In September of 2011, I started sleeping in a tent in Dewey Square, a hellishly loud, privately owned plaza across the street from South Station in Boston.

When I had first heard about Occupy Wall Street in New York, I looked at photos of the occupation in Zuccotti Park and recoiled in embarrassment. It looked like hippie bullshit, I thought. But when an encampment popped up in Boston, where I had just begun my second year of college, a friend from school asked if I wanted to take the train downtown to check it out. I ignored his message at first, but after further prodding, agreed to go.

I remember emerging from the subway stop and crossing the intersection outside of South Station — I would come to know the rhythm of its traffic lights on an almost cellular level over the next few months, as the train station’s bathrooms were the only ones publicly available in the hostile environs of the city’s financial district. My initial impression of the occupation was that it looked like an alien organism. People streamed by on narrow pathways fortified with wooden pallets that reverberated with each step. Threatening to spill over into the foot traffic were tents of every shape and size and state of disrepair that featured handwritten signs designating their purpose: food, direct action, media, and, yes, a healing circle hippie bullshit–type tent (I can’t recall the sign for that one).