Baek Sehee

THE PHENOMENAL KOREAN BESTSELLER PSYCHIATRIST: So how can I help you? ME: I don't know, I'm – what's the word – depressed? Do I have to go into detail? Baek Se-Hee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her – what to call it? – depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgemental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends; adept at performing the calmness, even ease, her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a yen for her favourite street food, the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like? Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a 12-week period, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions and harmful behaviours that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness.

I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

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ARCHIVE.

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. — Une Parfaite Journée Parfaite by Martin Page.

Steffi Colberg

trúc hân

deniz

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.

Marek Hnatiak

So I turn my gaze. From despair to hope. From discomfort to comfort. From the majority to the minority. From the things that are useful but make me rust to the things that are useless but make me beautiful.

I like to be by myself a lot. But only under one condition: I must have someone who loves me. 

To me, solitude is my one-bedroom apartment, underneath the blanket that fits me perfectly, beneath the sky I find myself staring at while out on a walk, a feeling of aliernation that comes over me in the middle of a party. 

And she answered that she was alone every day so how could she have a happy moment. 

it finally occurred to me that to expect someone to always be a certain way or consistently do a certain thing can be a huge burden on them.

I feel that our time is precious and happy, and our futures that much more fearful and dark.

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. 

Helen 

Because there's really no end to worrying once you set your mind to it. 

I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki quotes

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