I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

I have trouble both accepting my own darkness and throwing myself into the light

Life is as messy as a bag whose owner never cleans it out. You have no idea when you might reach in and pull out a piece of old trash, and you’re afraid someone is going to look through your bag someday. Maybe your ‘baggage’ is like an old bag, too. You toss it around any which way, not caring how worn it gets or where it lands, and no one notices. You can’t afford a new bag so you carefully and painstakingly hold it so the rough patches don’t show

Togetherness means altruism, and altruism is what saves us from selfishness. Because it begins with me and ends with everyone. Others are bound to be moved by the fact that you want to be with them, that you want to understand them, that you can’t do without them

In the end, a better way to live is to live among others

There are days when I wish I were numb, when I’m desperate to feel nothing. I want to be simple and cold and totally without feeling. Empathy has a large presence in my life, and it can cast a very long shadow

All kinds of negative emotions kept rising in me, leaving me unable to breathe. I needed to find a way to let them out.
That’s when I first sought therapy. I could immediately sense that sharing, which was something I had no trouble doing when I was younger, had already become much more difficult – but once we began to talk, I could feel everything flowing out of me. I had thought I only needed one person to share things with, but I was wrong.
From that moment on, I often shared my thoughts and feelings with family, friends, colleagues and even strangers, listening to their stories in turn and filling myself with new air. Not in a fake-friendly way but in a sincere way, with all my heart. It felt like I was balancing out some of the self-consciousness and self-pity in my feelings

Rebecca Solnit said in The Faraway Nearby that empathy is an act of imagination. If I don’t plant the seed in myself, it will never grow. Which is why some people never seem to understand the lives of others. But the only way to create something inside me that is not there to begin with is through imagination. You’ve got to learn how to empathise, to imagine

My older sister is the same way. Having studied singing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, she is taken for granted if she delivers a good performance but heavily criticised if she happens to hit a sour note. She lives in constant fear of being judged harshly. Many people must feel this way. It’s why we can’t enjoy the things we chose to study because we loved them. It’s why some would rather find the nearest mouse hole to hide in than take the chance to develop their interests.

I’ve never loved anyone with half of my heart thinking, this is enough for me

I’ve got to accept that everyone has a flaw or two, and first and foremost, see myself as I am first. I must stop expecting myself to be perfect. The best I can do is to learn or realise something new every day.