Tag Archives: year in review

2019 Sucked, Here’s to 2020

Posted on by
Reply
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”

To Be Open and Honest

Posted on by

A lot of my friends write long, thoughtful “year-in-review” letters to send to all their friends and family around Christmas or New Year’s. I’ve never entirely understood this, and I’ve often wondered if it’s a midwest thing (having gone to high school and undergrad in Kansas City, most of my friends are from the midwest). No one in my immediate or extended family has ever done this in my entire life, and it is something I had never been exposed to until my high school friends started doing it.

I don’t write these sorts of letters myself. Frankly, my life is not interesting enough to write about, and a lot of things that I would include in such a letter are not necessarily things I need/want everyone to know about. The friends/family that I feel comfortable sharing such information with already know.

But I sometimes wonder why I don’t share the bad things, the problems, the embarrassing bits more freely, like I see so many of my friends do online – whether it be twitter or facebook or a blog or whatever. There are a few reasons, of course. First, I have an extremely high capacity for embarrassment. The smallest things mortify me. Seeing other people do or say something embarrassing mortifies me. There are entire movies and tv shows I am physically incapable of watching because the second embarrassment is genuinely painful to me. So there’s that. There is also the problem, as always, of not wanting to share my problems for fear of being accused of whining, or of trying to garner pity, or some such thing. And on top of all that, I am constantly fighting the conflicting desires of wanting people to care while also not wanting them to worry.

For the most part, I don’t much care what strangers think of me. I can share thoughts and feelings anonymously on twitter or tumblr or where-ever without much concern. I can give talks at conferences without undue levels of terror (I mean, there’s always SOME terror, this is me after all), because I know I will never see most of these people again. But I balk at the idea of telling some of these things to people I really know, people I will have to face. Hell, half the time I cannot even stand the idea of letting a friend or colleague read something I wrote – no matter how much I trust that friend or colleague. The room full of conference attendees doesn’t matter. YOU all do. And so I cannot stand to face judgment, even the gentlest and kindest of judgments. Mine is a very fragile ego, all told. I have low self-esteem even on my best days. And let’s be honest, the last few years have not been my best days.

A few years ago, I started an anonymous blog for the expressed purpose of writing about my depression and my bad days. I very carefully avoided any possibility of my name being attached to it. Created a new email address for it, used no names, never mentioned it to a single friend, did not share links on social media. The people who found it, who found me there, were people who identified with the topics, the subject matter, the tags I used. I stopped posting there ages ago (abandoning a blog for not the first time). It’s still there though. I didn’t delete it. But no, I will not tell you what it was called or how to find it. There are still things on that blog I could never stand certain people to read. Ever.

All that being said, I have decided to try this again. This public blogging thing. Obviously. Being as open and honest I can stand to be.