End of the Year: Reflecting on 2021

As we near the end of the year, I reflect a lot on all the changes going on in my life and around the World. This year was like a bulldozer that has run over our lives, mine at least. It was like I thought I paused a movie but it went on playing without me and now I can’t rewind it.

Doesn’t it feel like COVID has stolen so much from us? We’re trying to move on or make up for the lost time but let’s face it, we’re never getting back the time we lost, we’re never getting back what could’ve been but a replica of it. Something would always be different, something would always be off, there will always be a what-if at the back of our minds. And unlike what we like to think, this isn’t even over, yet. But the worst for me has been seeing a lot of people moving on while I get left behind. It’s not their fault and I’m happy to see the people I care about happy but it makes me feel quite lonely within my struggle. It makes me think that something is wrong with me. Call me dramatic, but I’ve been finding it really hard to adapt. I’ve read this thing the other day on Instagram, it said, if one of your hands is always reaching out for the past, you can never fully embrace the future. I completely agree but I couldn’t quite yet find how to remove my hand from the past when the past feels so homely and the future so foreign. This pitfall I’m in gets more dangerous day by day because it makes both the present and the future more difficult to reach in a way that I can’t afford. Do you ever just want to hold yourself by the shoulders, shake yourself up and yell at yourself, “get your shit together”? I feel that every day, lately.

I feel like I’m constantly running but not getting anywhere; at times I’m trying too hard, at times nothing I do is enough. One struggle follows the other and sometimes it’s very hard to see a way out. We’re all so eager to ‘go back to normal’ but every time we convince ourselves that ‘nature is healing’, we are faced with a new problem; a new covid variant, strikes, economic crisis, a billion problems unnecessarily created by Brexit and a lot more things that’s been going on for ages but we’ve been ignoring until they affected us. Honestly, we like to talk about how bad of a place the world is becoming but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s never been a good place in the way people expect it to be. You know that classic question where they ask you in which era you would’ve liked to live in? I think about that a lot and I can never come up with an era I would want to live in. More or less a pandemic every hundred years, two world wars in a matter of 30 years, not to mention there being a civil war somewhere at all times, many bloody and incestuous royal families all over the world with a lot of familicides, slavery, peaks of racism and sexism and ableism and homophobia, people with mental health disorders being disgrace or possessed or a subject of experimentation and many more issues that the inconvenience of the non-existence of some useful technology we’ve got being the least of these problems.

I know this sounds so depressive but maybe it doesn’t have to be. Yes, the world’s never been a great place (well, maybe except the times Homo sapiens didn’t exist) but we have made progress with certain things, though some things made no headway.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we are not at the end of the world as some may believe, we’re not out in the clear yet, too (though at this point I’m not quite sure what that means) but natural and man-made disasters have always existed, and unfortunately will always exist as long as the world keeps turning around. All we can do is do our best, do our part in trying to make the world more liveable and, though it’s extremely hard for some of us – especially when we find a moment we can call home –, somehow find a way to accept that only thing that doesn’t change is the change itself.

So, my wish for the new year is for all of us struggling to adapt to this ‘new world’ to find a home within ourselves that no change would affect and still learn to embrace the changes happening today and will happen tomorrow.  I also hope that we can make some things better and finally hear some good news about the pandemic, too, so that we would have one less thing to worry about while picking up what we’ve got left and keep working for a better future. One step at a time.

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