IT’S 2020: GET ME OUTTA HERE!
🚩 TW // 2020
Despite the title of this post, I’ve only watched one season of I’m a Celeb and all I remember is Gino D’Acampo in the “celebrity cyclone”, trying and failing against the rapids.
Not sure if I could find a better metaphor for 2020 if I tried.
I am not the first to say that 2020 kinda sucked. Y’know, to put it lightly. Between Australian forest fires, Polish women’s abortion rights being overruled, black people across the world being relentlessly subjected to institutional racism and police brutality, the almost World War Three with Iran , Donald Trump debating military action after the election because’s he’s a sore loser and garsh…I feel like I’m missing something here. It’s on the tip of my tongue…that’s gonna bother me the whole ride home…
You don’t need me to tell you how crap this year has been, just look at TIME magazine’s cover from the 14 December where TIME declares 2020 to officially be ‘the worst year ever’.
Need further proof? Look no further than Flo & Joan’s super funny, super sweary round-up of the year from hell.
Or just watch Charlie Brooker’s, the creator of Black Mirror, new mockumentary “Death to 2020” on Netflix, which frantically scowered for the comedy amongst all the darkness.
I could easily jump on the band wagon here and use this year’s round-up post to grumble and complain about how and why 2020 has been so terrible. I moved back home to a very picturesque if not a little lonely town and I dragged myself kicking and screaming through my degree whilst sitting at the kitchen table. I watched everyone spend their Lockdowns baking banana bread and exercising with Joe Wicks while I cried over human rights violations in Venezuela and french poems about lonely birds.
I moved away from my best friends in the world who I instinctively spent everyday with, gossiping over coffee ( and then wine ) . I have been lucky to see them once or even a handful of times this year but frankly, with the world the way it is, I have no idea when I am going to see them next.
If we’re talking about 2020 as a whole; all of the lives lost, all of the Lockdowns, all of the scandals and all of the disappointed hopes, it would be hard to disagree with you that this year has been anything other than the absolute worst.
But personally, I am determined to find a silver lining. No matter how thin a lining it may be. Now, I’ve never been the determined optimist. In fact, I have been called many things and that is yet to make the cut. I was born with worst case scenario as my default setting and I never bothered to change it. Yet that is one thing that 2020 has taught me or rather forced me into. More often that not, I find myself looking for that silver lining wherever I can and if it is too dark to find one, I make my own.
I’m not saying it’s as simple as that. Not only would you see right through me like a size zero body positive influencer but trying to convince you otherwise, doesn’t help anyone. That being said, there is something in the bleakest of times that brings out the best in people. Just look at Marcus Rashford, Captain Tom and countless communities across the country that have helped each other through, even when it felt like there was no glimmer of a silver lining to be found.
For me, it’s been habit. The worse everything got, past the point where you’ve officially declared that it cannot get any worse, I heard myself more and more saying: “at least we’re X and we’re Y / We’ve got to be grateful for A / We’re lucky that B ”. Sickening, right? That determined optimism is the last thing that a depressed person wants to hear. I should know but it’s a sickness that I can’t seem to shake.
Currently, I’m restricted to the house, as we all are, but I hope that one day soon, I will find myself in a coffee shop that’s not in my home town or where I work. Or I’ll be having dinner with my friends in a restuarant. Or in a cinema on god forbid a date. And if this is a place where I can share my dreams (and I like to think that it is) I will eventually get on a plane and fly somewhere far far away.
Coming into 2021, my life is my laptop and my third coffee in as many minutes. In other words, my life is my work. I could easily complain, and I have enough times, because work is hard especially with the amount of hours I am working at the minute. However, you might have already guessed. I wouldn’t change it for the world. Sure, I’d love an actual holiday but doing my course, tutoring, editing and writing pieces is exactly where I want to be in my life right now: occupied and fufilled. I can’t ask for much more than that. Scratch that- paid- I definitely want to be paid.
Back in March, I wrote a post about the 22 lessons I have learned in time for my 22nd birthday- what convenient timing of me. It’s not that these lessons are irrelevant now because some of them still apply to our current Lockdown existence but they almost feel like lessons for a simpler time. I acknowledged it then, stating:
“I can’t wait to see the new lessons that I will discover because as it says here, 22 lessons are not enough to cover a lifetime of growth and change. So, I have decided to commit here to adapt and add lessons as I go”.
I gave myself a span of five years to come to the conclusion that I hate blogs and that the life lessons in this post are “naive” and “stupid”. Little did I know that it would only take nine months for the world to completely turn upside down and for this book of lessons to be thrown out of the window.
Earlier this month, I was asked by YWCA Scotland to give a wrap up of 2020 — to condense the best and the worst moments, the things I had learned and the things I would rather forget — into a few brief sentences. If this was any other year…but it isn’t any other year, its 2020 and the year that many of us are determined to forget. And who would I be to blame you? It’s definitely been a year of pain and loss for so many people-wouldn’t we all choose to forget if we could?
There are always going to be moments that we will want to rewrite if we could. Yet, the more likely outcome is that instead of changing this year, 2020 is the year that will change us. It has been a year that has reframed our lives, the ways we communicated with one another, our relationship with the environment, with politics, with others and with ourselves.
2020 might be the year that we’d rather forget but that forgetting is the one thing we will never be able to do. This year was when I left Dundee, I left all my friends and and lost a lot of my independence. But this year is when I took my next steps into journalism and felt more purposeful than I have in a long time. In other words, we each will have highs and lows, achievements, disappointments and lessons that we need to take forward. Since, for better for worse, 2020 is one that will go down in history, or infamy- however you want to spin it. And we didn’t just read about it in a dusty textbook or passively take in an excruciatingly long documentary about it. We lived it, we breathed it and it’s our history, our story to tell.
In the pursuit of silver linings, I collected these golden moments this year. Thank you to everyone- friends and family- those pictured and those who are not that got me through the year that felt like it would never end.
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
