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A Paper Clip's Existential Crisis

What happens when purpose is too small—and still too heavy?

There’s a paperclip on my desk that hasn’t held anything together in weeks. It just lies there—twisted slightly, one end stretched from some past insistence. It used to bind pages, serve a purpose. Now it just listens.

I wonder if it remembers.

How strange that something designed to be useful becomes unsettling when it’s still. That its inaction feels like failure, even though it hasn't broken, hasn't rusted. It's just... unneeded.

We call objects "idle" when they are not in use, as if their worth depends on being occupied. As if stillness is only ever temporary, and silence is a flaw to be fixed.

The paperclip hasn’t moved in days, but neither have I.

I sit here most mornings, staring at a blank document, wondering if I’ve bent myself out of shape trying to hold things that were never mine to keep. Expectations. Deadlines. People. Ideas. I used to think I was built for connection. But maybe I was just made to fasten things that didn’t want to stay.

A paperclip doesn’t choose what it binds. It just obeys.

And when it stretches too far, it doesn’t snap. It distorts. Quietly. Permanently. It keeps the shape of strain.

We envy objects for being simple, but I think they mourn too—in the only way they know how. A drawer full of tangled paperclips is not disorder. It’s grief, piled small and metallic.

Maybe this is what most of us are: minor mechanisms waiting for a task that feels meaningful. Maybe usefulness is just the slow erosion of our original shape.

I touch the paperclip sometimes, absentmindedly. Not to use it. Just to remember that even the smallest thing can feel too much.

Not everything broken looks it.
Not everything still is at peace.

And maybe that’s the tragedy: not that the paperclip forgot its function—
but that it remembered,
and no longer knew what to do with it.

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