sometimes i stand outside my house and peer in through the windows. if i manage to scramble onto the roof — don't worry, it's safe — i'll look into my bedroom window. it's a fascinating feeling — being an outsider peering into your own life. the world within the walls doesn't seem real but rather something constructed by soldering imagination, aspiration, and desperation into an image we present to ourselves and anyone else who — rather than looking in — waltzes through the f

Note: Written in June 2021 as a final exam for Making of the Modern World 15 — the last course in the sequence, submitted online, at the tail end of my sophomore year and what felt like the tail end of coherent reality. The question was essentially: how do you fulfill social responsibility while staying autonomous? I had Sartre, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mike Davis, and a year of pandemic fatigue to work with. The essay is more honest than most because exam conditions have a way of