Earlier this June I had the privilege of traveling to Asia for the first time. My partner had work to do in South Korea, and because I’m a shameless opportunist, I decided to tag along. It was the kind of trip you look forward to when the ticket is bought months in advance, and then increasingly resent as the travel date approaches because of the stress it begins to inflict on your life. Packing was a nightmare because I’m an overly anxious person who does not like to be caught off guard about anything, and the flight could only be described as fresh hell. I’m a nervous flier to begin with, and at nearly sixteen hours it was the longest I’ve ever been on a plane. It was a length of time in the air that I couldn’t make peace with, and somewhere around hour ten when we still hadn’t landed, the surreality of the experience settled into my bones and refused to be shaken out. Even as we touched down on the tarmac, the unearthly feeling permeated every sensation and left me in a weird half-tethered-to-reality state.

It was around this same time that I noticed something unusual happening with the camera on my phone. Every time I went to use it, the subject that the lens was pointed at would flicker for a moment before snapping into focus. Because I’m a rational person and a strong supporter of science, I decided to apply the principle of Occam’s Razor to my thinking and deduced it wasn’t that the sensor was squonsked because I drop my phone at least twice a day, but that after being hurtled across thirteen different time zones, I had slipped in-between timelines and the fluttering of my camera was evidence of reality splitting. Every image capture was proof of my future branching off into multiple dimensions. This happened not only across Seoul, but Jeju Island as well, buoying my theory that I was trapped on an island-bubble outside of space-time a la Lost. I began to wonder if perhaps I was in limbo to gather information and deliver it to an alternate version of me who was suspended and crystallized in time like a fly in amber, awaiting my return to be dealt a certain fate. If I were, it came as a mild disappointment that the version of myself unencumbered by the rules of my normal reality wasn’t radically different from the one that was. I still tripped a concerning amount; I was still useless with directions; I was still wildly indecisive; and I was still as awkward and oblivious as I’ve ever been.

So the idea began to take hold that if this were purgatory, I had been sent there for a reason: To figure some shit out. Jeju, after all, did have a surprising number of museums. Like . . . way, way more than you’d expect an island with less than 700,000 inhabitants to have. Maybe their entire purpose was to help people discover themselves: What was it that really got them going in life? There could be no other explanation for how curated and niche they were. Take, for example the Automobile and Piano Museum. Not the Automobile Museum and the Piano Museum; the Automobile and Piano Museum. One museum we passed by was called the Figure Museum, and seemed to just be a collection of life-size superhero action figures, the kind you used to see in Sharper Image stores. By our hotel there was the Grimm Museum, which after a not-very-thorough investigation online, we found out was basically a building with a bunch of empty rooms that had murals of Grimm fairytales painted on their walls.

Did I visit these museums? No. I don’t know how to play the piano, and while I’m technically licensed and capable of driving a car, it’s been about ten years since I have and even then, I had a pretty blatant disregard for how an automobile functions. I’ve always loved superheroes, but I have to admit that the onslaught of DC and Marvel movies became exhausting after a while. As for the Grimm museum, well, my emotional connection to the brothers trails back to my childhood when my father—literature’s greatest fan—would read from a collection of their short stories before my brother and I went to bed, kiss us goodnight, and then leave us staring wide-eyed at the ceiling in the dark.

But perhaps the existence of so many museums was to teach you as much about what you don’t gravitate towards as to what you do. What I did end up loving was the Bonte Museum, a small, architectural gem in the middle of the island. It housed a collection of art from some of the world’s most contemporary thinkers, and I left it feeling inspired to create. Create what exactly, I still don’t know. But I have a semblance of an idea. Answers are given a hero’s welcome when they’re found, but it’s the questions that lead us to them. To even know which ones to ask are just as much a part of the discovery as the discovery itself. Even if I still don’t have a lot of answers at this point in my life, my hope is that I’m getting better at asking the questions that find them. And sometimes the question is as simple as, “What do you like? What do you want?”

In the end, I didn’t leave with enlightenment, but perhaps the right clues that lead to it. And this small fact was enough to put to rest whether I’d be allowed to leave my space bubble island, because spoiler alert, Korean Air did let me board my flight. No “Not Penny’s Boat” here (IYKYK).