I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

Even in my most unbearably depressed moments I could be laughing at a friend’s joke but still feel an emptiness in my heart, and then feel an emptiness in my stomach, which would make me go out to eat some tteokbokki – what was wrong with me?

I wonder about others like me, who seem totally fine on the outside but are rotting on the inside, where the rot is this vague state of being not-fine and not-devastated at the same time.

I simply gave in to the fact that I was someone who was depressed from birth, and let my world grow darker and darker.

And the world is full of so much suffering that it’s the easiest thing to find people who are having a harder time than you are.

What I’m saying is, don’t compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to your past self.

I’m so sensitive that I overcompensate by being nasty about it to myself, like some animal goaded to the edge.

It’s impossible to fathom the sadness of those who are left behind, but if life gives one more suffering than death, shouldn’t we respect their right to end life? We are so bad at mourning in our society. Maybe it’s a failure of respect. Some call those who choose their own death sinners or failures or losers who give up. Is living until the end really a triumph in every case? As if there can be any true winning or losing in this game of life.

What do I wish for? I want to love and be loved. Without suspicion, and with ease. That’s it. I don’t know how to love or be loved properly, and that’s what pains me.

I want to love and be loved. I want to find a way where I don’t hurt myself. I want to live a life where I say things are good more than things are bad. I want to keep failing and discovering new and better directions. I want to enjoy the tides of feeling in me as the rhythms of life. I want to be the kind of person who can walk inside the vast darkness and find the one fragment of sunlight I can linger in for a long time. Some day, I will.

I can do well today, or not. It’ll be an experience either way. And that’s fine.

If the incident has to do with work the consolation is bigger, but with love, it’s the pain that looms larger. Because the moment I realise I should do better comes just when the person I should do better with is no longer by my side.

In any case, I tend to go back and forth between romanticism and cynicism. Crossing those barriers between hot and cold, I forget the lukewarm boredom of life; that lukewarm state is what I fear the most. Unable to return to feeling hot or cold, to be numb within a state of room temperature. In that state, we’re nothing better than dead.