I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki: Further Conversations with My Psychiatrist (I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki)

by Baek Se-hee

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

‘The person I like doesn’t like me. I wanted to be loved by this person, or maybe I wanted to be loved by everyone, but I will never be loved.’ These thoughts kept me in the thrall of self-hate and feelings of unworthiness. And I also questioned whether I could ever truly love someone.

we don’t need to be completely honest with everyone. But it made me realise, I haven’t been honest with myself, even, I’ve only been honest with myself insofar as I could stand it.

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.’

when you’re thinking something, your emotions are mixed up in it. And you’re still inside your ‘feeling at the time.’ But once you put the situation outside of yourself by using words, you can judge the situation from an observer’s perspective. Rationally.

all that suffering, once put into words, is just nothing.’

you simply did not have the capacity to handle the pain then. You basically put it away in a secret box inside you for a bit, waiting for a time when you might be able to face it.

‘It hurt really bad when it happened, but now there isn’t even a scar’?