I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

Today I deleted my school and work information on Facebook, because I wanted to erase the modifiers that followed my name. Displaying my school and occupation gave me brief feelings of superiority, but they also made me feel insecure.

Hoping there will come a day when we can all feel good about ourselves regardless of modifiers.

Normally I’m afraid of adults (despite my having become one), and powerful adults even more so.

I envy those who can answer questions adroitly and without guise.

Rebecca Solnit said in The Faraway Nearby that empathy is an act of imagination.

But surely to create something in me that didn’t exist before and to extend emotional solidarity to another person is one of the rites of adulthood.

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.

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.

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.

I love the innocence of bright and honest people and adore the writings of positive thinkers, but I fear that I will never be able to find myself among them. I have trouble both accepting my own darkness and throwing myself into the light. I yearn to be valued by others, to be loved unconditionally by others, but I feign disinterest in others despite my substantial interest in them. My faking creates more faking, and that goes on to create even more faking, to the point where I can’t tell whether I am faking or not faking, whether these are my real feelings and thoughts or the packaged ones.