Withdrawing

An era can end when you decide it should end.

I’m back from a vacation, working on a new essay for the newsletter, and I have a question:

Do I exist?

From my early twenties until my mid-thirties, I rarely felt like a stranger. I’d meet someone I hadn’t seen in a while, and they’d know what I’d been up to—books I read, places I visited, changes at work, that sort of thing. I usually knew the same abou…