Originally published on sappy sallows (12 Dec 2023).
My friend Cyan and I met as we both experienced a personal loss. We decided to get together to produce some work that would help us find some sense of purpose in the haze of feeling like a loser. Not an autobiographical account of what happened to us as we tried to figure out what we wanted to do, but a self-analysis, in the best style of reflexive social scientists, to account for all the ways that what happened to us affected our ideas about the world and our place in it (as much as our self-awareness allowed).
I am not a Sociologist by degree but I care about the idea of being able to tell others I am a Social Scientist by my post-degree. I care about calling things by their name, giving them a title, in a way that makes them categorisable. Once, during an ice-breaking game, I was asked to describe myself as a machine. I said I was a BERT model; at the heart, I’m nothing but a classifier. Just a fuzzy identity, trying to assert my footing by telling others what to expect from me, and expecting others to tell me what to expect from them, with little ambiguity, with as little anxiety of uncertainty as possible.
My friend Cyan and I now have a new collaborator in our project and his work is about accepting our uselessness. I hate the thought of it, so maybe I should sit with this discomfort for a bit. Here I am, losing sleep and hurting my body with horrible habits just so that I can do the work of three semesters in one, just because I want to overcompensate for what I lost, just because I want to prove to myself that I am not a loser. I am losing a lot of things in order to prove to myself and to others that I am not a loser, even though I did lose something.
How useless will that be, in a year or two? Maybe one day I will rationalise my way into thinking that this has been an amazingly useful season. I can feel the seeds of that thought popping and spreading all throughout my insides, branching out into my limbs and getting ready to come out through my holes. The leaves, the flower, the fruit, I will cry them out and sweat them out and voice them out and puke them out for as long as they keep growing. Anything can be useful if you think very small, if you only think about yourself and a small handful of others. But life isn’t small.
My new friend Sunghoon is interested in how the experience of nature can help us recover the realisation of our own insignificance, in a comforting way. I have fallen out of touch with both the comfort and the anxiety of most natural things around me, outside the boundaries of the metaphors that I use to order this gelatinous space of flows, but I can still relate to the sky when I look up at night, not as a mind, but as a body. My skin shivers and my nerves buzz like a swarm of bees, like a swarm of drones, the more and the harder I try to picture how big the celestial bodies are, and how far away from me they are.
I am dust, with no use except to be cast out, to be thrown away. I am working hard for things that will never matter in the grand scheme of things. And, yet, I exist. And I am aware of that. And my body and mind are seeking control, in this uncertain world, to find some peace, to manage to survive through the hell of being too small to do anything. Addicted to making meanings out of things because I bear the burden of existing, and I wonder why, and I wonder how, and I wonder what, and for how long, and wishful thinking is the best I can do, when all hope is gone. How strange it is, to be anything at all.
Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
Corvo Correio | the Raven Post 
Hello, thanks for the piece.
At this moment, after the weirdest, harshest burnt out time of my life so far, I became more accepting of myself relating to my ‘uselessness’ and weirdness. I can’t change my emotions, I can’t change others, I can’t change who I am at an instant. It was so frustrating to accept myself, when I didn’t like how I was. Too impulsive, emotional, … too many ‘too’s and disliking myself. Then I found out that I indeed was taking my value by my utility, how well I am conceived and validated by the world – which was imaginative, and never to be fulfilled.
I am reading bunch of books and just reading, in the nature these days. I have realized the most than ever that I never really lived the present. I was always grading myself towards a better future, or giving me an F for the past and blaming myself for that. I was physically there, but not really grounded. Recently I am gradually feeling liberating as I just go out to the playground near the dorm. I just sit down and either journal, drink water and do nothing, read, or have meals. I stared at the color of the leaves, ants walking by, wind blowing and making those sizzling sounds in the leaves and branches, blowing through my face, and the smell of the grass kick in – then I sometimes felt ego-less, as if I was part of the scenery. it was new, and relieving. wonder if it relates to what Sunghoon has been talking about – connecting with the nature and embracing the uselessness of life.