I wrote it all down to ensure that I made progress, however steady. I checked in with myself three and six months later to realign. (For context, I was only in middle school at the time.) Instead of making promises to myself that I would “never go back to the way I was,” I started to set smaller, daily intentions and measurable goals. I bounced between spiritual high, disappointment, and guilt for years before I finally understood that my expectations for radical spirituality were unrealistic. While these lifelong commitments are positive and necessary, they’re easy to make when we’re immersed in a culture of change. Here’s to hoping that 2021 is our year: a year of recovery, of change, of intention. We now recognize statements like these as inappropriate and tone-deaf in truth, they always were. I heard more than a few people ring in 2020 saying, “this is my year.” Ironically, it was no one’s. We can no longer displace the blame on 2020, because our issues outlasted it. We find ourselves now in 2021, just one day older and few problems resolved. There was a sort of unspoken promise with 2020 that, when it passed, so too would our problems. In the delusion we constructed for ourselves, our problems could remain neatly intact and bound to 2020–a mentality that “2020 sucks” but that time always moves on. The world turned around the sun the same way that it always has, rotating and tilting with precision for, in 2020’s case, 366 days. It has been nice, if not cathartic, to place blame on 2020 for all of these issues, when in reality, 2020 had nothing to do with it. Fortunately by November, election results and hope of a vaccine slightly tempered the air of disunity in exchange for quiet holidays at home. The world, having suffered through isolation, was perfectly primed for the unrest and hate that came in the following months. The virus acted as the first domino to fall in a long line of other issues. The issues of 2020 were seemingly, even before we knew it, packaged neatly into a one-year-long debacle. I wondered why, when 2020 brought so many challenges, that I was almost sorry to see it go. While most of myself begged for 2021 to finally usher in, a small part remained hesitant. on December 31, 2020, under the influence of wine and tequila, I finally articulated a nagging feeling that I couldn’t shake.
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