I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“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.”

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

“When you're having a hard time, it's natural to feel like you're having the hardest time in the world. And it's not selfish to feel that way.”

“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 forwards, 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.”

“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.”

“What do I wish for? I want to love and be loved. Without suspicion, and with ease.”

“In effect, it's your thoughts that are torturing you.”

“I used to love being alone. Lying in my bed as I read or daydreamed, taking walks, listening to music on the bus or subway, napping, all of these were my favourite times of the day. But for the past two weeks I've felt inundated by a strange feeling called 'boredom'.”

“I hope you will listen to a certain overlooked and different voice within you. Because the human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too.”

“To right every wrong you come across in the world would be an impossible endeavor for any one person. You're just one person, and you're putting too much of the weight of the world on yourself.”

“To tell the truth, no one was looking down on me except myself.”

“Perhaps you're co-dependent on your work as well. When you get good results, your worth is realised and you relax, but that satisfaction doesn't last long - that's the problem.”

“If twenty-year-old me met me today, she would cry with joy. And that's enough for me.”

“I want to love and be loved. i wan 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.”

“Looking deep within myself is always difficult. Especially when I’m in the throes of negative emotion. How shall I describe it? It’s like I know everything is fine, but I can’t stop myself from endlessly checking to make sure it really is fine, and in the process I make myself miserable. Today was like that. I just felt like whining. And leaning on someone, and being sad. 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.”

“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.”

“Psychiatrist: If you make yourself anxious to gain attention, someone will give you attention. Then you get comfortable, and the other person will as well. But after that, you feel despair again. Despite your intentions, you start thinking, If I’m happy then this person will stop paying attention to me, which naturally leads to you trying to avoid becoming happy at all costs.”

“But again, you can enjoy the freedom of your own thoughts. Instead of thinking, 'I must not have these thoughts.”

“It’s impossible to fathom the sadness of those who are left behind, but if life gives one more suffering than death, shouldn’t we respect their right to end life? We are so bad at mourning in our society. Maybe it’s a failure of respect. Some call those who choose their own death sinners or failures or losers who give up. Is living until the end really a triumph in every case? As if there can be any true winning or losing in this game of life”

“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.”

“I don’t know why an individual has to be treated as less-than and strive to fit society’s standards when it’s the people who denigrateothers who are the real problem. That frustrates me. That I can’t step out of this frame, that I still feel inferior when I meet someone supposedly superior to me, and that I feel confident and comfortable when I meet someone supposedly inferior – Iabsolutely loathe that about myself.”

“Your self-esteem determines how you feel about the sincerity of others.”

“Sometimes, when someone tells me to 'Cheer up' when I'm going through a tough time, I just want wring their neck.”

“Because it begins with me and ends with everyone.”

“I feel too young to have seen the life and death of a living sentient being.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What I need to practice from now on is to stop trapping myself in the same formula of, 'This is what I have to be doing,' and to simply acknowledge the fact that I am an independent individual.”

“Ucapan semangat, ucapan pendukung agar kita bisa lebih berani dan ucapan agar kita tidak menciut bisa jadi adalah racun bagi kita.”