“For Her” by Sisyphus 55.
This is a video essay in an interesting sense. It’s more like a written essay read aloud with accompanying visuals than a script written to be spoken in a recording with the occasional accompanying visuals popping up here and there. It’s interesting to me to think about how a recorded essay and a video essay could be different. One is this already established thing that is just being brought to a new media type, and the other is fundamentally structured around the media type.
This post’s essay is one that you should watch and/or listen to if you want to think about love. The framing is that of a guy responding to a text from what seems like an ex girlfriend where they have just broken up, their relationship remains amicable, but they are both still hurting. The essay is framed specifically as the words he is typing out.
I don’t want to say too much about the contents of the video because I think everyone has a very personal relationship with things like love, loss, growth, loneliness, and company. I won’t offer too much of my own interpretation, instead, I’ll leave what I have been thinking about after watching this.
- I really relate to the quality the author seems to have of appreciating people and loving the being of a person, without maybe being in love with a person. I try and live my life making authentic connections, and that means I want to notice who people are, what they like, think, and care about, outside of who they are to me. It was interesting to see this kind of quality reflected in the video, even if it’s not exactly the same.
- One of my greatest fears in life is wasting time doing the wrong thing. That makes it hard for me to consider the future without being paralyzed by indecision, worry, and regret. A lesson I’ve had to learn is in this video, I think. Being able to treat difficult events and decisions that might have led to pain as just experiences rather than mistakes has been crucial to overcoming some of the paralysis I feel. Treatign every experience as good (regardless of if it was positive or negative) because of the growth and lessons each experience contains, is something I work hard to live by every day. And it’s so damn cheesy I hate it. But it’s made me a happier person, more able to appreciate the goodness even in bad situations. Gratitude for exactly the present moment, every positive thing, and every negative thing, is a very transformative thing to internalize, and I see reflections of that in this essay.
