The Shape of What Remains » Entries
December 1, 2025
Exhaustion sits frozen on my shoulders like glacial snow. Two jobs. One provides for my livelihood. Another provides a reward in a currency I can neither spend nor deposit. The brief satisfaction of watching someone realize the true cause of the obstacle before them. Or, the door they need to unlock to escape the room of soulful suffering in which they have found themselves.
I do not seek reward. Nor recognition. That would defeat my purpose. Though, somehow, I think I've forgotten what that purpose is. Or was.
I've been doing the work of a surreptitious consulting analyst for decades. A strange kind of private strategist for people who didn’t know they needed one until they suddenly did. It has taken various forms, but fundamentally has always been the same. My shadow. My alter ego. A person who is and is not me. The person, perhaps, I always should have been but was unable to become. Was it incompetence that led me here? Ignorance? Cowardice? I don't think I'll ever know.
I’m always late to learn the lessons life has to teach, especially histories that keep repeating. Late to learn who I really am and what it all really means to me. To the world.
Some nights, most nights actually, I wonder what remains of what I've done and what I'm trying to do. The help I've given. The help I've thought I've given. I wonder if any of it still holds. From 1992. From 2002. From 2012. Was any of it more than just my selfish desire—my hubris—to make a difference in the lives of others? Or have I just given them clearer frames for their same stuck lives? If seeing clearly is enough, or if clarity is another form of helplessness dressed up as wisdom.
Has any of it mattered? Does any of it still matter?
Berlant wrote about cruel optimism—the condition of maintaining an attachment to something that actively prevents your flourishing. You keep investing in a fantasy even when you know it's unsustainable, even when the dream itself has become the obstacle. When your pursuit of heaven becomes a personal hell. A walled prison, albeit ornately decorated.
I think about this often. The fantasy I'm holding: that what I do—anything I do— matters. Here, or anywhere. Feeling that people cannot let themselves feel, seeing what they've trained themselves not to see, offering the question that unlocks the room—that it builds toward something, even without evidence. But do those doors lead anywhere new? Or are they just thresholds to other prison cells?
Questions may yeild clarity. Clarity may change lives. Or maybe people just like feeling seen for an hour before returning to exactly who they were. Maybe I help. Maybe I don't.
Like Berlant, I know that recognising cruel optimism doesn't end it. Awareness doesn't cure. It traps you, if you're not careful. But even if you are, you can still fall into its snare. You can see the trap with perfect clarity and still remain caught. Still choose attachments that sustain and exhaust simultaneously. Still believe the work matters without proof. Without evidence that any of it really makes any difference.
This is my absurdity. My hypocrisy. I see the trap. I fall anyway. Deeper and deeper. Over and over. I'm not crazy. I don't imagine a new or different outcome each time. I know I'll always end up here, where I am tonight. Asking myself the same questions. With only the silence of the cosmos to hear in reply.
If you think I'm stubborn, you'd be wrong. Stubbornness is a kind of willful ignorance. I'm fully aware of the realities of my situation. I simply find joy by denying the futility of my task. This is the absurdity of my life.
By staring that futility in the face and choosing to do this anyway. By choosing to keep answering when people reach out. Neither of us knowing if it means anything beyond the moment we create together.
That is the shape of my choice. I may never know the shape of what remains.
Dean Bowman
Written by
