As I watch my partner hold the weight of everything this year has taken from his community, waking up every other day with yet more cases of police violence and brutality, hurting each time another black man is shot down for nothing. I can’t help but wonder at the sheer brute of this year. What a year. And it’s not even December yet.
The year started with losing Kobe, and a painfully long list of African Americans to an obvious system of racism, then, just two mornings ago, waking up to the news of Chadwick Boseman’s passing.
J’s pain is not marginalized for me but only amplified by the sheer chaos that seems to be erupting all around the world. It’s not just one pocket somewhere far away from us, it’s here, in our front yards, in your backyards, and in the collective garden of our human existence.
I am truly amazed by our ability as a species to adapt and persevere. I know that someday we’ll look back at this year and gasp at the thought of how we coped. Everything feels like it’s been taken right out of an apocalyptic bestseller. The only difference is that we’re living it. I’m baffled that all of this is real.
Locusts swarms somewhere in East Africa and in India, violence in Hong Kong, violence in India, protests in innumerable parts of this world, floods in Indonesia, floods in India, a volcano in the Philippines, earthquake in Turkey, civil unrest in America, waking up to visuals of Beirut jolted by something altogether frightening, and how can I forget the backdrop of this global pandemic that all of this has unfolded before. There is so much happening all at once in 2020, it’s becoming easier not to expect an end in sight and going with the flow of the year. What else is there to do?
2020 Vision
As 2019 began to slip away and the energy of the new year seemed to bubble over the horizon, I distinctly remember feeling like 2020 was about to be a breath of fresh air. 2020 Vision I said. Yes! 2020 vision. And that’s exactly what I’ve got. Me and the rest of the world really. Everything is so clear now but that doesn’t mean it easy to digest.
With unending allegations abound, from the elite sex trafficking ring to conspiracy theories around the Coronavirus; for me, the most painful revelation in all this madness has been the mind-boggling chasm that is now starkly visible between the rich and the poor. Things seem to be far too clear now, and I have to wonder if “going back to the way things were” is an option I’m okay with.
So many truths are making their way into our mind-space at surprising rates.
A Year of Loss
In many ways, 2020 has been a year of loss for all of us. We’ve lost icons this year. We’ve lost jobs, opportunities, some of our sovereignty, and for so many of us, we’ve lost a sense of control over our world, the coronavirus is causing a historic rise in mental health problems, not just in America, but around the world too, so it’s not just the pandemic we’re fighting, we’re fighting our own personal battles raging stronger than ever given the landscape of our current reality.
We’re living in fear, about the future, the state of the world, if it’s not the virus, it’s worrying about eviction, if it’s not that, it’s working overtime because we’re afraid of getting laid-off. It’s an endless wait for assistance from a partisan government that has the gall to go on recess while millions sleep at home with their lights cut out, or rent overdue. Yes, we’ve lost faith in our governments too.
And all of our many losses are going to have profound long-term effects on how we navigate within our world, with the undercurrents from the shock of how quickly our lives can change, directing the choices we make for a long time to come.
A Year of Gains
Before sitting down to write this article, I wasn’t sure I’d have much to say here. ‘A year of gains’ seems nowhere near what the year has felt like for so many us. But when I look at my life and the lives of my friends and family, there’s been a touch of magic in what we’ve gained in all of this loss.
I see my friends spend more time with their children today than they might have in all the years put together since their kids were born. I have watched in amazement as I went from prowling the internet for answers to my growing anxieties, to plunging deeper into myself and finding more depth in my experience of this world than I thought someone like me was capable of experiencing. And I’m not the only one, people around the world are taking this time to go within, in search of something unknown, and perhaps bigger than all of the flux in our world right now. Random acts of kindness all around the world have reinstilled my faith in humanity’s capacity for love and kindness.
We’ve dramatically learned lessons on how fragile life truly is, and how it can transform us for better or worse in a matter of seconds.
I for one, have learned how resilient we can be when pushed to the brink, I have learned to reach out in times of need and accept help when it seems like my options have run out. I have learned to love better, spending more time with my partner than our seven years together combined, has taught me so much about him, and if it was ever possible to love more fiercely, then I have learned what that love feels like too.
I’ve become a better friend, a better sister, and a better professional in the last six months, and strangely enough, I owe it all to the backdrop of this pandemic, and all the chaos erupting in the world today, it has brought me closer to myself and closer to everything I love.
So everything that has happed in 2020 (so far) has baffled, inspired, blown my mind, (insert more adjectives of your choice here), enough that I can safely say, I am no longer the person I was when this year started. The growth has been subtle, organic and an almost natural progression of my earthly experience. Who would’ve thought?
