Writing anything about 2020 feels superfluous and almost stupid, which is why I've avoided it for awhile (don't let the post date fool you. I wrote this in January and back dated it, because it's my blog and no one can stop me). It's also redundant and pointless to say that it was a terrible year for the world at large, and any attempts to summarize that feel at best reductive, at worst insulting. It sometimes makes me think something along the lines of "who cares how the suffering of the world affected me, who was, really, affected so little, circumstance wise at least, when real suffering was rampant everywhere?" So you see. It's quite an easy train of thought to paralyze you.
But of course, even when the world's suffering seems to matter so much more than our individual stories, our individual stories persist. And we must live them, and we must make sense of them. Or at least try to. Even if that, perhaps nonsensically, makes us feel a little selfish and self-absorbed.
If I must be self-absorbed, then, I would equate 2020 with my writing journey, because that was perhaps the brightest part of it for me. With how I wrote a novel in a month, edited it in weeks and then submitted it to an extremely competitive writing competition, which though I didn't "win," was extremely encouraging and transformative for me, because I got some really great feedback that encouraged me that I was doing something right, and, more than anything, that I wasn't fooling myself into thinking that I could be a good writer (in case you didn't know, this is the perpetual concern of any writer, which returns again and again, even when you are sure you've finally squashed it). The amount of emotional ups and downs that I went through with that competition, and even what came after it, is almost laughable. But it taught me so much. It strengthened me so much. And also gave me some new insecurities that I'm going to have to keep working through, because turns out the publishing industry is half maze, half minefield.
But anyway. That's on my 2020. As for the 2020 of the world, which we are all a part of that story, it's so heavy and such a mess that I do not know how to make sense of it. I don't know how to process it. I don't really know what to do with it other than to feel its weight and let it occasionally fill me with heaviness. And I don't really care if it does. I mean, I don't care about finding a different way to deal with it. It's okay to feel the hurt of it, even if it does feel too heavy sometimes. I don't think it matters, at least now, if I try to make sense of it. And I think that comes from me finding it all too real to try to get some grand lesson or something out of it. It's just hard and it's happening right now, and that's enough, and it feels disrespectful to try to make it into something when it's all still occurring as we speak.
So, that's what I have to say about 2020. Not much at all. 2021 though, is brand new, so I might allow myself a few thoughts about it. Like how it's filling us all with hope, even if it is of a delicate, cautious kind. Hope that change is in sight. That the bad stuff isn't permanent. That healing and restoration are on the horizon. And I'm so grateful for it. That there's always hope, even if it sometimes looks like only a crack of light from beneath a darkened door frame. But hope is hope. And even a little of it is incredibly powerful.
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