The More Sibyl Podcast

The More Sibyl Podcast Presents:  Up next on my love-letter-to-Korea series...Kaitlin Barclay is a military veteran and a military spouse of almost fifteen years, now living in South Korea for the second time. The first time, she was in her twenties and mostly there for the nightlife. This time, she came back to do it right, and it changed her. Kaitlin has lived both sides of military life, first as a service member and now as a spouse. She tells me about six isolating months in a suburban house with a yard, and the huge apartment complex that changed everything. We get into beauty standards, being stared at for her fair skin, the whiplash of going home, and why "you're not allowed to age" here, though that's slowly shifting. We talk about the gyopo gray area, where foreigners get a grace that Korean-Americans often don't, and about being visibly tattooed across three continents, including in a country that only recently legalized tattooing. She shares the story of a subway stranger who tapped her shoulder, not to scold her, but to help. We also talk about what it costs a military spouse to keep a career alive while someone else's orders move her life every few years. Kaitlin holds three medical certifications, two bachelor's degrees, and a master's, and has still ended up working at Dunkin' Donuts and a pet store. She explains how volunteering became her bridge to paid work, the A3 visa rules nobody warns you about, and her non-negotiables for anyone hoping to thrive in Korea, not just survive it. It's honest, funny in places, and it doesn't flinch from the parts of expat life nobody puts on Instagram. “You truly need to experience everything, everywhere, as much as possible. And you need to be able to just take it in for what it is. But at the exact same time, prepare for some of the things to change you, in some of the best and worst ways possible.” Go listen to the full conversation. This one's for every military family, expat, sojourner, and anyone who's ever had to rebuild a life somewhere without instructions. Read blog: https://mosibyl.medium.com/kaitlin-barclays-korea-6409cde9ee65 

The Relationship Room Presents: Someone posted that they just bought a house. In the comments you see things like: how dare you be happy. That's where this episode starts, a real online story about a woman who admits she got jealous of her own friend, and cut her off. Ada and Mo! use it to crack open the one thing nobody wants to admit out loud: Envy. Mo! doesn't buy the excuse. If jealousy is reason enough to cut someone off, she says, you'd eventually be alone on an island, because there's always somebody doing better than you. Then Ada makes a confession of her own: she’s not jealous of people’s looks, or their money. What catches her attention is their joy, the visual of it, the persona of a person who just seems happy no matter what. Social media, Mo! says, didn't invent envy. It just multiplied it. Before, comparison meant keeping up with one neighbor. Now it means measuring yourself against thousands of strangers online, most of whom wouldn't say to your face what they'll type in a comment. Then Mo! goes even further back, to childhood, to parents comparing your report cards and IQ scores to those of other kids, to women raised to compete for one seat at the table. Comparison isn't a social media problem at its core. It's a self-worth problem, and social media just gave it more room to grow. By the end, Mo! offers the only comparison she says is actually fair: not to the woman next to you, but to who you used to be. Listen now to hear how it all connects. Read Blog here: https://mosibyl.medium.com/the-room-conversations-envy-comparison-and-self-worth-a658b87f06ed

The More Sibyl Podcast Presents: Let me introduce you to the two characters: Mo! the 언니 and Taj the 동생. We met in Seoul as neighbors and fellow Fulbright Scholars, and somewhere between spontaneous hallway conversations, shared meals, trips around Korea, and plenty of laughter, our 언니–동생 bond took shape. In this special episode, part conversation, part time capsule, we reflect on our Nigerian and Haitian-American immigrant experiences, our very different generations, and what happened when Korea took us outside the lives we had always known. We talk about racial burnout, learning to slow down, receiving kindness without keeping score, and realizing that you don’t have to be extraordinary to be worthy of love. Taj also takes us from her childhood in Port-au-Prince to Miami, NYU, global health research, and eventually Fulbright. She shares what happened when she rediscovered an autobiography she wrote in eighth grade, and realized she had already lived many of the dreams her younger self wrote down. And, of course, we investigate Taj’s very questionable understanding of U.S. geography. Is Oklahoma next to Arizona? 😂 This conversation is about Korea, but more than that, it is about coming home to yourself and the Fulbright experience that made that homecoming possible.   Read blog here: https://mosibyl.medium.com/from-haiti-to-seoul-coming-home-to-herself-dd1272a9d588

The More Sibyl Podcast Presents:  If you've been with me for a while, you know how much I love South Korea. I spent a full year there with my mum and my kids, and that memory is one I'll always cherish. But loving a place doesn't mean staying quiet about the parts of it that aren't lovely at all. In this episode, I sit down with a guest I'm calling Sis. Her real name stays anonymous, because she's not alone in this, and a lot of people going through the same process right now are still afraid that speaking up could cost them their own application. Sis recently applied for a visa to visit Korea, where she now has family. She'd already been through other embassies before this one, so by every reasonable expectation, she assumed the Korean embassy in Lagos would be just as straightforward. It was not. Nine or ten visits. To an embassy that, on any given day, sees a handful of people, nothing close to the queues at the UK, US, Canadian, or Australian embassies. A checklist that changed depending on who was behind the desk, and sometimes even when it was the same person behind the desk. Staff who denied ever giving her instructions they'd given her days before. A two-hour drop-off window that assumes nobody applying has a job to get to. And in the end, her passport didn't land in her hands until the day of her flight, even though she'd booked that flight two months out specifically to give the process room to breathe. I bring my own family into this one too. My mother went through her own version of this: flown back to Nigeria for a TB test the embassy insisted on, even after we offered to have it done and verified locally. Seven trips to the embassy. Her visa finally came through the day before she flew out. Comparing notes with Sis made one thing painfully clear to both of us: this isn't a bad day at one counter. It's a pattern. This episode isn't really about Korea, the country I love. It's about a process that doesn't match the country everyone's currently falling for from a distance, and about the gap between the people running that system and what's actually happening to applicants on the ground. We talk about what we'd each fix if we could, and what we wish someone had told us before we started. This was a hard one for me to sit with, and an even harder one to put out. But if it reaches even one person going through this right now, or one person who can actually do something about it, it's worth it. If you've had a similar experience, at this embassy or any other, I want to hear it. Drop your story in the comments. Let's stop letting this stay in the shadows.   Read blog here: https://mosibyl.medium.com/the-stress-of-getting-a-korean-visa-dfcb15973026 

The More Sibyl Podcast Presents: Sade Curry did marriage "right" by every metric she was handed: virgin, saved, husband who checked every box, right intellect, right ambition. Twenty years later, she was still there and barely present, over-functioning and compartmentalizing to keep the front up. Sade is a life and relationship coach, creator of the DIAL method, and host of the Extraordinary Life and Dating Divorce podcast. In this conversation, she traces the gap between the two facts above. The religious conditioning that sent her looking for a husband before she'd built any real discernment of her own, and how scripture gets cherry-picked and applied to marriage in ways the fuller text never intended, including the verses about divorce nobody preaches. What "quiet quitting" a marriage actually looks like from the inside, and the exact moment she knew staying quiet wasn't protecting her kids anymore. Why she believes 80% of relationships are unhealthy behind beautifully curated fronts. And the boundaries she didn't set until year fifteen, when year one would have changed everything. We didn't agree on everything. I pushed back on whether an unhappy wife looking outside her marriage is a red flag or a woman finally choosing herself, and we sat in that disagreement rather than resolving it. We also talk about faith, honestly. Sade's version isn't the one she was handed, it's built on the belief that women deserve real autonomy in how they hold their own faith, knowing God for yourself instead of borrowing someone else's version of Him. This was a challenging one for me. I don't think we landed in the same place on everything, but it got me thinking, and I hope it does the same for you. I'll be on the other side with my own reflections. Read blog here: https://mosibyl.medium.com/quiet-quitting-a-marriage-83c84886f66d