One of my greatest anxieties was that I would lose my grip on I. When I was nine I had an existential crisis in church. Not over the existence of God, but over the existence of I. The pastor told the congregation to “all rise” and we did, as one. And then we began to sing a hymn, as one. And in that moment I realized I was not an I but an indistinguishable we, a mass, at mass, in supplication to God. It’s difficult to describe the sensation that came over me. I wanted to scream. It was profound terror mixed with embarrassment. I was embarrassed that we so readily erased and debased ourselves like this. In this moment I did not see us as lofty and evolved creatures; I saw that we were no different than a colony of ants, a murmuration of starlings, a school of fish. Like slime moulds, which exist as single-celled organisms until food is in short supply and then coalesce into a single, oozing mass. I looked at the people standing around me and I could not see their faces. Their faces did not make sense to me. I looked up at you singing, but you were not my mother; you were just another woman in a singing congregation. It was unbearable. I began to cry. I couldn’t cope with the loss of my integrity; not in the moral sense, but in the sense of remaining a single, integral being. A whole unto myself.

Perhaps this childhood crisis was the inevitable by-­product of our post-war march towards the all-­encompassing I. Your very own house! Your very own car! Your very own appliances! And from the depersonalized malaise of post-war suburbia and consumerism came another frenzy of personalization, which capitalism once again co-opted and made a mockery of: a new wave of parent, a new wave of child, each one gifted and gratified with new excesses, new consciousness, self-actualized with better sex, better moods, better skin, better lives through pharmaceuticals, self-help, exercise, organic food. And this Me Generation gave birth to iGen, my generation, the millennials, supposedly saturated with more self-obsession than ever before. And yet what I felt in church that morning, the moment the congregation rose and began to sing, myself among them, seemed somehow bigger than a fifty-year endgame. It felt bigger than acculturation. It felt ancient. It felt like a timeless conflict between self and non-self.