Epitome Anatomy: RENOVATION OF GRIEF AND VICTORY
EPISODE SUMMARY:
"It's time for renewal. Every time we are at a crossroads, we renovate, refresh, and reconsider things in our lives."
In this lively episode, Wish takes us on a reflective journey through the whirlwind of 2025. With themes of grief, victory, and renewal, Wish shares personal stories of renovation and resilience, reminding us that life is a series of renovations—both literal and metaphorical. As we bid farewell to the year, Wish encourages us to embrace change, find joy in the chaos, and look forward to the adventures of 2026. So grab your metaphorical toolbelt and get ready to renovate your soul with a dash of humour and a sprinkle of hope!
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MAIN TOPICS:
00:00 The Skewed Standards of Beauty
09:58 The Journey to Self-Acceptance
17:37 The Future of Beauty Standards
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Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (00:00.158)
the nostalgia of December's and end of years. 2025 just swished by at its most rapid pace with superlatives of emotions dug into our innermost values, opinions, mantras, and most especially what is important to our own souls. In line with this, I have a few reflections myself. Some story time review.
of this year perpendicular to our collective experiences altogether. The biggest themes of humanity this year perhaps are grief, renewal, destruction, and somewhat a dose of victory. Welcome to Human Thesaurus Presents Epitome Anatomy
My name is Wish and I talk about something. Somehow today set a word or phrases relevant from my life to yours. Ready for the epitome of grief and victory? Let's go! Our keywords are grief and victory. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary,
Grief is a deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement. While victory is a win, an instance of defeating an enemy or opponent. First known use of the word grief was from the 15th century. Its etymology is from Middle English. Okay, I may butcher this but I will say it anyway. Graf- Greef- Grifie?
Grief, means hardship, distress, hurt, anger, sorrow. Borrowed from Anglo-French greve, that means burden, molestation, wrong, hurt, hardship, calamity. While victory's first known use was in the 14th century, 100 years before the word grief emerged.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (02:20.32)
Victory's etymology is simply from Middle English Victoria from Anglo French from Latin Victoria from Victor
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (02:33.868)
I'm re-recording this at the airport right now on the way to New Zealand for our holidays. I didn't feel what I've recorded before and I feel like the salient points did not come across as properly as I wanted to. So here we are. I will do one story time for you just to kind of review the year that was, at least in my purview.
From December 2024, we started our renovation in Manila with our new apartment. It's from a very good foundational old building. It's either we're going to renovate it or we're going to just like paint it and just rent it. But we wanted it to be full on because, you know, this is an opportunity and it's easier to just do it in one go.
I've learned so much from this renovation. It finished last August. It was such a massive learning experience for me because this is our first time to build something like this. It tested a lot of my character. It pushed me to different extreme of emotions and this is coming from someone who retired in the past 6 years. So this became my full-time job altogether and it was so difficult.
There are lots of frustration. I think what's awesome about this part is when something fails, you always go back to the theme because we were very solid on what the theme was of the design of our apartment and the concept. If something falls over, then you can go back, you can recoup that by just going back to the theme. But you know, the biggest frustration here is working with
so many multiple people and suppliers. I just needed to overshare. So there's this one supplier, I think, at least this is the cabinetry supplier, and this is a luxury cabinetry supplier. And you would expect that if you're paying the most of your budget in one element of your renovation, you would at least expect the best service that you can ever get. Not just the quality of
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (04:57.538)
the supply of the manufacturing, but also the outmost quality of the people who serve you. As a client, I don't expect people to roll a red carpet for me or do something extra. I just wanted some form of professionalism. I'm also, in my mind, when I pay for services, when I pay for quality, I also pay for
the quality of work or of the service of that supplier. And I did not get that. Imagine this, you're paying a lot of money, the biggest part of your budget and they're fucking crap. Like, stupid. One mistake after another after another. At first, you know, one mistake, that's fine. And then when it comes to billing, they bill you right away. It's annoying. It was... I can't get over it.
to be honest with you, but it's... I haven't even given them a full-on feedback. But one of them has to be fired. It's that horrendous. I don't wish to inflict any pain or anyone losing their job for, you know, because of me. But in this case, it was so unprofessional, it was so idiotic. It's beyond belief that in a big reputable company like this that...
people are so fucking incompetent. It's crazy. So I think this is one of the biggest part of that experience for my renovation. It was so difficult, but at the end of the day, it was also fun because I've learned so much. I always love design and I always love the way it harmonizes everything and everything comes together. And even the technicality of everything as simple as
a glue or the tile and how it's done. I wanted to understand all of that and I did. It gave me, in this case, there's a certain grief every time you stumble upon incompetence or something that didn't work out. But you always pivot because you know you have a goal. When you have a goal, I think it's easier. When you have a milestone, I think it gets better when you encounter something that didn't work out.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (07:18.22)
Unfortunately, plans change, right? But you really needed to be flexible about it. that's part of the beautiful thing about this renovation. apart from my ramp, setting aside my ramp, there are also little wins throughout the wait. My designers, they're young, talented women and they were fantastic. And you can see where they could go from here. Yes, there were always some mistakes here and there, but
It's part of it, you know, it's part of being human. But learning together and learning from each other, I think it's very significant throughout this project. I was really happy in the end. My husband, most especially, was so, happy with the results. So in the end, after all of these, it was glorious. It was fantastic. And I'm always grateful that we get to do this. I'm so, so, so grateful.
Okay, let's circle back to grief. There were a lot of people who lost someone this year. I remember that feeling of that grief and how each individual has to cope with it. I always say when someone's going through a loss to take their time and nobody can ever tell them how to grieve because we all have to grieve differently and we all do. That's just a matter of fact. And when I say grief, there are different types of grief.
I'm just gonna name a few. Someone who passed on or death, it's a loss of life or letting go of people in your life and most of them have been really really precious to you. They mean a lot to you or they're your life, they're your blood, etc. There's also grief for ending a career. There's a poignant portion in that when you grieve for the
career that you loved but you have to let go. Again, it's part of my story but that's for another time. So all of these types of grief is always about the end of something. Like the meaning, right? It has something to do with bereavement. Grief is very personal, very unique to each person. Grief is something that takes time to heal and some of them never really heals completely. It's
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (09:42.936)
Just a matter of understanding the sadness, the loneliness, the loss that we have and how you move on with life having that heartache. As life goes on, we go through a lot of shit but we hopefully choose to rise above or at least we hope to rise above the heartache. There's a certain reward for that.
As we move on with life healing and understanding and having peace, making peace with whatever we're going through, at the end of that there's a certain victory that you earn. Victory for yourself. Again, it's all about winning, right? Like little wins, it's either. When you get through it, maybe there's less pain in your heart, less anger in your heart.
and you're more open to the world or it made you pivot to a different kind of lifestyle or a different choice and apparently it would have been better because all of these happen for a reason. And then I will just circle it back to renovating. So in life, I hope, I certainly hope that we all have a lot of renovation. We go through a lot of renovations in our lives. We reinvent.
It's time for renewal. Every time we were on a crossroads, we renovate, we refresh, and we reconsider things in our lives. Which path we're going to go to, what new decision we're going to have to make, because everything is all a matter of survival. We fight for ourselves. We fight for ourselves so that we can fight for others too. It means a lot. This poetic
renovation of grief and victory. It's a cyclical thing that happens in our lives and it's more about appreciating that part and also considering that not everything are in your control. All you can control is how you move past a disaster or a drama or
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (12:06.55)
or something that's really hard in your life. This year seems to show us that nothing really is permanent. Sometimes there's this golden era of something and then things change, but that's part of life. This season, I've opened up and ranted mostly about several things. Like I finally opened up about my IVF experience.
for several episodes of that. And also I discussed about the perpetual scenes of victimhood that really irks me about each individual would have our own unique verbal fingerprint that defines us as how we communicate to others. And also a lot of rants about social media stuff, my distaste for toxicity of influencing and
the beauty standards and all of these loss of history, loss of kindness and loss of consideration for other people or over consumption of content. All of these, there's always positive, there's always negative. It's all about how we choose what path we're going to take, what path we're going to understand and what path we're going to help with. Because sometimes if we feel helpless, like
In the grand scheme of things, you're a tiny pebble or you're a tiny pebble in the sand, in the sea of people. What do you do with all of these? You know, there are still dread in the coming years, but there are also exciting things happening. So sometimes we have to, I think nowadays you just needed to find the good news. Like it takes a lot of effort now to get into the good news.
than opening your app and there's always bad news. But I think it's worth the effort, you know. Whether you celebrate Christmas or something else or you're just gonna rest during the holidays, always remember that I think this is the time to renovate, refresh, to reconsider who you are.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (14:28.534)
and what you want it to be. It's just very symbolical. You can do your renewal at any time in your life. But I think this holiday season is always just a remembrance, a bookmark for all of us to reflect on something, for us to remember who we cherish and what are the important things in our life. So this new year...
I'm hopeful, I'm dreadful, well I'm dreading it as well. But New Year, 2026, should have more to give. We have to be realistic too. There will be a lot more happening and again that's beyond our control. At least for me, 2026 is hopeful and exciting. I've been working on it in the past few weeks because there is an element of renewal for me.
and for my little family unit. And I'm not gonna give that away just yet. So you wait till 2026. We're just going to have a repose and have fun in summer Christmas in New Zealand. And then the next chapter of our lives begin. Also, my season five will also begin by then. So for now, you can listen to my older episodes, my older seasons.
Maybe if you're bored, maybe you can listen to some of them and I would wish that this season will be something full of joy and full of food. Good food for you.
What do you think will happen in your 2026? I'm not gonna ask for goals because that's... that's overused. But what do you think? What do you think you wanted to do in 2026? What will be your theme? What would be something you look forward to or you dread to see in 2026? And at the same time, what did you renovate? What did you renovate in your life this year? How did 2025 go for you?
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (16:38.848)
So I'm gonna give myself a little rest and I'm gonna give you more news, more rants, more raves in 2026. So I'll see you in a few weeks and please watch out for season 5! Yay! Until next time, ciao!
Epitome Anatomy is created by me and Jeremiah Ronquillo. rights reserved via Wishblizz Media. Happy Holidays! Have an awesome, fantabulous, extraordinary and hopeful 2026!
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