2020 is the Reason
…It was the catalyst to re-asses our lives.
I wrote this post earlier this year but it got lost in a publication queue and then fell off my radar. I think it still applies.
I don’t need to go into how bad 2020 was for everyone. I feel blessed to be able to write this without having lost someone close to me or having fallen ill myself. I’m fortunate I was able to work from home and hole myself up for much of last year in relative safety.
But we all know that physical safety and mental safety are different things. You can’t hole yourself away from fear, worry, or depression. Many people had to seek out care, support, or found other ways to cope. And for some of us, last year put a mirror in front of us with “what are you doing with your life?” plastered across our foreheads.
2021 is a different beast; our spring to a cold, dark winter. Tentative spring.
I’ve written about how I changed my entire writing genre — it happened organically as it became very difficult for me to write my happy, bubbly, or romantic stuff. I wasn’t in the mood for happy. So I’m a new kind of fiction writer now, starting over.
Where in 2020 I had picked up panic hobbying — stuff I’d always wanted to do and finally had the time, solitude, and a desperate need to escape reality — I quit several of those in early 2021. It had occurred to me that the sheer number of hobbies I’d taken up was, in itself, unhealthy.
I re-directed my energy. Where panic-baking had always been a coping mechanism, panic eating become an issue in 2020. By the end of the year I decided just to go ahead and start selling my baked goods online because for me, the baking is therapy. Selling the baked goods is self-care because at least I’m not eating them. Not all of them, anyway.
It seems lots of people are trying to do things they had only considered previously. Radical things. Scary things. New things. As bad as last year was, and it was truly horrible, many people can say their new path in life started because … COVID.
2020 put the age-old questions in stark relief with frightening clarity:
What are you doing with your life?
Are you headed in the right direction?
If today was your last day, would you have regrets?
What are you contributing to the world?
Are you even making the world a better place?
Are you being your authentic self?
Are you telling the people you love that you love them?
Are you grateful for every day?
Do you believe in a higher purpose?
Are you living or just surviving?
It’s impossible to think about moving on without thinking about the many people who were lost in 2020 and their families. Their grief can never be forgotten. It is because so many good people were lost that those of us blessed with another day have a moral obligation to try to find the answer to these questions, and become the people we were meant to be.
I’m freelance writing these days. Visit me at exploringmyhappy(dot)com or shoot me an email at admin(at)exploringmyhappy(dot)com.