★ For everyone living with “the Grey”—learning to make peace with yourself when suicidal thoughts keep arising.
★ A heartwarming exploration of a modern civilizational illness: depression. Delicately portrays the true inner voice of someone living with mild depression. Genuine, touching, and deeply moving.
★ A unique narrative style blending fantastical elements with dark humor, personifying depressive moods as “the Grey.” A realistic yet healing vignette of self-discovery and breaking through psychological struggles.
★ Highly recommended by readers on the publisher’s platform—widely resonates with audiences.
★ If you enjoyed I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, do not miss this equally compelling work exploring mild depression.

Please forgive me for writing these words—
I’m just barely holding on. Sometimes I want to die. I’m sorry.

Invisible wounds are the hardest to heal. Learning to live with the part of yourself that has mild depression.

“What color do you see yourself as?” She handed me a small desk mirror. I looked at my reflection and slowly said, “Grey.”

Li Sien is twenty-three years old, an ordinary young woman just starting her career. She goes to work on a regular schedule, has a gentle and unassuming personality, and on the surface leads an uneventful life. But she has always felt out of step with the world around her. She has never told anyone—ever since her beloved grandmother passed away, she has constantly imagined various ways of dying: being run over by a train, jumping from a high-rise, being stoned to death, slicing open her chest with a sharp blade, slitting her wrists with a craft knife…

As suicidal thoughts keep surging up, the negativity inside her grows day by day. The weight of her own life seems to be getting lighter and lighter. She can no longer live normally like she used to. Layer upon layer of low mood gradually turn into chronic mild depression—and that is when “the Grey” comes knocking.

“The Grey says he doesn’t mean to cling to you. He just wants to help you, that’s why he follows you.”

“Then will he follow me forever?”

“He says he will leave someday, just not very soon. I hope that before the Grey leaves, you can try, slowly, to accept him.”

To say goodbye to “the Grey,” to find her own colors again, Li Sien stumbles her way onto a path of self-discovery, learning to live alongside “the Grey.”

Yan Lan

Graduated from the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling at National Hsinchu University of Education. In high school, she sporadically started a few unfinished short stories, but what she wrote most were Hunter x Hunter time-travel fanfictions born from her deep love for the series. Much later, during a certain low period in her life, she began writing her first full-length novel, I Once Wanted to Die (original title: A Coward’s Way to Die).

She wants to be a gentle person, writing gentle stories.