Walking into someone's apartment, house, van, tent or trailer for the first time can feel sort of like flipping open the first page of their journal. The places we choose to call home and the way we assemble them say a lot about who we are and where our priorities lie. But at some point, our environments can start to construct us as well. In the two months between the end of a semester of college and the beginning of a seasonal job, Ethan Newman loaded all of his belongings into his Saturn sedan "like a champion Tetris player," and drove to Bishop, California. He was thrilled to discover an alternative to pitching a tent every night or getting sand blown in his face while he slept. Until he woke up one morning to realize that the habitat he had constructed had started to change him.

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