It was a typical summer afternoon when a yellow and purple book caught my eye at Blossom Book Fair—standing out on the rusty top shelf of the quaint second-hand bookstore. Intrigued, I picked it up, and the book immediately resonated with an unfamiliar yet intense feeling within me.
The title read, “I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki.” How subtle, isn’t it? Like a thin line that balances the depths of despair and the undying urge to end everything with the simple, comforting pleasure of life — eating Tteokbokki.
It didn’t take me long to flip through the pages and silently witness Baek Sehee’s conversations with her therapist. The narrative was raw and unfiltered, with words slashing through like a thousand papercuts.
Dysthemia it said, not once but several times, describing the feeling of emptiness that drowns her from time to time. I read something like this:“I wasn’t deathly depressed, neither was I happy. I could be laughing at a friend’s joke but still feel emptiness in my heart, and then in my stomach which would make me go out to eat some Tteokbokki. I was floating in between, conflicted with two different thoughts and emotions.” ending it with a question, “Why is it so hard for us to be honest about how we feel?”.
At that moment, I found peace because the world tends to focus on extreme joy and utmost sadness, overlooking the in-between. It’s as if it’s either the blacks or whites, and the grays are treated as outcasts.
People find it baffling to understand that you may seem completely fine on the outside, doing the things that every normal person does, yet feel an ocean of emptiness on the inside.This isn’t the kind of depression that’s commonly acknowledged or accepted, and that’s the problem this book tries to resolve- how the yearning to escape life and the simple pleasure of enjoying Tteokbokki both stem from a place of seeking comfort or familiarity in the face of life’s uncertainty.
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