You are a Phoenix Rising from the Ashes of Covid
The Wordle Years, I believe I will call them.
For two years my mornings followed basically the same routine. Like a Sims character, I rose at 7:30am and walked my blurred-out body to the shower. Then I popped into more or less the same outfit – a black tee that was loose but not so unprofessional that it would look like pajamas on Zoom, and a pair of jeans.
I didn’t bother to style my hair or wear make up, so after dressing I would maneuver directly to the living room to share a cup of coffee with my husband, scrunching my wet hair into hopeful curls and grilling him about his work life, because unlike mine, his job happened outside the bubble of our little house. Who had he met? I would ask. What had he seen? What had happened? How was traffic? How was the weather?
During this time we would also do the daily Wordle puzzle and talk about it in that roundabout way you talk about Wordle without giving the answer away. “I’ve entered the dishwasher of despair,” Spencer would lament, a nonsensical term we drunkenly coined for when you have four letters in the right place, but five options for the remaining space and only a couple of guesses left.
Then if I was lucky, he would look up and say, “I think I have time for another coffee,” and this, dear reader, was the epitome of my day. A joyous moment full of potential – another steaming cup, another half hour of quiet appreciation of the morning.
Then work, and lunch, and a walk (or a consideration of a walk). Then more work, a Zoom meeting or two where everyone’s faces were fixed in a glazed expression of false engagement, and eventually dinner and a quiet evening, followed by a habitual two to three units of alcohol.
Was this a good time? An awful time?
I don’t know about you, but for me it felt like limbo. Like my more extreme emotions had been blended together, the bright hues mingling, mixing, and coming out a dull grey.
I didn’t spend a lot of time crying or angry during this time, but neither did I spend a lot of time smiling or laughing. It wasn’t a time for making memories or planning for the future. It just was.
It only occurred to me sometime in mid-April this year, while I was irritatedly doing Wordle at 8am, scrunching my damp locks, that perhaps this limbo was actually comfort in its most insidious form. The kind of comfort that happens when your life is more or less the same, even, ironically, when nothing in the wider world feels remotely normal or secure.
In reality, I had built a cocoon of comfort in the midst of a storm outside. The plan was simply to wait it out from the safety of my walls. I think it was the same for many of us.
Sometime in mid-May, I decided to be a rebel and break my Wordle streak. I simply didn’t want to do it anymore and realized how obligatory it felt, as if someone was ordering me to do it every morning. What else do I feel trapped in, that I’m not actually trapped in? I wondered as I watched my 78-day streak turn to 0.
Then in June we went to Europe for an adventurous month-long, self-directed bike tour through Germany and The Netherlands with three friends, before dipping into Switzerland and Scotland. During this month of no internet nor fixed schedule, and lots of cycling and getting lost, where the only goal was to see things, arrive somewhere, and imbibe the local fare, everything changed for me.
As I stepped onto the final plane ride home from this journey, refreshed, unwashed, invigorated, and exhausted, it felt as if I had systematically burned down whatever the hell I had been doing for the last two years. The routine was broken, and in the ashes that remained, a new beginning was born. The potential for a new chapter.
I was surprised, then, when this wave of positive energy collapsed the moment I walked into my house and set down my backpack.
There it was – the couch where I drank coffee, read books, chatted on the phone to my mom, did Zoom meetings, worked all day, ate food, drank beer. The kitchen where we cooked, cleaned dishes, put them away, took them back out, made them dirty again. Seeing all our normal stuff and their associated routines caused a heavy weight to fall on my heart. It felt as if something had changed inside me, opened up to possibility, but my life hadn’t caught up.
Over the next few days I felt an overwhelming need to do something drastic. To move, maybe. Or toss the couch off a cliff. Or burn all my clothes and go shopping for new ones, or cut off all my hair.
I am happy to announce that I did none of these things. Moving might be a great choice for some, but the truth is that we love our house. And after traveling, I certainly didn’t have the expendable income on hand to purchase a new couch or wardrobe. I consider it a sign of unprecedented maturity that I didn’t lop off my long hair that I spent the last decade growing.
When it comes to new beginnings, I have a history of turning to the radical. Quitting jobs, moving houses, ending relationships, selling all my stuff. This time around, I learned that not every new beginning needs to be so dramatic.
In my own little dishwasher of despair sometime in mid-August, I finally decided that making meaningful changes is a choice within my reach, even if making external changes is not in the cards.
External changes can be immensely meaningful and exactly what you need for a fresh start. But sometimes, they can disguise a potential real change, the one that matters and lasts. For instance, buying a whole new set of clothes will make me look different, but will it help me step into a new version myself? Seeing the change might be enough for a quick-fix satisfaction that prevents me from doing the inner work it takes to make a real difference. In the end, I might end up with a closet of clothes that feel old after a week.
When making external changes isn’t an option, or isn’t a desirable option, we are left with internal changes. And this, in my experience over the past six weeks since I’ve been home, is a far more uncomfortable and meaningful change to make.
Deciding that I wasn’t the same Sims character who methodically and thoughtlessly roved through the day, despite evidence to the contrary, was hard. It was uncomfortable because this change of perspective lacked the instant gratification of the external.
Once I came to grips with the idea that meaningful change is possible without changing my stuff, I slowly figured out my missing internal piece: gratitude.
Even typing that tired, overused, greeting-card word sets my teeth on edge. As a concept, I’ve interacted with gratitude in many forms. But this was the first time I looked around at my life and felt how good I have it right in the marrow of my bones.
I decided to employ an old Stoic strategy of negative visualization. This somewhat dour practice requires you to imagine the worst case scenario that could happen. Not just the concept, but the full force of the reality that would hit you like a sack of bricks if shit went down: For instance, you might imagine that your house burns to the ground, and heart-wrenchingly burns all your childhood memorabilia with it. Or you might contemplate how it would feel if your lover died suddenly, leaving you adrift, or if your siblings or parents died today, or your children.
Once while doing this, I imagined that all my clients fired me on the same day with no explanation, leaving me with no income and a crushed ego. Another time I imagined I had to declare bankruptcy and sleep under a bridge.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but what results is pure magic: a deep, almost overwhelming gratitude for the people and things you have right now. For me, imagining a scenario where I lost all my money effectively launched me off the hamster wheel of money obsession because I suddenly realized the security and freedom I had now but wasn’t letting myself enjoy.
Imagining losing Spencer in a tragic event caused an overspilling feeling of love that had been dulled over the last two grey years of routine living. In my journal, after this visualization, I wrote: We’re here now, and in the words of Regina Spektor, today we’re younger than we’re ever going to be. This is precious to me, this time, this health, this presence, so we may as well have the best time of our lives for the rest of our lives, however long that is.
I find myself swimming in hippie-levels of gratitude and ecstacy for each late summer day because I imagine what it will feel like in mid-January. I feel lucky to be able to buy whatever I want to eat at the grocery store, considering the reality of not being able to afford good, healthful food that so many people experience.
September is Maverick month. The archetype of Maverick is all about ending old comfortable, outgrown stories and bringing about a much-needed change.
Maverick is a powerful archetype, capable of bringing down the most deeply rooted belief systems, the oldest and most established governments, and the evilest of industry. It lies dormant inside you until you are ready to grind your old life to a halt and propel it in a completely different direction.
I think September is a good time for change. Many people I’ve spoken with on this topic consider September as more of a new year than January. Maybe it’s something to do with school starting, or maybe it's having the space of summer to see what’s truly going on and contemplate what is important and desirable to change.
Whether you’re moving across the world, saying goodbye to a relationship, burning your black Covid tee in a ritualistic backyard bonfire, or embarking on an internal shift of perspective, you are a phoenix rising from the ashes of Covid. The biggest changes can be the most subtle. What will you do now?
Brittany Veenhuysen is a writer and co-founder of BrandPsyche. With a BA in English and a philosophical lens, she uses strategic storytelling to connect entrepreneurial folk with people they love to serve.