When she was 19, Henn Kim stopped speaking for two years. “Growing up, I felt trapped because I couldn’t express my emotions. Now, without words, I felt inspired.”
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Comments 1
It's coincidental that there's an anecdote from a 2006 NYT Magazine article on the Japanese hikikomori condition where someone experiencing it was coaxed out by a Radiohead lyric. I'm also reading a lasciviously-named manga where a woman experiences becoming unable to speak as a teen and feels shut out by the inability, only to have lust help them break through and feel they're fully able to communicate. Maybe it's a high-expectation, relatively-tight-social-net thing that another condition (which I also learned of through manga) involves a female character who cannot eat in front of others - beverages are fine, but losing that communal shared time and subsequent anxiety causes them to leave work. (You're definitely critiqued by how you hold chopsticks and such random stuff as not being able to eat very hot food, you're referred to as having a 'cat's tongue' and belittled.) School is supposed to be this trial-by-fire, training for being slammed into society, and work has always been this necessary evil, it's probably not a distinctly Asian condition that people lose their ability to express themselves and fall through the cracks. It's great that obviously this artist was able to gain success and have their story told, I feel more examples that it's ok to butt your head against anxiety are steps along a path to more fulfillment for all of us.
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