It was this past December, and I was driving through a neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, on my way to an in-home interview.

I was looking at the houses. Just ordinary houses like you find in most ordinary neighborhoods. And I had a thought: “how did this neighborhood handle the pandemic?”

Not just the neighborhood as a community. Each house. Each family or roommate situation or person living alone inside each one. What were their rules? Did they wear masks? Did they see their parents? What social bubbles did they form? Did their kids go to school or stay home? Did that house lose someone?

Every house has similarities and differences to our own lived experiences, and it can be challenging to overcome our cognitive biases to understand that. I wrote about this in my book. In Tell Me More About That, I asked readers to visualize their own home — then the homes of close family members and friends they might visit often. Then zoom out further:

(There are nearly 134 million households now. We keep growing.)

Arriving at the respondent’s house for the interview, I felt the scale of that number all over again. One neighborhood. Dozens of houses. Dozens of different pandemic experiences happening simultaneously, side by side, behind closed doors. Even within households there were stark differences. We may have shared a lived experience but the effect of that experience is playing out differently in each one of us.

Is it any wonder we feel even more fragmented as a society?

The pandemic you had may not be the pandemic I had.

March 2020 brought life as we knew it to a halt. The commute disappeared. The calendar emptied. Time stretched out in ways that were both disorienting and, for some, unexpectedly clarifying. People baked bread. People took walks. People sat with themselves in ways they hadn't in years, if ever.

Not everyone had that pandemic experience.  For some, the pandemic accelerated life. Front line workers were asked to continue to show up to support their communities. And corporate America quickly adapted their meetings to virtual platforms. Bedroom corners were the new office cubicles.

My pandemic also looked different. How about yours?

I was leading Ignite 360, a qualitative research firm, and the work didn't stop. It felt like we went into overdrive. I was on Zoom calls from eight in the morning until six at night, meeting with colleagues, clients and counterparts in the industry as we figured out how to keep the company alive, solving the problems of how to do empathy-building deep learning from a remote desk without sacrificing the quality we were known for.

I was getting 1,500 steps in each day, which reflected the repeated trips between my desk and the kitchen and the occasional pit-stop in the mid-point bathroom.

And I launched Navigating to a New Normal — a longitudinal study in which our team conducted ongoing interviews with everyday Americans throughout the pandemic and beyond, tracking how people were coping, changing, adapting to the world around them. Six years in, that study is still running under Dig Insights, who acquired Ignite 360 in 2024.

Those weekly interviews kept me sane. They gave me perspective on what was happening to people across the country, unfiltered and unedited. Together we processed what was happening to them which in turn helped me process what I was experiencing.

What kept you grounded during those first months of lockdown?

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The word that keeps coming to me is uncertainty.

Not just the uncertainty of those early weeks and months; “is this airborne, how long does it last on surfaces, what exactly is a close contact?” but a deeper, lasting uncertainty that settled into our nervous systems and hasn't fully left.

Life upended in an instant. And then it kept upending. Rules that changed. Guidance that contradicted itself. Leaders who asked us to do things and other leaders who told us those things were overreach. Neighbors who were careful and neighbors who weren't. The definition of “careful” or “risky behavior” during the pandemic were debated.

We were often surprised at the reactions of people we thought we knew, persuaded by content, to act in ways opposite of our own. The familiar became foreign.

And all of that layered on top of a political era of chaos that didn't end when the restrictions did.

Did we ever resolve that sense of uncertainty and the emotions that it brings up? This pandemic-era piece from Greater Good on coping with uncertainty remains relevant.

I am particularly struck and inspired by this line: “The opposite of uncertainty isn’t certainty; it’s presence.”

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“How did the pandemic change your life?”

I’m fascinated by the answers to this question. There are at least 128 million of them. That’s what happens when an existential crisis is presented to everyone all at once.

We moved forward. But we didn't return to normal. We evolved into something new.

For some, life changed so significantly — new homes, new families, new careers — that the before-times feel unrecognizable. I’ve heard of family rifts that have yet to mend and may never heal. Some took careers in new directions. For others, certain behaviors stuck in ways that still surprise them: heightened awareness of germs, a hesitance to commit to travel plans, a preference for staying home that they didn't have before.

And still others find it hard to point to anything that changed. Their lives look the same on the outside today as they did in 2019.

All of it is valid. All of it is real. For the 128 million households that lived through the pandemic.

So, what changed in your life?

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There is loss here. It deserves to be named.

Some of us lost people. People who were in our lives who are no longer here. That loss of 1.24 million people (and counting) in the US to Covid-19 is woven into this anniversary in ways that don't require elaboration.

But there is another kind of loss that is harder to articulate. The loss of a version of ourselves. Of a past life that existed before March 2020. Of a way of moving through the world that we didn't know we'd miss until it was gone.

You can't grieve what you can't name. So let me try to name it:

We lost the assumption of continuity. The quiet confidence that next month would more or less resemble this month. That plans could be made and kept. That the world was, if not safe, at least reasonably predictable. There was a certain stability to our lives that we could rely on.

And we haven't fully gotten that back. Some of us have made peace with not getting it back. Others are still waiting for the feeling to return.

And still others may not yet realize it was gone in the first place.

There were 128 million households after all.

I am somewhere in the middle. It depends on the day and my mood. And I'm learning that might be okay.

---

On letting go — the second ending.

This month, I began transitioning away from moderating on the Navigating to a New Normal project.

Six years of conversations with everyday Americans about how they were coping. Six years of sitting with their stories, their fears, their resilience, their contradictions. It was, in a very real way, my lifeline during the pandemic — a way of making sense of something enormous by listening to the people living through it alongside me.

I held onto it fiercely. More fiercely than was always rational. When my leadership team would suggest we pull back, I would get emotional. I wasn't just protecting a research program. I was protecting something that protected me.

Now, as part of the transition to Dig Insights, I am letting it go. With complicated feelings. With gratitude. With the recognition that transitions require release.

This, for me, is a second ending of the pandemic. And I’m still figuring out how to honor it.

What might you be holding onto from the pandemic-era that could be released?

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It's worth noting that this issue lands near the Spring Equinox. It’s the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere, and the start of Aries season for those of you who pay attention to such things. There's something fitting about that.  The dark and light are equal at Spring Equinox, and from here the light grows. The pandemic didn't end cleanly and our healing won't either. But the season is turning. That counts for something.

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The Guinness that waited.

I want to tell you about a bottle of Guinness.

I first made Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Guinness Cake in February 2025. It was extraordinary. Dense and moist and intensely chocolatey, with a richer depth from the stout and a cream cheese frosting that Nigella decorated in her cookbook photography to look like the pale head on a freshly poured pint. I wanted to make it again almost immediately.

Then, a couple months later, I broke my kneecap. My niece was visiting to help with my recovery and more than ready to help in the kitchen.  We bought some Guinness, tucking it downstairs waiting for its purpose. But I couldn't muster the energy to be in the kitchen and coach her through the recipe. So, the Guinness stayed downstairs. Waiting.

This past week, I finally made the cake again.

St. Patrick's Day. My yoga instructor Katy came to the house. She and my husband Charles and I sat together after yoga and each had a slice. There were "oh my god that's good" reactions. There may have even been a second slice for some of us. The cake is dense and rich enough that a little goes a long way but the “musty” must-have-some-more feeling is hard to resist.

Baking is one of the pleasures of my life. Not just the outcome, the warm thing that comes out of the oven and makes the people you love say oh my god, but the process. When I bake, my brain settles into a kind of focused presence. Thoughts float through. I'm not actively solving anything. I'm just making something. Researchers would call it a flow state. The part of the brain that ruminates gets quiet. New ideas surface. It's more reflective than analytical.

I didn't get to bake sourdough bread in 2020 like everyone else. I finally made a crusty artisan bread in fall 2023, when I stepped back from the CEO role at Ignite 360 and gave myself time to exhale. By then, three years had passed. I didn't have FOMO exactly. I just knew I had missed something.

The Chocolate Guinness Cake, on St. Patrick's Day 2026, was not about catching up. It was about presence. It was about finally having the energy and the space and the right moment to connect. It was about the Guinness that waited patiently in the garage, the friend coming over, and the pleasure of making something beautiful with your hands and sharing it with people you love.

My pandemic may not be completely over in a psychological sense. But that bottle of Guinness with some sugar, flour, chocolate and a warm oven are a pretty good place to start.

(Want to make it yourself? Here's Nigella's recipe: Chocolate Guinness Cake

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Before we close — two quick things.

If the uncertainty of this pandemic reflection feels familiar in other parts of your life, I'd point you back to our recent issue on coping with the news cycle. The tools in that piece apply here too.

And I keep hearing from people about the micromanager having empathy piece in the last issue. Private messages. Quiet acknowledgments. One person, when I suggested they share it with someone who might need it, replied — jokingly, but not — "To all of corporate America?"

Exactly.

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A reflection for you — six questions to sit with:

You don't have to answer these out loud. You don't have to share them. But sit with them. That's where the healing starts.

1. What word would you use to describe what you're still carrying from the pandemic?

2. What did you lose? A person, habit, assumption, maybe a version of yourself, that you haven't fully grieved?

3. What behavior changed for you during that time that you're glad stuck?

4. What is something like a small pleasure, a ritual, a thing you've been meaning to do, that's been waiting patiently, like that bottle of Guinness?

5. Think of something that you’ve been holding onto. What would it mean for you to let it go?

6. What is one small thing, entirely within your control, that you could do this week that would feel like an act of presence rather than catching up on a to do list?

And then, do the thing.

Uncertainty thrives in the abstract. It lives in the space between what we know and what we can't predict, and it grows when we stay in our heads. One of the most reliable ways to quiet it, even briefly, is to do something tangible. Something with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Bake something. Plant something. Write one page. Call someone you've been meaning to call. Take a walk somewhere you've never been. Make the thing you've been putting off until the perfect moment. That right moment is now.

The nervous system responds to completion. Give it one this week. 

Until next time — Stay curious. Ask good questions. Let empathy follow.

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