Congratulations, 2020
Like most people, I am far more haunted by my failures than I am buoyed by my triumphs. The last month of the year is particularly hard for me in this respect — I usually spend the month of December in a sticky spiral of "what-ifs" and "I didn'ts," briefly blasted out by the light of holiday celebrations and culminating in a dark slide into a a hedonistic New Year's Eve. I wake up on January 1, my body and brain battered, and feel hopeful once more.
But this is 2020. A year wherein the divide between tax brackets, political factions, and "before" and "after" grew so wide and so deep that staying out of it seemed like a full-time job. First, there are the deaths and the catastrophic illnesses. And then there are our psyches, which is the only thing I'm even remotely qualified to comment on. I haven't formally studied the human mind since a Psych 101 class in the 90s but my father — who died in 2015 and was therefore spared both the Trump presidency and COVID — more than once told me I was the most introspective person he'd ever met.
So from deep inside my psychic year-end hole, I bring you congratulations. I bring you kudos for the things you've done, endured, and suffered, because it's the next best thing to being able to easily offer them to myself.
Congratulations on going to work every day, if that was an option. If you had to leave the house to do it, congratulations on your patience and fortitude in the face of sick people, inconsiderate people, people buried in bleakness and people who didn't give a damn about you. If you stayed home to do it, congratulations on getting out of bed and giving what you could to jobs that seemed theoretical sometimes, that maybe you loved before but hated this year or vice versa, on reinventing the wheel that you sometimes thought might just grind you down in new ways that you helped enable, on keeping the wheels going even when it felt like we were all running out of road. Congratulations on starting a new job at a time when work has a new meaning that no one can quite figure out.
If work was not an option, congratulations on surviving without it. Congratulations on making it through under worse circumstances than most, on asking for help when you could and even helping others, on enduring cruel bureaucracy that seemed set up to keep you from making ends meet, on finding ways to keep busy and alive, on feeding yourself and your loved ones and your soul.
Congratulations on staying in school. Congratulations on going to class through a screen, on doing homework as best as you could. Congratulations on holding your graduation party online.
Congratulations on all the things you made this year — not the things you didn't make that may violently vex as you try to drag yourself toward making them again — whether you built or wrote or drew them. Congratulations on your podcasts and radio shows, your daily diaries and personal essays, the songs you wrote and the ukulele covers you sent to faraway friends (even if those friends just felt far away) and the live sets you played for the internet, on your masks and dresses and quilts and scarves and furniture and cross-stitch samplers and, of course, your baked goods. Congratulations on growing your hair out, shaving your head, cutting your own bangs, and letting the grays come in.
Congratulations on taking care of your children, on educating them as best you could and keeping them entertained and fed and healthy. Congratulations on your patience with them, even if sometimes you had none. Congratulations on however normal you managed to keep their lives, and however much you felt like you could explain about what was happening to us all this year.
Congratulations on letting yourself feel and letting that feeling lead you to action. Congratulations on getting out in the streets to protest injustice when it felt even less safe than usual, on sending postcards and working the polls and making calls and talking to folks on the other side of the political divide even when it felt like that chasm was the deepest and darkest of all. Congratulations on voting and on getting other people to do so, even if it was just one.
Congratulations on surviving the loss of loved ones in a year when we could not hug each other, much less hold the hands of our sick friends and family. Their memories will live on with you just as they do in any other year. I beg you to try and focus on their lives and their love rather than the way in which they passed — trust me when I say that the latter way leads to madness. Congratulations on taking care of your partners, your children, your housemates, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your pets, and yourself. Congratulations on being honest with your loved ones about who you’d seen and how safe you’d been (as if we were all in a big polyamorous relationship) and for staying home. A lot.
Congratulations on extending kindness to strangers, whether it be in the form of wearing a mask or — extra points! — aggressively smizing over the top of that mask, or giving a dollar for someone at an intersection or 100 dollars to a nonprofit.
Congratulations on what you learned, the languages and instruments and software and crafts. Congratulations on what you learned about yourself — the good and the bad, because both will serve you going forward. Congratulations on growing all those vegetables and flowers and doing all those jigsaw puzzles and discovering new favorite musical artists and crushing all those candies and doing all that Sudoku and reading all those books and watching all those movies and television shows because, as someone who understands the world through stories, I salute your taking in all of those narratives in the hope that they will assist you in shaping and reading your own.
Congratulations on meditating, on taking your meds, on your sobriety. Congratulations on doing absolutely nothing — lying around, unshowered, wallowing in sadness for hours or days — and then getting up again for however long you can. Congratulations on asking for help when you needed it, on starting or continuing therapy, on managing to sleep through the night sometimes.
Congratulations on adopting new pets, on having new babies, and on bringing sexy back in the midst of a decidedly unsexy year. Congratulations on staying connected through trivia nights and book club and reunions and birthday parties, even when doing so often felt like just going to another goddamn meeting.
Congratulations on keeping your house as clean as you could manage, on finding a place to sleep at night, on making new friends and reconnecting with old ones, on keeping the post office in business, on supporting small businesses, on giving things away and making your environs better however made sense to you. Congratulations on renewing your driver’s licence and paying parking tickets and filling out paperwork even though it felt like WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT? Congratulations on your workouts (Richard Simmons or crossfit or anything in between) and your yoga and your hikes and your walks and the tennis games with your roommate on empty courts. Congratulations on keeping up with current events and on turning your notifications off when it seemed necessary.
From my dark, haunted place to yours: Congratulations on making it through 2020.