How Coronavirus chaos clarifies what matters most in life

As the world shutters, we define powerful truths

It would be easy to read the above headlines and imagine me — the writer — as some distant, unaffected milquetoast millennial startup yogi on some kind of tone-deaf spiritual journey.

Sopping up the milk of human suffering with an algorithmic sponge, to whip up a fluffy clout-chasing afterglow, looks something like this:

Marvel at the thought leadership buzzword salad! Harder, better, faster, stronger! Sleep is for the weak!!!! Hustle is the only drug we need! WHAT MUST I DO TO GET GARY VEE SENPAI TO NOTICE ME UwU!!1

The actual reality of my recent clarity is hardly that mentally masturbatory, though it did start out fairly tone-deaf.

It’s hard not to come from a place of aloofness when the plates you’re spinning make it impossible to even see your own hands (thanks, capitalism).

We are blind to truth because we’re blinded by our own immediate needs.

In mid March, I took on a few freelancing gigs while I lazily read the news pouring over my social media feeds. I knew something very very bad was happening, but as a remote worker saddled with a few very large projects, and a penchant for equally large anxiety, if I had obsessed then I’d have been undone far too soon.

I bulldozed through one huge project, prepared to steamroll a few more, and then something happened that twisted my insides like a fork in the gut.

My best friend of more than 15 years finally called me after many months of silence.

We have the kind of relationship where we can go years without speaking, and pick up right where we left off. This isn’t unusual for us.

This time, it wasn’t a casual call to chat about her very large-eyed baby, our fave oldschool MMORPG, or how our respective families were doing. It wasn’t even a vent-call for her to lament about shitty men, which always has me taking the MomFriend role.

To be honest, even though I hate giving her the same advice about crappy dudes over and over again, I really wish this call had been much the same.

I wish there had been no need for the type of call we ended up having, which on the surface sounds tame, but as I know her emotions as well as my own, it was anything but.

There was panic in her voice; and as the person who has helped her through many a bout of panic of varying degrees, I was keen to the difference.

It’s a nervous laugh on the edge of her mouth where I’m sure she’s distressed but trying to paint the mental picture of a goofy best-friend chitchat.

It’s the same self-effacing humor paired with dressed-up hope I’ve come to expect from her when all is not right in her world, only there was a layer of terror.

I don’t know if she knew I could hear it, or even if she knew she was doing it. But I knew, because I love her with every particle of my soul, and I know what she’s saying even when she’s not speaking.

In this case, all was not right in the greater world around us, and I’d buried my head in the work sand, because I’d been too busy working, which is typical of asshats in tech.

I sat at my desk, placed my head in my hand, and simply listened to this woman I love platonically with my entire being.

They’d run out of wet wipes for her big-eyed, beautiful baby — how silly, how stupid, people be crayzee, how goofy, she suggested.

I thought: how scary. How scary for you. Is anyone going to the store for you? I can’t get there. I’m so far away.

I can’t fly there — planes bad. Too far away. Are you okay? Are you safe?

She lives near a metropolis; she forgot if we did too.

No, no, it’s Rhode Island, chickadee. It’s small…we’re okay. But you, you may not — You will be fine. You will be okay. Are you being okay? Are you being safe?

A million thoughts raced through my head.

She has a small child. How was our furry little son? she asked.

He’s a cat, he’ll survive. He’s more likely to hurt himself eating too fast than he is to get sick. Kira makes a joke, she laughs. Kira makes a joke, she laughs.

Kira keeps making jokes to make her friend laugh because Kira can feel the weight above her best friend’s head on the other end of the line, even if she herself doesn’t know it’s floating above her skull.

This was when the coronavirus got very, very real for me.

But I pressed on for a bit, because work waits for nobody, until work finally stopped making sense to me.

When systems break down, the glaring flaws become beacons of reality.

I’m a marketer — no, that’s not really the truth.

I’m not a marketer. I’m a writer. I’m a writer, who was once and still is, an artist. I’m a gamer, a friend, a cat-mom, a partner, an only child. I’m a singer, a DnD/roleplaying nerd, a cinephile, and melomaniac.

I am a teacher.

The reckoning of truly having to own what I am not, though I position myself to be by way of dope skills and a necessity to pay bills, spun me sideways.

I could not proceed as usual.

I had a full week of existential dread, while trying to finish up some large projects.

During that time, I had to cut my coffee intake, because I just couldn’t stop the rolling panic.

Even as I shut out the news as best I could, one fact got my heart racing: my partner would go out each day, while others stayed home.

I worked from home, he went out into the world. The days ticked by, the work continued. I was numb, then I wasn’t.

In little stops and starts, I was fine. Then, I wasn’t.

The mallet hit the target, and what started brazenly as “we got this, we’ll be fine” became mild spells of crying into his shirt, from seemingly nowhere.

What if we didn’t? What if, what if, what if?

And why, in God’s name, am I worrying about anything else other than humanity? Why is my government — any government — worried about anything else? Why are businesses worried about anything else? Why are people worrying about anything else right now?

Why is anything else important, right now, aside from taking care of people?

I went through the stages of grief and ran up my thoughts about the actual state of marketing to tie-up the epiphany.

My clients were receptive. My clients understood; marketing, now? No. Not that sort, not like this. This sort. The learning-helping-giving sort.

Clients like the ones I have and have had are the reason I could wear this ill-fitting mantle for so long.

But I am not a marketer, that truth speaks loudest now. It screams.

Yet I still had trouble listening to it.

Defining powerful truths for one’s self requires being willing to speak them by name and confront them.

Chaos can be a teacher for this; when stress displaces hurt, it often means it’s created elsewhere.

For the past five or so days, my sleep has been absolute ass. I chalked it up to being restless. I’d come to terms with much of the chaos of the world, hadn’t I? This meant I just had to release it in a flurry of creativity.

The thing is, I have plenty of ways to release inner chaos. I’ve always had a lot of it, after all.

I could paint.

I could sing. I could write. I could dance. I could build an app. I could do almost anything creative I wanted to. But I found myself unable to do most of it, aside from a fun (albeit distractable) gaming hobby that doesn’t touch on my inner emotions (DnD).

At first it was an off-night of waking up every few hours.

Then, that steamrolled into several days.

Each day, I hydrated, tried to work on something fun/productive, but each night came more restless sleep.

I found myself unable to make social media posts, when that’s basically the lead-gen part of my career, let’s be real. Everything I wrote felt wrong.

I found myself unable to write the two fun articles I’d planned: one on roleplaying being a great panacea for social isolation, and the other talking-up Animal Crossing: New Horizons as a similar poultice.

I found myself unable to check my email, when despite not expecting gigs, that’s generally a good rule of thumb.

I found myself no longer stuck to my partner’s chest, worried about his public-facing job.

I did, however, find myself failing to exorcise my emotions and get to some semblance of routine.

Naps kept coming, but they weren’t restful. Every attempt had me jerking myself awake with the twitch of a foot.

On the fourth day, I reoriented the ship, to sleep soundly.

But the only reason I was able to do this was because I confronted why this was happening in the first place:

My career role, my place in tech, does not match with what I’m meant to do with my life. It isn’t my soul-goal. And going back to that in even small ways was a cognitive dissonance I couldn’t handle, especially in a world in this much turmoil.

I had to own this fact, for myself.

I had to boil down what mattered most to me, as I felt the grief of the world putting my value system into picture-perfect clarity.

I am a teacher. I have to teach. I am an artist. I have to create.

I am a writer.

I must write, and write the raw, real stuff. Even if it sinks my future gig prospects. Even if it butchers my strangely crafted career. Even if it makes people angry.

Especially if it makes people angry; it means I struck the right nerve with the wrong types, who needed to have their nerves struck.

How Coronavirus chaos clarifies what matters most in life:

It makes everything sharper. It reframes and amplifies every hardship. It requires people to protect each other and think of those around them, lest everyone fall prey to the illness.

No one is exempt.

The virus doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, but it certainly helps if you’re rich to have access to testing and better healthcare (this is crazy-making).

Yet it still kills, regardless.

The virus doesn’t care if you’re influential or a nobody. It doesn’t care if you’re young or old, a celebrity, a sports star, a politician, the President.

It does not care.

It breaks every flaw in every system, even your own personal, ego-protecting systems. I should know; it did this for me.

It does not give any ground to broken societal structures, broken forms of government, broken economical models, or the broken ways in which we treat each other.

All it took was a virus to scuttle the world’s population, and bring us to our collective knees.

Now that we’re there, we have a decision to make, as a human species.

Just like I had a decision to make: do we ignore what our fear, suffering, and pain is teaching us, or do we take the hard route and become the best version of ourselves?

As the world shutters, we have the ability to not only define powerful truths, but act on them, to make our world better in almost every conceivable way.

That is what this chaos brings; it’s the only net positive.

That is how we are forced to understand what matters most. Whether we can universally adopt this as a species, only time will tell.

Time we don’t much of right now.

Give yourself the chance, right now, to embrace this fear. Own it. Own the possibility of nothing working as intended.

Own the possibility that this goes tits-up for you.

Own the possibility that you will be affected. Own it.

Own the possibility of normal never happening again.

Own the possibility that ‘normal’ was never good enough, anyways.

Now that you’ve owned this: what the fuck are you going to do about it?

I’m going to go on a journey to realign my goals. I will try my best to entertain, to write, to teach, to create, to help people in the ways I can, to be so real it scalds, and be the “me” that I knew I wanted to be in third grade.

What about you?

Kira Leigh is a writer-person, anime blogger, and freelancer (who is trying to do bigger, better, bolder, cooler shit).

Send her a message if you want her to write words for you, or better yet, allow her the grace of digivolving into the big-time nerd-person she truly is (I Want To Write About Anime And Games).

Special thanks to Renato P. dos Santos for his continued support, and of course the whole LinkedIn squad for being rad humans.