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

The more my therapy progressed, and the more my wounds healed and the scars turned faint, the more vulnerable I became to suffering. It was too easy to uncover buried hurts and immerse myself in depressive thoughts again.

Familiarity felt like safety to me. Which is why, whenever depression or emptiness came calling, I was all too eager to open the door of self-pity and go right inside.

For someone who has lived with depression as long as I have – to the point where it’s like your second shadow – 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.

I want to feel what I am feeling and not measure my pain against the pain of others.

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.

‘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.’

I would think, ‘I’m someone who inspires disgust, that’s the value that I have.’ And what’s even more disgusting is how I would internalise that gaze and perpetuate it. I would look down on someone who liked me, and out of my obsession with weight, hate people I perceived as fat. My hate was all twisted, but in the end, I think I was projecting myself onto them, seeing myself in them.

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.

And I’m fine with colleagues who are around my age, but when I’m with people who have power and are part of a clique at work, I feel anxiety and dread. ‘This person is going to go around talking behind my back. This person hates me and will harm me.’ The anxiety and fear really bear down on me. No one has said an unkind word, but I’m already cut off from everyone and adrift on my own. I felt a lot of mental fatigue from that yesterday.

I think you should allow yourself a bit of fear and dread for the sake of your own progress.

Psychiatrist:Everyone has those experiences where they have flashbacks to things they don’t want to remember. Like when they felt hate towards things they consciously knew it was wrong to hate. They feel shame and make an effort to do better. They may not have always been victims in the past. But that’s how you ‘become your own person’ with your own thoughts, by trying on different attitudes and rolling with the punches that follow. An extreme experience remembered in a single moment cannot and does not explain someone’s whole life.

I suppose if one has self-pity and narcissism at the same time, their perspectives would be very narrow. Maybe that everything they think is correct. Or they connect everything to their own issues and wounds.

There are things we’ve hidden so far down in our subconscious that we can’t even remember them. But once the floodgates open, they start coming back, and it’s like the subconscious has determined that you are now capable of handling the heft of these emotions, that you can at least begin to address them.

Your life comes first. We live in a world where there are all kinds of different lifestyles, and when you see others living their lives you might think, ‘I suppose that’s another way of living,’ but when it comes to yourself you tend to take someone else’s perspective, the worst perspective possible, when there’s no reason to take such a narrow view of your own self and feel hurt about it.

And at work, I receive more stress from my interpersonal relationships than the work itself. It’s not like anyone bullies me or even pays me much attention, but I get so stewed up in my own thoughts that it stresses me out. I’m fine with getting stressed about the work, but the people stress? The competitiveness? How you have to keep changing and you must not be left behind? I keep thinking I want to be free from those things. Psychiatrist:I think you must learn to accept that everyone has such stresses, that no matter how much you’re enjoying your job, you will never be completely free from these things. That stress is inevitable. Even in your happiest moment, you can’t like absolutely everything about everything. It’s just that you happen to be feeling sturdy now, and a little knock here and there isn’t going to be enough to topple you, whereas before the smallest knock would’ve left a painful wound. Telling yourself something like, ‘What can I do to hurt less and minimise the suffering, surely I’m not the only one who’s hurting right now’ can help you along. Me:Accept it . . . I do feel stress about work, but I really like it, too. Even if I’m really anxious and unsure of my abilities and everyone else seems like a genius, I like the work a lot, despite the stress.

Psychiatrist:When you’re this disappointed, your perspective naturally skews negative. I think your current state is one of selective attention to the negatives rather than the positives. And the more you think this way, the more you will continue to think this way into the future. I wonder if you should try to understand the situations of others in order to get a little more objective.

Me:I don’t know why the prospect of people insulting me makes me feel so fearful. Why should I care so much about that anyway? Psychiatrist:Well, you dismiss it with ‘Why should I care so much about that,’ but at the same time, I think you keep internalising the gazes of others and judging yourself through them. Even the emotions you are feeling don’t go through any kind of filter before immediately being subjected to this gaze. Which makes you give up on things because of the influence of others, despite such things having value to you or potential for profit. It would be fine in such situations to be a bit more selfish, do things your way, choose the things you feel are more important.

Different people will perceive you differently, but if you go down the slippery slope of catering to each of them, the energy you have to spend on those you actually care about will be depleted, and those who are close to you will resent you for it. Which makes you then regret how you haven’t been able to be there for the people you love.

How about trying to save up as much of yourself as you can, to daringly make the choices that profit you as much as possible and lose as little for you as possible?

Me:Am I just desperate for attention? I just want someone to know how hard it is for me. Psychiatrist:I think you need to know for yourself how hard it is for you. Me:But I’m suspicious of that. I go back and forth with it. When it’s hard, I think it’s really hard. And at the same time, I think to myself, ‘What’s the big deal with you?’ Psychiatrist:It’s because you’re influenced by those around you too much. Whether you take a leave of absence or quit, that should be the end of the matter, but then you insist on explaining yourself to other people. And I don’t think it’s just to other people. I think you’re trying to explain it to yourself.

You have to practise saying that you feel unwell when you feel unwell. Instead of enduring it until the last minute and going, ‘Look at how much I’ve managed to endure, to the point of harming myself.’

When it rains we put on raincoats or open an umbrella, but when it’s really storming and blowing, none of that is effective anymore and we have to seek shelter.

My partner kept whispering to me about my shining future yet to come (that might never come) in very firm stories that had clear, inevitable structures. They whispered these to me until I fell asleep.

In the end, I want to be myself and not myself at the same time, always. I don’t know where this strange contradiction will lead me.

Me:When I open my eyes in the morning, I have this particular feeling, you know? Either of being weighed down by helplessness or being very light and clear. That first feeling determines the rest of my day. It never varies from that.

I scroll through Instagram. Someone I’m jealous of is always meeting someone I don’t know, going to places I’ve never heard of, listening to music I’m not familiar with. This feeling of being left behind, or that this person is special while I am not. Their posts are always so interesting, their expressions fresh, but what am I? Neither here nor there, which I hate.

As I sit with my dogs in my arms, I hear the spring breeze blowing and children playing, and see the cherry blossoms and the forsythia wilting and falling. I want to lie down in the sun for a while. To feel the season, even for just a few minutes, right down to my very bones. Because summer is coming soon. I want to be healthy.

I was in a car accident. It was my first time driving from Hongdae and Gwanghwamun back to Ilsan, and it was on this final leg at Ilsan. I was at the point on the highway where you merge with the cars turning right, but it was one of those intersections where the merge happens immediately after the turn, and I hadn’t checked for oncoming traffic. There was a loud honk and I crashed into an oncoming truck, my small car shaking violently. The cars filing behind the truck came to a stop under the traffic light at the crossing. As my car halted, all I could think was that I was done for, but there were people opening my driver-side and passenger-side doors, checking to see if I was all right. They said they’d been fearful I was seriously injured. I was in complete shock, and passersby called for an ambulance and the police. By the grace of the heavens, I was physically unharmed – but I had to scrap the car. The wounds on my wrist and the crumpled-up car made me wonder if a person’s fate was indeed something set, that you were not supposed to go if it wasn’t your time. Maybe, I thought, it’s not that easy for me to die. And in that moment, seeing how many people there were who were struggling to live for one more day, my worries seemed especially petty and almost luxurious, which made me hate myself.

I took what was precious to me for granted and shoved it all in a corner of my heart. I was so bored with the present and kept going over the past, or the past kept recurring in my mind. I couldn’t enjoy the present.

I was so unharmed it was almost ridiculous. Unharmed despite having hit a truck, having totalled my partner’s car. It made me look upon my life anew, with a fresh set of eyes. The things I’d taken for granted suddenly seemed very clear and true. Not because I lived, but because I didn’t die. This may sound strange, but I really felt it wasn’t my time to go. I thought: maybe there was some purpose left in me. I wanted to believe that, and to pursue it.

Psychiatrist:Have you heard of this book— Me:Which book? Psychiatrist:—titled Psychodrama? Me:Me? No. Psychiatrist:It’s a bit similar to the psychodramatic method. Me:Really? There’s a therapeutic method where you have a conversation with yourself? I didn’t just imagine the conversation in my head; I actually had a talk with myself. And it really felt like I was having a conversation, even though it was only with myself. Psychiatrist:This method of questioning and answering allows you to see things you hadn’t initially seen when you were too upset to take note. Me:You’re right. It really felt like an emotionally charged me and a rational, objective me were having a conversation. I felt much calmer after having this ping-pong game of a dialogue.

I tend to think of silence as another mode of conversation.

Frankl himself writes that ‘suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.’ I’ve stopped comparing my suffering to that of others, which has enabled me to seek professional help instead of just enduring it on my own. As hard as it is to avoid, using the standards of society and others to measure and suppress one’s own suffering is a very dangerous exercise. I want to be able to meet my darker emotions on their own terms.

You know how extreme I am, if I ever meet someone I don’t like for some reason, I don’t stop at ‘What a weird person’ but go straight to ‘I hate all people!’ So I spent that night crying and saying how much I hated all people, hated meeting people, and hugged my dogs close and said I was never going anywhere else ever again and fell asleep like that.

standing in front of someone unable to say what I really want to say in that moment like some loser, torturing myself. Even in my dreams I feel frustrated.

Being an adult is less about acting exactly the way you want just because you can, and more about trying to be patient in the midst of an infuriating situation. Plenty of people in this world try to go with the flow, to not rock the boat.

It’s all right to accept your natural urges instead of berating yourself for having them.

I now know how to blame others for their wrongs. I can think, I refuse to destroy myself because of something you did. I’m more aware than ever that my life and my self are not so worthy of contempt.

I actually don’t think I’m that clever, and I’m envious of people who are: quick on the uptake, finding the most optimal way of doing things. Despite my self-declared scepticism of astrology and tarot readings, I had ended up completely enraptured by what the astrologer was saying, and the thought that I was an easily influenced stooge – the only person in the world who didn’t have firm roots – was painful.

Was my friendliness trained into me? Sure, I feel good after being friendly to other people, but sometimes I feel really tired after a day of doing that, especially when I didn’t really want to, dammit. Not that I want to be rude, but I don’t want to make a huge effort trying to keep the mood all light and happy, either. But I think it was because I acted that way that the people around me could tolerate me. There are lots of people who become shy in front of those they’re not familiar with. I tend to set the tone in conversations with such people. But I don’t want to do that. When I come back home, I’m all exhausted. Which is why it makes me wonder if my politeness was just trained into me. I want to not smile when I don’t feel like smiling and not always be making an effort to get along.

Psychiatrist:Everyone at some point is someone you once were getting to know. I want you to think of your relationships as being the fruit of the effort you put into them. Me:But why do I have to put effort into that? (Surprised.) Psychiatrist:Because everyone does.

In high school I had low self-esteem and I was very self-deprecating to the point where my friends would say, ‘There you go, cutting yourself down again.’ People don’t say that to me anymore, which means I’m getting better, right? I think once you’re used to putting yourself down, you let others put you down as well. Because you become less sensitive to the putdowns. I had this friend I felt thought very little of me. I’ve told you this before, but there was a girl in my final year of high school who would see me eating chocolate and say, ‘That’s why you’re getting fat.’ Those little things left big wounds, I have so many memories like that. But I couldn’t tell her that she was hurting me. My friends habitually told me how oversensitive I was. So I didn’t say anything. And it got to the point where I thought, ‘She’s always putting me down, I’m just going to cut her off.’ And in an extreme fashion, I never spoke to her again. She was actually a very close friend, right? I think she was very taken aback. And three weeks ago, she sent me a message through Instagram. Saying she had missed me, but she hadn’t had the courage until now to reach out. It made me think a lot. I wrote her a long reply talking about all the things I had kept inside me for so long. ‘I used to think you were putting me down . . .’ I was scared that if I met her, I’d go back to being that nineteen-year-old, that she’d cut me down, and I’d be unable to say anything and just accommodate her. She replied to...

I thought about why I am overly polite to people who are not important to me. It’s because they can hate me at any time. Because they can judge me and resent me for the smallest things I do. Meanwhile, because the people who love me already love me, and there’s a low chance they’ll start to hate me, I get snappy with them. What I realised this time around is that my politeness has been learned over a long period of time. I’ve been told to be polite since I was little and made to think it was my obligation to be obsequious to others. I didn’t want to be hated, and I was truly afraid of being ostracised. But on days I perform politeness for long stretches of time, I collapse into bed. The fatigue lingers. I can never leave behind the fear of someone hating or resenting me, and I probably never will. But I still want to be free. Even if I’m left behind by everyone, insulted by everyone, and end up completely alone, I want to throw aside this façade. I don’t want to be polite or seem like a good person – I’m not a good person anyway. Replying politely to social media comments, the emails I send where I verge on fawning. Wearing a mask of politeness with others, reacting and smiling at the right things at the right time. When it gets to be too much, I will stop. Anytime, when my heart is no longer in it. I need to be myself sometimes. I hate myself for realising this so late, at the age of thirty. This self-hate that’s as serious as my self-pity, I have come to accept that it’s...

I know that having a cause and fighting for it is impressive. Very much. How could I criticise that? But the duelling of extremes is tiring, and I myself feel uncertain about the issue, which makes me read a lot. I want a solid point of view.

‘Am I prettier than her? Is she thinner than me?’ I’d stare at them working out and feel so much hatred for myself. But who cares if someone is skinnier than I am, or heavier than I am? I hate myself for the reassurance I feel when I see someone heavier than me. And this looking at women’s faces, trying to see if they are prettier than me or not. I normally never bother to look at other people in the first place, I just put on my glasses and do my own thing on the treadmill. Otherwise, I’m looking down at them, judging them as being less than me. So I began to think, why was I trying to compete with other women, was it all to impress men? I couldn’t get to the bottom of it, and even if I were a victim of patriarchal conditioning, it’s not such an easy thing to overcome, and it’s hardly my fault – I’m just a single individual.

you’re primed to see everything you do as some kind of sin.

Everyone has their own multi-faceted life, and to pity someone while in ignorance of what their life is like is very arrogant and just wrong.

Psychiatrist:To make a habit of continuing things and getting things done is in itself an excellent development. When one thinks, ‘I am depressed,’ it makes them stay at home more and be helpless and meet fewer people and get cut off from society. In such cases, it is the habits we developed when we were not depressed that help us slough off that depression. One might say they’re doing a certain thing because they’re depressed, but such behaviour may be exacerbated by a habit of withdrawing from society. If we make a habit of doing a certain thing when our serotonin levels are high (when our condition is good), the possibility of creating more good days by trying to be the selves we were at that optimal state would be that much greater.

I read something fascinating in a book recently. It’s from this book titled Conquering Shame and Codependency by Darlene Lancer where she explains that people who don’t try to gain something from outside of themselves are those who end up gaining the most, that self-esteem and pride come from letting go of external validation. It made me think about how I’m always trying to gain something from the outside. I’ve always craved external validation, whether it was through knowledge or affection or esteem. But it’s this very craving that indicates how I’m not enough to myself. I keep wanting to fix myself, to gain something better. It’s exhausting. Wouldn’t it be better for me to accept my flaws as they are?