Originally published sappy sallows (22 Dec 2023).

I was reading “Switchings under uncertainty: The coming and becoming of meanings” (Godart & White, 2010) to write something for my manuscript and then I decided to write something else.

My greatest existential terror is insufficiency. I’ve always felt like I had the ability to do a lot, and to do well, but not well enough to be great by the standards of greatness. Like a person who scores 81 when the cut to get an A is 82. I know a lot of people think I’m great, but I know there’s a lot more people in the world who wouldn’t think the same. And that’s horrible, because it means that there is an uncertainty level — an incomputable risk — that people that I meet will think I’m below their standards, be it because of my gender, my nationality, the way I look, the way I speak, what ideas I share, how much money I have, what I wear, what I believe in, what I have done with my life so far, and how many pages I can fill with this information.

At times, I could have simply avoided being places with those who could see through my limitations, and could point them out. The trick of being scared of being insufficient is the craving for being great, for being more-than-enough, for being so much that no one can ever say otherwise. If we’re being honest, someone’s low self-esteem is an epiphenomenon of their inflated sense of self, aspiring to be more than they were made out to be, by their birthplace, their birthparents, their birth rights. I’ve seen people surround themselves with people they thought inferior to them, and I’ve seen people crushing to the point of killing those they thought superior to them, if they had the power to inflict that kind of death.

Arrogance that is easily mistaken for humility is the greatest cognitive dissonance of our times, because we are all drowning in the anxiety of being left behind by a world with standards that we cannot meet, but we want to, because we cannot give up the illusory promises we have been made. I starve my body to fit into a smaller dress because I want the assurance of happiness that comes with skinny beauty. I destroy my body and deprive my mind of its much-needed rest because I am blinded by the promise of hard work that pays off, even as I rationalise my commitment to capitalistic ideals into commitment to myself and what I believe in — that I ought to do my best, in order to sleep at night (even if I don’t sleep at all in the process).

The discomfort of cognitive dissonances also keeps me up at night, and, truth be told, I am so self-aware that it makes me angry. A few weeks ago, after several painful weeks of overthinking and crying and dragging myself through the days, trying to understand what was wrong with me, I arrived at the same realisation I had had on the day things started going wrong; I had known the answer all along, but I had to, first, exhaust all the other possible explanations, to convince myself in a way that would allow me to close that door for good (or something like that). I have, indeed, opened the door to make peace with my own insufficiency. But I’m still stuck, standing by the door, the same place I was when I grabbed the doorknob and pulled it. I am paralysed because I am too scared to confront the truth in a way that forces me to find some sort of resolution. Because I’m insufficient by several standards, and I’m weak and I’m also one of billions and, statistically speaking, there will always be way, waaaay more people to whom I won’t mean anything, than people to whom I will mean something.

To mean something to someone, such a stupid-sounding aspiration, but one that we cannot live without, because meaning-making is the only thing we have, as humans, on earth. And to mean something to someone means that someone will care about me, enough for me not to disappear, even as I feel as if I’m fading away. But what security is there is meaning something to someone, if everyone is a larger or smaller version of the same mess I am made of? As much as I have let others down, I have been let down, and the reason I am terrified and I cry to sleep at times these days is because I was, once again, counted as being worthy of being thrown away. Once again, the insufficiency I am not ready to come to terms with came back to hit me, and my inherent, statistical disposability reminded me the odds will always be against me. And every attempt at controlling the outcomes will be inherently, statistically more likely to be unsuccessful than the contrary.

And the universality of the experience doesn’t help that much when it hurts. To know that everyone else out there — including the ones who inflict the pain and discomfort I experience — are also trying to establish their footing, and resolve their existential anxiety, and sleep well at night in the arms of something other than the absolute historical contingency of facts. What I realised is that nothing is ever absolutely meaningless, but not every meaningful thing means the same, to the same extent. In fact, we might even not care at all about what something means, or even how useful it can be, if the possibilities are not clear, tacit, tangible, desirable, or even reasonable, or if there isn’t enough empirical evidence to verify that it means something to me. What I’m trying to say is that something can be meaningful and still be disposable, because it doesn’t fit, because it doesn’t serve us right now, because it’s meant to be thrown away anyway, like a plastic spork in a box of takeout fried rice, or even like, oh God, like a pair of disposable rubber gloves, whose disposability literally saves lives in the right context.

And what is the opposite of disposable? Reusable doesn’t sound that good to go with meaningful and useful, but I don’t feel ready to think about that yet. There are multiple other layers to consider. But I do think it’s interesting that things can be meaningful, and useful, and still worthy of going into the bin. Like candy wrap, the moment you open it, and you finally get the chocolate you coveted. You can’t eat the paper. You shouldn’t eat the damn thing. So, yes, sometimes we’re just the paper hiding something better, more important, more significant, that requires me to get out of the way for others to get their hands on. Is it that absurd? Sometimes, it feels like such. It feels unfair that I should be measured up against a pair of wooden chopsticks to say if it’s good or not that someone decided to throw me away. I would say i’s just a technicality, at best, because it all comes down to how we play with the meanings, and if we feel enabled to switch them towards our favour, when it’s convenient to do so.

Even so, right now, I still feel pretty much like I’m stuck in the trash bin of someone’s life, and I need to make my way out of it, if I want to see things more clearly.

Featured image by Julio Lopez on Unsplash