Dying Twice
There's a saying in the sports world: athletes die twice. Once when their career ends, and once when they draw their last breath. In my case, I died the year I stood on the threshold of Formula 1.
Back then, I was an F2 driver.
I was a woman, a Korean-Asian raised in a British immigrant household. As both a Korean and a woman, I was the first to make a real mark in the Formula circuit, and from my karting days onward, every eye had been on me.
And I answered that attention the only way I knew how — by leading every race with a dominance no one else could touch.
In those days, not a single rival in F2 dared to beat me.
To evaluate pure driver skill, every team in F2 is required to run the same engine, the same chassis, the same tires. Only after proving yourself there and earning a seat in F1 do you finally climb into the purpose-built race cars each team designs for itself.
I was on the verge of clinching the F2 Championship, and a seat for the following F1 season had already been promised to me.
My future was a crown forged from shining stars, waiting at any moment to be set upon my head.
I was so arrogant then that I never made friends in the industry. Not because they were competitors — because everyone in F2 felt like dirt beneath my feet. The people in F1 were my real rivals. Not the second-rate humans running beside me.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder if death was the punishment handed down for that arrogance.
On the day of the accident, the brakes on my race car stopped answering. Unable to control my speed, I slammed into the guardrail, and in the enormous impact the steering wheel drove straight into my head.
I have no memory of the crash itself after that. What I do know is that the wheel fractured the left side of my skull and drove a shock into my eye.
They transferred me to the nearest hospital, where I went under the knife for a surgery that lasted more than eight hours.
Inside the operating room, the doctors argued back and forth over whether to remove the collapsed eye, I'm told.
In the end, my eye survived the surgery. But surviving was all it did.
When I came to, the vision in my left eye was gone. Shattered bones throughout my body I could live with — those could be rehabilitated. But there was no way to restore the sight I had lost.
The moment I woke and heard the doctor's explanation, I started screaming.
"Aaaaaaah!"
I had understood, in that instant, that the driver in me had died on impact. What remained here was nothing but a broken, empty shell.
People who know nothing about this world imagine that drivers simply sit in the cockpit and chase thrills. The truth is that drivers push their physical limits as hard as any athlete in any sport.
For two hours you drive inside a machine that feels like a block of heated iron, enduring four to five times normal gravity, all while constantly monitoring a flood of variables — the shifting condition of the car and tires, the direction of the wind, and more.
And to run a track at all, you need superhuman dynamic vision.
More than twenty cars, each pushing past 300 kilometers an hour, fight for every position.
A driver who can't accurately judge the distance to cars running at nearly the same speed isn't just gambling with their own life — they're gambling with everyone else's.
In the corners, the G-forces spike intraocular pressure so sharply that even a healthy eye can momentarily lose strength.
There was no world in which someone who had lost an eye could run that track.
I had blacked out for only a moment, and in that moment I had died once already — and everything had changed. The nurses had to restrain me to the bed. I screamed, and screamed again.
Until then, the world's attention had been mine alone. I had been the F2 driver scheduled to take one of only twenty seats on the planet. If I had become an F1 driver — if I had kept leading races the way I always had — unimaginable wealth and fame would have poured over me. I might have become a first in the entire world.
Ah, but more than any of that — I loved racing.
I had staked my entire life on it.
No. Not just my life. My parents' lives, too.
And then I blinked, and woke to a face covered in bruises, my long, thick hair shaved clean, unable even to reach the bathroom without help.
When my parents saw me in the hospital room, they cried. But I was so twisted by then that their pain didn't reach me at all.
"Why are you crying? I'm the one who wants to cry."
Even if I rehabilitated, going back to that world was impossible. I was the one who wanted to cry. I was the one who wanted to die.
"I don't want to live like this. Just kill me."
This mental agony — dozens of times more terrible than any physical pain — was something I felt only because I had survived. If I had died on impact, my soul would never have been shredded the way it was now.
I had always known I couldn't drive forever. But I never imagined I would retire like this.
While I was in the hospital, I tried to kill myself more than once. But dying turned out to be astonishingly hard. Every attempt was discovered, and I wasted away — neither dead nor truly alive.
Rehabilitation? Meaningless. Not if I could never return to a driver's life.
After I was discharged, I lived because I couldn't manage to die. I let time pass through me like water. The muscular body I had built through extreme diet and conditioning deflated almost overnight, like a balloon losing its air.
Why am I even supposed to keep living? I have no future. I want nothing.
I couldn't find a reason.
And still, I lived. Every night I whispered that I wanted to die, that I wanted to die — and still life clung on with a monstrous tenacity. I never climbed out of the depression.
If I had never started this in the first place…
To get me to F2, my parents had poured every last coin they had into me. I was a money-eating hippo. They scaled down their business and their home, even traded in their car, just to keep supporting me.
While I toured the world as an F2 driver, my parents and my younger sister never once took a real vacation.
My dream had already cost an enormous sum. Now there was no way to recover any of it.
Later, once I started drawing attention as a rising talent, I did pick up various sponsorships — but even attempting this dream had been ruinously expensive.
F2 exists to develop drivers and serve as a gateway into F1, so even winning brought no money. The prize money itself went to the team.
And through all of it — nursing me, absorbing my rages — my parents barely had room to breathe.
Most of my screaming came down to the same things: Why did you let me live? How dare someone with two working eyes claim to understand my pain? Looking back, though, I never understood theirs either — the pain of parents whose daughter had lost an eye.
It was my younger sister who finally dragged me into reality.
Anna — the little sister who had always watched me lift the trophy with shining eyes, who had stayed quietly by my side even after the accident brought me home — walked into my room one day. She looked at me without a word.
"Why are you looking at me like that? Do I look ridiculous to you, too?"
My parents had always been weak with me. They fretted and fawned as if they owed me a debt — when the debt, in truth, was mine. But Anna was different that day.
"Yeah, you do. Look at yourself. Is this not ridiculous?"
She didn't flinch at my shouting. She didn't take it to heart. Where my parents had always gathered my barbed words against their chests, my sister was simply cold.
"One crash and you're sobbing like the whole world ended."
The words hit me like a blow to the skull.
"Did you never once consider that something like this could happen when you're flying at three hundred kilometers an hour? Dozens of other cars are all going the same speed, all fighting for first, looping the same track for dozens of laps. Unnie, this accident didn't happen because you're some tragic heroine. It happened because you did something that made it possible — hundreds of times over. So stop with the drama-queen act."
"…"
"You've spent your whole life eating Mom and Dad's love and sacrifice just because you were special — like it was nothing. And now? You're nothing. So please, just live like a normal person. Stop drowning in self-pity and making Mom and Dad suffer for it."
Those words gave me something I had been missing.
"Or just go ahead and die for real."
The realization that I was no longer special. That I was ordinary.