I don’t mean to say I believe in fate. I just mean I’ve always felt like the chaotic one trying to figure out how to fit into the world around me. Now in this isolation, it seems like the world is disjointed and figuring itself out, and I’m the one with some type of order, waiting on the world to find its axis again.

With the dissolution of feudal, old-world bonds, new possibilities of economic and social mobility emerged, and this transience infected the soul. People began to wonder whether we possessed some innate essence that might be discovered by peeling away layers of our surface. Or maybe there was nothing innate, and we were always in the process of sel