Oh shit: Baek Se-hee is dead. Baek Who, I hear you ask? Baek Se-hee, I repeat. She wrote a book called I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki and it was beautiful. In it, she wrote about her conversations with her psychiatrist, suffering as she did from dysthymia, which is persistent depression. The book includes short essays, too, and it’s very affecting. More importantly, it was generally regarded as a kind of self-help book, put out there to encourage and bring about hope. Her death at 35, currently unexplained, is devastating for many of us who really did gain hope from her writing.
Amazon described the book as follows: ‘I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness.’ That’s absolutely spot-on and it has been a go to for me ever since it was first published in 2023. It was in many ways a book I have been waiting for all my life.
The reviews were all positive and pointed to a better, brighter day. Baek wrote of her own depression, which I thought to be extremely brave, but also, at least for me, gave hope. As one reviewer put it: ‘At once personal and universal, this book is about finding a path to awareness, understanding, and wisdom.’ While resigned to living with depression for the rest of my days, I had begun to wonder whether things might just get better. With the news of her sad death, I now await, selfishly, I know, how she died. The fact that she is dead should be the end in itself, but what if that means all my hope could be gone forever? If it turns out hers was, how to interpret that?
Baek Se-hee was self-aware enough to write that this was her story and because we were all different, it could not be the reader’s, which in this case means me. But there were too many similarities, too many parallels and the differences and when I read about her, there was a large part of me there, too. I think many of us mental people would feel the same having read her work.
Much of the book surrounds conversations with her psychiatrist, which is not something I can easily relate to since I have not been able to access one in decades, but I can remember just enough of how those conversations went and the words all ring true. I could feel her pain in almost every word, so many of which resonated deeply into my very being.
Baek Se-hee is dead. She wrote about the one thing she knew so much about: depression. She said what we feel about, she walked the same road; I was grateful she walked that road with me. And now she is gone, I feel I am walking the road alone again. I’ll get over that bit because I retain enough perspective that I am not alone, but in this moment a light has gone out in the world. ‘Depression‘, she said, ‘is an incurable chronic illness.’ Her world is my world and my world is a lesser place tonight that it was earlier.
