Beginning around mid-March last year, I stopped looking at my Facebook memories.
I used to look at them pretty often. As the years progress, it’s usually pretty fun to see where you’ve been. I used to like looking back at vacations and work milestones and random bullshit that happened from day to day in years past. But when I couldn’t travel, I didn’t want to see where I’d gone. When I (and hundreds of other talented people) got laid off, I didn’t particularly want to revisit day-to-day work reflections anymore.
The beginning of last year was difficult for a lot of reasons. I found out on my first week back to work in January that Hallmark was going to be laying off a lot of people, so that cast a pretty dark pall over the next couple months. (And that was before most of us knew the pandemic was going to be a big deal.) I was also going through some pretty excruciating personal stuff with a few close friendships and relationships, too. There were mounting personal and professional frustrations that just made me feel like I was in a purgatory that I didn’t ask for and didn’t particularly deserve. It was soul-sucking and paralyzing and debilitating. I felt stuck and frozen out in just about every way.
So as the months rolled along, I just stopped looking back. I thought things were going to go a certain way, and they didn’t. I didn’t need reminders of that.
Today, though, I took a quick look back at what I posted on New Year’s Day last year. And I laughed.
I love Neil Gaiman, and this really is a lovely wish/hope for the year. But combined with my caption, this post turned out to be a pretty clumsy mixed bag. We coped and survived, but we did not get on with living some sort of grand evolution of ourselves. We had madness, alright, but I can’t say it was particularly good.
But you know what? I did write. I made some art. I wrote a lot in the Spring and the Summer. In July, I got hired by a creative company that seems to appreciate and utilize what I can do. And I did a lot of writing for myself for the first time in years.
After last year, I’m not going to make some sort of grand statement as this year begins. I’m not going to hope for things that aren’t likely to happen, because there’s a lot that’s just out of my control. This year on New Year’s Day, I posted a dumb meme with a cute-ass New Year’s baby Yoda (you can’t make me call him Grogu), because that’s something safe that everybody loves and can agree on.
A-freaking-dorable, right? That’s about the extent of my well-wishes for a new year, though.
We’re two days into 2021, and things are already looking a little better than they did last year. We got a fresh snowfall in Missouri overnight on New Year’s Eve. On New Year's Day, I helped my kids and my neighbors make a mini-snowman. Today, I went sledding for a couple hours and watched my 6-year-old son ride down and walk up a huge hill about 30 times without slowing down at all. (I made about half of those trips myself, but that's still a lot of trips up a hill.)
As I settled in tonight, it occurred to me that I’m already 2 for 2 in 2021. We’re early yet, and there’s plenty of time for things to go to shit again. But this year has already started better than last year did. I feel valued. I stopped looking back at memories that all seemed to point nowhere. I honestly have no idea where this year is going to go. But after the way the last one went, maybe that’s for the best.
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