Not Quite About Tteokbokki

I thought the title is cute and I didn't mind a flip if it's an e-book. This isn't a genre I'm keen on; I most definitely wouldn't buy a hard copy. I just found the title cute. It's 'I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki' (2018) written by now 32-year-old Baek Sehee, translated by Anton Hur in 2022. 

The selling point is apparently 'As recommended by BTS' RM'. Ahhhhhhh. I dunno who is RM. I cannot recognize who's who in BTS, but okay.... BTS sells things huh? This would explain why I'm 1447 on our National Library Board's waiting list for a digital copy. The notification for me to borrow and read in Libby came only 6 months after I reserved a digital copy. Dohhh.

I didn't know what is tteokbokki. It made me curious. When I stared at the choices of cooking styles of tteokbokki at the restaurants, I decided not to try it. It's literally spicy stir-fried rice cakes. That meant gochujang max, and that weird sweet sauce. NO WAY. It sounds like a very thick mee hoon kuey or a very different kind of elongated gnocchi. I'd eat it if I can find a light version that doesn't have these sweet or spicy sauces layered onto the rice cakes.

This is Baek Sehee's 'intimate memoir', a recording of her dialogue with her psychiatrist over a 12-week period. The young and presumably successful social media director at a publishing house seemed to be suffering from burnout and started seeing a psychiatrist. She was diagnosed with dysthymia, a "persistent depressive disorder or a state of constant, light depression". She noted down what transpired during her weekly sessions and added her own reflections. It culminated in this book. 

I almost stopped reading at this point. I'm not keen to be mired down into reading the venting of these dark emotions, and for her to state that her type of depression is "baffling". I decided to speed-read it to just get a gist of it, and not comment or form any opinions. The book began with a Prologue to tell readers that happiness comes hand-in-hand with confronting fears and suffering and being unhappy at the same time.

Even in my most unbearably depressed moments I could still feel an emptiness in my heart, and then feel an emptiness in my stomach, which would make me go out to eat some tteokbokki — what's wrong with me? I wasn't deathly depressed, but I wasn't happy either, floating instead in some feeling between the two. I suffered more because I had no idea that these contradictory feelings could and did coexist in many people. 

I went through all of the writer's emotions and thoughts. It is, indeed, deeply personal. I sped through them because she isn't my friend. I'm not keen to know every detail or understand her. I'm not even trying to draw parallels so that I could help friends or whatever. Sorry ah, I'm not that great a friend sometimes. There're only a few people I would give my all to, to help and still not be pissed if they should yell at me or not speak to me for a few months. 

While Chapter 13 is the Epilogue, it isn't the end of the book though. We have another two chapters to go. There's a Chapter 14 that holds the Psychiatrist Note, and there's a looooong Chapter 15 of 'Postscript: Reflections on Life Following Therapy', before we reach the end of said manuscript. 

Chapter 13's 'Epilogue: It's Okay, Those Who Don't Face Darkness Can Never Appreciate the Light' does a self-reflection at the end of these sessions with the psychiatrist.

I tended to discount anything positive that happened to fall into my hands. Even when I managed to accomplish something difficult, or when I wore a pretty dress, I would immediately decide my accomplishment was no big deal; the dress would lose its power. Nothing in my grasp seemed precious or beautiful. The real problem was how this principle began to apply to people as well. The more someone loved me, the more I got bored of them. Perhaps not bored — they ceased to sparkle in my eyes. 

.....................

But even as I read my finished manuscript, I still hate the way I go in and out of depression and happiness, and it's hard to find meaning in it. I went in and out of the clinic that way, and here I am, before I realized it, years later. 

.....................

This book, therefore, ends not with answers but a wish. 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. 

Some day, I will.

Chapter 14 'Psychiatrist's Note: From One Incompleteness To Another' holds her psychiatrist's thoughts, especially when she knew the patient would be recording the sessions. The psychiatrist didn't expect the manuscript to hold such vivid details, and raw emotions put out for the entire world to read — it was as thought the notes in the patient's chart came to life. 

I found the psychiatrist's words/advice rather helpful. An extract here from the end of this chapter has the psychiatrist putting this on record, 

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. The therapist makes some mistakes and has a bit of room for improvement, but life has always been like that, which means everyone's life — our readers included — has the potential to become better. To our readers, who are perhaps down and out from having experienced much devastation or are living day-to-day in barely contained anxiety: 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.