Tag Archives: 2019

2019 Sucked, Here’s to 2020

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This meme (and the second near the end) were found floating around on Twitter. I have no idea who originated them.

In order to move forward being open and honest, I have to first look back a bit. Because the last handful of years have been increasingly difficult and painful.

At the end of 2018/beginning of 2019, I posted to Facebook a long explanation of exactly how bad 2018 had been (financial worries, family problems, crippling depression, being suicidal for months), and how badly I needed 2019 to be kinder and give me a break.

So, of course, 2019 decided to double-down instead. It said “you haven’t seen bad yet! Yeet, Bitch!” It sucker-punched me and then kicked me in the face repeatedly while I was prone on the ground.

I was begging for a break, for some mercy, but instead this is what my year looked like:

  1. my grandmother fell and fractured her spine in January and was in the hospital for a month
  2. My mother had a heart-scare in February and was in the hospital for a couple of days
  3. Also in February, one of our dogs escaped the yard and was hit by a car – he survived but my mother and I both had to take out a substantial loans to pay for his care
  4. In May, just days after her birthday, my mother was laid off from her job (keep in mind, I was already mostly-unemployed excepting for some part-time work and money was already very tight)
  5. In July one of our cats (my mother’s Baby Girl, Mieko) was diagnosed with cancer – after thousands of dollars worth or tests and early treatments, it was deemed untreatable
  6. In August, my grandmother (still recovering from the spine fracture, and already suffering from an auto-immune disease) was diagnosed with Parkinson’s
  7. In September, while caring for our dying cancer-stricken cat, one of our other cats (MY Baby Girl, Bobbi) died very suddenly of an aneurysm with no warning whatsoever
  8. In October, Mieko died
  9. In November, with my part-time job becoming more and more financially unstable and being unable to pay me consistently, I got a second job in hopes that I could eventually make it a FULL-time job — only to learn a couple weeks later than, actually, the store is closing at the end of January at which point its back to the drawing board.

Things were so rough at the end of there, that instead of saving the money my dad sent me for Christmas, I used it to buy Christmas gifts for others. The good news is that my mother finally has a job again, but having been financial unstable for so long, it will be months before we can crawl our way out of severe debt and back into something at least resembling manageable.

After 2016 was rough, and 2017 was a little worse, and 2018 was horrendous, and 2019 was an evil sadistic bitch, I feel tired and beat-up and hopeless. I’m afraid to even bother asking the universe for help anymore. It always responds by kicking me while I’m down.

But I keep telling myself I have to keep trying. Trying to keep myself together, trying to find more direction and purpose in life, trying to find more stable work. There are tiny glimmers of possibility here at the beginning of a brand new year and a brand new decade. I starting to read more again. I am trying to save money again (for the first time in years). I am looking at some possibly good part-time jobs (*fingers crossed*). But I am afraid to get my hopes up, so I guess we’ll see…

So here’s to the year 2020: may the world be a little kinder and more merciful this time around.

Most years (though not all), Neil Gaiman writes a new “Wishes for the New Year” on his blog that is encouraging and hopeful. He said he wasn’t going to do one this year, and then in the end couldn’t seem to help himself. The one he wrote for this year is a little different than the kind of thing he usually writes, but it seems fitting, so I’m going to end this post with his wish:

…I hope in the year to come you won’t burn. And I hope you won’t freeze. I hope you and your family will be safe, and walk freely in the world and that the place you live, if you have one, will  be there when you get back. I hope that, for all of us, in the year ahead, kindness will prevail and that gentleness and humanity and forgiveness will be there for us if and when we need them.

And may your New Year be happy, and may you be happy in it.

I hope you make something in the year to come you’ve always dreamed of making, and didn’t know if you could or not. But I bet you can. And I’m sure you will.

— Neil Gaiman, from “A New Year’s Thought”

My Favorite Books of 2019

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For a long time now – three or four or five years – I’ve been mostly unable to read due to a combination of severe depression, time constraints, and a touch of internet addiction. This has been excessively painful to me because books and reading is a very huge part of my identity. I have been a reader my whole life. In high school and through most of my undergrad, I could read somewhere around 4-6 books a month. That number grew smaller and smaller as I got further into grad school, and by 2015 I was reading practically zero.

I simply could not physically READ. Could not focus on the page, could not absorb the words, could not digest what I was seeing.

The thing that finally broke books back into my life, and frankly, SAVED my life, was audiobooks. I started “reading audiobooks off and on back in 2013 or 2014, but in 2019 they became my lifeline. After a years-long reading drought, I “read” 29 books in 2019 – mostly audiobooks, with a handful of ebooks and just a couple print books.

A lot of the books I read in 2019 were not new releases. They were older books I’d been planning to get to for years, but there were a few new releases in the mix. Out of all the books I read in 2019, here are my favorites in no particular order (some new, some not):

Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz (published 2000) – this book is the memoir/autobiography by Gene Kranz, the head flight director of NASA during the Apollo era flights who was immortalized in the movie Apollo 13 (as portrayed by Ed Harris). This book covers Gene Kranz’s experiences from his entrance into the space program in its earliest days during the Mercury era flights, all the way through his rise to becoming one of the head flight controllers, and his eventual retirement. It is an absolutely fascinating look into one of the greatest times in human history, which is both astounding and inspiring. Of course, I’m a huge space/NASA nerd, so I might be biased.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan (published 2018) – I am a huge fan of nonfiction books in general, and especially both biographies and books about science. This book is both – as Michael Pollan set out to write a well-researched book about the science of psychedelics and ended up writing about how personal life and experiences as well. Plus, as a person who has suffered from depression my entire life, I was especially fascinated by and invested in the topic of this book. To put it succinctly, this book blew my mind, and I have been recommending it to every person I know since I finished it.

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan Mcguire (published 2018) – this book is the third installment in Seanan McGuire’s series of novellas called The Wayward Children series. The first book, Every Heart a Doorway, remains one of my favorite books ever. And this, the third installment, is also absolutely fantastic. Seanan McGuire captures the breathless excitement, but also the pain, inherent in portal fantasies in ways that break my heart every time. She also always portrays diverse characters such as those who are LGBTQIA, PoC, and fat (*gasp*), with enormous sensitivity, humanity, compassion, and JOY. She has two more installments (so far) that I have not gotten to yet, but they are on the TBR list for this year.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (published 2019) – I love science fiction/fantasy novellas (like the aforementioned Wayward Children series, as well as such brilliant books as Binti and The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe) so I knew had to read this novella, especially after seeing such glowing reviews. I mean! An epistolary novel about two kickass women spies on opposite sides of a time war who accidentally fall in love? How could anyone in the world resist such a story?! This book is written with the kind of lush poetic language that cracks your ribs open and tears your heart out with so much tenderness and beauty you don’t even mind. I can only dream of writing like this. Everyone should read it. Period.

Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger (published 2019) – my favorite novel of the year, by far, was Steel Crow Saga – only Paul Krueger’s second novel in what is definitely going to be a long and glorious career. The tagline for this book was “Pokemon meets Avatar: the Last Airbender,” which was definitely the thing that first sold ME. And I can say that while the book definitely fits and lives up to this comparison, it is far more than just a mere mashup. Come for the cool pokemon-like animal-spirit partners, kickass fight scenes, and enormously hilarious snarky characters… stay for the deep, incisive, and insightful critiques of colonialism and imperialism, power and responsibility, family loyalty, guilt, and genuine atonement. Plus you get amazing LGBT characters, hilarious one-liners, a bunch of excessively nerdy anime/pop culture references, and gratuitous descriptions of adobo.

So that’s my top five favorite books I read in 2019. Not all newly published in 2019, but whatever…. *shrug*

If you’ve read any of these books, please tell me what you thought! And please feel free to share your personal favorites of 2019 in the comments! I’d love to hear what everyone else was reading last year, what touched your heart (or kicked in the face – in a good way!), what books I should have read and didn’t (I’m always looking for more books to add to the insanely-long TBR list!)