33. solastalgic longing

five years since the world changed (and we changed too)

A reminder that hitting the like button is a great + free way to support this work <3

Last month marked five years since the start of the pandemic, when the world as we knew it changed forever. It feels so strange that something that altered nearly every facet of life on this planet has no ritual, shared moment or pause to memorialise it.

March came and went this year, like any other month, except it wasn’t. Maybe that’s why it slipped by unnoticed. There’s already so much else going on, so many layers of grief, rupture, and crises unfolding in real time. But my body remembered, and maybe yours did too? That quiet panic, that shift in the air, the knowing that something began and never fully ended—a wild, strange, surreal truth: it’s been half a decade.

In the years since, time has felt so blurry, as though it folded in on itself, not behaving in the ways we once expected it to. There's a pause when I’ve recently been reminding others of this anniversary: something shifts in their expression, their jaw drops as they repeat it back in disbelief.

Has it crossed your mind, too? I’m not asking from a place of judgment but from tenderness, noticing how quickly the world asked us to forget. To move on, pretend we’re okay, to go on as if we hadn’t been so profoundly changed. It created the intense, dystopian emotional dissonance we’ve been living in ever since: functioning on the surface while something deeper inside is cracking. There is a quiet split between the unbearable and the expected, between knowing and continuing. And yet, I sense that many of us are still carrying it—some quietly, some heavily, some too deep in it to name.

Maybe you lost someone. Or perhaps you’re still living with long COVID or navigating a world that has all but abandoned your safety. Maybe, like so many of us, you lost a part of yourself—or something more material: a livelihood, a dream, a relationship, a project that never bloomed. Perhaps it was your home, momentum, and trust in the future. A version of community you haven’t been able to find again. Maybe your ease, playfulness, and energy to show up for others or yourself faded. Maybe it was your creativity, your ability to dream, your sense of being held.

It was a moment that redirected countless lives. Some changes were immediate, others slow and imperceptible, but few were untouched. We adapted, adjusted, and kept going, but some essential parts of us have slipped away from the process since then.

In many ways, I lost my capacity for the outside world, not just because of social anxiety but because of social bandwidth. So many friendships and connections couldn’t survive this time. Some drifted for the better. Some revealed their depth and staying power. Quietly, I lost touch with others—people I still love—because I just no longer had the capacity. Part of it, I know, is ‘growing up’—lives that once revolved around nightlife, adventures and spontaneity shifting into different rhythms. But in my case, the pandemic fast-forwarded that change. My energy for casual connection, for “keeping up”, evaporated. What remained was purely what felt essential.

Even the soundscape of my life changed. I used to listen to so much big-hearted, full-bodied, loud music. Over time, without it being something I was even doing consciously, more ambient-like music became the comfort I reached for every day, and I know I’m far from alone in that shift. So many of us cocooned, needing to soften the sensory overload.

And maybe it wasn’t even something tangible. Perhaps it was just a shift in your nervous system—a dulling, a tightness, a lingering fatigue or sense of disconnection you couldn’t quite name. The pandemic changed our nervous systems in both significant and subtle ways. Many of us have been living in prolonged states of dysregulation ever since—stuck in sympathetic overdrive, hypervigilant and braced for the next blow, or collapsed into the dorsal vagal state, numb, withdrawn and shut down. These states are described by the polyvagal theory, which helps us understand how our bodies respond to safety and threat. They are natural survival responses, built into our biology to help us cope. But they were never meant to be long-term homes. And yet, for so many of us, they’ve become the background hum of daily life. We are still trying to find our return to safety, connection, and a body that feels like home.

And if you lost someone, this five-year mark might feel louder than most. You might be carrying an anniversary no one else is naming. If that’s you, I want to say your grief is not invisible; you’re not alone.

The pandemic wasn’t just a pause but a portal, a threshold into a time of chaos and collapse, where certainty dissolved and the unravelling began. What we are experiencing now is not an isolated moment but part of a larger initiation—a prolonged period of endings, disruption and disorientation. And yet, I have to remind myself, what we lost wasn’t whole. Nostalgia has a way of softening the edges, but so much of what we long for was already fraying. The sickness of the world had been bubbling under the surface for a long time. The pandemic didn’t create collapse; it revealed what had already been eroding.

And still, I remember how much hope there was in those early months. Despite the fear and stillness, there was also a sense—quiet but alive—that maybe everything could change, that this rupture could become a turning point, and we might emerge differently. And in some ways, the world did change. And in many ways, it did not. And with that comes a sorrow that builds over time, layered with personal upheaval, disillusionment, ecological collapse, and spiritual fatigue. It lives in the body, often just out of reach.

How can we make space when the onslaught hasn’t let up? When another round of horror arrives before the last has even had a chance to settle? How can we mark our heartbreaks, let alone the heartbreaks of others, when there’s barely been a pause to breathe? When every day brings another atrocity, another unbearable loss?

Since being given political cover by the Trump administration, the Israeli government has escalated its genocidal assault on Palestinians with even greater brutality, an unfathomable truth, considering the horrors of the past 18 months. What could be worse than what we’ve already seen? And yet, the violence intensifies. The killing does not stop. We are not witnessing the aftermath; we are still inside the catastrophe.

In these last five years, there has been no time to mourn the dead, no time for ritual. Lives lost and invisibilised have been rolled past, like unmarked graves, buried in silence. This, too, is its own pandemic—one with effects we don’t yet fully understand, the kind that stretches quietly through our bodies, our dreams, our relationships, through the ways we disconnect, the ways we stop feeling, and the ways we forget. Under capitalism, where collective healing is measured by GDP, of course, we’re not allowed a moment to stop. And as the descent into fascism continues—globally and unapologetically—the cracks only deepen. This is not just heartbreak. It is a moral collapse, a global unmasking, a vast betrayal that shatters any illusion of safety or progress.

For me, what faded during those years—subtly—was my lightness. The ease, the playfulness, the softness that used to live so freely in my body. A version of myself I didn’t realise was slipping away, that dimmed whom I miss.

After spending 18 months alone in my apartment, I was one of those people who took that moment as an invitation to change my life. Amidst the mania, I had somehow met someone, and I moved for love in a bid to try something different. In 2021, I began to leave London—slowly at first, then entirely by 2022. It was a conscious decision, a gentle unraveling from one life into another. I thought I was moving closer to myself—and in many ways, I was. At the time, I saw leaving my comfort zone as an exciting challenge, but little did I know how painful this challenge would end up being. I was now being asked to face parts of myself I’d never had to meet directly. The pieces I could once soften or obscure in a familiar place grew louder when I was gone. What felt like a move toward freedom also became a quiet reckoning.

Leaving also meant I lost daily access to my village. London had held so much of me for 17 years, not just in geography or routine but in people. The daily web of care, the friends and collaborators, the dance parties where people actually dance, and the unplanned side-of-the-road chats I hadn’t realised were illuminating my days. Leaving that, even with intention, opened a kind of ache I’m still reckoning with.

I often ask myself, do I miss the city or the version of me that existed there? I’m starting to see that the two may be inseparable. That lightness I long for wasn’t just mine; it was relational, held in the laughter, the touch, the unspoken rhythm of being part of something.

In the grief-tending tradition I’ve been apprenticing in, we often speak about the ache of disconnection—of losing our sense of belonging, of not being held by community in the ways we once were or still long to be. In her recent newsletter, Rowen White—an Indigenous seed keeper, storyteller and cultural leader from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne—named this with such poetic clarity. Through her, I first encountered the word solastalgia, coined by ecopsychologist Glenn Albrecht. It describes the pain of watching your home environment change in ways you can’t control—a kind of homesickness you feel at home. It is grief not just for a place but for what it once held and who we were when we lived inside it. When I read that, it helped shape what I’d been carrying—not just sorrow for what was lost but sorrow for what is still being lost. Places. Relationships. Futures. Ways of being. The sense of safety and belonging we once took for granted. This ache isn’t just personal; it’s ancestral, ecological and ongoing. She reminded us that we are not meant to hold all this alone.

They say it takes a village to raise a child but it also takes a village to support one in life. In grief. To grow. To age. To recover. To hold joy. To feel alive. And this, I realise, is where my longing for lightness lives too. .

The pandemic brought to the surface a gnawing in so many of us: of living in contradiction, trying to move with integrity inside systems that make it nearly impossible, trying to live by our values while also needing to survive. It stirred a deeper question in me: How can I make a living that aligns with who I’m becoming while still holding compassion for the tension that it brings?

It’s been a long process—and I’m still in it. I’ve taken steps, but part of me is still afraid to leap fully. It is terrifying to let go of the familiar, even when it no longer fits. Clinging to what we know can feel like safety in an increasingly volatile world. “It’s scary out there,” my nervous system whispers. And it’s not wrong.

Joy felt further out of reach as the structure and security I once relied on fell away. Freedom felt more fragile. The independence I’d built over years began to fray. And I’m writing to you from here. That rupture—the one I knew I needed but still feared—has shaped everything. Even though this change is something I deeply want, it’s brought a grief of its own. The kind that comes with shedding a skin you’ve worn for a long time. The kind that says: you can’t go back, even if you wanted to.

Maybe that’s part of the work now: letting go of the fight to go back. Accepting that things have changed, and so have we. As Octavia Butler wrote, “God is change.” The more we learn to dance with the many seasons of change in our lives, the closer we get to the Creator within us all. So much of our suffering comes from trying to live inside a shape that no longer fits. That old version of me I miss didn’t exist in isolation; she was shaped by community, by connection, by being witnessed. It doesn’t mean I won’t find those parts of myself again. The joy, the play and the cocoon of care took time to grow, and with patience, desire and intention, they can take a new shape. Letting go isn’t giving up. It’s making space for what else might want to emerge. She hasn’t disappeared.

She’s waiting for me to find her again, wherever presence lives.

So, as we cross this five-year threshold, I want to ask gently:

Where were you five years ago? What were you feeling as the world began to still? Who were you then—and who are you now? What did you lose? What did you gain? Not to reopen wounds but to honour what was never named. To mark what deserves to be marked. To remember that, even if no one else did.

Perhaps the invitation is simpler than we think: to notice what we miss, name what still matters, and gently ask what we want to bring back—or finally release. To light a candle for the parts of ourselves we miss. A candle for all that’s been lost, forgotten, or never fully seen.

Maybe today, that’s the ritual.

Lastly:

• I would love to hear from you if you’d like to answer some of the reflections mentioned above in the comments section below <3

• If you want a space to hold some of what may have been stirred, you can read more about my one-to-one sessions here. I’m still offering pay-what-you-feel first sessions for paid subscribers this month. Upgrade your subscription and book in while you can!

• For more info about grief-tending and to find out about future gatherings, click here.

• You can support this work by giving me a one-off tip here.