The Lost Year

It’s been a year. A year of being in the house. A year of nerves. One year, 365 days, 12 months & it moved so fast. 2020 felt like a lost year for me. I’m sure it felt like that for most people. Millions of people lost their jobs, their plan and their sanity. For me, when I look back on it I only emotionally accept 2019 which is long gone now. We can all say that it’s been a year of this chaos we have all become accustomed to but now what? 

Now, I return to collecting my thoughts, my emotions. Reclaim the life that I feel was snatched from me, from all of us. I never thought that something like this would happen so obviously I had no cognitive clue to its ramifications. Boy are there ramifications! The lack of social interaction is the biggest impact that I can honestly say I didn’t think would have affected me so much. I am a loner by nature and have been my entire life. I have always been good on my own, but that’s kinda by choice. The pandemic made that difference abundantly clear. 

When it was my choice to stay home and watch a new series or have a relaxing weekend in the house, it was my choice to do those things. Most of 2020 wasn’t about leisure, it was about life or death situations. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives due to covid so I didn’t think “ oh that can’t be me” I absolutely believed it could be. I can recall almost every single interaction I had in 2020 because it was that few and far between. Even now I am cautious but making plans to get vaccinated and on the road to calming my life back. 

2020 was hard. I went through a break-up days before the world shut down. I moved out of my apartment two weeks into the pandemic and my mom contracted covid. I was an emotional mess. Thankfully I had my sister and we leaned on each other a lot. I’m also very happy that her and I had a plan to move in together once her lease was up prior to the pandemic, so that helped take some pressure off the idea that we both could lose our job. Everything was so up in the air with where our world would be once this ended- If it would even end. I can say now that we’re well into 2021 and we landed on our feet just fine.

I’m not even gon hold you, I am still working on processing 2020 but I am at a very solid place right now. I feel like me again. I feel like there’s something to look forward to again. I don’t feel worried about what’s next. I’m getting back into the things I loved to do again. I no longer have CNN on 24 hours of my day. I am bringing back the positive energy that I had. I’m glad that I am fortunate to be able to say that. It is not lost on me how fortunate I am. I am blessed and I am so very grateful. Though 2020 felt like a fever dream, it was not most certainly not a dream. It was a tumultuous year for most of us. It’s important to make sure that I process it and then move on. As I always say, keep moving forward.