2022: the quiet life

my camera roll is proof of a quiet year

I wanted to take a look back at 2022 and realized I don’t remember much about it, besides the being sick part. The rest of it is a collage of work and home and work and home all plastered together so it looks like a lot of nothing. What did I do? Where did I go? I got out my phone, did a search for 2022 and was rewarded with 1,617 photos from last year. Aha! Here’s how I can jog my memory and look at all the fabulous things I did over the course of the last twelve months.

Well. There wasn’t much to see, folks. There’s about 1,000 pictures of my dog, 500 photos of album covers that I either had just bought or was listening to, a dozen or so memes, and, for some reason, all of the French onion soup I ate in 2022. Which was a lot.

What did I do? Where did I go? These questions kept ringing in my head and the answers that came were a bit depressing, at first. I spent a lot of time at home. As I scrolled, a couple of things caught my eye. A trip to Rhode Island for a sisters weekend. That night my daughter and I caught Kevin Devine playing his new album in a record store. Family Day. Birthdays. So there were sporadic events here and there, but for the most part I was home, in my living room, living a very quiet life.

I think sometimes we put too much emphasis on living a life of forward momentum. We’re bombarded with signals that a busy life is a fulfilled life, that your time on earth is worthless if you are not cramming action and adventure into every minute. Everyone wants to keep busy and I suspect this is due in part to the fact that most people do not want to stop and reflect upon their lives because it might make them go insane. So they keep busy, keep having places to go and people to see and things to do.

I don’t do that. I’m a hermit by nature, just a million or so dollars short of being a rich recluse. I don’t want to see people all day long. I don’t want to always have somewhere to go. I want to just be. My idea of a fulfilling day is one where I’ve been on my couch alternately reading, writing, watching sports and consuming memes. It does not include leaving the house, or getting out of my pajamas. Some of this is due to my depression and anxiety. But most of my desire to be home all the time comes from my theory that says if I am physically comfortable, it will be easier for me to be mentally and emotionally comfortable. And I am all about being all-around comfortable. I don’t need to have an active social life, I don’t need to be running from point A to point B all the time, I just need to be in an environment that is conducive to feeling relaxed and at ease with the world around you. I am at a place in my life where I prioritize those things. Mostly that means staying put.

So that is why there seems to be nothing interesting in my camera roll for 2022. No real vacation photos, no waving from a beach, no landscape pictures shot in a state park, no purple mountains majesty. But if you look closely you will see it. You will see what I see: a small series of joyful things strung together to resemble a life. You will see pictures of me and my dog, both of us smiling (yes, dogs smile). You will see yet another bowl of French onion soup. You will see sunrises and sunsets taken from my front lawn. You will see albums I listened to and snacks I ate and flowers I received. You will see a year that held promise unfulfilled, but also held an unexpected transformation. You will see selfies of a woman who gained some confidence and lost some sadness.

one of many, many onion soup pictures

If there is an underlying theme to 2022, it’s about being alone without feeling lonely. Learning how to do that was a revelation, and all that time spent home alone on my couch was truly a learning experience, in that I learned how to enjoy my own company. That doesn’t come across in pictures; I can’t expect you to glean that from looking at my 2022 camera roll. But I can tell you with certainty that while it looks like I went nowhere, that’s not true. I went on a journey.

While I’m pretty big on the idea of looking back when it’s time to flip the calendar to the new year, I’m not one for making resolutions for the future. I never complete the tasks I set for myself and it just serves to make me feel bad. Besides, I like to let a year play out on its own, to see where the days take me. Who knows, maybe I’ll have a more interesting camera roll at the end of 2023. Or maybe I’ll just stay home.