The Song That Found Me During a Difficult Chapter
Music has a way of becoming connected to moments in our lives. Sometimes a song becomes more than music. It becomes a memory, a place, and a moment in your life that stays with you. Years later, the first few seconds of that song can bring us back to a specific place, a specific time, and even a version of ourselves we thought we had left behind. For me, that song is Pain by The War on Drugs.
The first time I heard it was in 2017 while I was riding in a taxi on the way to the airport in the Philippines. It was playing quietly on the radio inside the cab. At that moment, I had no idea that a song I had never heard before would become connected to one of the biggest turning points of my life.
I was in the middle of a chapter I never expected. My divorce had been finalized, and I was struggling to find my way back to myself. When a major part of your life ends, it is not only the relationship that changes. Your identity changes. Your plans change. The future you imagined suddenly looks completely different. I was trying to understand where I belonged and what direction I should take.
At the same time, a friend I had known for more than ten years was encouraging me to move to the Philippines. He talked about building something together and starting a company. It sounded like a new beginning during a time when I needed one. I was standing between the life I knew and the life I had not yet discovered.
While sitting in that taxi, listening to Pain, something about the song connected with what I was feeling. It felt like the song understood the emotions I could not fully explain. The uncertainty. The disappointment. The feeling of trying to move forward while still carrying something heavy from the past. The lyrics about pain being on the way out but knowing it would be back again resonated with my own experience of grief. Grief does not leave you all at once. It comes in waves. One moment you feel like you are finally moving on, and the next moment you are right back in the middle of it, wondering if you will ever feel whole again.
That taxi ride was brief, maybe thirty or forty minutes through the congested streets of Metro Manila. But in that short span of time, something shifted inside me. I cannot explain it logically. It was not like I had a sudden vision or a clear plan for my future. It was more like a feeling, a quiet inner voice telling me that something in my life needed to change. The song became the soundtrack to that feeling, and even now, years later, I cannot separate the two.
A Decision That Changed Everything
When I returned to Korea, that moment stayed with me. I kept thinking about the conversation with my friend, the possibilities he had described, and the life I could build in a new country. I was not truly living where I was. I was going through the motions, waking up, going to work, coming home, and repeating the same cycle while wondering what had happened to the person I used to be. There was no excitement. No sense of purpose. Just the hollow routine of someone who had lost their way.
After weeks of thinking about my future, I made a decision. I packed my things and moved to the Philippines. It was a major change. I was leaving behind my comfort zone, my familiar environment, and the life I had built. I sold my car. I ended my lease. I said goodbye to friends and family who looked at me with a mixture of concern and confusion. They did not understand why I would leave a stable life for something so uncertain. To be honest, I did not fully understand it either. But I knew I had to try.
At the beginning, it felt exciting. A new country. A new opportunity. A chance to create something meaningful. There is something powerful about starting over in a place where nobody knows your past. You are forced to meet yourself honestly because you cannot hide behind old routines. You learn what you are capable of. You learn what matters. You learn who you really are.
The first few months were a whirlwind. I was learning how to navigate a new culture, a new language, and a new way of doing business. Everything was different. The food, the weather, the way people communicated, the pace of life. There were moments of frustration, moments of confusion, and moments of pure exhilaration. I felt alive in a way I had not felt in years. The pain of my divorce was still there, but it was no longer the only thing I could feel. There was hope mixed in with the hurt.
My friend and I threw ourselves into the business. We worked long hours. We had late night conversations about our vision. We believed we were building something that would change our lives. For a while, it felt like we were actually doing it. We were making progress. We were attracting clients. We were building momentum.
But as time passed, I discovered that the journey was not going to be the story I originally imagined.
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When Trust Was Broken
The person who encouraged me to move was someone I trusted deeply. Knowing someone for more than ten years creates a certain level of confidence. You believe you understand who that person is. You believe that when you face challenges, you will face them together. You believe that the bond you have built over a decade is strong enough to withstand anything.
But eventually, I discovered something painful. I was betrayed by the person I trusted.
Betrayal has a unique kind of pain. It is not only about what happened. It is about realizing that someone you believed was standing beside you was not the person you thought they were. It makes you question memories. It makes you question decisions. It makes you replay conversations and wonder if you missed something.
The details of the betrayal are not important to share here. What matters is what it did to me. I felt foolish. I felt used. I felt like everything I had built, everything I had sacrificed, everything I had believed in, was built on a foundation that was never really solid. The person I had trusted with my future made decisions that changed the direction of my life, and I had to learn how to move forward from that reality.
For a while, those thoughts stayed with me. There were financial struggles. There were emotional struggles. There were moments when I had to deal with the reality of being far away from everything familiar while trying to rebuild myself. I was far away from everything familiar, dealing with the fallout of a broken partnership, and trying to figure out what to do next.
But somewhere along that difficult road, something changed. I stopped asking only why it happened. I started asking what I could learn from it. That was the moment the meaning of my journey began to change.
The Lesson Hidden Inside the Pain
The hardest experiences in life often reveal things about us that comfort never could. If I had never gone through that chapter, I might never have discovered certain strengths inside myself.
I learned independence. In Korea, I had a support system. I had friends, family, and a familiar environment. In the Philippines, I had to figure things out on my own. I had to navigate bureaucracy, negotiate contracts, and manage my finances without anyone to fall back on. It was terrifying at first, but it was also liberating. I realized I was capable of more than I had given myself credit for.
I learned patience. Things move differently in the Philippines. The pace of life is slower. The approach to business is different. I had to learn to adapt, to stop expecting things to happen on my timeline, and to accept that some things take time. That patience extended beyond business. It became part of how I approached my own healing. I stopped trying to rush through the pain and started allowing myself to feel it, to sit with it, and to let it teach me something.
I learned resilience. There were moments when I wanted to give up. Moments when I questioned every decision I had made. Moments when I wondered if I had made the biggest mistake of my life. But I kept going. Not because I was strong. Because I had no other choice. And in that process, I discovered that resilience is not about being unbreakable. It is about being willing to break and still choosing to put yourself back together.
The experience hurt me, but it also shaped me. That does not mean the betrayal was acceptable. It does not mean the pain was unnecessary. It means I refused to let that pain become the final definition of my story. A person can be hurt and still grow. A person can experience disappointment and still find hope. A person can lose trust in someone else and still discover trust in themselves.
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Understanding the Meaning of Pain
When I first heard Pain, I thought about the struggles I was going through at that moment. I connected with the lyrics about pain being on the way out but knowing it would be back again. I understood the frustration of trying to escape something that kept returning. Today, I hear something deeper.
I hear acceptance. The song is not about denying pain or pretending it does not exist. It is about acknowledging it, feeling it, and understanding that it is part of the human experience. There is no shame in hurting. There is no weakness in admitting that you are struggling. The strength comes from being honest about it.
I hear growth. The narrator of the song is not the same person at the end as they were at the beginning. They have been through something. They have been changed by it. And while they are not entirely sure what comes next, they are still moving forward. That is what growth looks like. It is messy. It is uncertain. But it is also beautiful.
I hear the reminder that pain is part of being human. A meaningful life does not come from avoiding every difficult experience. Sometimes the things that hurt us also become the things that teach us the most. The goal is not to erase the pain. The goal is to understand it, to learn from it, to grow from it, and to keep moving.
The pain I experienced was not only about what happened to me. It was also about what I discovered because of it. I discovered that I was stronger than I thought. I discovered that my future was not controlled by someone else's actions. I discovered that even when one chapter ends painfully, another chapter can still begin.
A Song That Still Reminds Me Who I Became
After everything I have described, this song feels different every time I hear it. The meaning has changed with me. What once felt like a reflection of my pain now feels like a reminder of my growth.
Looking Toward The Light
I still have challenges today. The journey is not finished. There are still goals I am working toward and obstacles I am overcoming. But I see things differently now.
When old memories return, I do not let them pull me backward. I use them as reminders of how far I have come. I listen to this song because it brings me back to the right perspective. It reminds me that I survived moments I once thought I could not overcome.
Strangely enough, I can now look back at that chapter with gratitude. Not because the betrayal was something I wanted. Not because the struggle was easy. But because the experience helped create the person I am today.
I do not have hatred. I have learned that holding onto anger would only allow the past to continue taking something from me. I do not want to live carrying anger. I choose to move forward. I choose to believe that every difficult chapter can contain a lesson. The person who hurt me also unknowingly became part of a journey that made me stronger.
The pain changed me. But it did not destroy me. It helped me discover myself. It showed me that sometimes the hardest chapters are the ones that reveal our strongest qualities.
Sometimes the road that breaks your heart is the same road that leads you back to who you were meant to become. That is the truth I have learned. That is the meaning I have found in this song and in my own journey. And that is the hope I carry with me as I continue to move forward.
Moving forward does not mean forgetting what happened. It means refusing to allow the past to take away the future I am still building.
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