I kept this little tree from my old place and it made Christmas feel nice and cozy. A nice moment in a hard year.
We did it! We made it to the end of the year. And what a shitty year it was for pretty much everyone.
I’m having a hard time reflecting on the past year. My brain just doesn’t want to focus on it. That said, some good things happened. And some bad things. And some thoroughly mediocre things. So let’s do a little reflection if we can.
The Good
Work
I got a new position at my company that’s hopefully a much better fit (I start Monday!). I’ll be working in IT, so I’ll get to use some of the skills I went to school for and enjoy using. I’m also no longer going to have to spend a significant chunk of my days calling people to request information from them, which I think is going to reduce my stress level about work a ton.
School
I graduated from library school! I need to re-order my diploma, I think they had my old address and whatever way they ship it, it doesn’t get forwarded like regular mail. They also shipped it far later than originally planned (covid!), or I would have received it at my old place and it wouldn’t have been a problem. Oh well. I should probably order an official transcript, too. But I graduated! I now have a master’s degree. Even if it doesn’t feel like it. No one’s really hiring librarians right now, and I can’t even volunteer at the WA Talking Book and Braille Library due to covid, but hopefully in the future I’ll get a chance to use my degree.
Exercise
This is a late-to-the-game, fairly recent thing, but I took up running again and it’s doing wonders for my mental health. Exercise plus making sure I get outside for a good length of time equals very good. I’m hoping I can keep managing it in the colder months ahead. I’m certainly going to try, and runs on cold days recently have been manageable. The only real problem right now is finding a good time to run, because my work schedule has me start right around sunrise and end right around sunset right now. But that at least should solve itself, now that the days are lengthening again. If I can get my butt out the door in the morning, at least.
Media
I read some good books, played some good games, and discovered and listened to some good podcasts and music. I’ll talk more about these in another post. Maybe. >.>;;
Podcast!
I started recording an RPG podcast with some friends, and it’s going pretty well so far! I’m still catching up on editing, and we want to have a buffer when we start off, so there’s no released episodes yet. Soon! We’re playing Castles & Crusades, too, which is wonderful. I’m running the game, and being back in the GMing seat has been fun.
The Mediocre
There were also some mediocre things.
Living Situation
I moved to a new apartment, so I could live on my own (and my previous roommate had to move out), and because it was time to move on. My apartment near Discovery Park was really quite nice, but I associate it pretty strongly with my past relationship and on some days that was hard to grapple with. I miss it a lot, though.
The reason moving is a mediocre thing is that I’ve been having oodles of trouble getting comfortable in my new place. It’s been months now and I’m not done unpacking, which would be fine except stuff is in the way. Really the whole apartment feels like there’s always something in the way. The solution is probably to declutter, but I’ve been struggling to do that while staying quarantined. I’d need to venture out, and on top of that the local Goodwills are absolutely slammed with donations from everyone doing the same thing I’m thinking of doing. The quality of the building itself is also mediocre, which can be frustrating. Special mention to almost everything not-an-appliance in my apartment being wired to a single 15-amp breaker.
My new neighborhood is…fine. There’s a lot of road noise and I have some loud neighbors in my apartment complex. But there’s quiet residential streets to run on and the houses are cute. I’m sure gentrification has started (boo), but it hasn’t taken over the neighborhood yet. I think I’m going to like it a lot better after quarantine is over, because I’m close to the light rail and Seward Park and other places that I can’t really use now but will be very cool once I can.
Still, I’ll probably not stay after my year is up. Which means moving again. Eugh.
Medication/Mental Health
I got on new meds. They’re great in that I finally have normal amounts of energy again and am not constantly falling asleep. They’re bad in that now that I have energy, my anxiety has come back in full force, and feels worse than it has in years. I’m trying to manage it, but along with the stress of covid-19 and my apartment not being a very relaxing environment, it’s not going great. Hopefully my psychiatrist and I can add/adjust things.
Jabberwocky Care
It’s just been hard to keep up with her, in combination with all of the other stuff going on. Especially the move, which messed up the enclosure/environment setup I’d had going and which hasn’t recovered yet. I’m getting the hang of it again, I have a plan to improve things, so stuff should get better. But right now worrying about it causes a good bit of stress.
There’s some struggles with balancing her enclosure needs with my new apartment. My bedroom sucks for managing the humidity her enclosure gives off to the rest of the room, which is a challenge now that it’s cold and I can’t just leave the windows wide open.
She got sick over the summer, which was tough to manage. She’s recovered nicely, though. And it’s looking like my worry these last couple weeks that she might be getting sick again were unfounded, unless the blood test results from her vet appointment this week indicate otherwise.
Overall, she’s just been A Lot this year, through no fault of her own. She’s my good angry potato dragon girl, but was rather stressful. And that’s okay, but it’s not great, so it ends up in the mediocre category.
The Bad
Of course, this was a year of struggle for everyone. I imagine my bad things are the same as a lot of other people’s, but here we go.
Isolation
As someone who already got lonely/sad frequently, isolation has been pretty brutal. I miss my friends. I don’t have a pod or bubble of people right now, so it’s just me and Jabs. I’ve been doing okay at keeping up relationships over the internet with some people, but not great overall, and it’s been wearing me down. Plus, I started 2020 optimistic about dating and meeting new people and trying to get myself to be out and about and more social more often. And then the pandemic hit. So it was an extra level of disappointing!
That all said, my RPG groups have been lifesavers. Doing something fun and conversational for a few hours a couple times a week has helped so much, and kept me in contact with a large portion of my core group of friends. The only issue is I often feel very lonely when the session is over and we hang up the call. But so it goes.
Covid More Generally
Keeping up with masks, social isolation, etc, has been tricky. Doable! Worth it! But tricky. Especially with the winter spike, I’ve been trying extra hard to minimize my exposure to other people. Which means it’s even more stressful when I end up too close to someone, or someone walks by me without a mask or with their nose hanging out so it’s useless. It adds a lot of social stress, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of frustration at other people to my life. And that’s just the bad end from my perspective, without even getting into all the people who got ill or even died this year. I’ve been lucky in that no one in my day-to-day, close circles has caught it. I hope it stays that way. Still, I’ve had a couple members of my extended family get sick, and I worry about them even though we’re not super close. So if you could send some good thoughts their way, I’d appreciate it.
Writing
My writing went down the tubes this year. I was already unfocused before the pandemic, and now… I dropped off on writing fiction consistently, and wrote a lot of disconnected scenes and stuff for my morning pages, which ended up being discouraging because I wasn’t ever finishing anything, and I was looping around to the same kind of stories and topics over and over without really having much fun with them. And then I started doing more journaling type stuff in my morning pages, which often just made me feel worse about things. I’ve picked up writing fiction again, though, and on top of that it’s about the Shivering Deeps characters, which has been helping me rebuild my hope for my writing and the project as a whole. My morning pages the last several days are following a story with them, so I feel like I’m actually building something with them, even if I’m not sure what it is yet. I’ll have to find a proper ending and actually do it. I’ve always been terrible at finishing stories.
Shivering Deeps didn’t get worked on very much this year, which is my biggest disappointment given that I really wanted to get it rewritten and sent out on submission this year. I considered just shelving it completely, since it’s taken me so long to draft and re-draft. But! As mentioned above, I’ve been writing some stuff with Sargt and co. lately and it’s been fun and makes me want to work on their Shivering Deeps story again, or at least makes me feel confident that I can do it.
So there was a glimmer of hope in the writing darkness, hiding here at the end of the year. And that’s not nothing. I’m worried talking about it will make it go out, but hopefully not. That’s my anxiety running the show again. Whee.
Career
I ended up staying in my current position at my work a lot longer than I meant to. I didn’t have any spoons for job searching, so I was stuck in a job that wasn’t a great fit for me (and was extremely low-paying to boot), which got me down further, which depleted job-searching spoons, and so on. I also didn’t adapt to working at home well, and at one point it even almost got me fired due to extremely poor focus/productivity. It’s improved since then, but it never felt great. We also changed how we do things at my job in a way that seemed like a net negative for us, the workers who were actually doing the work. But that’s leaning towards a long grumble that isn’t really appropriate for this post. Or possibly to post on the internet.
I also learned that not everyone is as ready to (potentially) risk their jobs to try to start a union as I am. Which was really, really disappointing even though I should have seen it coming.
I felt very stalled, career-wise, too. I graduated into a situation where jobs in my field (libraries) are even rarer than usual. I didn’t feel qualified to get a tech job to save my life, despite going to school for it four years. Or, rather, I gave up on the market ever seeing me as qualified for anything besides the lowest-paying work that I wouldn’t be able to live on, or datacenter work, which I really don’t want to do again. And developing further qualifications seemed like it was going to be a second job, which I just don’t have the gumption to do right now.
As mentioned in the Good section, my new job will be in tech, and in technical support at that, which is a field I wanted to move into as part of moving towards doing support, computer admin work, and/or infosec. I’ll be starting from the bottom of the pile again (every job I’ve gotten has been the bottom of its particular pile), which is a little hard to swallow given that I’m almost 10 years into my professional life, but it has a path forward and explicit support for growing and expanding the role, so hopefully it’ll be a good move.
I am thankful I was able to stay employed even as the pandemic caused millions of people to lose their jobs. And I’m very grateful my manager let me know about the IT position opening up and encouraged me to apply. It means next year will almost certainly be better, but this year was brutally bad.
Straight Up Bad Luck
Okay, maybe not luck. But everything has seemed like it’s had an extra layer of suck this year. Graduating but not actually receiving my physical diploma. My car’s battery dying in the parking lot at the vet on Tuesday (thankfully the receptionist was able to give me a jump). Stress from various power and internet outages and problems at my new place. Breaking one of my few keepsakes from my Wicca days in college while moving a shelf. My fridge seemingly dying on Christmas eve, right after I’d done a bunch of grocery shopping that morning. (Thankfully it was just the power plug it was plugged into going bad.) And most of that’s just been the last month or so. The hits just kept coming this year, and on top of everything else it was overwhelming.
Conclusion
Okay, shit, that was a lot. Oops. 2020 was a very tough year for everyone, and it really ended up wearing me down with its repeated kicks to my psyche. But even the bad parts had some silver linings, like starting to write fiction that makes me happy/a little satisfied in these last days of the year. I’ve managed to keep on keeping on, and I’m thankful for that. I’m hoping this next year I can break out of some of the holding patterns my life feels stuck in right now. Or at least find more contentment in them while I wait for the world to shake itself back out to the new normal, depending on how long that takes.
I hope your 2020 went better than mine! And that you’ve got some hope for the new year, even if it’s just a little, even if it’s doubtful like mine. A flickering candle is better than no light at all, so lets huddle around it, cup our hands around the flame to protect it from the buffeting winds of 2020’s incredible difficulties, and see if we can’t keep it going for as long as we can. If we’re really lucky, maybe we’ll get to use it to light a bigger flame. All we can do is try our best, and hope that it’s enough.
Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s move on from 2020 and into the unknown future ahead. <3
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