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Hindsight
Let's hear about your 2020... what have you learned? How are you different? Have your thought or opinions changed? In any form you like (except please, please, please, not the vertical one word at a time in a list of words, I have a brain injury and if it is one word at a time I can't ready it; makes me seasick) xo What came into your life that was good? What did you loose? Knowing we are just weeks away from another 'new year' does it change the way you think about another 'new start'? . For the sake of us all, no political centered posts, please. I have lost too many friends over such nonsense. . I think I may be more interested in I thought this years would be.... but instead it was..... . Juice for the the stories that make me happy, or perhaps opposite to that, a little better based on how disgustingly messed up my elated expectations and then the reality of what it has been.

Nothing New

All Ive learned this year is things never really change.

Ive hear this year refered to as the worst year in human history, the year everything fell apart, the year the world started ending. But is it?

This year sarted with me realizing I couldnt attend college. It felt like a shock at first, but is it? In eighth grade I wrote an essay for my english class about how going to college was an unnecessary and classist expense, and how I would never do it. Sure, eventually I got swindled into stressing about the Common App just like everyone else, but is it ultimately a shock to anyone that I didnt end up going?

Then Covid hit. To be honest, I wasnt shocked by it. Four years ago when Donald Trump got elected I saw a video where man stood on the street talking to Trump supporters and asked them if they would still vote for him if he stood on fifth avenue in broa daylight and shot someone. They all said yes. Now he may as well have lined up 200,000 people and shot them all, following thw shot by spitting on their dead bodies. And hee we are, days away from an election, new sureme court justice in tow, on the precipice of world war III and his cult following is holding their cup of Kool-Aid, knowing full well of the arsenic inside, and ready to down it like tequila. Diappointing? Maybe. Shocking? not a chance.

The the epidemic of protests, calls for revolution, and police violence. People saying things that made it seem like Donald Trump revolutionized racism - that Trump's America is some sort of breeding ground for violence. But this shit has been around. Police were born out of slave patrol. Literally formed to oppress, to keep in line, to marginalize. I could not be more simultaniously hearbroken and unphased by this call for revolution. This isnt Trump. This isnt new. This is America. This has always been America.

I started seeing someone in June. When he broke up with me I idnt even cry. I wasnt expecting it, it sort of came out of no where but, you know, why not? its happened so many times just like that, that I hardly even noticed. Its almost second nature to delete a contact, to block a follower, to forget sharing my life with people.

I started seeing someone again a month later. I fell in love with him and then he left me. It hurt, significantly more than the other one. It felt like my heart was being lit on fire, like my life was falling apart, but it was familiar somehow. It felt like ultimately that was where I was destined to be. That that was how I was destined to feel. Maybe not forever but for now. It felt like coming home. A home I hated, a home that made me sob in the bathroom at work when I saw something that reminded me of him, a home that made my room unbearable to be in because all I could think about was him helping me move in, but a home none the less.

All of it hurts. All of it issad and soul crushing and difficult to push through. But isnt that life? Hasnt that always been life?

None of this is new. None of it feels shocking. Maybe a culmination, maybe a more public expose of what this world is, but not a boiling point, not a eye opener, simply another notch in Americas belt, my belt, and probably your belt of shitty moments. Things never really change. Shift, maybe. But, ultimately this is the life we have all been living this whole time, most people have simply only become self aware enough to realize it now.