I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

I decided, instead of aimlessly wandering in search of these others, to be the person they could look for – to hold my hand up high and shout, I’m right here, hoping that someone would see me waving, recognise themselves in me and approach me, so we could find comfort in each other’s existence.

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

I don’t know why an individual has to be treated as less-than and strive to fit society’s standards when it’s the people who denigrate others who are the real problem.

But as I had that thought, I had another: 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.

This is a record of a very ordinary, incomplete person who meets another very ordinary, incomplete person, the latter of whom happens to be a therapist. The therapist makes some mistakes and has a bit of room for improvement, but life has always been like that, which means everyone’s life – our readers included – has the potential to become better. To our readers, who are perhaps down and out from having experienced much devastation or are living day-to-day in barely contained anxiety: I hope you will listen to a certain overlooked and different voice within you. Because the human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too.

So I turn my gaze. From despair to hope. From discomfort to comfort. From the majority to the minority. From the things that are useful but make me rust to the things that are useless but make me beautiful. Once I turn my gaze, I see the more interesting aspects of life. And my gaze guides my behaviour. And my behaviour changes my life. I realise that I can’t change all by myself; what makes me really change are the myriad things of the universe that my gaze happens to rest upon. Through turning my gaze, I learn that the low points of life can be filled with countless realisations.

In the end, a better way to live is to live among others, something I felt when I went on a holiday with my family, the first in a long while. Togetherness means altruism, and altruism is what saves us from selfishness. Because it begins with me and ends with everyone. Others are bound to be moved by the fact that you want to be with them, that you want to understand them, that you can’t do without them. Being together, misunderstanding each other, sharing with each other, growing further apart from each other, all these things help us live out our present moment. I wonder if this is our way of comforting ourselves through the darkness that is our world.