I've been going through my phone off and on for the last week, clearing things out in preparation for an upgrade. I've had this phone for more than three years, and it's pretty much reached the end of its life.
For some reason, I saved this picture on New Year’s Day 2020:
I don’t know what led me to grab it. It was probably a cycle of insomnia compounded by holiday stress and travel. I had just driven back from Tennessee on a post-Christmas trip to visit my parents. Long road trips with kids aren't the picnic everybody tells you they are. (Nobody with kids actually tells you that.) I had also stopped smoking about a month and a half before, and my head was probably still pretty cloudy as the new year began. Do we ever really know what makes us impulsively screen-cap a picture in our feed and save it away for some occasion down the line?
Whatever the reason, the image ended up being a pretty good harbinger of what 2020 would be: Late nights and early mornings with my head spinning, searching for words to express something profound in the middle of personal and global crises.
Sometimes in the early hours we feel a lot of things: regret, loss, resolve, occasional hope. But we don't always match words to these feelings, and the result is a lot of emotive thought balloons that swirl around us, taunting us and making us uncomfortable.
Occasionally I manage to find words that form coherent expression, and I blink through drooping eyes and quickly type them into the notes in my phone before they’re gone. (Crap. That’s something else I need to clear out before I get rid of this thing.) Sometimes I fill in my thought bubbles with clarity. Things I want and need to say (but probably won’t). Great comebacks or quips that didn’t come quickly enough when I was talking to people earlier. Things I’ve been meaning to say to friends I haven’t seen in years.
Sometimes this helps me get back to sleep. But there’s always a squidgy swirl of restlessness that precedes it. The right words often elude us. 2020 was spent trying to find the right words and to use them to find purpose and direction in an unmoored year. In many ways, that’s continued into this year. We’re not quite out of this pandemic yet. I still have one more Pfizer shot until I feel comfortable (and responsible) venturing out into the world again. I hope I remember how to talk to people. Real people in the real world beyond work. I hope I start having things to talk about again.
Whatever happens during the day, though, I imagine the thought bubbles will probably continue at night. Words in the overnight hours are hazier and more elusive than they are during the day. But maybe that elusiveness will make them all the more welcome when they’re found.
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