The Stretch

“For me, deeply immersive experiences have been both fascinating and disorienting. Spending long periods of time with people different from ourselves can affect our own sense of identity. When I return to my regular life, I think of it not like shedding a skin but like releasing the tension in a rubber band. My immersion stretched my somewhat flexible sense of self; returning home, the rubber band snaps back into its previous shape mostly … but not entirely. After all, rubber bands once stretched aren’t exactly the way they were to begin with. They hold more. And so I usually feel larger, in a good way, from having been stretched.”

—Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep

Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."