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[Netflix When Life Gives You Tangerines Review #7] A Love the Times Did Not Permit
There Were Feelings, but No Language for Reality
Youngbeom loved Geummyeong. That much was true.
But he could not translate that love into the language of reality. He kept repeating, “Let’s not break up,” trying to preserve the feeling itself—but that remained an act of clinging, not of sustaining love.
The Temperature of Responsibility and Action
What if he had saved money intensely for a year, found even a tiny one-room apartment, and said, “Let’s start here, just the two of us”?
Would the ending have been different?
Perhaps. Because those words would have carried not emotion, but the warmth of responsibility and execution.
A Generation of Emotion
But Youngbeom didn’t know that language. He belonged to a generation that learned love only as emotion. He valued feelings over action, ideals over reality. That purity was sincere—but sincerity alone could not break through structure.
A Generation of Intellect
Geummyeong was different. She was a woman who graduated from Seoul National University and even studied abroad in Japan. For a woman of that era, such academic achievement was already a quiet revolution.
But it was a revolution the world did not welcome.
The Paradox of Knowledge
Her intellectual capital did not become a weapon to protect love—it became a label: “a woman who is too smart.”
She had learned much, yet that learning did not set her free. Because there was no structure that could convert her knowledge into social authority.
She Could Persuade, but She Could Not Change the World
In the end, she had many words to persuade him, but no authority to persuade the world.
That was not her failure—it was because society was not ready to accept women like her.
A Love the Times Did Not Permit
So Youngbeom and Geummyeong did not part because of each other’s faults. They simply loved in a time that did not permit their love.
He tried to endure the world with emotion alone.
She tried to protect the relationship with intellect alone.
Both were right—but the world was not mature enough to bear their rightness.
Love Is Not Just Emotion, but Structure
Love appears to be personal, but in truth it is structural.
People love with emotion, but the world judges love through institutions. And in some eras, it is not the lack of love, but the lack of structures capable of sustaining love, that separates two people.
The Sin of the Times, the Innocence of People
Youngbeom and Geummyeong did not lose each other.
They were simply born into an era where love itself had nowhere to stand.
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A Night I Don’t Want to Fall Asleep
A Night I Rely on Medicine to Sleep
I still don’t know the exact clinical name of the condition that developed because of CPTSD. Think of it like this: imagine you have diabetes, and complications have appeared—but you still haven’t identified what those complications are. Mental disorders are especially influenced by a patient’s personal memories and thoughts, so it can take a long time to arrive at a clear diagnosis. It could be major depressive disorder, or bipolar II disorder (a form of bipolar disorder). So I’m still searching for the right medication.
Even so, the one thing I’ve consistently been prescribed is medication with sedative effects. At some point, sleeping became difficult. When I lie down to sleep, the stillness and the darkness make me so anxious and restless that I become more awake instead. And even if I try ASMR or white noise, the very thought that I must sleep makes me hypersensitive—the sound irritates me, and I end up more alert again. Even if I manage to fall asleep somehow, I keep waking up every 30 minutes or hour. I can’t get deep sleep.
After painfully repeating that cycle of sleeping and waking all night, I would eventually give up on sleep altogether. So I decided to accept help from medication. I started with sleeping pills, but now I’ve switched to an antidepressant that can induce sleep. And honestly, it works quite well. If I take it, I can fall asleep within about 30 minutes. And if nothing extremely stressful happens, I can sleep for about 6 to 8 hours.
A Night I Refuse Sleep
But separate from the fact that I can sleep, I keep refusing it and delaying it. I know I can’t sleep without medication. I know that even if I do sleep, it isn’t easy—and that I can’t get deep sleep. And I also know very well that if I take the medication, I can sleep more smoothly and reach deep sleep.
And yet, I keep postponing it. I could go to bed around midnight or 1 a.m., but I delay and delay until it’s past 3 or 4 a.m. before I finally take the pill and try to sleep. Some nights, I delay until I end up watching the sun rise. On those days, I can’t even take the medication—because I worry it will ruin the day that’s already beginning—so I settle for forcing myself to sleep for just one or two hours, somehow.
If I know the medication will help me sleep, why do I keep putting it off?
Resistance to Sleep
Sleep means “stopping” and “letting go.” It’s the act of pausing the day and shifting into recovery. But people who carry trauma or anxiety are not good at stopping or letting go—especially when they can’t even manage daily life well in the first place.
When it gets quiet, intrusive thoughts flood in. Sometimes they terrify me. In the dark, I feel defenseless. Even though it’s a closed, safe, comfortable moment, it feels—as if paradoxically—I’ve been opened to something infinite, and I fall into anxiety. Ending the day sometimes feels like death. Turning off consciousness and switching into recovery feels like abandoning myself in a crisis, like an act of “throwing myself away.” Like lying down on a highway where cars are speeding by. That’s why I feel so anxious and restless.
But even doing something makes me anxious and restless. The fear of “What if I fail?” makes me hesitant to even begin trying. So I suffer inside a feeling I can’t quite name—whether it’s laziness, lethargy, or fear. If holding onto something during the day is painful, and even stopping and letting go is painful, then isn’t this life filled with nothing but pain?
Wanting to Hold On to Today
Today is so painful, but maybe I’ve already grown used to this pain. And maybe the fact that I can feel it—and control it to some degree—makes me believe it’s predictable. The moment I take the pill, I have to let go of “today,” which I could predict and partially control, and face “tomorrow,” which is uncertain and uncontrollable.
The truth is, time is just a system humans decided on: an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year. It isn’t nature as it is; it’s a human-made convenience. That’s why some countries shift time every few years, and why months have different numbers of days. Even “today” and “tomorrow” are imaginary rules humans invented. They aren’t physical realities.
And yet, I relax because today has already passed—because it became the past and therefore feels predictable—and I grow anxious about tomorrow, where uncertainty waits again.
I Didn’t Complete Today
I have a perfectionistic kind of compulsion. I can’t always specify exactly what must be perfect, but in certain areas, I feel obsessed with being flawless. And that includes how I end a day. If today wasn’t satisfying enough, I feel like I have to stretch it—stay up later—do something, anything.
But as I said, for reasons I can’t fully untangle—laziness, lethargy, fear—I find it hard to do anything at all. And even when I do start, it’s incredibly hard to sustain. So most days, I do nothing. If it isn’t raining, I take a walk, and I write a little every day—just scribbles. And even the writing often ends halfway, unfinished. The studying and work I want to do either don’t happen, or I glance at them briefly and stop.
When all those fragments add up into a day, I usually feel the same failure: I didn’t complete today again. I feel unsatisfied, so I postpone sleep. And that leads to worse condition, sleeping in late, and an endless cycle.
Someone Who Prays I Sleep Well
I know the medication can help me sleep properly. But I’m afraid even of taking it. In a way, only the object of my fear has changed. Before, I was afraid of the act of trying to sleep itself. Now I’m afraid of the act of taking the pill.
Of course, sleep helps health—but my essential problem hasn’t been solved. And medication alone will not solve my sleep issues in the long run. Fundamentally, I have to change. I have to accept the transition from daily life to recovery as something positive. I have to stop being terrified of what I cannot predict. I have to be able to sleep by remembering what I did manage to do—even if the day wasn’t satisfying.
This behavior doesn’t improve easily on its own. That’s why it’s an illness. That’s why I go to the hospital and take medication.
But there is something even more effective than treatment like this. It’s people. On days when I spend time chatting freely with comfortable acquaintances over the phone, I feel sleepy even without medication. I can take the pill at the planned time and rest with an easier heart. In the end, the most effective medicine for mental illness is people—people who tell you it’s okay to be exactly who you are; people who believe you’ll be okay, but more than that, people who simply wish you a good night’s sleep today.
I want to become someone who can wish sleep for someone else, too.
#Thoughts_No_20250614
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[Netflix When Life Gives You Tangerines Review #6] Even Love Has a Class Structure
Is Love Really Classless?
People often say, “Love has no class.” It’s a beautiful belief—but reality tells a different story. Marriage, in the end, is a structure where the cultures of two families collide.
Different Baselines
No matter how much the poorer side prepares, their efforts rarely reach the sensibilities of the wealthier side. That’s because their worlds are built on entirely different baselines.
The affluent grow up with polished speech, unhurried gazes, and a rhythm that does not threaten others’ emotions. This isn’t something that can simply be learned later—it’s an emotional texture absorbed like air from early childhood.
The Texture of Emotional Wealth
That texture isn’t merely about manners or refinement. It’s the tone of people who live with less fear.
People who don’t become anxious—“Do they dislike me?”—when their opinions are rejected. People who aren’t shaken by others’ gazes. That calmness is the texture of emotional wealth.
Imitation Is Possible, Reproduction Is Not
So no matter how hard the disadvantaged side tries, that texture can be imitated but not reproduced. Because it isn’t the result of simple learning, but the generational accumulation of safety.
The Courage to Lower One’s Standards
For two different families to unite, someone must eventually let go. Not of money, but of standards—of the belief that “our way is absolute.” That shift in perspective is what’s required.
The Boundary Between Love and Institution
If the wealthier side can do that, marriage becomes a relationship.
But if they cling to “this is just how our family does things,” marriage turns into an institution that reproduces inequality within a relationship. Love is an emotional matter, not an institutional one. Yet once it enters an institution, love must confront structure.
The Courage to Admit Inequality
Acknowledging that love is not equal—ironically, that may be the only way to protect it. A marriage that lacks this awareness will inevitably be built on someone else’s pride.
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