March Prompts for Verifying Humanity

8 prompts about being human right now

Yesterday I was completing a puzzle on my computer to “verify my humanity,” clicking inscrutable squares with blurry photos of drawbridges and motorcycles and crosswalks. I started thinking about those words: Verifying my humanity.

Later that evening, friends invited us over for roast chicken. They'd been out of town for a few months, away from LA’s year-round vegetables, and prepared overflowing plates with all the ingredients they'd missed: sautéed squashes, and fennel with herbs, and braised radicchio, and Nardello peppers, and discs of steamed Japanese sweet potato.

Afterward we sat around the table and started talking about our specific strategies for coping: coping with the anxieties of this particular moment, and coping in general. Em said staring at the violence of the sea paradoxically soothed her—to look at such contained wildness and see herself reflected back. I thought about my dad saying he felt unsettled when he couldn’t see the horizon line, and how I, too, feel most at …