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All the Things We Need to Ditch Once This Is Over

The fact that the whole world is on time-out is an opportunity to make some changes

Luvvie Ajayi Jones
ZORA
Published in
5 min readApr 22, 2020

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A photo of businesspeople getting food at a lunch buffett.
Photo: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

Normal is dead. There is no normal. Normal packed up its bags and left the keys on the kitchen counter.

This Covid-19 pandemic has turned the whole world upside down, and there is truly no going back. It’s like when you shave off your eyebrows one too many times and think that good shape you had will eventually grow back in. Ask the older women in your life. There are some things you can’t come back from, and this situation we’re in is one of them.

The fact that the whole world is on a “divine time-out,” as my girl Devi Brown calls it, is shaking the way we’ve lived to the core. It has upended all that we know to be ordinary, and maybe it is for the best. I think God is tired of our shit and has been telling us to saddown and get it together for a while, but we haven’t listened. So he brought on locusts and a plague. A global biological enemy had to lock us in our houses so we can go think about what we’ve done.

What we are now seeing is that the way we’ve been living has been unsustainable. How we’ve been working is slowly killing us. And why we need to reprioritize is more evident than ever. There are things we’ve been forced to do, now that we are sheltered in place, and new habits we’ve had to pick up. When all of this is done—Father Lord, let it be sooner than later; hot girl summer shouldn’t be postponed till 2026—what stays and what goes? What did we once engage in that no longer serves us? What did we start doing more of now that we need to continue? Here are a few things.

The ‘keep’ list

Staying connected to those we love

Since we are all hunkered down in the house, the only way we’ve been able to socialize with people who aren’t under our roof is by calling them. This has been heart food and has allowed many of us to connect with the friends we haven’t talked to in too long. We’re video chatting more regularly with our loved ones, and that part has been glorious. The sister circles I’ve been a part of have really fed me. We have to keep that after all of this.

The slowdown and

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ZORA
ZORA

Published in ZORA

A publication from Medium that centers the stories, poetry, essays and thoughts of women of color.

Luvvie Ajayi Jones
Luvvie Ajayi Jones

Written by Luvvie Ajayi Jones

2x NYTimes best-selling author, speaker and podcast host. Latest book: Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual. The goal is to loan people courage.

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