Last year, I stayed quiet on social media, largely because I didn’t think I had much to add. Everything I wrote I didn’t post because I kept asking myself, What was I trying to add here really? But I think a couple months into 2021, I’m ready to wrap everything that’s been floating around in my head to one long blog post. Man, we really all went through it last year, didn’t we? I don’t have another way to say it other than it was just a year of loss for everyone, whether you lost a loved one, a job, or some time that you would have preferred to spend another way. No matter how the COVID-19 pandemic affected you, it feels like everyone just lost a part of their life. If you by some miracle survived that, you were certainly hit by the social, racial, and political explosion that has been slowly escalating for years but exploded in the last year due to harsh circumstances brought on by the pandemic. It felt like we were left to live out a decade’s worth of historic, unprecedented moments in one year. I spent so much of that time feeling sympathetic for other people’s situations. I volunteer with high school students that lost their senior year, have friends who are weathering unique stages of relationships and family building in isolation, and have a Grandma that moved to a new senior living center where literally the day after we moved her, we weren’t allowed inside. As a moderate empath, I felt the pain of everyone in these situations, so much so that I even forget to process emotions about my own situation. If you fell into this trap, too, I urge you to take a moment to feel as bad for yourself as you do for other people. It may not physically change your situation, but it will make you feel so much more validated emotionally. My whole year played out weird independent of everything going on in the world. In January, I left a job after only five months working there. Anyone who has been in a lot of jobs knows that feeling when something is not a good fit. It simply wasn’t working for me or my employer. It was a new job in a growing department, and it was my first full-time job post-graduation. I’ve balanced a full-time schedule before, but I have never spent forty hours per week at the same job. Because my experience didn’t meet the expectations of the job, I struggled with feeling like I wasn’t good enough, like I was doing things wrong, and that my employer wished they had hired someone else. Now that I’ve had a year to reflect on that experience, I am grateful for my employer and everyone I worked with. I am still in touch with some of them who are willing to help me in my development and current job search. The time abundance I had this year turned into a good thing. With another year to develop, reflect, and work through some things, I feel more professionally and emotionally prepared to take on my next experience. In February, I committed professionally to making it my primary goal to find a great new job as fast as possible. I read professional development books, did all the worksheets on them, and applied to over fifty jobs in advertising, communications, events, and higher ed. While I did that, I put in a lot of time and energy volunteering with high school students in an effort to keep moving forward and work toward something. Returning to my high school robotics team wasn’t something I ever planned. When I moved back home after graduating from college, I was so used to balancing multiple activities that I found myself seeking a new organization to join, thought about returning to the team, and ended up sending an email inquiry about mentoring. Now, I can say confidently that it’s the most rewarding decision I’ve made in the past few years. In hindsight, it makes sense. Robotics on the business side is largely about organization, communication, event planning, and student development, which are all things I love. At the end of the day, giving back just feels good. I ended up working a lot with an awards presentation team that fueled me in a coach role that was fulfilling creatively and developmentally. I found ways to support and connect with students that built the robot even though I never knew much about engineering. They ended up being finalists with their robot and winning for their awards presentation. By March, I had a new job lined up that I was nervous about, but I think it was the right kind of nervous. I was excited to do something specific to my degree, work on a creative team, and put myself out there professionally in a way I haven’t before. The same day I got the call with the formal job offer was the first day that COVID-19 cases were found in Michigan. It’s funny how something can be almost a year ago now, and I still haven’t fully processed it. I remember not really knowing what to expect, thinking about how many people in my life I could lose, and worrying about what this chapter could look like and how long it would last. I can still see the red headlines about the COVID-19 Pandemic on all the news stations burned into my brain. It’s stranger too how I have a lot of vivid memories of last year pre-COVID. I don’t know if I just haven’t formed new memories to flush them out or if they feel more like a distant dream that you can remember sharply exactly because of how distant it is. I had some really fun times last year before the pandemic started. I still remember my last concert in January, the last time I went out to eat with friends, and my last trip up north that was semi-normal. I remember going to a robotics meeting the day that the first cases in Michigan were found. I remember not really knowing what to tell some of the students that were worried. I remember knowing it was going to be the last time I was going to be in the shop for a while and taking a deep breath to look around at the shop before I locked up for the day. Early stay at home went by relatively easy for me. I like being alone, and I was enjoying my time abundance to catch up on TV shows and old games I’ve wanted to play. I still met up with a couple close friends to walk outside, and nobody in our family had any degree of exposure anyways. As it turns out, this was one of the easiest times of COVID in my opinion. I wasn’t fatigued by COVID, being home, or deeply missing social interaction in the way I do now. In my opinion, COVID is going to be the most significant historical landmark for our generation. For people who are in a similar life stage as me, we will never forget how fast everything can fall apart right when it feels like you’re getting your feet under you. For the government and our society largely, I really don’t know how you come back from this. The response to a deadly pandemic has destroyed our generation’s faith in nearly every institution. When people were dying, the government did nothing to shut the country down. For the things they did shut down, they did nothing to fairly compensate people for their losses. All of the economic loss showed just how fragile the entire system was, sparking a lot of questions about if “going back to normal” was the answer at all. Politically, I think I was most stunned to discover how little federal governments are willing to handle responsibility, pass down guidelines, and step in when it feels like the world is falling apart. In 2016, I didn’t believe the president truly held that much power, but the lack of executive leadership was immediately apparent in the first months of the pandemic. I was also optimistic that our congress was competent enough to quickly make policy to provide aid to people in need. This optimism was also largely unfounded, as this has been proven wrong multiple times in the past year. On the flip side of this, I was surprised to see how important state and local governments are during a time of crisis, which is even more surprising when you consider the lack of news coverage and information is available about those elections and appointments. Again, I think it’s critical for us to reflect on if ignorance of local politics is something we want to return to after seeing the resources we have had to turn to during the pandemic. For society, I think I was most upset seeing how people treated each other. Namely, that there were people who were unwilling to make sacrifices, adapt their lifestyle, or even make small changes to protect others. Did you really have to do that thing you did in person? Was it really that hard wearing a mask? Was there really anything anyone did all year that was worth endangering a life, knowing there was always an end date for this pandemic based on rapid scientific advancements on a treatment and vaccine? Scientists have already written articles about how COVID has changed our physical responses to people outside of our circle in significant social encounters like at grocery stores. I think this is the best metaphor for how the pandemic has affected us at our core. My strong stances on COVID are founded in my everyday life. I am fortunate (or unfortunate depending on the day) enough to live with my parents. Being in my early 20’s, living with my parents has been a god-send as a financial safety net to save money while I get established. This year, it has also had the unintended side effect of giving me somewhere to live for free and not be pressured to take a job that will potentially expose me to the virus. While some people felt we should just open the country up and let survival of the fittest rule, that was never an option for me. Every single person in my immediate family is high-risk for a fatal reaction to the virus. My dad is over 65 years old. My mom has a history of heart problems and risk for lung disease. In April, I found out I have asthma. In what was already a weird year for everyone paying close attention to their personal health, I quickly noticed I was having shortness of breath, the same symptom for COVID patients, but I didn’t have any of the other symptoms besides an occasional fever. For nearly a month on and off, I shut myself off in my room for fear of exposing my parents to the virus. It felt like my respiratory system was under attack. My body felt out of rhythm with shallow breaths and my muscles and organs felt like they weren’t getting the oxygen they needed. After multiple telehealth appointments with my doctor, I was one of the first people I know to get COVID tested in the drive through set up at Wayne County fairgrounds. This was when they had to stick the swab up your nose AND hold it there for ten seconds. After a negative COVID test, I went into my doctor to get my heart and lungs tested and found out I was breathing at 28% lung capacity. The only possible diagnosis for this was severe asthma, and I immediately went on several medications including steroids that made my mood unstable for a week or so. The only thing that caused it was allergies, getting to an age where my body isn’t as resilient, and being home more often (it’s likely the air in my home is more stagnant and infested with allergens than outside). With this experience, I learned everything I had to about insurance this year. Even though my family pays hundreds of dollars each month, our insurance covered only the cheapest of my medications, putting up a fight to pay for a $300/month inhaler that my doctor claimed I needed and even charging me $80 for a COVID test after only paying a small portion of the fee. I had to pay hundreds of dollars for going into the doctor to take three breathing tests throughout the year just to figure out if my medication was working. Having asthma was entirely out of my control. The way I was breathing in April was unbearable, and I had to pay hundreds of dollars to fix it despite paying hundreds for insurance already. So, if you think the health care system in America is working, let’s have a sidebar about that because I have too much to say to put in here. I’m sure you’re already seeing a theme emerging, and I hope you understand why this year felt like a cynical uprising of my hatred for every system in our country. Around this time too, the state opened up work for essential businesses including construction. I wasn’t optimistic about being hired to any remote work any time soon. At this point, most business were operating at catastrophic losses, so I started working in construction again with my close family friends. Working in construction again gave me a daily routine, enough income to break even for the first half of the year, an enjoyable social aspect to my day, and I literally got paid to work out by carrying heavy equipment, swinging tools, and working on my feet every day. I enjoyed the time I spent with my family friends, finding meaningful work, having a daily routine and commute that included getting Tim Horton’s coffee as a reward at the end of a hard day of work. In May and June, the police and public safety systems (that the bulk of our taxes and public budget go toward) CONTINUED to unfairly target, disproportionately incarcerate, brutalize, and take the lives of Black people in America. To be clear, this is not a recent resurgence of racism or an escalation that has only been clear this year. The only consolation is that there were enough Americans glued to the news that it felt like people were finally paying attention to and absorbing messages about systemic racism and questionable ethics of the police. Has the system always been rigged against people of color? Yes! Is it still? Yes! Now, we have seen an abundance of numbers proving that the pandemic has been disproportionately harmful to people of color and the communities they reside in. We have also seen that the Blackest cities in America like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta can swing an entire presidential and congressional election in favor of the party that seems most willing to contribute to real living people from all different backgrounds. I sincerely hope the Democratic Party can fulfill the promises they made to those cities with progressive social, racial, and economic policies. In my opinion, this is the most significant issue to continue pushing for racial equity and not forgetting lessons we learned this year. I don’t know where we go as a society from here if we don’t learn our lessons here. Part of writing about racial justice as a white man is acknowledging that I have played a part in systemic racism, engaging in and promoting systems that continue to unfairly target people of color. The most important thing you can do is educate yourself. For this reason, I highly recommend subscribing to Anti-Racism Daily, which overviews current events with an anti-racist lens, centers the voices of people of color, and gives anti-racist action items you can take immediately. There was some point in the summer where I felt I could do this for as long as it takes. We had lived through some of the worst of it, and I was still optimistic our society would learn from everything we’ve been through. I was seeing my friends going on masked walks outside. I was doing meaningful work. I was getting enough daylight hours to feel physically competent. I knew the sacrifices that I and many people in our state were taking was working. The COVID numbers in Michigan were low and livable. In July, my family still took our annual trip up north, enjoying time at our family cabin and watching the fireworks on the beach on Fourth of July. When baseball started back up, I watched every single Tigers game with my mom (and my dad too when he wasn’t working). This is something I constantly come back to and think of fondly, knowing that not many people have an opportunity to spend that amount of quality time with their parents during this life stage. In August, I started getting really pessimistic again. I stopped working in construction because there weren’t jobs lined up that needed my help. A lot of my friends left town to go back to the towns they worked or went to school in. I picked up a lot of support from the online community, getting really into Twitch and playing a lot of older games I haven’t touched in a while. I regret how much time I spent inside. I slept in until 2 p.m. or later most days. I think I was depressed, but I didn’t really know that or why then. I knew I had to do something again, so I made plans to see some old friends, go on trips as safely as possible, and try to enjoy life again. In September, I went back up north with my family, getting so sick that I thought surely I had COVID. I had a fever that kept me up all night. I had a cough that was so aggressive I threw up a couple times. Thankfully, after getting back home, I felt better quickly. My mom and I tested negative for COVID and felt better after a week or so of rest. It was a brutal reminder of how quickly you can get sick and how serious the whole situation was. A few weeks later, I celebrated my birthday, which was one of the better birthdays I’ve had in a few years, largely because I didn’t have expectations. I have some of the best friends in the world. I went up north again, enjoying it this time and getting take out from some of my favorite places. I had a takeout picnic with friends in Ann Arbor, and we had a Zoom call later to celebrate too. I was starting to feel like myself again, and I was starting to feel like there was a post-pandemic world that I could exist in happily. In October, my world came crashing down, and I dealt with loss of my own. While I’m fortunate that all of the people in my immediate family are still healthy, we lost my dog Sonny who was only five years old. He was my golden boy, a dream dog of mine when I was young. Reflecting back on it, he found unique ways to bring a smile to my face every day. We had so many rituals: pet names I called him, fun tricks, body language and cues that he would give me when he wanted to be pet a certain way or play a certain game. At the risk of being dramatic, there were days of stay-at-home when I would pass by Sonny, depressed, pet him, look him in the eyes, and think “as long as you are here, I can make it through this.” Like, as long as Sonny lived through it, I would have someone there for me to absorb my anxieties and bring a smile to my face. I still feel like there’s a way I jinxed everything in this way. I always felt like he wasn’t going to live that long, but I didn’t think he would die this young. Because I don’t think I can possibly go on without specifying some of his weird rituals, here are a few of my favorites. Sonny LOVED playing basketball. When you go outside, it’s the first thing he wanted to do. When you take a shot, he gets the rebound and rolls the ball out to the yard with his nose. When you pick it up in the yard, he runs back on to the deck and jumps on the railing, barking at you until you pass it to him. And when you pass it, he nudged the ball back to you to take another shot. He could do that for hours, even though after about thirty minutes, you could hear his heart beating out of his chest. When you got home, or when anyone entered our house, Sonny would SQUEAK and spin in circles while you pet him. He was just so excited to be around another person who could pet him. He thought everyone he ever met absolutely LOVED him. If you wanted him to calm down, you could lure him to the couch where he would prop his head up on the back rest so that his head would be close to level with yours while you pet him. He loved being the same height as people. In the last year or so, he started doing this thing where he would run upstairs and go to an area of my house we refer to as the castle, which is a sort of indoor balcony overseeing the living room. He would run up there, stick his head down through the posts, looking down on us from the second floor until we looked up and acknowledged him. Then, he would run down to get pet. I think this was something he did for attention and free pets, but it was so cute to have his droopy face look down on you from the balcony above. People who know me know that I’m not a very physical touch person. I hardly hug my close friends, and it’s just not my preferred love language. It’s weird but true to say that I miss Sonny in a very physical way, and that’s not something I’ve ever gone through before. When my mom wakes up in the morning, I still have an urge to reach my hand out, waiting for Sonny to run down the stairs and run under my hand to pet himself. When it storms at night, and I’m not awake enough to think straight, I’m waiting for him to nervously jump in my bed and lay his back against mine until I put the blanket over him to comfort him.
By November, so much shit had hit the fan. There was a cataclysmic election coming up with a storm cloud of bad news every day. My dog had just died, and my house felt sad and empty. To be honest, I was feeling sort of apathetic about everything, so I pushed everything I had into a long-time goal of mine that coincided with November. It has been a livelong goal of mine to write a novel. Every November, I take part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but it’s always been largely unsuccessful because I tried to write during a busy season for work as a student. My time abundance this year gave me no excuse. The only bump in the road was the first week. Like many people, I had election anxiety that encapsulated almost a whole week. I did everything I could personally, urging almost everyone I know to make a voting plan and dropping off my early vote with my parents. There was a moment the night of the election when they uploaded Wisconsin votes from Milwaukee: if I could bottle that feeling up and inject it in my veins, I would pay anything for that drug. The moment Joe Biden was confirmed felt like a point where something decent finally won over evil in 2020. It was that kind of landmark moment. It’s still depressing to think of how many people felt like Donald Trump was a better option. I can’t put into words the jolt in my attitude I got to see someone speak who was presidential, hopeful, and had a plan for working toward our future. Now, in 2021, we have already seen just how dangerous Donald Trump and his supporters can be. And we’ve seen that Joe Biden isn’t the end goal of progressive politics, but I am optimistic that he can make some steps toward overwhelmingly supported progressive policies. Because Sonny died so unexpectedly and the election anxiety took over my early November, I had almost no time to prepare my novel, but I had an idea in my back pocket that I had played with in my head for a few years now. I did nightly meditations that helped me think clearly about where I was going with the plot. In a particularly dark night, after everything I had been through, I confess that I had made a pact with myself that if I couldn’t write this novel with all the time I had, then I was going to end my life. At that time, it felt like there wasn’t much to live for anymore. I didn’t particularly like myself or my life. I didn’t really feel like I was contributing anything to the world, and I had for a long time felt like writing was my purpose in life and yet I couldn’t complete it. If I couldn’t write the book now with all the time in the world and no excuses, what was the point? I don’t know if this was the exact motivation I needed or if I was making this ultimatum because somewhere in my head, I knew there was no world where it was excusable for me to fall short on this goal, but I dragged myself to my laptop for approximately two hours every night to write the amount of words I needed to stay on pace for my goal. I’m excited to say that the result is the completed first draft of a novel that I’ll be editing and hopefully sharing this year. Somewhere around this time, I went back to a free weekly happiness class I started taking after seeing it on the news at the beginning of the pandemic. The course is called “The Science of Wellbeing” offered for free by Yale University on Coursera. I highly recommend it to anyone. I feel like the course answered a lot of questions I had about what feels like a universal decline in mental health in our society over the past decade. It also offered constructive framework to make your life better: I’ve definitely already used what I learned for my day-to-day and for helping my friends when they are down. By the end of November, there was a lot of hope in my world. I had completed a lifelong goal of mine with a completed novel. I had a life plan that was going to make my day to day bearable for the foreseeable future. In December, I was doing things that made me happy, knowing an end of the year was in sight, a new president was coming soon, and good vaccine news was starting already. It was really hard to get through the holidays. I didn’t feel a particular affinity for my traditions in prior years, but this year having near nothing just felt all wrong. I usually love the new year too. I love the idea of a blank slate. I love doing year-end stuff like summarizing the year and making year-end lists. It wasn’t fun to recap this year, but I think it was necessary to finally write this. I usually love writing goals, but this year it was hard to even envision what my next year would look like. There is still a lot to look forward to this year. I think by the end of the year, things will be relatively normal again. I’m looking forward to getting vaccinated and being able to see my friends in-person again without feeling guilty about breaking social distancing best practices or feeling worried about endangering my family and myself. I’m looking forward to editing my novel and working on some other goals. I feel more optimistic about the job market than I have in a while. Places seem to be hiring remotely, and I think only more jobs will be posted as people get vaccinated, and I can continue on my quest to find a career that is a good match for my passions and skills. I still get to do some fun stuff. This past month, with my robotics team, I have had my faith restored that virtual robotics meetings can be comparably fun to in-person meetings, as the talented students I work with have led energizing brainstorming sessions and even structured an entire virtual program for elementary school robotics. If you’re ever feeling down, get on a zoom call with 40 K-5 kids and watch how they are still excited to interact through the screen and bring a smile to your face with random thoughts and questions that come to their heads. I’m happy for all the technology that has made it easier to stay in touch with all my friends virtually. I truly have the best friends in the world and enough of them to keep me happy for the rest of my life. I repeat this in my head a lot when I’m feeling lonely and stuck at home. I still struggle to get out of bed some days. I am depressed beyond what previous year me would have thought was possible, but I’m still here. I remind myself constantly that I’m living through a global crisis, and the same rules and expectations don’t apply. I just put one foot in front of the other, and I do what I can. It took me two months to write this, but I think I finally got it all down on paper, what happened last year.
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AuthorI am a proud creative, U-M LSA employee, University Activities Board at Michigan State University alumni, pro wrestling fan, Detroit sports follower, Nintendo geek, and sandcastle champion. Categories |