‘Extremes are hard to fight. Good and Bad are such strong concepts that it is hard to see the full spectrum of ourselves.’
Synopsis: i want to die but i want to eat tteokbokki is written by Baek Sehee and translated by Anton Hur.
It is a small nonfiction, part memoir, part self-help book about the author’s collected conversations with her therapist and retrospected essays on her mental health. How her future self is constantly molded by her endless desire for a peaceful and more collective life.
Baek Sehee was approximately 28 years old at the time when the book was written and she was working for a publishing company. She was leading an okay-ish life but for some reason (and we get to know; for many reasons) she didn’t feel happy at all.
So she made the biggest choice; she decided to embark on a journey to find out who she is, why she feels about herself the way she feels, and while doing that she writes and records everything down for us. Readers. Fellow okay-ish people.
She finds out that she has dysthymia; a persistent depressive disorder and she meets with a therapist once every week to have conversations about how she thinks about herself and her struggle with anxiety and mild depression.
Structure: This book is a small pocket of gorgeousness and joy. It has 192 pages and 15 chapters.
The narration is in the first person as it is her personal experience and encounters being written down. Easy and definitely a speedy read thanks to the bite-sized chapters.
I particularly liked the highlighted pocket wisdom parts that can be useful when you are feeling down and you just need some quick inspiration for the day.
The book is mainly about recorded dialogues between her and her therapist. I always loved to read and write dialogues. There is just something genuinely smooth about it. Like butter with a perfect spreading temperature.
Every chapter ends with a short essay about the topic of the dialogues. I truly loved the part when the doctor herself wrote about her experience of her being recorded in a book for all eternity.
As a bonus, we get to learn about the font that was used in the book and this part always melts my little nerd heart.
My take on it: I came up with a saying or a motto if you will when I was 16 years old and deeply in love with writing poetry; ‘Life is just as much as what’s left behind after busy little hands took out their share.’
Baek Sehee’s story reminded me a lot about this period of my life. When I was still so young and everything needed to have a deeper meaning to it. Just like her with her extreme thinking. Although life sometimes is just simpler and much more colorful as it is without us imagining something extra to it.
Or just like how our superego always shakes in fear thinking about: What if life is just this and nothing more? And then a scientist talks about how truly extremely fortunate we are to have life in the first place. I love to think about this because it keeps me humble and helps me keep my anxiety about death at bay.
It was good to read about behaviour patterns that I possess as well. Low self-esteem for example or mine would be people pleasing as a survivor mechanism that I developed from a very early age. Obviously, not everything matched my own extremes but it shouldn’t anyway.
It was admirably brave of her to write all of this down. To be open this much not just with herself but with all of us strangers is by itself something very respectable. It sets an example of ‘it’s okay not to be okay’ which is slowly getting more acceptance and attention from society.
I truly cherish her story and I wish the very best for her in the future.
Have a wonderful and peaceful day with loads of books and thank you for reading this far.
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– NOLITETHOUGHTS –
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