Michelle: Alright, Mark. Five-word review for I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. Go. Mark: My brain is sad. Tummy's hungry. Michelle: Perfect. Mine is: 'It's okay to not be okay.' That really is the whole book in a nutshell, isn't it? Mark: It is! And what a title. It’s one of those you see and immediately think, "I get that. I've felt that." It perfectly captures this weird state of being that's not full-blown despair, but definitely not happiness. Michelle: Exactly. And today we are diving deep into that feeling with the book I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by the South Korean author Baek Sehee. What's incredible is that this book, which feels like reading someone's most private journal, was initially self-published through crowdfunding in South Korea. Mark: No way! Really? Michelle: Yes, and it just exploded. It became this massive bestseller, even getting shout-outs from members of the K-pop group BTS. It clearly struck a huge nerve, especially with a younger generation grappling with mental health in a culture where it's often been a taboo topic. Mark: That makes so much sense. The title alone feels like it’s giving a voice to a feeling that a lot of people have but don't know how to articulate. Let's start there, with that paradox.

Michelle: The entire book is built on that paradox. Baek Sehee is diagnosed with dysthymia, which is a form of persistent, low-grade depression. She describes it beautifully in the prologue, saying she wasn't "deathly depressed, but wasn't happy either, floating instead in some feeling between the two." Mark: It’s like having a low-grade emotional fever all the time. You're not bedridden, you can go to work, you can laugh with friends, but you're definitely not well. There’s a constant, dull ache. Michelle: That's a perfect analogy. And she has this quote that I think is so powerful: "Just as a light flu can make our whole body hurt, a light depression can make our minds ache all over." It validates that this "slight" depression isn't actually slight in its impact. It's pervasive. Mark: And it creates this internal conflict, right? Because if you're still functioning, you feel like you don't have the right to complain. Michelle: Precisely. She tells this incredibly relatable story about being out for drinks with her friends. They're all complaining about their jobs, their bosses, their struggles. But Baek’s job is actually going okay. She even likes her boss. So she feels she can't say anything. She just sits there, listening, feeling this resentment build because she's also suffering, but her suffering doesn't feel "bad enough" to share. Mark: Oh, I know that feeling. It's the Suffering Olympics, where you feel like you can't even enter the competition because your problem isn't a gold-medal tragedy. You disqualify yourself before you even start. Michelle: The Suffering Olympics! Yes! And that self-disqualification is a huge part of dysthymia. It keeps you isolated. This extends to her relationships, too. Her psychiatrist introduces this concept called the "hedgehog's dilemma." Mark: The hedgehog's dilemma? What's that? It sounds prickly. Michelle: It is. It's the contradictory state of longing for intimacy but also wanting to keep others at arm's length. Hedgehogs want to huddle together for warmth, but if they get too close, they prick each other with their spines. So they are constantly shuffling, trying to find the perfect distance. Mark: Wow. So she craves connection, but when someone gets too close, she pushes them away, maybe out of fear they'll see the "real" her or that she'll become too dependent? Michelle: Exactly. She says she feels stable when she's dependent on a partner, but then she starts to resent them for it. When she's single, she feels free, but then the anxiety and emptiness creep back in. It’s this constant, exhausting dance between needing people and resenting that need. Mark: That sounds incredibly draining. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of loneliness. You push people away to protect yourself, which makes you lonely, which makes you crave connection, and the cycle starts all over again. Michelle: And that cycle, that hedgehog dilemma, doesn't come from nowhere. The book is structured as a series of transcripts from her therapy sessions, and it becomes this fascinating archaeological dig into why she feels this way. It all comes down to what she calls "that goddamn self-esteem."

Mark: Okay, so let's get into that. If her low self-esteem is a building, what are the bricks it's made of? Where does this all start? Michelle: The book uncovers these foundational experiences from her childhood, these painful "artifacts," as you say. The first one is shame, specifically shame around poverty. She grew up in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with her whole family. In her neighborhood, there were two apartment complexes with the same name—one with big units, one with small ones. She lived in the small one. Mark: I can already see where this is going. Michelle: One day, a friend's mother asks her, "Oh, do you live in the big complex or the small one?" And in that moment, she's just flooded with this hot, paralyzing shame. It’s such a small, seemingly innocent question, but for a child, it's a spotlight on everything she feels is wrong with her family, with her life. Mark: That’s a heavy weight for a kid to carry. It teaches you to hide, to feel like a secret. But that feels like one piece of the puzzle. The book goes deeper, right? Especially with her family. Michelle: It goes much deeper. The most brutal "brick" in this architecture of low self-esteem is her relationship with her older sister. Her sister's love was completely conditional. She would buy Baek and her younger sister clothes and shoes, but she used these gifts as leverage. She’d say, "If you don't listen to me, I'll take it all back." Mark: Wow, that's not love, that's emotional blackmail. It's teaching a child that affection is transactional. Michelle: It's incredibly damaging. Her sister would mock her for gaining weight, for not getting good grades. It created this dynamic where Baek both hated her sister and was terrified of her anger and abandonment. She finally confronts her as an adult, telling her, "You make me very uncomfortable." Her sister is shocked and cries for days. But even after that confrontation, the pattern of dependency just transfers to her romantic partners. Mark: So the blueprint for her relationships was already set in childhood. That's heartbreaking. And it explains so much about her constant need for validation, which seems to be a huge theme. Michelle: A massive theme. It manifests as this obsessive self-surveillance. She's constantly worried about how she appears to others. This is rooted in more childhood trauma, like being bullied for her eczema. A boy she liked refused to hold her hand during a dance. Later, in middle school, anonymous people on an online forum wrote horrible things about her appearance, like "her elbows are blackened and disgusting." Mark: That's just cruel. Of course that would lead to an obsession with appearances. You'd feel like you're under a microscope 24/7. Michelle: And she literally puts herself under one. She admits to recording her conversations to analyze her performance later. She’s terrified of being judged. Her psychiatrist eventually suggests she has tendencies toward histrionic personality disorder—not a full diagnosis, but a pattern of seeking attention and being overly dramatic, which is all a defense mechanism against her deep-seated fear of being ordinary and unlovable. Mark: Okay, but I have to push back a little here, because this is a point of criticism I've seen from some readers. The psychiatrist's advice can sometimes feel a bit… simplistic. "Focus on what you like," "Don't worry what others think." Is it really that easy? It can come across as a bit dismissive of the depth of her pain. Michelle: That's a very fair point, and it’s a tension in the book. The format is raw therapy transcripts, not a polished self-help guide. So we see the advice as it's given, sometimes bluntly. But I think the value isn't in the advice itself being a magic bullet, but in the process of hearing it, resisting it, and slowly, painfully, trying to internalize it. The psychiatrist's role seems to be to constantly offer a different, healthier perspective, even if she can't accept it right away. Mark: That makes more sense. It’s not about a quick fix, it’s about the long, messy work of therapy. It’s about hearing a new voice so many times that it eventually starts to compete with the inner critic. Michelle: Exactly. It's about challenging the cognitive distortions. The psychiatrist points out her "black-and-white thinking"—her tendency to see people and situations as all good or all bad. If a friend criticizes a book she likes, her brain jumps to "this friendship is over." There's no middle ground. Mark: Which is exhausting. Living in a world of extremes means you're constantly on a knife's edge. So after all this digging, after uncovering all these painful bricks—the shame, the conditional love, the bullying—what's the big takeaway? Is it just about understanding your trauma, or is there something more?

Michelle: I think the book argues that understanding is the first, crucial step, but the real work is in building a new skill: self-compassion. It’s about learning to look at all those messy, broken parts of yourself without judgment. The psychiatrist’s most powerful and consistent advice is to stop ranking things in extremes and to differentiate the parts from the whole. A person isn't "bad" because they did one bad thing. You aren't "a failure" because you failed at one task. Mark: Seeing people, and yourself, in shades of grey. Michelle: Precisely. The real breakthrough moment in the book for me is when Baek has this simple but profound realization after a fight with a friend. She writes, "To tell the truth, no one was looking down on me except myself." Mark: Wow. That's it, right there. The prison was self-made. The surveillance was internal. Michelle: It was always an inside job. And that's both a terrifying and an incredibly liberating thought. It means the power to change is also internal. The book doesn't end with her being "cured." Mental health isn't like that. It ends with her being in process, more aware of her patterns, and a little kinder to herself. Mark: It’s a journey, not a destination. I love that. It feels so much more honest. Michelle: And that honesty is what has made this book resonate with millions. It’s a quiet, unassuming book that screams a very loud truth. The psychiatrist tells her at one point, "You are fine now, just the way you are." And that's the message she's passing on. Mark: That's such a hard thing to truly believe about yourself. It makes you wonder, what's one judgment you hold against yourself that you could try to let go of, just for this week? It’s a powerful question to sit with. If this conversation resonated with you, we'd love to hear your thoughts. What parts of Baek Sehee's story felt familiar? Join the conversation on our social channels. Michelle: We’d love to hear from you. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.