I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Se-hee

‘If you want to be happy, you mustn’t fear the following truths but confront them head-on: one, that we are always unhappy, and that our sadness, suffering and fear have good reasons for existing. Two, that there is no real way to separate these feelings completely from ourselves.’

I wonder about others like me, who seem totally fine on the outside but are rotting on the inside, where the rot is this vague state of being not-fine and not-devastated at the same time.

Sometimes the best thing to do with people who would never listen to you in the first place is to avoid them altogether. To right every wrong you come across in the world would be an impossible endeavour for any one person. You’re just one person, and you’re putting too much of the weight of the world on yourself.

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,

What I’m saying is, don’t compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to your past self.

‘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 must have someone who loves me. Someone must ask after me every day for me to be alone.’

‘Emotions have something like passageways, and if you keep blocking your bad emotions, you end up blocking your good emotions as well.’

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.

loving myself. I am someone who is completely unique in this world, someone I need to take care of for the rest of my life, and therefore someone I need to help take each step forward, warmly and patiently, to allow to rest on some days and to encourage on others – I believe that the more I look into this strange being, myself, the more routes I will find to happiness.

‘To tell the truth, no one was looking down on me except myself.’

Fear increases when it’s something that you keep to yourself. Instead of suffering alone, it can often be good to share it with someone else,

think it’s good to experience complete solitude in an unfamiliar environment. You’re not hitting rock bottom right now. When we’re sinking in water, it can be a relief to feel the ground beneath our feet, the rock bottom, because we know we can kick against it to rise again. But if you can’t feel the ground in life, the fear can be overwhelming. So maybe it’s good to find your rock bottom.

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.

When life becomes something one just lives through, when the demands of survival take up all of our time and effort, leaving no strength for any other demands, and when time rushes by drying up or rotting whatever we have had to neglect, expecting someone to carry on being the same is truly too much of a burden.

Rebecca Solnit said in The Faraway Nearby that empathy is an act of imagination. If I don’t plant the seed in myself, it will never grow. Which is why some people never seem to understand the lives of others. But the only way to create something inside me that is not there to begin with is through imagination. You’ve got to learn how to empathise, to imagine.