Christine’s Lifelong Existential Crisis (Redux)#
At last, we’ve come to Topic 10. As a reminder, here’s how my friends and I attempted to define it:
Topic |
Brief Interpretation |
Friend A’s Interpretation |
Friend B’s Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
10. time people day school year life |
History of my platonic relationships |
nostalgia or some other kind of relationship to the past |
autism things tbQh |
And here were my initial thoughts:
Topic 10 felt like a trash can, honestly. All three contraction fragments ended up here, and what remained were a bunch of generic-seeming words that felt like they applied to a person in general, not me specifically. Time? It passes. School? People typically go to it. Friend/friends? A thing people tend to have. “History of my platonic relationships” arose from my desire to connect the dots by force — I tend to have made my friends at school or work, for instance. And they are…people? In my life? Who I feel things about?
As I mentioned when I created my spreadsheet, all 37 pieces in my corpus contributed to Topic 10. (The next most common were Topic 1 and Topic 6, which each had 15 pieces contributing to them.) On its surface, it had no personality. No one quite knew what to do with it. And still, every interpretation was correct.
Besides all 37 pieces contributing to Topic 10, a whopping 15 pieces had Topic 10 as the primary topic. I’m thinking about something I said back when I first introduced the topic model:
However, the piece is about my relationship with Gonzaga basketball in the midst of worsening mental health crises. That [Topic Modeling Tool] opted to separate these felt notable — or, was it just a reflection of my writing that I didn’t do enough in the piece to connect the two?
Could it just be the case that my writing has no personality? That I undertook this project because I didn’t know what to do with it? That my writing is so segmented that it came up with nine distinct topics, but instead of settling on a tenth topic, the tool decided it needed to tell me about all the noise that is making my writing worse? Or…am I just undertaking an impossible endeavor of personifying technology, asking it to fix me?
Where were we? Right, the lifelong existential crisis.
I didn’t meaningfully engage with this topic when I first saw it, instead deciding to blame the tool for making me seem like a generic, non-me person.
Time? It passes. School? People typically go to it. Friend/friends? A thing people tend to have.
Time? It passes. Unless it threatens to not anymore because my depression has fully convinced me I don’t deserve more of it.
School? People typically go to it. In particular me, who has been pursuing higher education for 8 of the 15 years represented in this corpus.
Friend/friends? A thing people tend to have. Yet here I am, posting a screenshot of a tweet that reads “fumbling a friend group by having depression” to my Instagram story for everyone to see.
I continued:
“History of my platonic relationships” arose from my desire to connect the dots by force — I tend to have made my friends at school or work, for instance. And they are…people? In my life? Who I feel things about?
And still, every interpretation was correct.
And still, there are so many more truths left to explore.