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Growing up in South Korea, I believed America was a better place to be—because the people knew how to demand better. It was a country that thrived on calling out injustice and fighting inequality. It was a country that perpetually spiraled upwards. From across the Pacific, it seemed to me a place where defiance was dignified, and activism was appreciated.
I was an angry woman in South Korea. Rigid hierarchy demanded silent obedience in the face of misogyny: chronic violence against women, normalized sexual harassment, perpetual sexual violence, socioeconomic injustice, and workplace discrimination, all woven into the fabric of daily life. I blamed the Eastern philosophies that taught people to accept suffering. Confucian theories justified the existing order, while Buddhist teachings romanticized compliance as virtue. To me, “acceptance” meant acquiescence. But if you accept, you stop fighting.
So I joined a radical feminist online collective called Megalia—a group of women who refused to keep peace with the world we lived in. We were angry, and rightfully so. In the dark corners of the internet, we found true horrors of humanity: gang rape videos recorded and traded as pornography, men drugging their partners and inviting others to rape them, and fathers trading images of their daughters as porn content. It was unbelievable how “normal” and prevalent these behaviors were. We reported, protested, and pleaded for help. No one listened. Night after night, we had to watch in real time another woman being raped, because men did not shy away from sharing these videos publicly online.
So we became louder. We built a new language for outrage. We were calling out to the world to change. Our activism was like therapy for the world. The world was sick, so we tried to cure it.
Although we achieved a great deal as a collective, we were more often crushed by how powerless we felt—how small our individual efforts seemed, and how stubbornly unchanged the world remained. Rape still happened, discrimination still went on, and men still called women names. As if nothing had happened.
Then I became a psychiatrist.
What surprised me was how familiar the language of mental health was to the language of activism. We spoke about social determinants of health, systemic racism, and structural injustice. We were taught that injustice can leave biological scars, and that microaggressions can shape physiology. I believed it deeply. I wanted the world to change for my patients, just as I wished for myself back in Korea.
I taught my patients what I’ve learned: “Your pain is not your fault. The world is unjust.”
This was profoundly validating. It helped people name their suffering, and it helped us connect to them with empathy and moral clarity.
But gradually, I grew uneasy with this approach.
Some patients seemed to get more distressed as I emphasized the world’s unfairness. They grew angrier, more hopeless, and more powerless. I could validate their pain and offer medications. However, ultimately, it did not change the world that drove my patients into deeper despair and rage. Every headline became another wound. Wars, injustice, deaths, crimes, and violence reinforced their helplessness. Each time, highlighting how the world had wronged them diminished their sense of agency and resilience. In a way, they were being set up for failure.
I started to question: Am I making my patients sicker?
As a psychiatrist, I teach patients to distinguish between what they can control and what they cannot. Social justice, on the other hand, urges us to change a world that is completely out of our control. I had seen this with my own activism. When I realized that predators continued to prosper and hurt other women, I found myself feeling hopeless.
I remember a friend telling me, “You cannot change the universe, but you are changing someone else’s universe. That’s good enough.” That was therapy for me.
Every day, I see people whose suffering is rooted in real injustice—poverty, racism, abuse, exploitation. Their pain is real, and often not their fault. But my task is not only to validate and medicate. It is to restore agency, help them reclaim the small corners of control that remain theirs. Most people won’t change the world. But they can vote, speak up and write, volunteer, get involved in activism, or do one kind thing for a stranger. Then the rest is for us to accept. Learning to live in peace with this tyrannic, ruthless world somehow.
When I was in the East, I longed for the West. I was captivated by its fierce pursuit of equality, refusal to settle, and hunger for freedom. Now, living in the West, I find myself oscillating back to the East. I teach patients to meditate, practice gratitude and acceptance.
Over time, I came to believe that true healing can be found not in choosing between these approaches, but in oscillating between them. The Western mind fights for justice, while the Eastern soul accepts imperfection. To ask for a better world without being consumed by its ugliness, to accept life’s unfairness in peace without surrendering to it. Perhaps when we can hold both, the warrior of the West and the monk from the East, we can flourish.