As we moved through the “Know Thyself” syllabus, I grappled to articulate the elements that went into knowing myself. I hammered away at myself like an interrogator.

"What do I do when I need solace? When I lose the sense of wonder I can only get by physically being with the people I love, experiencing the places I love, and everything in between? I do what I’ve always done: I write about family.

I have stopped dressing to be seen; I dress for walking. I cropped my hair and allowed it to go salt and pepper. With the mask and the hair and the tennis shoes, I am unrecognizable, sometimes even to myself.

On nights that I can't sleep, I feel sorry for my eggs. I worry that they're suffering in their own snow country of liquid nitrogen. I know such concerns are beyond ridiculous. After all, my eggs are not tiny, microscopic people. They aren't even embryos.

A few years ago, I was brought on board by a New York-based publishing house to be a fiction editor. My first assignment was, instead, a book about Trump’s relationship to Russia.

“Refrains like ‘we were down with you, down with you, down with you’ extend beyond the bounds of normal chorus and invite a particular mode of listening that engages the logic of mantras—sound as vibrational soothing.”

“By preventing myself from thinking about how to do more with my day or why I hadn’t accomplished as much as so-and-so—by ‘doing nothing’—I constructed a new framework of what mattered to me.”

I found myself tensing in crowded places and in groups of loud teenagers, until Paris passed from curfew into our second confinement. Now my mind is over-packed with thoughts of isolation, injustice, and the upcoming election.