I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

‘If you want to be happy, you mustn’t fear the following truths but confront them head-on: one, that we are always unhappy, and that our sadness, suffering and fear have good reasons for existing. Two, that there is no real way to separate these feelings completely from ourselves.’

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

But even when I changed all the parts of my life that I had wanted to change – my weight, education, partner, friends – I was still depressed.

I couldn’t keep food down when I was stressed,

Real

She’s a bit older than I am, which meant her word was law.

It’s like you’re running inside a hamster wheel. You try to get out of your depression through your efforts but fail, and this continuing cycle of trying and failing feeds back into the original depression.

I have this obsessive worry about not inconveniencing others,

Sometimes the best thing to do with people who would never listen to you in the first place is to avoid them altogether. To right every wrong you come across in the world would be an impossible endeavour for any one person. You’re just one person, and you’re putting too much of the weight of the world on yourself.

I think you tend to focus too much on your ideals and pressure yourself by thinking, I have to be this kind of person! Even when those ideals are, in fact, taken from someone else and not from your own thoughts and experiences.

Your results indicate you’re more anxious and obsessive than depressed, and your anxieties are especially high concerning social relationships.

Because there’s really no end to worrying once you set your mind to it.

I like being alone, but also hate being alone?

‘Extremes tend to connect. For example, people who appear arrogant tend to have low self-esteem. They keep trying to get others to look up to them.’

The contradictory state of longing for intimacy but also wanting to keep others at arm’s length is called the hedgehog’s dilemma.

Which is why you shouldn’t torture yourself with questions like, Why can’t I be happy with what I have?

I’m constantly wondering, ‘Am I boring them?’ or ‘I’m enjoying myself right now, but how are they feeling?’

Forgetfulness can be liberating,

Your high school grades do not determine the rest of your life.

Despite getting everything I’d ever wanted, my depression continued.

When you feel envious of something, try to imagine how you would look to your twenty-year-old self. Wouldn’t she think something like, Wow, look at me! I graduated college and I’m working at a publishing house!

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.

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

‘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.’

You know how you think someone is very similar to you, and then as time goes by you see how different they are?

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.

she was criticising the book and not me, but I kept feeling like it was an attack on me as well as the book.

I always considered pain or discomfort as me being a nuisance. I would censor my own pain. Despite my discomfort, I cared more about how I appeared to others. I hated to look as if I was whining about something that was actually more or less bearable. I was ashamed of my pain.

When we’re sinking in water, it can be a relief to feel the ground beneath our feet, the rock bottom, because we know we can kick against it to rise again.

Those Who Don’t Face Darkness Can Never Appreciate the Light

I was perfectly capable of looking at the other side of the coin, but the coin just happens to be a little heavy, that’s all.

light and darkness are part of the same thing. Happiness and unhappiness alternate throughout life, as in a dance. So as long as I keep going and don’t give up, surely I will keep having moments of tears and laughter.

I want to keep failing and discovering new and better directions.

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.

It’s my first time doing this, there’s no way to do it perfectly, anyway. I have to remind myself of that and think of ways to do it better next time.

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

Words and behaviours are very different, and while hiding words is easy, hiding the behaviour that reaches out from one’s subconscious is impossible.

I feel too young to have seen the life and death of a living sentient being.

All beginnings and endings feel so heavy to me.

I am too much of a worrier to focus on the happine...

There are days when I wish I were numb, when I’m desperate to feel nothing. I want to be simple and cold and totally without feeling.

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.

I thought I had built a shelter for myself, but I had only locked myself up in a prison

In the end, a better way to live is to live among others,

Togetherness means altruism, and altruism is what saves us from selfishness.

it’s hard to find a good thought in my inner rot. Just like muddy water filtered through a mesh still comes out brown, the thoughts I’ve refined and refined again are thick with darkness.

I try to create a path where there is no path, but no matter how much I pace that rough ground, it refuses to become a path. My toes keep kicking against the rocks.

I place more importance on attitude than on character.

We often judge the whole by a single moment.