I feel, at times, a new self pushing up through the old, dead one, like a fingernail after the original has been damaged. With this newish self comes a kind of urgency, an awareness that even with ‘re-opening’ — a return to ‘normal’ — things will not be put right (that maybe they were never right to begin with).
Counter-intuitively, the past year of relative isolation has meant a great divestiture of privacy, a surrender of inner-life to the hive-mind. Emptiness, a vague sense of scarcity seem to be the dominant mood; I meet a lot of people whose anxieties and ego-needs have hypertrophied…
