I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

I’ve also realised that revealing my darkness is just as natural a thing to do as revealing my light.

It’s a question of whether ‘everything you ever wanted’ was ever what you really wanted in the first place.

What matters isn’t what people say but what you like and find joy in. I hope you focus less on how you look to other people and more on fulfilling your true desires.

To the point of thinking: I want to go up to that person and ask her how she did it! But the you of the present is looking at your life and past as if you’re a failure. When in truth, from the perspective of a younger you, you’re the very picture of success.

You’ve lived with anxiety for a long time. Once your new experiences start overwriting your old ones, your view of yourself and others may become far brighter than it is now.

If twenty-year-old me met me today, she would cry with joy. And that’s enough for me.

Just because you like one thing about a person, you don’t need to like everything about them. And just because you don’t like one thing about a person, it doesn’t mean the person as a whole isn’t worth your time. I think you should get in the habit of thinking differently.

I am someone who is completely unique in this world, someone I need to take care of for the rest of my life, and therefore someone I need to help take each step forward, warmly and patiently, to allow to rest on some days and to encourage on others – I believe that the more I look into this strange being, myself, the more routes I will find to happiness.

Empathy has a large presence in my life, and it can cast a very long shadow. I can be watching a television drama or a movie, listening to a song or looking at a photograph, listening to someone’s story or writing my own, and my heart and mood will sink. Like a punctum they pierce me without context, a feeling I am very used to now and tired of.