not exceptional — I didn't have the ear, the innate musicality that separates the technically proficient from the genuinely gifted. But I could play. I could perform. I could stand on a stage at a school recital and execute Vivaldi's Winter with enough precision that the parents in the audience nodded approvingly and my mother's face did the thing it did when I'd earned her a small piece of social currency.

The night I quit, I was practicing in my room and I looked at my hands — the cracked calluses, the curved fingers, the muscle memory that could find an E-flat without thinking — and I felt nothing. Not hatred. Not exhaustion. A total blankness, like looking at someone else's hands attached to my wrists. And I put the violin in its case and closed the lid and felt the click of the latch like a period at the end of a sentence.

My mother didn't speak to me for three days. Not as punishment — she would have said it wasn't punishment. It was disappointment rendered as silence, which in a Korean household is louder than yelling. I sat in that silence and ate my rice and did my homework and something inside me noted, with the precision of a child who's already learning to track emotional weather: This is what happens when you choose yourself. This is the cost.

I was eleven. The lesson landed in my bones. It would take twenty years to unlearn.

I quit university at twenty-four. This one I've written about — the Incheon airport, the numb hands, the one-way ticket. But what I haven't written about is the day I actually made the decision, which was three months before the airport. The day of the decision was quieter than the leaving.

I was sitting in a lecture hall. Corporate law. One hundred and sixty students in tiered seating, the professor's voice a drone that entered my ears and exited without touching anything. The fluorescent lights made everyone look slightly dead. The girl next to me was highlighting a textbook with four different colors, a system so organized it looked like a map to somewhere I didn't want to go.

And I looked at the door. Just looked at it. A beige door at the back of the lecture hall, the kind with the small rectangular window and the push bar. I looked at that door and I felt something rise in my chest — not panic, not anxiety, something more like the physical sensation of a question: What if I just walked through it and never came back?

I didn't walk out that day. I sat through the lecture. I went home. I ate dinner. But the door lived in my head from that point on — the beige door, the push bar, the rectangle of hallway light visible through the small window. It became the symbol of everything I was about to do, and every night for three months I lay in my Seoul apartment and had a conversation with that door.

Here's the full list. I'm writing it because lists are how I make sense of things, and because the accumulation is the point — it's not any single departure that defines a life, it's the pattern of departures, the willingness to keep leaving.

Violin. Age eleven. Cost: my mother's silence, three days. What filled the space: nothing, at first. Then drawing. Then words.

The expectation of marriage. Age twenty-one. I told my aunt at Chuseok that I didn't plan to marry. The table went silent in a way that was different from my mother's silence about the violin — this was collective silence, the silence of a family recalibrating its understanding of a member. My grandmother looked at her rice. My aunt said something about how I'd change my mind. I didn't change my mind. Cost: a particular kind of family inclusion that I'm still grieving, if I'm honest. What filled the space: solitude, which I learned to stop calling loneliness.

University. Age twenty-four. Cost: my father's respect, or what passed for it. He didn't yell — my father never yelled. He simply began referring to me in the past tense, as if the version of me that was worth discussing had already ended. "Cathy used to be..." Cost also: the credential. I have no degree. In Korea, this is social death. In Berlin, nobody asks. What filled the space: the terrifying freedom of having no predetermined path and the even more terrifying realization that the path was now mine to draw.

Korea. Age twenty-five. Cost: everything that comes with leaving a country — the food that tastes right, the language that lives in your body, the knowing how things work. The comfort of being legible. In Korea, I was legible. People looked at me and knew what I was: Korean, female, student, daughter. In Southeast Asia, in Europe, I was illegible. Nobody knew what to make of a Korean woman alone with a backpack and a spreadsheet and no story that fit the expected narratives. Cost also: my mother, or my relationship with my mother, which became a long-distance thing conducted in careful text messages where neither of us says the real thing. What filled the space: the entire world, which turned out to be both bigger and lonelier than I'd imagined.

My first business. Age twenty-six. A translation service I'd built in Singapore. It was making money — not much, but enough to eat. I quit it because I could see the ceiling and the ceiling was low and the work made me feel like a tool, not a person. Cost: stability, such as it was. What filled the space: three months of panic, followed by the consulting work that would eventually become KINS.

A relationship. Age twenty-eight. He was German, kind, an architect who designed beautiful spaces and couldn't understand why I spent my nights building spreadsheets instead of sleeping next to him. He asked me to choose — not in those words, but in the way that bodies ask. His body asked: When will you be here? When will you stop working? When will I be enough? My body answered: I don't know how to stop. Cost: the most functional love I'd been offered, and the guilt of knowing I was the broken one, the one who couldn't receive it. What filled the space: KINS. Whether that's an upgrade or a downgrade depends on the day.

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Alcohol. Age twenty-nine. Not dramatically — I wasn't an alcoholic. I was a nervous drinker, two glasses of wine to soften the edges of a nervous system that ran too hot. I quit because the morning fog was costing me the first two hours of my day, and those hours were when I wrote best. Cost: the social lubricant, the easy warmth of a Kreuzberg bar on a Friday night. What filled the space: clarity, and the uncomfortable discovery that I don't actually like most social situations when I'm fully present in them.

The idea of being fixed. Age thirty-one. This was the biggest quit and the quietest one. I stopped trying to arrive at a state called "healed." Stopped treating my C-PTSD as a problem to solve and started treating it as a landscape to navigate. Cost: the hope of normalcy, whatever that means. What filled the space: something better — the competence of knowing my terrain, even when the terrain is rough.

Investors. Age thirty-two. Sixteen pitches, sixteen versions of myself I contorted into, sixteen rooms where I performed the version of KINS that venture capital wanted to hear. I quit pitching and chose bootstrapping, chose slow, chose small. Cost: the fast path, the big checks, the validation of someone with money saying "I believe in this." What filled the space: ownership. Total, uncompromised, sometimes suffocating ownership.

I notice, looking at this list, that every quit cost me something I can name and gave me something harder to name. The costs are concrete — money, relationships, social standing, a mother's voice on the phone. The gains are abstract — freedom, clarity, ownership, the slow accumulation of a self that's chosen rather than inherited.

I also notice that quitting gets easier. Not painless — easier. The first few quits were agony, each one accompanied by the conviction that I was making a terrible mistake, that the door I was walking through led nowhere, that I'd regret this for the rest of my life. The later quits were calmer. Not because the stakes were lower — if anything, they were higher. But because I had evidence. I had a decade of walking through doors and finding that the hallway on the other side, while uncertain, was survivable. The data was in. Quitting was not the catastrophe my nervous system insisted it would be.

There are things I haven't quit that I probably should. The need for control. The habit of working when I'm tired instead of resting. The belief, buried so deep it's almost geological, that my value is a function of my output. I'm aware of these. Awareness doesn't mean action. Some things you carry because you're not ready to put them down yet, and the honesty of saying "not yet" is its own kind of progress.

I'm thirty-four. I've quit a country, a degree, an instrument, a relationship, a funding model, a substance, and the idea of being normal. I've built a company, a content engine, a life in Berlin, and a nervous system that works most days. The building happened in the spaces left by the quitting. Every time I released my grip on something, my hands were free to hold something else.

Not something better, necessarily. Something more mine.

What are you gripping that you already know you need to release — and what's stopping you from opening your hands?

Thread: The Lost
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I write about freedom, healing, and building alone. The full archive is at soulin.co.