It feels dopey to even write this, but humor is central to my sense of self. It’s what I do as a cartoonist, essayist and occasional stand-up comic, but it’s also part of my general life philosophy. The real goal of my work is always human connection. The communal joy of laughter, the balm of knowing that you are not alone in your feelings — those are my touchstones.

Who am I if I can’t string two words together? What am I but a useless blob with a head full of oatmeal?

The other night (or last night, or last month) I was putting my daughter to bed and she started to cry. “What’s wrong, baby?” I asked, and I meant it. She happened to catch me in a moment where the fog had cleared a bit, and I could do a little better than just pantomiming empathy.

“What is all this even for?” she wailed. She didn’t mean the quarantine: “All of this, why are we even here? Why are we even alive?” I tried to put together a soothing platitude about helping one another, leaning heavily on the Sunday school tenet of loving God and our neighbor as ourselves.

To her credit, she was having none of it. “I hate this, I hate everything that’s ever going to happen to me. Help me, Mama, please, please help me.” And if I needed a starker example of the disparity between my constructed self (a cheerful, competent mother) and reality (bird, oatmeal) there it was.

Absent the scaffolding of the world as we know it, I’ve got nothing to say. So I did the only thing I could. I held her, and rocked her, and hoped my silence helped.

My daughter is saying out loud the questions that everyday life helps us forget. This quarantine feels like a time of reckoning, forcing us to look at ourselves as we really are. Maybe whatever world we build after this is over will be more honest about that reality; but I don’t know if that’s something to be hoped for, or deeply feared.