Ah, 2020. A new decade full of possibilities. I think I can speak for most of us when I say we hoped that this year would be the one that inspired us to change our lives for the better. There's just something about entering into a new decade that makes anything seem possible. Or maybe that's my inner millennial talking. (We are a bunch of dreamers right?)
Like so many others, I started this year with goals and resolutions. I was going to start some of the projects I'd always thought about doing, but never did. I was going to go on vacations and take lots of professional looking photos for my travel blog. I was going to get fit and eat better because I don't want high cholesterol or blood pressure. I was going to finally start dating after years of flying solo. I was finally going to pay off my credit cards and really start saving money. And I was going to take the first steps towards buying my own place.
It started off well enough. In January, I joined a gym. I felt so official and motivated to work out. I had my vacation planned out and purchased that new camera I'd had my eye on for quite some time. I was working diligently on the travel blog and looking into healthier recipes to cook.
It didn't take long for things to begin a downhill descent.
I've never been the biggest professional basketball fan, but even I knew what a legend Kobe Bryant was. I remember watching some of the plane crash footage on a TV at the gym and thinking how sad it was for his family and for the world to lose him and his daughter. What a terrible way to end January.
Then everyone thought there would be a World War III. That is, if the murder hornets didn't get us first.
In probably mid-February while at the gym, I started hearing about the virus we now know as COVID-19 on the news. All I thought about at the time was how scary that was for China and for my co-worker's son who was living there. Then, when cases started rising in other countries like Italy and South Korea, I felt for them too. When we got our first case in the US, I still thought it would probably blow over soon.
Not six months earlier, my friend Courtney and I had gone to Washington, DC. We visited the Natural History Museum while in town and one specific exhibit we checked out was called Outbreak. It was about pandemics and widespread viruses. It was so easy to think that global pandemics were a thing of the past, even as one of the employees took us through an activity showing how easily a virus can spread.
Flash forward a few months and here we are, living this damn exhibit.
Much like the rest of the world, my life has been affected by Coronavirus. My vacation was postponed a year, my gym closed, other upcoming events I was looking forward to have been cancelled and I've had to spend a lot of quality time alone with my thoughts (never good). Although, complaining about my misfortune seems really selfish and stupid because ultimately my life is still pretty good.
I didn't lose my job or get my hours cut, I got to work from home for two months before being allowed back in the office. I haven't caught COVID, and neither has anyone close to me.
BUT... the isolation has really gotten to me. I've been forced to think about a lot of things I was trying hard to push back and, honestly, I've found myself feeling depressed and anxious instead of motivated like I hoped to be at the beginning of the year. What's stressing me out? Besides the possibility of getting COVID and giving it to my grandparents?
Well, I'm in my 30's now and facing the social stigma of being a loser because I live with my parents. And whereas a part of me wants to say 'screw you haters, I'm not wasting my money on rent', another part can't help but feel like I'm not a proper adult.
I've also managed to wrack up quite a bit of debt, and have virtually no savings. It always bugs me when older generations speak badly about millennials, but it bugs me more when I prove them right.
I've had a lot of time to think about my life as a whole (relationships... or lack there of, my job, my writing) and it's tended to make me feel worse as opposed to better.
And, over the past month, I've done a lot of self reflecting. In the past, it has been easy for me to ignore protests about racial injustice. It has been easy to pretend that racism isn't really a big problem anymore. But lately I, and a lot of other people I'm sure, have almost been forced to face reality. I've had to ask myself a lot of uncomfortable questions.
I've never considered myself to be a racist, though most people would say that, and I'm not sure how much weight it holds anymore. I can say that I haven't been very anti racist. I tend to ignore things that make me sad and that don't directly impact me. I like to live in a nice little bubble where everything is fine and people don't treat each other differently because of skin color or sexual orientation. But that's just not realistic.
I've been doing a lot more reading and listening than ever before. I've been having conversations with people about race. I've been facing my own shortcomings. And though it has not been a fun process, it has been a necessary one.
On the slightly brighter side of 2020, I have been somewhat productive during quarantine. I repainted my bedroom after years of thinking about it. Courtney and I started the YouTube channel we've been talking about for quite some time. I've been able to keep up with the travel blog and have worked a little bit on some of my stories (that I hope to turn into novels someday). I helped get ready for my brother's wedding and finished my to do list on time for once. I cleaned and decluttered. I completed two virtual race events, walking over 150 miles.
I list all of that because I know it's easy to lose the good among the bad sometimes. I try to remember the Lauren Alaina song Getting Good: "Once I learn to grow right where I'm planted, maybe that's when life starts getting good." It's easy to imagine that if you just had one more thing - a bigger house, love, money - that everything would be better. But sometimes you just have to learn to appreciate where you are now. To appreciate the things you do have instead of focusing on what you don't (really talking to myself here).
So thank you, 2020, you bitch, for being a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year (even in Australia)... and yet somehow bringing about good changes, both for the world and for me. It's definitely one for the books. And it's only half over.
