Hi everyone,
I was going to write my annual resolutions review post today. As I tried to dream up some novel things I might want to accomplish this year, an odd kind of futility was blocking my imagination and I fell into my somewhat annual ritual of reflecting on the year as a whole instead. It feels strange to be reflecting back on a year that seems, at least at this moment, accordioned in on itself to almost nothing. 2021 feels like the year that wasn't. While I dimly understand that a whole year of things happened, largely because the COVID-19 pandemic continues apace everything feels so brutally, numbly the same.
In fact, as I reread my posts closing 2020, I'm struck by the rawness of my grief, rage, despair, and powerlessness. I was so angry and bitter toward that miserable, traumatizing slog of a year. I was resisting it, refusing to accept how much had truly been lost. Yet even earlier on, after a month of two of COVID-19-induced isolation had passed, I sadly and resignedly acknowledged the possibility that all of those feelings could eventually congeal into a gray, heavy mass of bleary, plodding, blank acceptance--born from the ceaseless grind of unending deprivation--on a long enough timeline.
And here we are.
It's not that I've felt nothing all year. There have been big and small moments of sincere contentment, enjoyment, happiness, and even joy, as well as merciful opportunities to be with the people I love beyond my immediate tiny family. I'm just surprised and unsurprised all at once to watch myself arrive at this later stage of grief and processing, where the trauma is ongoing but I've managed to numb its acute agony by rotely proceeding through day after day after day of living around it, and by slowly mentally backing away from the magnitude of the horror we're all living through. It's stunning and disturbing seeing how repetition and the passage of time can make us accept brutally unacceptable things, in part because we just get too tired to think about its unacceptability all the time.
I can't help but wonder: What would I be feeling at this moment if the pandemic had finally ended? Would my reactions to the events of the past year have been more vibrant, or perhaps altogether different? How much broader would the emotional palette of my day-to-day life be if I finally had the world back? Will my richer spectrum of feelings grow back once the constant drudgery and constraint of the pandemic is gone, like a deadened garden coming back to life when it's no longer deprived of the sun?
Being who I am, my answers to those questions are optimistic. I still feel a quiet longing for what could have been, including those emotions that could have been. I know there are better times ahead, and that I will finally have the world back again. But sometimes I really do feel scared of the toll the pandemic has taken on me. The daily world I'm in is so small, I've almost forgotten that Husband and I live in the City Where We Met, and that is simply heartbreaking. Will it still bring me joy when I can go back into it again? Will I be so trained away from venturing out into it that I will forget to? I hope not, and I don't think so--it's just that so drastically losing contact with this place for so long is one of many losses I'm scared I won't properly recover from.
While there is so much cruelty in the brutal sameness of 2021, just like at the conclusion of 2020, when I again turn to the pictures I've taken throughout the year, I see that there is so much brightness that happened during the past 12 months.
There were vacations and delicious meals, holidays with our families, our wonderful pets, and Husband, my coparent and partner.
As in other years, wonderful things happened too: people I love got married and had children. Through an epic amount of planning and precaution-taking, I even attended two weddings and a bachelorette party at Disneyland--seemingly impossible indulgences that would not have even remotely been possible without Husband's commitment to taking care of our Child while I was away and while I quarantined afterward.
Because of his labor, I saw my brother get married as well as a dear friend, I saw my beloved best friend, my closest friends from college, and my family, I ate two servings of the best pasta Boston has to offer and caught up with our friends who make and serve it, and I got to remember how much I love rollercoasters and $7 churros. Truly--and we know how I feel about Disney--I had dreams about being at Disneyland after that trip, and they were sheer bliss. Those trips offered massive relief to the isolation of the last almost two years.
As always, in reviewing the photos from the past year, the extremely dominant subject is, as last year, my glorious, beautiful, sweet, happy Child: playing in snow for the first time and again right after Christmas, eating tiny bits of string cheese and later whole sticks of string cheese, going for walks through our neighborhood in his stroller backgrounded by beautiful greenery, tromping around our community pool on Tuesday mornings when no one else was using the baby pool, grabbing fistfuls of sand and seawater and learning to throw rocks on beautiful, bright beaches, seeing aunts, uncles, and grandparents and playing with a cousin, peacefully flipping through board books with the platonic ideal of upright posture.
And so the conclusion of 2021 is the same is 2020: I hope the focus these years have forced us into on the things that are most important to us remains long into the future. And I hope our recovery from the harm done by these years only enables us all to grow stronger, happier, ands more vibrant than we ever were before.
Happy New Year.
{Heart}
No comments:
Post a Comment