I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

I really don’t know how to tell the difference – between what I really want and what others want for me.

Everything that comes after would be like a lovely bonus. When you feel envious of something, try to imagine how you would look to your twenty-year-old

year-old self.

from the perspective of a younger you, you’re the very picture of success.

don’t compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to your past self.

Twenty-Year-Old Me to the Me of Now ‘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.’

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

Let’s redistribute your affections a little bit. Because you’ll end up the weaker person otherwise. And the more you sacrifice, the more you’ll begin to expect a payback. You’ll feel that because you’ve done so much for them,

you haven’t received enough compensation for your affections, and that will make you even more obsessed with them.

‘Am I really compatible with this person? What do I like about them, and what do I not?’

when I’m meeting people who have nothing to do with the arts, it feels like I’m an island in the ocean. Someone who’s neither this nor that.

Liking someone and putting them on a pedestal can lead to self-castigation. Even if the physical distance between two people lessens, the psychological distance can increase.

That can lead to feelings of inferiority.

you might find more satisfaction in cherishing the fact that you’ve met someone you like. Once you start valuing the time you have together, does

it really matter what kind of relationship it is?

You’ve got to stop falling into the binary trap

of thinking you’re either all-ordinary or all-special. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are not the only ways we think in black and white.

Your emptiness and fear are all mixed up, and you’re asking for help to defend yourself. But if you depend on another person for help, it’ll satisfy you only for a moment, and you may not be able to stand on your own two feet later. And you’ll lose interest in new things or pleasures.

I felt so proud of myself for that. I want to praise the younger me, tell her that she made the right decision. That I thought it through, made a decision, and did what I wanted to do.

You need to keep finding your own ways to comfort yourself.

I’m oversensitive. That’s the right word. I’m so sensitive that I overcompensate by being nasty

about it to myself, like some animal goaded to the edge. And this contradictory emotion raging inside my body makes my whole sense of self crumble. It’s become a habit to look in the mirror after I’ve had a bad confrontation along those lines, to take in my hot face where even my ears have turned red. My face looks pathetic and

shabby to me during these times of inner war. Eyes that are bloodshot and unfocused, my fringe all messy, a dim and stupid expression as if I have no idea what my own brain is thinking. I look like someone of no consequence, an invisible person....

that point completely ...

showing my anxiety to others could make them feel burdened with it.

You know how drinking sometimes leads to excessive honesty?

In general, thinking in extremes blocks out the nuances of relationships.

You keep obsessively holding yourself to these idealised standards, forcing yourself to fit them. It’s another way, among many, for you to keep punishing yourself.

The whole point of not liking your friend’s behaviour means you don’t like her behaviour, not your friend

as a person. But right now, you keep interpreting every behaviour exhibited by your friend as rejection.

it’s perfectly healthy to have disagreements

with friends and lovers from time to time. I just hope you learn to differentiate the parts from the whole. 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.

To Not Depend on Dependence ‘Emotions have something like passageways, and if you keep blocking your bad emotions, you end up blocking your good emotions as well.’

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

Do you think you can be happy being plump in your current emotional state?

menopause should not be ‘menstrual shutdown’ but ‘menstrual completion’, she thought that the word ‘suicide’ should be replaced with ‘free death’, a linguistic idea that made an impression

I want

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.

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.

Sometimes, when someone tells me to ‘Cheer up’ when I’m going through a tough time, I just want to wring their neck. Just be there to hold my hand, be sad or angry with me, or if you’ve gone through

something similar, tell me about it and say it will all pass eventually. That’s empathy and communication and a kind of consolation that enriches relationships.

Most people have trouble living a life where their words match their actions. No matter how much they read and try to remember, they always return to their old patterns. I admire those who realise their past mistakes and prove how they’ve changed through their behaviour.

The only things I’m good at are regret and self-criticism, and even these I can only pause, never stop completely.

I simply must accept that I have room for improvement, and consider these moments as constant opportunities for self-reflection, to feel shame and joy at having learned something new and to keep inching towards change.

The only way for me to become a better person is to go my way little by little, as tedious as that can be. To delay my judgement, to not force myself, to accept the countless judgements and emotions that pass through me.

Instead of ruthlessly judging

others the way I judge myself or trying to bend others to fit my rules.

I’ve got to accept that everyone has a flaw or two, and first and foremost, see myself as I am first. I must stop expecting myself to be perfect. The best I can do i...

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. Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed.

That’s one of the nicest things about books.