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.

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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.

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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