The Year Everyone Got Sick At Once

For a while, everyone's ordinary architecture came down simultaneously — the commute, the office, the casual proximity that had quietly been doing more emotional work than anyone credited it for. What surprised me wasn't the disruption itself. It was how differently everyone handled the identical circumstance, as if a shared event were somehow still capable of producing entirely private results.

Some people built new structure immediately, almost defensively — schedules, routines, a discipline that hadn't existed before and oddly survived after. Others let everything go slack and never quite tightened it back up, even once the reason for the slackness had passed. Neither response was wrong, exactly, though both got moralized loudly at the time.

What I took from it, eventually, was less about the event and more about what it revealed: how much of what we call our personality was actually our schedule, on loan to us, and how exposed we all were once it got taken away at the same time.