In addition to the performance itself, some people use the phrase “the Unraveling” to refer to all the changes afterwards. But how long was “the Unraveling,” really? Was it just the chaos of the first two or three years afterwards, or is it still going on today? People disagree.

Some people think, not only are we still in the Unraveling, but it’s going to go on a long time, and even become its own age, the Age of Unraveling. To me (and this is just my own opinion) it seems like they’re getting carried away. Ages are like hundreds of years long! You can’t have everything changing this much for hundreds of years. People have to settle down at some point! On the other hand, some people have pointed out that the excavations are all concluded. So how can it still be the Age of Digging? This is a point for further discussion.

The Unraveling (the second kind) had a big effect on my family, though not as big as for some people’s families. We lost our squatright and had to move, and my eldersibling Umis got in trouble for rioting, and my parents were like “what is happening with the world how could Umis do that it was never like this when we grew up” and “you’d better not act like your eldersibling when you’re bigger.” But they also stuck up for Umis even though the local adjudicators wanted them to send vem to a Learn Responsibility Enclosure once those started up. My parents were like “that’s the opposite of an Idyll” and “you can’t force someone to learn responsibility” and “our Mothers didn’t dig Fullbelly so we could put our children in lockboxes” and “these Midwives of ours have gone too far.” That’s why we lost squatright and had to move.

I didn’t like our new apartment at first, and I didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood, but I didn’t complain, because we had almost lost Umis to the opposite of an Idyll, and that sounded really bad. I had trouble sleeping for many months. I felt like the world was upside down and inside out and what was the point of anything. I had the opposite reaction of Umis, who wanted to fight all the time: I never wanted to fight again, even on the official mat training sessions. I just hid in my room a lot. That would have been bad for ratings, except with all the rioting and panic and dispute resolution incoherence, I guess a lot of people thought a young Vail just hiding in vir room all the time was better than whatever the average young person was doing.