peace&niche

I just finished watching a Korean drama called We Are All Trying Here and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

I went in expecting something to watch. I came out feeling seen in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

The male lead is a film director in his forties. While everyone around him from his peers to his friends, has already made it, already debuted, already carved out a name for themselves, he’s the one who hasn’t. Not yet. And instead of shrinking from that reality, he is shameless in his hunger. Relentless in his belief that his time is coming. That his fate is still his to write.

That energy stirred something awake in me.

It’s not the ambition exactly that resonated with me — it’s the refusal to accept the story the world and everyone else was writing for him. The audacity to believe he deserved more, even when everything around him said otherwise. I feel that.Not always loudly, but it’s there…this quiet, stubborn insistence that my life can look different than it does right now.

Then there’s the female lead, and honestly, her storyline wrecked me in the best way.

Her backstory is rooted in childhood abandonment, from her mother leaving and what the drama captures so precisely is how that wound doesn’t just heal on its own. It shows up. Every time something goes wrong at work, every time she feels even slightly dismissed, attacked or overlooked, she’s pulled right back to that original pain. As if some part of her never got to leave that little girl behind.

I recognized her immediately.

That instinct to trace every disappointment back to what happened when we were young — I understand it. There’s a real truth in it. Our wounds are real. Our childhoods shaped us in ways we’re still untangling. But what the drama doesn’t let her, or us, off the hook for, is using that pain as an excuse. At some point, the healing asks us to say: this hurt me, and I’m not going to let it run the rest of my life.

Watching her finally step into that and choosing herself, choosing to stop letting the wound make her decisions was one of the most gratifying things I’ve seen on screen in a long time.

Both characters move from victim to author of their own story. And it hit me harder than I expected, because I think so many of us are somewhere in between those two things.

We shrink. We dim. Not because we have to, but because somewhere along the way we absorbed the idea that we were asking for too much. That things working out wasn’t really meant for us.

But what if it is?

After watching this drama, I sat with that question for a while. And what came up was simple and a little terrifying: I want to stop playing small. I want to fight, not aggressively, but persistently, for the kind of life and fate I actually want. I want to shine brighter. I want to be so fully, unapologetically myself that there’s no room left for the version of me that hides.

We are all trying here. Maybe that’s enough to start.