A few years ago, Tumblr user theveryworstthing made a trilogy of comics comparing the transition of the New Year to a mage and a monster going through a cycle of killing the old monster and witnessing the rebirth of the new monster. It’s a strange and beautiful and poignant piece about living with hope in the face of a new beginning, even when the ending was so full of tragedy and heartache. I’ve been thinking a lot about it this year, about how the year 2020 would look if the artist made another installment, about the upcoming year after the striking year this one was.

Even without intense global strife, a lethal pandemic, increasingly overwhelming weather patterns brought on by climate change, and national escalation of violence and conflict, 2020 has been a rat bastard of a year. A real humdinger of a year. A Lucy pulling the football back from Charlie Brown at the last minute kind of year. The kind of year that eHarmony rightly paired with Satan in the single most genius marketing campaign I have ever seen (search on YouTube, it’s a riot).

It started out so promising, too. I had a writer’s group again that met regularly. Played D&D three nights a week. Started a new job with better pay and full-time hours that wasn’t such a drain on my emotional resources. I was off my meds but feeling alright about it.

Then my mom got cancer.

Then COVID-19 hit.

Then the job moved an hour away after a month.

Then I needed to be back on medications.

I tried to make it work. All of it. I socially distanced before it was mandated. I was able to keep working through the shutdown, but the amount I was spending on gas and wear and tear on my car was adding up. D&D moved fully virtual and went down to two nights. The writer’s group still talks, sometimes even about writing.

Summer hit and I was bowled over with the force of my suicidal thoughts (see Water Towers). I lost my “better” job and went back to childcare, trying to coordinate 20 children’s virtual school schedules and help with their homework. I started new medicines and then got back off a few months later. My upward trajectory saw me faceplanted back in the mud again like I’d been in January, like I’d been since college graduation and probably before that, too.

Now I have joint pains I certainly didn’t have at the beginning of this year. Grey hairs. More weight, thanks to a desk job combining with a medicine whose primary side effect is weight gain. Anxiety symptoms that come too close to mimicking COVID-19 symptoms for comfort. I am dealing with a brain fog and lack of focus that is seriously impacting my day-to-day and is easier to shrug off to others as not paying attention or spacing out or just not caring. Even just in trying to write this post, just this single paragraph, I have stopped and picked up my phone or stared off into space at least three times and wasted fifteen minutes doing so. I just did it again. Two minutes of staring blankly at my window blinds, drawn shut like always.

Of course 2020 has given me some beautiful moments, because life is never one unending streak of grey. Living with my brother and sister-in-law and their baby daughter has given me a reason to get up in the morning and to keep hanging onto life; I measure my life by her unmet milestones and keep recordings of her giggles for my hardest days. I was making enough to buy myself a tablet and I’ve picked up drawing again for the first time since I was a kid making comics (I am not good, to be clear, but it’s refreshing to have something artistic that’s just for me, besides singing in the car). Mom’s aggressive cancer responded well to treatment and she’s cancer-free now. Family members who caught COVID-19 have recovered or are in the process of recovering. The daycare is difficult but provides me ample opportunity to both pay my bills and pursue what matters to me, on days where I have the energy, and might even give me the opportunity to pursue some options for higher learning and see if that’s a direction I even want to take.

I could detail a million sadnesses and a million happinesses from this year. I could be ambitious and have grand plans for the next, but until COVID-19 is no longer a thing we have to worry about spreading, I am not going to be overly optimistic. Just being alive at the end of this year is a pretty big accomplishment, especially for someone as depressed and weak and defeated as I feel.

So, some 2021 resolutions:

I am going to read books more. I don’t remember the last time I read books the way I did in school (probably before college, to be honest); the goal is to reach 12 books, one for each month, but the secret goal is 100 books in a year. We’ll see how close I get to that one. Maybe I’ll post a book report each month.

I am going to write more in preparation for going back to school. I listen to my youngest sibling talk about art and the secondhand excitement I get from that is infectious. Maybe I do only want to go back to school to escape the inevitable and put off my student loans and avoid adult life and so on and so forth, but it’s better than sitting where I am now and avoiding adult life. I want to contribute more to my own life than what I am doing right now. So. I’m going to write more. Starting with this blog. A post a month sounds doable, all told. And I’m still paying for it even though I haven’t used it, so might as well make that money count.

I am going to love my body more. I am going to take care of it when it hurts rather than cursing it for having limitations, and dress it in what feels good, and do my best to feed and exercise it more. But I won’t hate it for keeping me alive and I won’t deprive it or hurt it for not living up to what I think other people’s expectations of it are. The only expectations that matter are my own. Fat does not mean unhealthy and unhealthy does not mean unworthy.

Probably the hardest thing of all is going to be being kind to myself. I’m not going to make the leap to loving myself right now. Tolerating myself would be enough. Looking at myself and recognizing that I am not worthless would be enough. Recognizing that I live with an invisible disability and need to readjust my expectations for myself and learn better coping mechanisms would be enough. If you can’t run, you walk. If you can’t walk, you crawl. If you can’t crawl, you find somebody to carry you until you can. I have an amazing support system, so much better than so many other people with my same mental cocktail or worse configurations. And they wouldn’t be there if I wasn’t worth something to them, if I wasn’t worth supporting. This is hard to remember most days. It’s hard to remember that I am loved and worthy even if I never make it out of my parents’ house (God forbid, but…). No one is more bitterly disappointed in me than I am; the inference is, if the person most mad at me is me, but no one else is treating me as badly as I treat myself, maybe others aren’t so much mad and disappointed as they are worried and rooting for me. This is probably reaching a bit far but if people I love and trust and respect feel the same about me, there’s probably a reason and I should readjust my view of myself. Always a chance that I am delusional and nobody I talk to actually loves or respects me, but that would be one hell of a Truman Show moment, wouldn’t it? Besides…I don’t think the people in my life are liars or actors, or that my judge of character is that far off. So accepting that I am worthy to be in their lives it is. (Besides, if this is scripted, I need to have a word with the writers, this can’t be as entertaining as the network thought it would be and I have some great suggestions.)

In conclusion…2020 was a rough year. It was a stinky, hellish, horrible, Other Bad Adjectives Here year. I fear I’m tempting fate by writing this a few hours out from New Year’s. But. While I’m stuck in quarantine because my workplace is shut down over a COVID-19 outbreak…might as well indulge in some hope for the future. Like the comic with the monster and the rebirth, the year must end, and we must gear up with hope for the next one.