For the next couple of years, I lived a relatively quiet and simple life with my wife, and honestly speaking, it was great. My wife and I both finally just enjoyed our early married life. We took trips around Korea, did fun weekend outings, and made new friends. We also decided to start our own YouTube channel that immediately became popular, which became an open door to other forms of creativity. However, we quickly realized popularity on YouTube brings a lot of stress. People would notice us in our daily lives, and it was hard to act normal in public. Since my wife was also working as an English teacher, we decided to take what we knew and run our own English business. I didn’t know this at the time, but the decision to work with my wife ultimately brought me back to games.
It was 2020, and COVID was in full effect. We had just opened our business which was stressful, but to our surprise, we were very successful. We worked out of our home, and at the time this was popular due to our small group size and the anxieties of big group gatherings. 2020 was also the year my wife and I started to try out so many new things. We tried investing and real estate, and I even started dabbling with modeling again. I even had friends ask me to make models for their tabletop games, which actually started to reignite a small flame of desire to do something creative again. It wasn’t until the next year that I would finally realize something important.
At the beginning of 2021, there was an accident. It was a snowy morning, and my wife had just accepted an offer at a new startup company. So, each morning I’d wake up and walk her to the car to say goodbye for the day. One morning after saying goodbye, I ran back into the entrance of our apartment because it was quite cold. Due to the snow on the bottom of my shoe, I slipped on the stairs and landed on my head. Disoriented and trying to grasp what had just happened, I noticed blood starting to come down my face in a rather rapid manner. I had never experienced anything like this. I immediately called my wife to bring the car back to take me to the hospital. Fortunately, I was very lucky and no major injury to my brain was sustained, but I was left with a fractured skull that took six months to heal and a scar that persists to this day.
This was a turning point for me. I realized a couple of things. To start, I couldn’t help but feel that the accident was the closest event to death I had ever experienced. I had landed at just the right angle for my skull to take the brunt of the impact in the most helpful way, but if the angle was just ever so slightly different, I may not even be here writing this. Furthermore, I started to contemplate my life and its direction. I knew I did not want to be an English teacher for the rest of my life. Despite the stigma around foreign English teachers, I really enjoyed teaching, but I knew from the day I started that it was meant to be temporary, and fundamentally I had no passion for it. On top of that, owning a business together with my wife—who, due to the fact I can’t manage paperwork, handled the managerial duties—was becoming a source of stress for both of us. I arrived at the conclusion: There was only one thing I was still passionate about. The one thing that despite dropping as a career choice, kept nagging at me in the background. I needed to work in games.