2020 is freshly dead.
I can't help but let out a sigh of relief as it lays there, a withered spiteful husk filled with malice and hatred towards everything and everyone that has-- or ever will-- exist. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has suffered at the hands of this awful, awful year; we all have our horror stories of the indignities endured, of the trauma inflicted. I know it doesn't feel like it, but having simply survived 2020 is a victory in itself.
There are so many people who didn't.
Before I start, I want to make perfectly clear that just because we are now in the year 2021, it doesn't mean we are in the clear. We all like to make it seem as if all the fucked up shit that has happened lies squarely on the shoulders of the calendar year, as if a series of unfortunate and unrelated events somehow conspired to shove a sandpaper dildo up the collective ass of humanity.
As much as I'd like to buy into that plot, I can't. Because 2020 was very much the result of several actions and inactions of the human collective. Human disdain towards the environment. Rampant capitalism being allowed to devour the lives and hopes of the poor. The cult of ignorance and hatred finding a repugnant orange figurehead to act as a mouthpiece towards its vile agenda.
In short, we actually went out of our way to buy the sandpaper dildo and shove it up our own ass. Without lube.
 |
| That's got to hurt! |
2020 was a bad year. In no particular order of awful:
1. I lost both my grandfather and my great grandmother.
2. My frail mental health got handed a beating in ways that I have never experienced. My depression got bad to the point that there were days I could not muster the energy to crawl out of bed to do more than use the bathroom. And my anxiety had me a twitching wreck, pacing about my room while fending off full scale panic attacks.
 |
| Just another day in America. |
Not that there weren't panic attacks, mind you. Because there were a great deal of them. I used up much of my pto at work by calling out sick due to the ever present threat of a panic induced frenzy. Speaking of work, that brings me to 3.
3. I quit my job! Without having any savings to fall back on, any prospects of new employment, and knowing that because I had quit, I would receive no unemployment.
Why would I do something so incredibly rash and irresponsible, you might ask?
The short answer is retail sucks.
The slightly longer answer is retail during a pandemic not only sucks, but is dangerous.
The even longer version is that working for a company that doesn't care about the health and safety of its employees goes beyond dangerous and into the realm of stupid.
I'll spare you the long-- and I mean looooooooooong-- list of issues I have with my former employers. For now. I'll get back it it later. Trust me on that. Suffice to say that they handled established safety protocols for an out of control pandemic poorly. I felt that my health was at risk after a while, so I abandoned that disease vector, and damn the consequences.
So, yeah. Fantastic year.
But I would be remiss if I didn't include some of the good things that happened in 2020. Like small glimmers of light, they helped pierce the murky gloom of the year and offered something vaguely resembling joy.
1. Final Fantasy 7 Remake
This game is something I've longed for for years. It had always been nothing but an unrealistic hope. Until June 15th 2015, when Square Enix revealed the first trailer.
Just like that, the dream was made a reality. And since that day, myself and countless other Final Fantasy fanatics champed at the bit, eagerly awaiting the day the game would be released. And on April 10th, 2020 it was.
And I am pleased to say that it was above and beyond everything I'd hoped it would be. The gameplay, the music, the story. All of it incredible. For the few weeks it took me to completely finish the game, I existed in a bubble of pure happiness.
2. I finally saw Hamilton!
Not in person, of course; I'm not rich or lucky. But thanks to Disney+, I was finally able to watch it, hear it, and finally understand how amazing of a show it is. When Hamilton first came out, several friends around me obsessively listened to the soundtrack. Which bugged the shit out of me, because without seeing the show itself, the music held no real weight with me.
I'm weird.
3. I built my own gaming PC!
Yes, I have surpassed my peasant console origins and joined the ranks of greatness.
Just kidding, that pc elitism shit is dumb.
Kidding aside, it took me a couple of months to get all the parts assembled; being dirt poor, I didn't have the $800 or so lying around to buy everything all at once. Instead, I did it piecemeal, buying one component every couple of weeks when I got paid. A good friend had a video card they were no longer using and donated it for the cause-- something I am truly grateful for, since that saved me about $400 alone.
The building process itself went relatively smoothly, with a minor hiccup* stalling the process for a day.
So all in all, there was some good and bad in 2020. Almost all of it overwhelmingly BAD, mind you. But still. If anything, 2020 helped me figure some things out. Like the fact that my mental health needs to be a priority hence forth. I've never been as much of a mess as I was during 2020, and I can no longer be lax on getting the help I need to function without feeling the urge to peel my own face off (anxiety) or melting into a puddle of hot garbage (depression).
In addition, my experience with the latest soul crushing job has demonstrated to me that working for some company and wasting my life lining someone else's pockets is REALLY not for me. I need to buckle down and work on my own goals and ambitions, because until I do, I'm a little more than a slave to a system that will do its damnedest to exploit me as much as it can get away with.
Let's make 2021 the year I change for the better.
*I could not get the damn thing to start. Apparently all of the power cables need to be plugged in for it to actually work...
No comments:
Post a Comment