me at family gatherings
#no guys you don’t understand #this is super important #mental health in korea is literally awful #you can lose your job because you’re being treated for depression #the fact that this big name star is opening up about it is huuuge #so thank you gong yoo
the screenshots here are from near the end of the interview, which i think makes it even worse, because the interviewer listened to everything he’d said and still didn’t treat it very seriously. there are other parts where she seems very smart and intuitive, but then other times he’d say something like “i hate myself to death and feel like i’m an empty shell” and she’d just laugh and move on while i’m just like !!!
i was really impressed by how open he is about it though, even the “ugly” symptoms that aren’t really talked about normally — like how he said he used to lock himself in his apartment alone and drink and “bang on the walls” because he didn’t know how else to cope with all the pain he was in, and he even mentions hurting himself and talks about scars and refers to himself as a “masochist” and says a coworker once referred to him as “someone constantly trying to hurt himself.” the fact that he was able to talk about all this so openly, despite the reaction he got, was so impressive and amazing to me
it’s really heartbreaking though because he’s obviously never had the support he needs — at one point he mentions that the first person he ever opened up to about all the pain he was in (back in his mid-20s, when he says it was much worse) was a director who was considering hiring him, and he later found out that that director had told people she thought “someone like that” would be “too difficult” to work with, and it caused this rumor/pre-conceived notion about him to spread that affected the way his coworkers treated him. now that he’s famous and has had other work he’s literally known for how charming and nice he is to everyone, but at that point his coworkers all thought he was moody, pretentious, and rude and always avoided him on set because of this, all because he opened up about his severe depression to the wrong person
