But what if they don’t like me?
How I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki Unveiled the Hidden Fears of the Average Twenty-Something
Words by Kennedy Smith
Long ago (February 2023) in a far away land (Atlanta, GA, USA), an e-letter fluttered through space and time to be received exactly two years after the date it was sent. Yes, this time two years ago, I wrote myself a letter about a new memoir I was reading, “I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki.” This letter was totally serendipitous, because lately I have been analyzing and overanalyzing myself in this period of my life as a woman in her late-20s– the same age as the main character in the book, Baek Sehee.
Using a website called FutureMe, I wake up every so often with a notification that I sent myself a letter from some point in the past. Either these letters arrive when I expect them to, like my birthday, or they come as a pleasant surprise, like a frigid day in February 2025. It’s always a toss up on what the contents of the letter will be: a winding wishlist of what I hope to have in my life, a pity-party of how I had just ended things with someone the day before Valentine’s Day, or a one sentence reminder to stretch my body and listen to this song that I couldn’t get out of my head.
On this day, I was having a serious moment of introspection while reading this therapy memoir. The main character is talking to her psychiatrist, as is the case with every chapter, about how concerned she is with how people think of her. Her example was when she got too drunk around the people in her movie club, and they were signalling to each other to put the main character in a cab. She thought that meant they hated her. She very often puts herself in the “victim mentality” where she thinks that people hate her, and she is envious of the people that don’t have those thoughts or simply are more likeable.
First of all, same. I find myself doing things because I think others will like them or because it will shield me from being unlikeable. I subconsciously search the faces of the people around me for their disapproval. Seeing myself outside of myself has become a deeply ingrained habit. I am constantly watching my movements and mannerisms, – never moving too much or else it might annoy someone close to me. Never being too talkative or too quiet. If I rate myself on being too much or too little insert-whatever-word, I suddenly shut down, silently putting myself in my place. I am building and rebuilding a version of myself that I hope others will offer their hand out to. I am my own voyeur, an “ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole in [my] own head” as Margaret Atwood once said. Although Atwood was focused on male fantasies in this quote, I have taken the liberty of comparing it to the struggle of people pleasing in general. It feels necessary, and it’s exhausting. I envy people who can just eat an apple and not imagine themselves while they are eating an apple, moving 360 degrees to make sure no angle is off-putting in some spoken or unspoken way.
The psychiatrist in the book says, “When you feel envious of something, try to imagine how you would look to your 20-year-old self. Wouldn’t she be like, ‘Wow, I graduated college and I’m working my dream job at a publishing house!” The main character is a 28-year-old college graduate, working her dream job. The psychiatrist points out how proud 20-year-old Baek would be by saying she’d ‘want to go up to the person and ask how she did it!’
It made me wonder, what would my 17-year-old self think of me now? My first reaction is that I probably wouldn't like myself at all. I was quite a judgemental, rule-following child, drowning in the opinions of others that forced me to perform. Like most young girls, I imagined a future where I was accepted into my top college, then I got married and had a kid by now. Soon, I realized that the initial reaction of thinking that my younger self would be horrified with my reality might not be true. Turning 17 was a big time for me. I became aware of being desperate for approval as a form of protection. I stopped straightening my hair, I reexamined why almost all of my romantic interests were white, and I was learning more about Black Lives Matter after the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Even on a baseline, if 17 year old me saw my current self walking around with unapologetically curly hair, wearing clothes that I’ve sewn, with a belly button ring peaking out, she could very well say, “I am obsessed with her.”
Maybe she would be mad that I didn't get into my top college. But she might change her mind when I explain that such a big campus would have likely been overwhelming, and my future self did not regret making lifelong friends at another college I never heard of. My younger self probably would have had her arms folded, but she would have accepted it. And yeah, I'm not married yet, but I’d tell her I don't want to be. Since being 17, I feel more comfortable with my body and I'm much better at conflict resolution than ever. I imagine sitting outside with my 17-year-old self on a warm day, pressing our legs into the bright red, grated picnic table of a fast food joint. As the younger me slurped on a slushie and listened to all I had to say, I hope she would think I was pretty cool.
Thinking realistically rather than fearfully helped me realize - I probably wouldn’t be disappointed with my current self all that much. Similar to the situation where the main character got too drunk, her psychiatrist encouraged her to think a bit more realistically. The psychiatrist asked, “Well, if you were your friend, your first idea would probably also be to put your friend in a cab.” It was more likely out of concern than them being mad at the main character. When Baek asked “what about my victim complex?” the psychiatrist simply said, “You’ve lived with anxiety for a long time. Once your new experiences start overwriting your old ones, your view of yourself and others may become far brighter than it is now."
Perhaps it’s not that I need to become a more likeable or acceptable person. Instead, it would benefit me to try and step out of the fictitious minds of others in order to reshape myself, and let my new experiences of being in my own mind eventually overwrite the older ones. Somewhere, hidden behind the warning signs telling me it is not safe to explore who I truly am, is a current me with her own needs and wants. Maybe once in a while, if I absolutely need to lean on someone’s view of me, I can find solace in my younger mind and what she thinks.
Lastly, the psychiatrist tells Baek, "What matters isn't what people say, but what you like and find joy in. I hope you focus less on how you look to other people and more on fulfilling your true desires." Cheers to this outlook being the curtain call for anyone with a performative version of themselves. May we slowly, but surely, find our way back to our own minds, bodies, and true desires.