Nine years ago, I found myself hiking through the Kentucky Appalachians foraging for ginseng with my then 75-year old mother. She had met a dealer in Los Angeles who spent half the year in Kentucky foraging for the precious root and who occasionally brought others along on his expeditions. My mom wasn’t in the best of health, but she decided she wanted to do this, and when she gets an idea in her head, she is stubborn and resolute. I was worried about her physical condition, and I also found the idea of trekking through the Kentucky woods in autumn irresistible, so I offered to go with her.

Our guide was a retired Korean building contractor in his 60s who loved the clean air and solitude of the Kentucky mountains and who had turned his foraging hobby into a side hustle. I wondered how this man, who was decades older than me, managed to leave me huffing and puffing in his trail as he effortlessly scurried up and down the mountainside. I marveled at how he casually scoured the forest floor, quickly spotting the ginseng plant’s trademark leaves among the hundreds of other plants that looked exactly like it, while also managing to maintain his overall bearings.

I also marveled at my mom, but for different reasons. It wasn't because she was fearlessly forging off the trail and into the woods, despite her physical condition, in single-minded pursuit of her goal. That was very familiar to me. No, I was surprised because she was letting me help her.

My mom is simultaneously the most stubbornly independent and self-sacrificial person I know — self-reliant to a fault, yet unwilling to take care of herself. For as long as I could remember, every time I or my sisters ever tried to help her — carrying her bags, for example — she would fight us tooth and nail. She tried to teach us to follow her lead. “You can’t depend on others,” my mom would explain. “No one is going to help you in this country.”

Given how she raised us, it was something for her to let me help her on this trip so overtly, whether it was holding her hand on treacherous inclines or making sure she took enough breaks and drank enough water. Five years earlier, all of this would have been a non-starter.

By all accounts, my mom had a steely will from birth. Up until the Korean War, her childhood had been happy, full of family and friends, and her parents — my grandparents — had been active in their community.

Then, when she was 11 years old, the North Koreans kidnapped her father. Eight decades later, we still don’t officially know what happened to him, but he was almost certainly murdered. Her mother died a year later. Becoming a war-time orphan was horrific enough, but what defined that moment for her was that she felt like her extended circle — and later, her siblings — let her down when she needed them the most. She stopped trusting people after that.

The heart of Kentucky is sparsely populated, with limited cell phone coverage and miles separating many from their closest neighbors. Our guide had a cabin in Stanton, a tiny community that was largely off the grid. Gallons of drinking water and boxes of canned and freeze-dried food lined his kitchen, as the closest grocery store was almost an hour away. People didn’t seem to ask for help around there, if only because everything and everybody was so far away.

Still, there were signs of connection and community, from churches to repair shops to the restaurants further out. Every day, as we set out for the woods, we would drive past a cemetery on the outskirts of town. I wondered what it was like to have the graves of people you had known your whole life on the periphery of your consciousness every single day.

Stanton felt representative of Kentucky in many ways. A third of the state’s population live below the poverty line, almost triple the national median of 13 percent. Of the 30 poorest counties in the U.S., nine hail from Kentucky, with as many as 45% of the population living in poverty. If you peek a little closer — unemployment, education, mortality, obesity, disability — the story is even more grim. Kentucky is regionally part of what public health officials colloquially call the “Stroke Belt” and “Coronary Valley” for its high rate of poor health.

A state with as many challenges as Kentucky naturally needs as much help as it can get. In 2022, 38 percent of its revenue came from federal funds, second in the nation and ten percentage points above average. For every dollar of Medicaid coverage disbursed in the state, the U.S. government pays 71 cents, the sixth highest amount in the country. More than almost every other state, Kentucky depends on everyone else, but folks there don’t realize it. A 2016 survey showed that only 16 percent of Kentucky residents knew that the federal government covered most of their Medicaid bills.

I could understand why the residents of Stanton might be distrustful of outside forces. My mom had taught me to be the same way, albeit in different circumstances. I had learned from her difficult experiences, and I understood the consequences of depending on others, only to have them let you down. So I tried not to feel too self-conscious as people’s eyes followed us everywhere we went, undoubtedly processing the sight of a Korean-American and his immigrant companions speaking mostly in a foreign tongue. It was harder the deeper we went into the countryside, as I was conscious of more than a few Confederate flags flying openly in people’s yards.

Still, people there minded their own business, and when they did engage, they were respectful. Everyone seemed particularly courteous around my mom and our elderly guide, something I don’t always feel at home in San Francisco or in other coastal cities.

There is a long tradition in Kentucky of foraging for wild ginseng, and it epitomizes how complicated self-reliance can be. The plant takes several years to sprout, and its five-leaf pattern is hard to spot on the dense forest floor. Deer and turkeys enjoy nibbling on the leaves and bright red berries, making it even harder to find.

Ginseng foraging requires skill and perseverance, but for the 'sangers in Kentucky, it almost feels like a birthright. People there — including the famed frontiersman, Daniel Boone — have been supplementing their incomes with the wild root since the 1700s.

For those skillful enough to do it, it’s a profitable endeavor. The root garners anywhere from $50 to $800 a pound, depending on its age and quality. Brent Bailey, the Executive Director of West Virginia Land Trust, found a positive correlation between ginseng harvests and the state's unemployment rate. "The forests are a social safety net in Appalachia," he toldThe New York Times. "Ginseng is Plan B for many households."

For something to garner such a high price means that someone out there is willing to pay it. In the case of ginseng, those feisty customers don’t live in Kentucky or any other state for that matter. They live in Asia. Ginseng has been a prized medicinal root there for centuries, so much so that it is almost impossible to find in the wild there anymore. That makes the Kentucky root all the more precious. Even back in 1824, the U.S. exported 750,000 pounds of ginseng across the Pacific. It’s safe to say that without Asia, there would be no Plan B.

Ginseng played a large role in my childhood, and not in a good way. When I was a kid, my mom often complained that I lacked energy. Her solution was to force me to drink ginseng tea every day. She would pour a heaping spoonful of this chalky, pungent powder into a tiny cup of hot water, and I would do my best to gag it down, whining and crying the whole time. As I got older, I got better at gulping it down, but I still found it vile, and I violently disagreed with her premise as to why I needed to drink it in the first place.

I stopped drinking it as soon as I left for college, and I did my best to forget this childhood ritual. But after graduating, I noticed that I often felt lethargic. Every time I noticed this, I was reminded of what my mom would say to me when I was younger. After a few months of feeling low energy, I swallowed my pride and asked her to send me some of the herb.

The tea she sent me wasn’t as strong as what I had drunk as a child, and I used a lower concentration. It felt palatable and familiar, and I was surprised by how comforting it felt to drink. After a few weeks, I felt like my lethargy was going away.

But there was more to this story. My first few months after college were the least active period of my life. I was living in a strange place, and I barely knew anyone. I would roll out of bed in the morning, get in my car, and drive to work, where I would spend all day in front of my computer. After work, I would drive home, often stopping for fast food, and would spend my evenings reading or watching TV before going back to bed. By the end of that summer, I had gained 20 pounds.

When I think back to that time, I think of how things started to change for me when I started drinking that tea. But it’s also possible that the lethargy started going away because I was shocked by how my clothes no longer fit, and I started consciously finding ways to move again. It’s possible that running into an old high school friend and getting invited to a weekly basketball game had more to do with the shift in my energy than the medicinal root I had once again begun to ingest.

Everything is possible. All I know is, almost 30 years later, I still drink ginseng tea every day.

The stories we tell ourselves are powerful, especially when they are forged in trauma. But there are always other stories too. On the surface, these stories may seem to contradict each other, but in reality, the truth is in the tension. The residents of Stanton, Kentucky are incredibly independent, and they also rely on the federal government more than others. Foraging for ginseng enables people to support themselves through their own skill and industry, and it’s a profitable endeavor because of the huge demand for ginseng in countries thousands of miles away. My adult ritual of drinking ginseng tea every morning coincided with a feeling of energy and well-being, and the chemical makeup of the root itself may have had little to do with why.

My mom does not trust other people, and she taught us to do the same. But in teaching us to be self-reliant, she also encouraged us to think for ourselves. I saw firsthand what it looked like to live in a world without trust and community, and I sought an alternative. Ironically, I ended up finding the story I was seeking from — you guessed it — my mom.

As much as she raised me and my sisters to be self-reliant, she also taught us to support each other. She modeled what it looked like to have each other’s backs and to take care of each other no matter what the circumstances. She also encouraged us to make and spend time with friends, even if she didn’t do so herself, explaining, “We need other people.” She often told us stories about her older brother — our uncle — who passed away last year. He was sociable and curious, and he made friends easily. He also loved traveling the world and experiencing different cultures, and because he had so many friends in so many places, he rarely stayed in hotels.

“You can’t depend on others.”

“We need other people.”

What does it look like to calibrate seemingly contradictory stories and to find the balance between them? I’m still trying to figure this out, both personally and professionally, but I think it starts by becoming aware of these stories and by acknowledging and respecting their truth, even if there’s more that needs to be explored. Gray can’t exist without both black and white.

I’ve been helping groups collaborate for almost as long as I’ve been consuming ginseng of my own volition. From the beginning, my practice was based on the premise that we are better and smarter together. I know this to be true. I know that this is not only a better, more desirable way to live, it is a necessary way to be in today’s world, where our most complex challenges are rapidly outpacing our ability to address them. I’m also stubbornly independent, like my mom, and as much as I’m willing to help others, I hate asking others for help.

And so I continue to learn and to calibrate. More recently, I’ve been leaning into the story, “We need other people,” in both small and big ways. I’ve been calling up friends and family, asking them simply to be present with me when I need to do something difficult, whether it’s weeding my garden or cleaning my office or designing a new training. My bike got a flat the other day, and rather than take it to a shop or sift through YouTube trying to learn how to fix it myself, I had a friend show me how to do it.

I’m not going to pretend that the shame of needing help has completely gone away. But to my surprise, I’ve found that people like helping their friends and that asking for help builds community. We all feel closer to each other, and we all feel less alone. I’ve been telling a story like this for over 20 years, and yet it feels like I’m learning this lesson for the first time.

My mom is still as stubborn as always, maybe even moreso. But in our time foraging through the Kentucky woods together, I realized that, as powerful and as true as the stories we tell ourselves are, we also have the ability to lean into the tension, to explore the nuances, and to find a better balance for ourselves and for others. If she can do it, I can do it too. We all can.