Why am I doing this?

Aside from people asking me how I've been dealing with the emotional process of moving to the other side of the planet, the most common question I get is: "Why?". It's usually posed as a general question, not, "Why South Korea?" not,"Why do you want to teach ESL?" just "Why?"

Why the hell not? No really, though. Essentially, I found myself in quite a rut back at the beginning of May of last year. I graduated college two years prior and started to get a really bad case of the woe is me's. I had a Massachusetts teachers license but no one really seemed to think that qualified me to do anything in a classroom and get paid for it. I was basically told that I had to student teach, which would be nearly impossible to do because I was no longer in school and also that I could substitute but that didn't seem like a viable option either. While I loved the people I worked with and made great money, I also didn't want to schlep tables forever. The whole thing just looked like one big mess of something I didn't want to deal with. Cue the angsty scene of me walking around with my head down, scuffing my feet in the dirt. Even if I DID get a permanent subbing job (some teacher, somewhere--get pregnant, PLEASE!) and then eventually became a permanent staff member, I was still going to have to wait tables in order to make ends meet to pay my loans and that also meant something else: I was never going to move back out of my parents house. Please understand, I love my parents very dearly. I love them to bits. But as I'm sure other post-grad blues havers are aware, your pride takes a little bit of a hit when you show back up on their doorstep with your tail between your legs because you don't have any money and can't both pay rent and feed yourself anymore. It happens to the best of us. But I started getting really disenchanted with everything, started wishing I had never gone to college in the first place, wishing I had been naturally good at math and science and majored in something else instead of English and Sociology. If you happened to graduate from college in this economy, I'm sure you know the drill. 

The only real, honest regret I had from college was never studying abroad. I had the opportunity to but didn't for all the wrong reasons. It was expensive! I wanted to party with my friends every night! I had an apartment that I was already paying for! I was TWENTY ONE, DAMNIT! Now I'm twenty five, which somehow feels a hell of a lot older and my God do I feel wiser, and I should have fucking gone. I started finding myself really jealous of the friends I had who just had the balls to pick themselves up and move wherever for however long. I knew two people who had gone to teach in Korea one of which I have known since I was born and until last spring I also pretty much had wondered "Why?", about her decision. In May I filled out an initial application for an EPIK recruiter and then kind of figured "we'll see what happens". He e-mailed me back and told me that I was too early for the February intake but that he'd e-mail me back In August with the application if I was still interested then. Around the same time I found out that a friend who bartended at a bar close to mine was actually going to teach there in August. Initially I felt jealous and then thought, "Wait a second, you already looked into this. Nothing is moving along here, do this. You can do this. You SHOULD do this." And everything about the opportunity looked amazing. I was going to make decent money that would go a lot further, have benefits, paid vacation, an apartment that was picked out for me and paid for, and an opportunity to learn a new language. I started researching everything I could about Korea and figured that if I was going to do this, what better time than now? I have nothing holding me back here and I am still young, but I surely will not be getting any younger and I know that if I let this slip through my fingers that I will wake up one day when I'm forty and really resent myself for it. Angsty is only cute for so long, amiright?