The Year That Was
or is it the year that wasn't
To tell you about my year is to tell you about your year. It’s been the same for everyone: fear, despair, isolation, worry, anxiety, missing things, missing people, maybe a little anger at our government thrown in, if you’re on the same page as me. For some it was even worse; there was sickness or death or both.
2020 lingers behind us like a long, dark we’re trying to find an exit from. Look in the rearview mirror at any time and it’s all the same view, it never changes, never curves, never brightens. We don’t really remember beginning this journey, we don’t recall the middle of it, or any of the pit stops along the way, we just know where we are at any given time and even that knowledge seems sort of suspect sometimes.
There was a lot of time spent on my couch, especially the first couple of weeks of quarantine when I was home but wasn’t yet set up to work remote. Like most people, I found it hard to concentrate on movies and television shows. I’d have ESPN or CNN droning on in the background, just to have something on the tv, but mostly I’d be listening to music while mindlessly scrolling twitter. Soccer Mommy’s Color Theory will forever remind me of those early days, the ones spent in an agonizing sort of limbo where time had no meaning.
Cancellations and postponements starting pouring in at some point. It seemed like one day we were talking about staying in for two weeks and everything would be okay, then the next day concerts months away were being taken from us. I began to feel a sense of hopelessness, the time ahead of us now stretching before us much like the time behind us; no real roadmarks, no exits.
I settled in. I put an indent in my couch. I tried reading books but I would get ten pages in and find I didn’t know what I just read. My brain was not taking in any new information; it only wanted to be fed statistics and graphs and charts and Governor Cuomo’s daily press briefings that did nothing to calm my fears and just made my anxiety worse.
I wore a uniform of yoga pants, tank top, sweater and sometimes I wore that same uniform for days on end without ever getting changed or getting in the shower. For someone who already had anxiety and depression, this whole scenario was just making it all loom larger and darker. I retreated into myself, coming out only on Saturday morning for spirited therapy sessions over the phone where I released an entire week’s worth of anger, anxiety and sadness on my poor therapist.
I attempted yoga. I went at it wholeheartedly for a couple of weeks, even bought a yoga mat. Each morning I would roll the mat out and pull up a youtube video and attempt to bring some sort of serenity and peace to my day. But I never made the mental connection I was seeking; serenity was long out of my reach. My dog took over the yoga mat. I retreated back to the couch.
We held my sister’s birthday “party” over Zoom, each of us separately providing ourselves with cake or cupcakes. We sang “happy birthday” and wished her well and felt an underlying despair that this is how things were now. We skipped Easter all together, foregoing coloring eggs with my mother, the ham dinner, the yearly discussion of Jesus Christ, Superstar. Just another thing to mark off, another event fell by the wayside thanks to this raging pandemic.
I lost myself in music. I bought Airpods because my husband was also home from work and trying to get shit done in the same living room I was wallowing in. I drowned myself in morose music, but took the time to listen to anything that was new and exciting. I listened to old loves, to recent releases, to playlists and entire albums and single songs that wormed their way into my heart.
Music was the only thing that excited me or got me to show any emotion besides despair. It didn’t take any energy to listen to songs, it didn’t take any brain power. I dove into new albums in 2020 unlike any other year, giving a listen to things I might have previously ignored. The albums I did love, I went all in on, sometimes listening to the same record ten, fifteen times in a row.
I bought stuff. I made me feel alive. I bought the Airpods and an electric toothbrush and a KitchenAid mixer I barely use. I bought dozens of records, new coffee mugs, clothes for a job that was currently taking place in my home. I bought a fucking Peloton bike. Waiting for packages to arrive was the only excitement I felt for months. Was I subtituting material goods for the comfort of a regular life? Yea, sure. But it worked. I would feel briefly happy when I pressed the purchase button and again briefly happy when the products would arrive. So few things were pushing my pleasure button this year, so I justified spending the money on me as self-care. And we all know this was a big year for self-care.
I worked from home. They gave me a Surface Pro and I spent hours of my day going over court documents and typing up decisions and answering emails. It felt good to be doing something productive, but at the same time I hated working from home. I wanted my office back. I wanted my commute back. I wanted to see people again. The only people I saw outside of my house were fellow shoppers in the supermarket and we were all masked up and scared to be there. There were no exchanged pleasantries, no small talk in the cereal aisle. We were all the enemy, and we marched through the store quickly, getting what we needed, and getting out.
When I wasn’t doing work I was in my usual spot on the couch, Airpods on, humming along to some brand new album, wistfully thinking about going to shows. Dogleg’s Melee played in my ears constantly at some point, another pandemic touchstone, another record that will always remind me of a place of despair and anguish.
Even after I went back to work in the office in May - starting out two days a week then eventually going to four - I still couldn’t get a sense of normalcy to settle in. The pandemic raged on, we all wore our masks everywhere, I watched the news relentlessly and waited for a second surge, then a third. I still had no sense of time, the months all seemed to blend together and every day when I woke up I felt like it should still be March 13th, the last normal day. Time stopped after that. Months blended together, days smushed into little compartments of hours, and while at times it felt like the year was lasting forever, there were days when I could swear it was just February and I was at Brooklyn Steel seeing Thrice and everything was okay.
We missed our wedding anniversary in June. The date just came and went. Maybe my brain did not recognize it was June already. Maybe my concept of time was indelibly changed and the calendar no longer means anything to me. I woke up two days after the fact and said, shit did we miss our anniversary? Does it matter? No.
I got a new turntable in August. The old one had been out of commission for years, and it was time. I had been amassing a nice collection of records anyhow - buying up albums from my favorite artists whose livelihoods were being threatened because of, well, everything, feeling like I was giving them a little shot in the arm by purchasing something of theirs. It was the least I could do, right? This pandemic got me back into listening to full albums again, and that’s basically the one and only good thing to come out of this.
But it’s not okay. This year has been anything but. It’s wasn’t okay in March or August or November and it’s not going to be okay now. It’s just getting worse as the year winds down and we’re all going to spend our new year’s eve hunkered down in our own homes, wondering what 2021 will bring.
Maybe I knew something back in 2019? I don’t know what events prompted me to tweet this, but I was right. It’s been a stupid year, and we certainly were not ready for it. It’s been stupid and infuriating. It’s been sad and depressing. It’s been filled with anxiety and despair and here we are at the end of it, the time of year where we normally reflect and move on and hope the changing of the calendars will mark some grand new beginning. But not this year. We will move seamlessly from December to January, the pandemic still intact, and time will mean nothing.
I wish I had nicer things to say about 2020. I wish I could say it was the year I saw the Deftones live. I wish I could say it was the year we had our eighth annual family day barbecue. But neither of those things are true, and it will go down simply as the year that wasn’t.