Soul II Seoul

ESSENCE Senior Beauty Editor reveals how a wellness trip to the South Korean capital became a major part of her healing journey

- Akili King

They say healing takes time. I couldn’t agree more. But I’ve learned that traveling across the world doesn’t hurt the recovery process either.

You could say my late twenties took an unexpected turn. Reflecting on it from the tender age of 30, I’m grateful for the path my life has taken. But if you had asked my 22-year-old self where I thought I'd be at 27, healing at the end of an 8-year relationship wouldn’t have been something I predicted.

I was too busy falling for my best friend to consider the potential repercussions of being vulnerable—the repercussions of a whimsical, “laugh so hard my belly hurts” kind of vulnerable; what my mama called “the Bobby to my Whitney” kind of love.

I wasn’t thinking about the pain that could possibly arise on the other side of it. The “crying on the hardwood floor of the apartment you shared” kind of pain. “Taking a late-night walk in the cold because you just wanted to feel something other than numbness” kind of pain. The kind of pain and grief no one can prepare you for, because it’s uniquely your own.

When I was finally able to pick myself up off the literal and metaphorical floor, moving out of that apartment and into my own, I started to become excited about having my own space. I thought that starting fresh and being able to decorate the way I wanted would expedite the healing process. I was quite wrong.

I had forgotten that I’d spent nearly a decade with this person in New York City, much of it in our Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. It wasn’t just the wabi-sabi-inspired, limewashed walls he had painted in the apartment—the once-Zen surfaces that eventually became suffocating to me—that I needed to get away from in order to move forward. It was the entire neighborhood and city.