I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

You have this superego that exerts control over you, a superego built not only from your own experiences but cobbled together from all sorts of things that you admire, creating an idealised version of yourself. But that idealised version of yourself is, in the end, only an ideal. It’s not who you actually are. You keep failing to meet that ideal in the real world, and then you punish yourself. If you have a strict superego, the act of being punished eventually becomes gratifying.

I’ve worked hard to get here. And now I make a living doing what I enjoy. I’ve no anxieties about whether this is the right path for me. All I want is to get better at it. 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 want to own my own life. To do everything I want to do, so I don’t live a life of regret.

To me, sadness is the path of least resistance, the most familiar and close-at-hand emotion I have. A habit that has encrusted itself onto my everyday.

Right now, your relationship is narrow, like a triangle, and pierces your heart, but at least a dodecahedron is closer to a circle than an octagon, right? The deeper and more varied relationships you have, the rounder your mind will be, and the less the angles will pierce you. You will be just fine.

The unhappiness floats to the top like oil while the happiness sinks below. But the container that holds both is what we call life, and that’s where I find solace and joy. I’m sad, but I’m alive, and living through it. That is my solace and my joy.

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.