Is it just me, or does anyone else feel dumbstruck when they think about all that’s happened in the past four years? I know that, according to the breakneck speed of media cycles, we’re supposed to have moved on from what I call “the COVID years” as if nothing happened.
But I spent the first part of this month moving out of the home that I’ve rented since February 2020. Maybe it’s the act of all that purging, parsing, and packing that has me processing not only the hazy time warp we’ve endured since COVID, but other aspects of my life where I’ve fallen in line and followed the herd, often going against my instincts and even ignoring my truth.
In 2019 – months before the global pandemic – I’d walked away from my career as a brand strategist in the agency world, intent on working for myself as a freelancer/marketing consultant. I’d landed a few clients and hadn’t even launched my LLC or website – it was all happening! I traded the Portland, Oregon rat trough for clean streets and a safe neighborhood in a small town near Corvallis. I was trucking right along until March 2020. We all know what happened then.
“Two weeks to flatten the curve.”
A whole new generation met Doctor Fauci. Many fawned over the longtime federal employee, forgetting or perhaps never even knowing that it was Fauci who ignited American’s overblown fear of AIDS by stating on national television that you could contract the disease through household transmission.
I’ll never forget the television ad, sponsored by the Ad Council, warning us, “don’t kill grandma.” (Of note: It’s difficult to find the exact ad that I saw on television, although I have a crystal-clear memory of it. I work in marketing/advertising – it’s my job to pay attention to these things. The ad I recall seeing was deployed during the “two-week lockdown” in March 2020. It used arresting yellow design, intense music, and fear-based messaging. Below are a few ads utilizing the same language but promoting the vaccine as the COVID cure, indicating the Ad Council took their “Don’t Kill Grandma” campaign and ran with it.)
Watch the Ad Council’s commercial, “Grandma” here.
Ever the people pleaser, this level of propaganda fucked with me hard. And look, I studied propaganda in college, taking every course on the topic I could access across undergraduate and graduate school. Goes to show that just because you possess a college degree doesn’t mean you know anything about the ways of the world. I should have known better. But looking back, my little ego couldn’t handle the idea that I might be the one to get somebody else sick.
My lowest point of harboring the COVID mind virus came when my mother arrived at my house late one night, worried about chest pains. She and my father live an hour from the nearest hospital. He’d driven her into town in case she needed to access the ER. She sat in my living room, with her hand on her heart, and I kept my distance. My partner at the time worked in healthcare, and I was panicked that maybe he’d brought the virus home, and we didn’t know it yet.
What if I get HER sick?
What if she’s having this heart issue because she has COVID, and she gets HIM sick, and then he goes to work and gets everyone at his hospital sick, and, and, and, and, and ….
A professional overthinker with hypochondriac tendencies, you can see why those first couple of months of the pandemic really spun me up.
Image Source: www.instagram.com/johandeckmann
Standing in my living room at two in the morning, staring at my saint of a mother in fear, that low point was also my breakthrough. There I was, scared about someone passing COVID while she was possibly suffering a heart-related emergency right before my eyes.
We loaded into the car. A few minutes later, I dropped her at the emergency room. Because of protocols at the time, I couldn’t go inside with her.
“I’ll wait here,” I said as she climbed out of my car. “Text me and let me know what’s happening.”
She shut the door, and I watched her tiny frame move across the empty portico. Electric doors parted before her, and she disappeared into the hospital’s fluorescent glow. Feeling like I’d just dropped my mother off at the spaceship with the aliens, I drove to the adjacent visitor lot and parked, leaving my car running and the heater blasting. I dozed off and on beneath the sallow lights of the vast, empty complex. I didn’t think about it at the time, but in hindsight, critical analysis would have inspired me to question what I was seeing. For all the fear we swallowed about being in the throes of a global pandemic, our local ER and the adjoining hospital sure were quiet.
Ping!
“They got me right in,” she texted. “They ran an EKG and said it looks normal, but they’re going to run a few more tests, so I might be here a while.”
“I’m still outside. I’ll wait.”
“Go home and get rest. They’re so nice. I’m in good hands.”
I winced at this. I don’t think my mother was insinuating that the hospital folks were nice while I was quantifiably the worse daughter ever, but my conscience got the best of me. I’d hesitated when she showed up at my house. I’d been scared to get close to my own mother. Who had I become?
I drove home but waited up. Mom texted a few hours later. “They’re getting ready to discharge me pretty soon. I’m okay. It was probably stress-related.”
“I’ll be there.”
I understand why many don’t want to look back at the past 4.8 years. Some brave souls rolled the dice and chose courage over submission, but for the majority, our fears dominated our thoughts and behaviors, negatively influencing how we treated others. It was not our finest hour.
Perhaps it’s too painful for people to examine their shortcomings and admit where they faltered. It’s easier to fall in line and move on, get the kids signed up for the next activity, buy the next trend, become swept up in the news cycles, just keep scrolling.
But here’s the problem with never looking back: you miss the opportunity to analyze what you wish you would have done differently. You never learn those dark lessons that generate personal growth and propel you into the light.
As a virus, COVID stole our loved ones. Countless hearts are still shattered by that truth, and I am by no means diminishing or ignoring that reality. What I am pointing out is that, as a global event that morphed into an ideology, we’re failing ourselves and those we love if we simply move along as if nothing happened, as if everything should remain the same.
As I said, by late 2019, I’d achieved liftoff as a marketing consultant with plenty of work.
“But you need health insurance,” my partner told me.
As the pandemic set in, I was offered a full-time opportunity, and, with gratitude, I shifted back into the agency world. Except now, I mainlined the agency world directly into my home via Zoom meetings, which I attended from the moment I dragged myself out of bed until the last email I’d send around eight or nine at night. Many days, I sent that last email from bed, placed my laptop on the ground, and then picked it right back up from my bed the next morning to catch the first status of the day (the agency I worked for operated on central standard time, so most days started around six or seven).
“We’re all in this together!”
That was the rallying cry. Corporate Americans setup home offices, tuned into Zoom meetings, and invested immeasurable energy into at least looking like they were working by making their Slack or Teams status show green, indicating online activity.
But what did you actually do today?
I appeared busy online.
Fast-forward: I’ve spent 4.8 years talking to a screen. Those days have consisted of stressing about website builds and email copy, producing audience research summaries, making sure clients were happy, and trying to inspire remote teammates to contribute, knowing they were likely burned out, too. During all of this, my ability to give a damn was slowly trickling out of me as if society’s cracks and fissures had extended into my desire to perform.
The advertising and marketing industry has always required its minions to keep up with trends spanning consumer behaviors, tech innovation, brand moves, social media chaos, influencer evolutions, AI advancements … trends, trends, trends!
But at some point, a viral apathy infiltrated my system. It’s been tough to kick.
While I’ve longed to step back and examine what just happened, my industry has been sprinting forward. The GenZ Corporate Girlies excitedly discuss TikTok trends that are here today and gone this afternoon while rolling their eyes at questions about client’s business goals and marketing impact, believing they’re the first generation to discover the grind because they make reels about it on social media.
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“Being a “corporate girlie” is all about romanticizing the grind … GenZ is sticking with companies 18% longer than millennials did in their first seven years on the job.”
- Fast Company; Sept. 24, 2024
I applaud this next generation for their innovative social media use and wanting to earn a paycheck. A wise man once said, “Those who won’t work, don’t eat.” But these kids will soon discover that there aren’t enough Zara suit jackets or J.Crew cashmere sweaters to justify giving your entire life to a corporation that sees you as a line item on a budget sheet. Delusion, free coffee, and happy hours can only take a soul so far.
There is reason to hope that the great awakening might go viral so that this next generation might realize sooner than we Millennials did that there’s more to life than a corporate career and nice clothes.
“I secretly want to be laid off from my corporate job so I can become a stay at home wife and finally pursue my creative passions without feeling burnt out all the time.”
- Anonymous submission to the Sept. 15, 2024
Sunday Confessions feature on the Sunday Scaries Substack
Across the internet, I see women whispering admissions like the one above about their deeply held desires to walk away from corporate America and pursue things they love, whether it’s pursuing a creative endeavor, raising kids (the cat ladies can get pissed, but in my opinion, there’s no greater purpose in life than helping a little soul find their way in this world), starting that business they’ve always dreamed about, or simply being a stay-at-home wife and taking a big fat nap.
Growing up, my grandmother was my best friend. She chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes all day, timed herself when completing the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning, and never missed her grandchildren’s sporting events.
She’d take a deep pull from her cig, then exhale a stream of billowy smoke and say, “Those feminists ruined it for you girls.”
See, Grandma Jo was a kept woman. She married the love of her life when she was 18. They had four kids. He worked. She stayed home, raised the kids, cleaned the house, made meals, and drank wine with her best friend. Grandma Jo held part-time jobs throughout the years but mostly stayed busy and was always entertained. My fondest childhood memories are of her reading in her rocking chair while drinking a bourbon cocktail on hot summer nights. She’d have opened the windows; the cool Pacific breeze made the curtains dance. The automatic sprinklers turned on at nine o’clock—the earthy smell of water hitting parched grass floated in through the windows. I’d be lying on her living room floor, watching Bewitched on Nick at Nite, full as a tick from the Chinese food we had for dinner. Grandma Jo was the boss of her own life, and she lived well.
After my grandfather died, my mother and aunt asked Grandma Jo if she might date again.
I’m already married, she said.
Grandma Jo’s lifestyle wouldn’t be ideal for everyone. Unto each their own, as she liked to say.
But I think of her often, fifteen years into an unfulfilling marketing career that I pursued because it was the only job with a decent paycheck I could land when I hit the job market in 2007. I was broke, scared of being poor, and I knew how to do one thing: work hard. Turns out, corporate America was more than happy to take everything I could give.
Many women are finally realizing this is a zero-sum game for long-term fulfillment. We work ourselves beyond burnout, giving everything for a job that doesn’t necessarily return the favor. Our jobs could go away tomorrow, and the world would keep right on spinning.
I quit my agency job in August.
“I’ve proven myself here,” I told the HR lead. “I work hard for this job, but it’s no longer working hard for me.”
I spent fourteen days parsing, purging, and packing the things I’d acquired over the past 4.8 years.
Standing at the door of my storage unit, I stared at the material things that represent my life – beds, midcentury modern couches, chairs, art, boxes of books – all stacked in an amorphous heap.
What if this all just disappeared? I wondered. Granted, I was deliriously exhausted. Moving out of a three-bedroom house on my own and scrubbing it from top to bottom really kicked my ass.
But seeing all my belongings in a pile like that, the result of all those years of corporate grind, I felt more confident than ever that my life and time here on earth are worth more. I don’t want the corporate grind, and I don’t necessarily need all those material goods that it’s yielded.
I did what we were supposed to do: go to college, get the degree, get a job, buy the things, grow my career. And I count myself lucky to be able to ring the bell, step outside the fray, analyze what the hell just happened, and move forward.
It’s taken almost twenty years, but I’m close to beating the virus.
All my stuff is in storage.
I’ve filed my LLC and am working toward launching my website to promote my marketing services.
I’m using an online tool to copyedit my novel, which I started learning how to write in 2016 and then wrote, rewrote, and rewrote during the pandemic. I intend to self-publish before the end of the year. (I’m working on another post about the inner workings of the publishing industry and why I’m choosing to self-publish.)
Of course, I want to succeed in all this.
I’ll pick up a few marketing clients and help them grow their businesses.
I will continue writing here on Substack in hopes that what I share here makes readers think, feel, and seek.
I’m working toward publishing my first novel.
I’ll figure out how to pay the bills. Working-class kids always know how to work hard.
But here’s the beautiful truth: the Spiritual freedom of a great awakening comes when you listen to your God-given instincts, activate your courage, and blaze your own trail. Success doesn’t come all at once, and it may not come at all.
But there is victory in trying.
