I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki: Further Conversations With My Psychiatrist

by Baek Se-hee

the disease is more like an incurable chronic illness than a brief cold. It needs constant management, and while you might get better, it’s a lifelong journey.

no one had ever accepted my affections.

there was someone who treated me like I didn’t exist once they realised I had a crush on them.

Memory is not accurate, and it can be rearranged any way you want: to be more extreme or more stimulating.

feared my partner would be disappointed once they learned how worthless, how unloved, and how dismissed I had been in my past.

‘I realised I had never completely accepted myself as I am, that I had never embraced my past and wanted only to rid myself of it, and ended up suppressing it, and now my past self and present self cannot connect or separate properly and are in a kind of limbo.’

everyone has different ways of healing.

And others, family & friends, should be accepting and understanding that we all have our own processes for how we deal with things.

I get all stewed up in my own negative emotions and then feel the urge to break away from them.

when I’m with people who have power and are part of a clique at work, I feel anxiety and dread.

Whenever i am around family members, people i know are very well liked...i feel like this

Psychiatrist:You continue to have this fear of being left behind.

There’s a desire to stick it out and prove myself and the desire to quit everything.

What’s wrong with wanting to come off well? What’s wrong with wanting to be loved?’

stress makes me eat more,

That stress is inevitable. Even in your happiest moment, you can’t like absolutely everything about everything.

I exhaust myself with this anxiety.

Me:Am I just desperate for attention? I just want someone to know how hard it is for me.

so it scabs over quickly and then falls off without any scarring? I didn’t want to lose the wound, which is why I repeatedly scratched over those spots.

if that friend is depending

on me and I cast them off, they’ll be hurt. So I just end up doing nothing about the situation.

‘Things are hard for me right now, and I’m sorry but I don’t have the bandwidth to worry about you or help you, I’ll answer you later’?

You cant help anyone else or be there for anyone else if you arent doing well either.

I really did feel better the day after self-harm. Like, why did I do that? I’m crazy, I should get healthier, stop drinking and eat properly and exercise! And then the next day, I’m helpless again.