Falling Up

E, P, O, R, V, D, I. Seven innocent letters that have become my Waterloo, my white whale, my uncrackable safe containing either enlightenment or madness. Or both. Or neither.

Everything is fine. I am a reasonably intelligent person who once scored in the 82nd percentile on an online IQ test that may or may not have been designed to sell me nootropics.

Okay, look for the patterns. I have two vowels. E and O. Two out of seven letters are vowels. That’s roughly 28.57% vowel content, which feels suspiciously low. Is the word even English? Did my sadistic MAHA uncle slip me a Finnish word search again? Fuck!!

PERVOID is not a word but it absolutely should be. “The crushing emptiness I feel staring at these letters has left me PERVOID of hope.” See? Works perfectly.

I need to be more practical. DIPROVE. No, that’s not right. PORVIDE. No, that sounds like discount erectile dysfunction meds.

Wait, what if I’m overthinking this? What if it’s just DRIVE with a random P and O thrown in to confuse me? That would be so Merriam of Webster. Those dictionary elitists have had it out for me since I publicly declared “irregardless” a legitimate word at the last offsite.

823+ combinations later and you’re telling me PERVOID, DRIVEPO, PROVEDI, DIPOVER, RIDEOVP and even POVERID are all unacceptable to you??

Ooh PODERIV… now that sounds like a very obscure mathematical term. Wait, Google says it’s not? It’s apparently the name of a Bulgarian folk dance troupe.

Maybe if I sound them out? D-I-P-O-V-E-R. V-I-P-E-D-O-R. P-R-O-V-I-D-E.

Wait.

PROVIDE?

That’s… that’s a real word. PROVIDE. Holy shit. PROVIDE! I DID IT!

I just spent four hours and forty-three minutes figuring out the word PROVIDE. A word I use approximately twelve to fifteen times a day. A word my five-year-old niece could probably spell. A word I literally typed in an email reply this morning.

This is what my $42k in student loan debt has prepared me for. This is it.

I am a goddamn word puzzle genius.

Discover what happened next here. 👀