Obsidian Memo] When “The Diplomat” Made My Life Make Sense

Have you ever had a moment when, suddenly, your life makes sense?

For me, that “aha” moment came while watching The Diplomat.

It wasn’t just a TV show. It was a mirror—one that reflected back decades of my own life patterns I hadn’t been able to name. The surveillance, the codes, the secrecy, the constant awareness of who’s in the room and who’s watching—it all clicked into place.

As a child, I grew up under layers of confidentiality I couldn’t explain to others—don’t reveal your name, your identity, your family. There were certain things I could never say, certain questions I knew not to ask, and an instinctive habit of reading every environment like a moving chessboard. I didn’t realize until recently that these were diplomatic security reflexes—trained into me not by protocol manuals, but by osmosis.

My father was a diplomat—more precisely, a special South Korean envoy to North Korea, with responsibilities that spanned countries connected to inter-Korean relations. He is retired now, but for 34 years, he lived in service to a government that demanded discretion, discipline, and silence. As his daughter, I inherited all three.

I didn’t know that my aversion to visibility—the instinct to blend in rather than stand out, to deflect attention instead of seeking it—was born from those early years. Nor did I know why the idea of “being traced” or “revealing too much” could feel like a threat in my body. Watching The Diplomat gave those invisible reflexes a vocabulary. It felt like watching my childhood decoded on screen.

Even after I left South Korea at fourteen to study abroad alone, the habits followed me. I carried them into classrooms, cities, and meeting rooms. They shaped how I spoke, how I trusted, and how I built a life in the world of finance—a world equally fluent in discretion and performance. Yet it was a double-edged sword. I quickly realized that in the Western world—especially in finance—unless you speak openly about what you know, people assume you know nothing. Sitting at the table in an Asian woman’s body, there was no inherent trust that accompanied my presence. At times, my security-protocol instincts and humility were mistaken for ignorance. I had to learn how to show up differently—to speak the language of confidence without betraying the quiet discipline that shaped me.

But there was also loneliness.
I could never fully locate myself in the stories around me.

I wasn’t an immigrant in the traditional sense—I hadn’t migrated with my family. I wasn’t quite "Korean Korean", “Asian American,” “Asian Canadian,” or “Asian British,” either. I was all of them and none of them.

Growing up with German and Israeli host families in Canada, I didn’t have the stereotypical “tiger parent” upbringing. My parents were the opposite—adventurous, permissive, almost bewildered by my ambition. They often told me to slow down.

If anything, they didn’t understand why I chose finance at all. They had imagined I’d follow my father’s path into diplomacy. And for a brief moment, I did. I interned at South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, imagining myself as a future envoy, moving between capitals and crises.

But the dream cracked quickly. I saw diplomat couples living on opposite sides of the world, children split between parents and countries. I heard the quiet warning never to ask a returning diplomat about their spouse—because the divorce rate was high, and pain was taboo. I met brilliant women in their forties who had given everything to their service, only to find their promotions stalled by invisible ceilings. Life looked glamorous on the outside but felt untenable on the inside.

So I let the dream go—or so I thought.
It turns out, diplomacy never left me. It simply took another form.

Like Maria Shriver’s description of the Kennedy family’s energy, my father’s family is fiercely competitive—sharp-minded, Type A, and obsessed with dominance. In that world, the only language people seemed to understand was power. And within that patriarchal structure, I grew up believing that the only way to survive as a woman was to beat men at their own game.

I learned to be stoic.
To never flinch.
To speak in boardroom tones and swallow my emotions whole.

I wasn’t a loud feminist; I was the quiet kind who refused to lose. For years, I kept everything inside me—the ambition, the anger, the fatigue. I see now how much that took from my nervous system and my body.

To succeed, I had become another version of the very archetype I wanted to dismantle: the stoic male king. I wore that armor for so long that I almost forgot what softness felt like. There were moments of exhilaration—of wanting to show the world what a woman could do—but they were often shadowed by self-doubt, impostor syndrome, and exhaustion. Surrounded by people who didn’t look or sound like me, I carried the silent question: Will I ever truly belong here? Will I have a shot at making a difference in the world?

The game I was born into—a game written long before I arrived—never seemed designed for me to win. There were nights of sleeplessness, panic attack, and quiet despair. And yet, something deeper in me kept searching for a different kind of world.

I thought of that while watching an interview with The Diplomat cast—particularly when one of the actors described a conversation with a successful African-British lawyer in London about what it means to “play” power as a person of color. The lawyer, accomplished on the surface, had grown up never allowing himself the word play. From Africa to Eton to Oxford, failure was not an option; survival was. To be let into the elite club, he had to fit in—to assimilate without leaving a trace of otherness. And in his fifties, he said he was, for the first time, learning how to play—to move through the world without fear.

That resonated deeply. For most of my life, I hadn’t been playing either—I’d been surviving. The scariest part was realizing this only during the global pandemic: that I had been bracing for each moment without even knowing it. For years, I had felt unsafe in my own skin—always on alert, as if the world were a test I could fail without warning.

Now, after years of inner work, I’m finally learning to soften—to inhabit both strength and surrender, logic and intuition, feminine and masculine. To stop waiting for someone who looks like me to appear in the boardroom and instead realize: we are writing this story now.

Today, in finance and sustainability, I still move between worlds—bridging language, systems, and values. I still read the unspoken dynamics in the room before speaking. Watching The Diplomat reminded me that this way of being isn’t paranoia; it’s pattern recognition.

I come from a lineage of public servants, diplomats, and a royal family dating back to 57 B.C. I say that not with pride, but with weight. That kind of inheritance can feel like carrying an invisible mantle—one passed down through patriarchy, secrecy, and duty.

For years, I fought it. I wanted freedom. I wanted to be seen as me, not as someone’s daughter or descendant. That was why I left South Korea for Canada—to carve out my own space and voice in a culture where women were expected to sacrifice for the family and remain invisible.

But now I understand that the diplomatic instincts that once made me feel alien are also my gifts: discernment, restraint, intuition, and the ability to see the architecture of power without being consumed by it.

It took me two decades to finally accept these—name them, and embrace them—as part of my identity.

Perhaps that’s what The Diplomat revealed most: not just my past, but my pattern. A reminder that what we inherit—seen or unseen—shapes how we navigate the world. And that sometimes, it takes a piece of fiction to show us the truth of our own story.

Never in a million years did I imagine that “geopolitics” and “national security” would one day sit at the center of sustainable finance. Yet here we are—and the very backgrounds and instincts I once tried to downplay have become my strengths: gifts I now bring into the 1:1, into strategy discussions, into the spaces where capital meets conscience.

This essay is, in many ways, an ode to my younger self—the teenage girl who once felt so lost and out of place, navigating cultures, power structures, and silences she couldn’t yet name. I wish I could tell her that all those reflexes of observation and restraint would one day become her superpowers.

And perhaps, this is also a question for you: what part of yourself once felt like a liability, but turned out to be your form of wisdom?