I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

Because there’s really no end to worrying once you set your mind to it. If you shift your perspective from their past to your present, you can start perceiving your personal experiences in a more positive manner. From ‘How sad they didn’t realise this’ to ‘How lucky it is that I realise this.’ In the past, you didn’t know how to label your symptoms, but now you know. That’s a reason for relief, not for more suffering.

Because when your life satisfaction falls, it’s natural to retreat into primitive measures. And eating and sleeping happen to be our most instinctive base measures. But the satisfaction from eating doesn’t last very long. Exercise or outside projects can help here. Setting some type of long-term goal, in other words.

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

They say that when we get too hurt we try to forget our wounds instead of healing them,

That’s enough for me – why did I torture myself by comparing myself to someone else? If twenty-year-old me met me today, she would cry with joy. And that’s enough for me.

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. Which was why it took so long for me to acknowledge the side effects of the medicine.

Psychiatrist: I think you can tweak that a bit further even. Me: How? Psychiatrist: You might think, She really must not have anyone else who can help her talk about these feelings. Me: But that would be so presumptuous of me! Psychiatrist: I’m only saying you should enjoy the freedom of your own thoughts.

Your self-esteem determines how you feel about the sincerity of others. In truth, there really are no sure-fire ways to increase your self-esteem. But what you mentioned doing earlier, how it occurred to you that you would’ve reacted differently before to certain situations – an awareness of that is in itself a great start.

‘The important thing here isn’t whether you are being loved, it’s how you will accept the love that comes your way.’

I think you also lower yourself in order to elevate others. When comparing yourself to your colleagues at work, you only see in them what you don’t have. You praise them and criticise yourself.

I tended to discount anything positive that happened to fall into my hands. Even when I managed to accomplish something difficult, or when I wore a pretty dress, I would immediately decide my accomplishment was no big deal; the dress would lose its power. Nothing in my grasp seemed precious or beautiful.

wish. 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.

But books are different. I often look for books that are like medicine, that fit my situation and my thoughts, and I read them over and over again until the pages are tattered, underlining everything, and still the book will have something to give me.