Death To 2020.
Halfway through this year, I started writing out this post, all the way back in June I was thinking about how I felt about this year, and everything that had happened up until that point. Since that point so much more has happened I feel like another whole year has passed, and yet it still feels like no time at all. Halloween came and went, Thanksgiving passed like a ship in the night, and to be honest despite it being December 30th at the time of writing, I still feel like I’m waiting for Christmas. 2020 for all its downs and further downs has been a year like no other, and for better or worse the world is a different place now than it was back in January, in dramatic fashion. For better or for worse, I am a different person than I was back in January. To kick off the decade we were left with a year that felt like a decade unto itself. In an attempt to summarize my feelings for the year, I’ve split 2020 into four unequal halves, because to me their experience was so distinct and separate it’s almost impossible for me to link them together. The breakdown goes January 1st to March 13th; the predemic, March 13th to July 15th; wave one, July 15th to August 31st the Sisyphean climb, and finally August 31st to December 31st, the tidal wave. Each of these time periods felt so completely separate from each other, and each one turned instantly to the next without any warning or mounting action. I slept, and when I woke my perception of the world had completely changed. No other year has ever felt like this. To start, lets kick off with the predemic.
January 1st - March 13th.
To be completely honest I don’t like to think about the beginning of the year too much, it hurts deep in my heart to think about what could have been, and the road I was on before everything fell apart, like a paper boat dropped into a waterfall. I started this year incredibly positively, I took my resolutions more seriously than I ever had before and approached the road to self-improvement with an understanding of the monumental effort it required. I didn’t expect results immediately, and as a result, I kept with a regular exercise routine for longer than I ever had before and felt myself gaining momentum as I went from one positive day to the next. I walked every day, gave a strong effort to eat better, and push through moving forwards towards greater heights. Last December was rock bottom for me, even with the pandemic nothing ever quite hit the level I was at 12 months ago. January was a massive turning point for me, and moving into February I had such high hopes for the year.
February was when the news of COVID-19 appearing in China finally hit, but it seemed so far away and inconsequential. As a global citizen my heart went out to the people affected, but I didn’t think it would become much of a problem, it would just be another unfortunate event I had no control over. I didn’t think about it much, if at all in February. I never thought it would really affect me, to be honest, By the time March hit I felt the pressure rising, and I realized it wasn’t just going to affect me but it was already changing things. The toilet paper crisis, the grocery stores being picked clean (still a wild response to me btw, there are so many other things you could do to prep for a pandemic), but the world still moved on like it normally did. I still took the bus to work, I sat there with no mask on drinking coffee as I went to and from work. Even so, I could feel the world changing around me. Spring didn’t feel as warm as it usually did, the sun didn’t feel as warm against my skin as it used to. There was a chill in my heart, and a mounting dread rising in my throat. March 10th I turned 24, my dad and I went out for lunch, he bought me some books from a used bookstore, and I had dinner with my grandparents, 91 and 87 at the time. The only thing I could think about during that meal was whether or not I was a carrier. Whether or not I just killed my grandparents during my birthday dinner. Two days later my now ex-roommate got sick with what was probably just a bad cold but presented with covid-like symptoms. I couldn’t stop thinking about how long he had been sick before symptoms presented, about whether or not I actually was sick when I sat down with my grandparents. I called into work that day to take the day off and by the end of the day, I got the call letting me know not to come into work the next day because the entire company shut down its retail locations. When I woke up on the 13th of March, every ounce of momentum I’d built up over the past two months broke away as I crashed into the surf of the first wave.
It’s difficult to even remember how that world used to be, and how it felt to live in it. I walked outside without a mask, I would take my notebooks down to a coffee shop, and spend hours sitting and working without lingering guilt of taking up capacity or closed seating altogether. My daily life operated so much differently than it does now, I didn’t get anxious from crowds of people walking around downtown, I didn’t have to step into the road to let the person pass me on the sidewalk, I didn’t have to feel guilty drinking water in public. I took for granted so much of that time, and I think as a result of that I don’t remember anything significant about that time. That period of time was the most positive of the year but I can’t remember a single thing besides a feeling of mounting dread. The dread that blossomed into one of the most anxious and self-destructive years I’ve ever had, while simultaneously being the year of the most significant personal growth.
March 13th - July 15th
Wave one to me was a roller coaster. I saw some of the shittiest people in the world showcased on the world stage, and while the world felt like it was ending I also saw some of the most dramatic change for the good. Without the monotony of work, it felt like the western world shook itself awake, and in a massive swing took to the streets and fought against it’s oppression. The deaths of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and countless others became a heartbeat, which turned into blood pumping through the streets of US cities. I spoke my piece on this earlier in the year, and I won’t go back into great detail right now, but to me, it felt like blinders had been removed from a people who’d been forced to march, and without the daily capitalist grind had the energy now to make themselves known to the people who’d kept them low for so long. The BLM movement is the first thing that gave me genuine hope for the future, that at the end of this tunnel there was a world where we could continue to fight and push for equality and equity. I felt proud to be living in the same world as those people, even though it’s been largely underserved on my part. I wanted to become someone like that, a person who fought for the wellbeing of themselves and everyone around them. A person who didn’t wait to be given something but took what they deserved.
It was at this point I also started to wonder what my community was. Every single piece of me feels disparate and oblique, like a picasso poorly recreated by a high school art student. Pieces of me just never fit, and I started to wonder where my flag was planted, and what I would rally with as the world steadily stumbles along. Time alone, out of the public helped me a lot in this, giving me an understanding of myself separate from the fears I carried with me about how I would be perceived. I experimented with my identity, and came to terms with a truth I’d known deep in my heart for years. I am not a cis man. How deep that rabbit hole goes I’m not entirely sure, but I became more comfortable with the idea of being trans (enby) and took a massive step forward in coming out to my sister and mom about it. Granted I still have some hangups about my relationship with my parents even 9 months apart couldn’t quite solve, but I made a choice entirely for myself, and followed through with it regardless of their opinions, and my fear of their judgement, and I take great pride in that. I broke a lot of doors down inside my mind this year, and I am a healthier and more capable person because of it. Sometimes it feels like I lost a part of myself during those months locked away, like a snake shedding it’s skin I excised a worthless knot of emotions from my heart, and it made me feel lighter than I’d ever been. I can still feel the other tumors eating away at me, but I know at least its one less thing that will eventually spell my death.
It was near the end of the june I started to get my momentum back. I’d taken up walking as a hobby, going on 3+ hour walks every day just to pass the time and I felt healthier and fitter than ever. I felt like those resolutions I’d made back in January had come back to me, and I felt more positive about my future than I’d ever been. I was out of the “closet” so to speak, I’d come to better understand my gender and myself, and it seemed like nothing could crush me like 2019 did.
July 15th - August 31st
This part of the year is the shortest, but also for some reason the most nonsensical. I got the call to come back to work on July 15th, and was told to either accept my position back with the company or quit. It was at that exact moment it felt like the oven timer dinged and every little ingredient I’ve been adding to my heart over the course of the year had been freshly baked into an utter and all consuming disgust with capitalism. I despise uniformity, corporate language, buzzwords, profit over people, everything that these large corporations are is poison to me, and I was forced to either return to work, or lose my job entirely without severance (because I would be forced to quit instead of being fired) in the middle of a pandemic. I would be jobless, and 4 weeks away from losing my government subsidy, forcing me to find work in a world where businesses were already closing down left and right. I would not have a roommate, nor any semblance of hope towards paying rent or bills come September. For all intents and purposes, I wasn’t given a choice at all, I was enlisted back to the service of my employer. I felt like a hostage.
If it weren’t for the genuinely kind and wonderful people I work with I’d have left that place long ago, but I stayed for them, and in the end I kept staying for them too. They made working for that company bearable. In my heart though I know I can’t continue like this, I can’t work in retail, I can’t work in economics, I can’t work for a company or a corporation, I can’t stomach the thought of losing my individuality in the service of a faceless monument to greed and self-entitlement. During that month and a half back at work for the first time, I felt my entire perspective on work shift, and I solidified my resolve to move into self-employment and freelance work. This also was the month I got rejected on my application for freelance work (for the second time the fuck’s up with that). I felt truly at the mercy of my employer for the first time, not only was my livelihood completely up to their nonsensical whims but my health, and the health of my friends and family. I stopped being able to visit my parents now that I was back at work, I couldn’t see my friends, and the only people I could talk to about my experiences were my coworkers. It almost felt like a vague attempt at corporate indoctrination. My entire social circle shrank to the size of my 6 co-workers. Thank god for my friend’s discord or else I would have swan dived off the side of my apartment building.
August 31st - December 31st
This segment was by far the most negative of the 4, on a personal level. The two year period between September and December was like the slow crashing of a wave that had long since blotted out the sun. It was a war of attrition between my ever failing mental health and the slow march of christmas retail during a pandemic. It was at this point that I truly understood the sheer idiocy of the general population, and the realization of how skewed people’s perception is, both of what it means to work retail, and how to effectively comport yourself in a pandemic situation.
The sheer number of people who refused to wear masks in the store was staggering. The people who would fight tooth and nail with us after our store made masks mandatory, how they would fight even when the PROVINCE made them mandatory. I had someone come into the store NEW YEARS EVE, refusing to wear a mask. It became a hopeless slog through a stagnant swamp of negativity, every day facing me like a wall I was forced to climb over just to survive each day. It was in the middle of that I was forced to find a roommate due to personal issues, a process which I needed to have finished by the end of October, and it took me until the last week of November. I was forced to max out my credit card to pay bills, which turned into a credit debt I have no hope of paying off, and although I did succeed in finding a roommate I was left with lingering financial stress on top of the everyday stresses of retail work in a global health crisis.
This period of time truly felt corrosive. Every second that passed ate away at my, gnawing it’s way through my bones, eating away at my brain. It became harder to do anything besides work and sleep. Spending time with friends felt like a chore, I found myself unable to cook or clean, resorting to buying food more frequently, spiraling my pre-existing financial crisis. On top of everything the people I meet would still try to act as if Covid wasn’t even an issue, that it was just “another flu” it was “less deadly” than other viruses’ so why even get so uptight about it. Meanwhile I was forced to wear a mask uninterrupted for 9 hours a day and smile knowingly at each person who complained jovially about “how hard it is to wear these things all the time”. Resentment grew like a vile weed in my heart, and I got really good at faking a smile with my eyes while I grimaced in the privacy of my fabric safeguard.
This period of time made me lose my faith and my hope. The pandemic seemed never ending, it felt as if it would never go away, while so many people refused to take it seriously, refused to take even the most basic health precautions. Refused to stay home. People kept bringing groups of children into the mall, babies in strollers who were unable to wear a mask at all were wheeled around in a crowded indoor area as though they weren’t already at high risk for Covid. The anger at the steadily decreasing store capacity, the constant line ups, the angry customers, the passive aggression from every other person I let in. It really didn’t end. People started to feel wretched. I’m thankful in the new year hopefully there will be less rush, less crowds, and although people will be just as ignorant and vile as before at least there will be less of them.
Overall I think the year was, well, not very good. Although it wasn’t my personal worst year, it didn’t do any favors for our collective unconscious, and may very well be considered the worst overall year in recent memory. In an effort to see the silver lining though I want to try and focus on the positive things this year gave us. The lockdown was hard, but for a lot of people it was a period of self-reflection and understanding, it encouraged people to understand themselves, and in doing so we might see our compassion as a people rise in time. So many options were developed to encourage working and learning from home, which will be a long time service for people who otherwise couldn’t learn or work. The steady downfall of american democracy was finally revealed, people grew less disillusioned about the 2 party system the US employs, and there is a potential political revolution in the next few decades. Donald Trump was finally given the boot, and although Biden is a terror in his own way we at least took an ambling shuffle in the right direction, collectively. And in maybe the brightest point of the year, they cancelled the Oscars so we don’t have to deal with that bullshit at least till next year.
I don’t think this year was entirely negative. The bright spots are so easy to forget, because the rest of the tapestry is such an endless void, but it’s important to remember how bright those spots were. I’m sure there are things in your lives you would consider a highlight, if you gave yourself a moment to think about how many good things actually happened in the last twelve months. I may be a more sour and bitter person than I used to be, but if I changed before, I can do it again, and I don’t need a global crisis to do it. I believe we are all able to improve ourselves, even if just in small ways, through our own will and perception of ourselves, and if there’s one thing 2020 did for us is it gave us some time to stand in front of the mirror.
When you see that reflection, how different are you now?
When you see your reflection at the end of 2021, how different will you be then?
Change is coming.
Happy 2021.