Unfortunately, we have very little control over our identity. Everyone else—our observers—ends up having so much more say over who we are than we do. When I teach in the country, for instance, I appear to students as a pretentious urbanite. When I walk around in real cities, I appear to urbanites as a country rube. Though inside I feel like a stoic and wise arbiter of truth and justice, everyone else seems to see me as a goofy sap, or a dingus of one variety or another.

But lately, without having so many around to judge me, my quarantine self feels all the more unstable. I can describe what I do throughout the day, but... what am I? Who am I? This weird dynamic reminds me of a poem by Fenton Johnson called "The Banjo Player." It perfectly captures that disorienting moment when society drops you in a cubby hole you didn't think you fit in but yet also cannot dispute, and that moment when you realize that you're nothing special. But Johnson does it in a fun, kind of jaunty way.

A few notes:

• In the poem, Johnson is inhabiting the persona of someone quite unlike himself in some ways. As the Poetry Foundation's brief bio lays out, Johnson was "the son of one of [Chicago's] wealthiest African American families," who earned multiple ivy league degrees. The distance between Johnson's and the banjo player, who is full of "the music of a peasant people," is stark. And yet that music rings out so clearly from Johnson.

• Just listen to the casual, easy-going rhythm of some of my favorite lines: "I wander through the levee, picking my banjo and singing my songs of / the cabin and the field. At the Last Chance Saloon I am as welcome / as the violets in March." It's as if we really do contain multitudes, and that identity isn't fixed. Hm.

• Ugh, that last line: "But I fear that I am a failure. Last night a woman called me a / troubadour. What is a troubadour?" This shift from the speaker feeling pride in his life as a musician to feeling anxious that society's label for his pursuit might not align with his sense of himself gets me every time. Whoever I am.