Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time

by Natalie Hodges

The performance of identity, especially that of a “model minority,” rarely, if ever, lends itself to notions of equality: In trying to play the part society has prescribed for you, you are inherently left at the mercy of the people who are watching, auditioning you for their way of life, evaluating whether or not you belong.

It’s a strange feeling, beautiful but also eerie: not only that you can step into time’s flow, but that you are the flow itself.

This is also what makes writing frightening, at least to my mind: the fact that it can change the past so effortlessly, and solidify that change into reality. And yet I tell myself, too, that part of the marvel of living must surely be in our struggle to understand our lives both as we narrate them through memory and as they really are; and that in doing so we might perhaps get closer to knowing the beginning and the end of time.