Quarantine was weird. I moved back home, graduated college, and like the rest of the world, was forced to adapt to that dreaded alliterative phrase coming out of every TV: the new normal. On one particularly strange day, I rummaged around my attic and found the doll house from my childhood. Right there, surrounded by dust, my old clothes, and an ugly, 20-year-old lamp my mom refuses to throw away in case it comes back in style, the idea for Existential Emma, the pandemic doll that represents me, was born.