Conscious Living

Essay Collection: Recordings from Seoul. (Summer 2025).

Hi everyone — it’s here.
I’m so grateful to share my new essay collection, written during a recent trip to Seoul. These writings began as simple reflections and unfolded into something deeper: a personal homecoming across memory, place, and time.

I’m EJ Elena Shin — an impact investor and a writer at heart. Born in Seoul, raised in Toronto and New York City, shaped by Israeli and German host families and the UN diplomatic world — I now live in London, straddling the space between expat and immigrant.

For over two decades, I’ve lived and worked abroad — longer than I ever lived in Korea — while building a global career in finance. I left Seoul alone at 14. It was a formative departure — urgent, necessary, and full of unspoken meaning.

Since then, the city remained in my memory not as a destination, but as a frozen frame I wasn’t yet ready to re-enter.

This collection marks that re-entry.

It’s an exploration of:

Identity across borders and institutions
Legacy inherited through family, culture, and silence
Belonging as a lifelong negotiation — not always with place, but with the self

For the first time, I’ve chosen to write publicly about my early departure and deliberate exile from Korean cultural spaces — not out of indifference, but self-protection.

I avoided language, community, and affiliation for over 20 years. What many assumed to be cosmopolitan ease was often structured avoidance — a survival strategy from growing up under diplomatic codes, unspoken family obligations, and the weight of ancestral performance.

I come from a lineage of royalty, public service, and governance that traces back to 57 B.C. This legacy carried both strength and silence, esp. as a woman. From an early age, I internalized the protocols of diplomacy — how to read a room, how to perform under scrutiny, how to protect legacy above self.

But I’ve never spoken of what it cost.
Or how long it took to reclaim not just a voice — but a body, a language, and a life of my own design.

This work is not memoir.
It’s cartography — an emotional and cultural map for those who live between systems, roles, and civilizations.

If you’ve ever wrestled with diasporic identity, institutional belonging, or what it means to return — emotionally, spiritually, politically — this writing is for you.

It’s also for the younger version of myself — and perhaps yours too —
the one who had to leave in order to one day come home. It’s also a gesture of reconciliation — with the past, with my lineage, and with a younger version of myself who once needed to leave in order to grow as a woman in a patriarchal society.

If you’ve ever found yourself navigating diasporic identity, intergenerational memory, or questions of home and becoming — I hope these words offer you a sense of recognition. A moment of feeling a little more seen — and a little more whole.

Thank you for reading.
Thank you for holding space for my voice.
And when was the last time you wrote… just because?