I try really hard to live my life with the philosophy that every day is a gift. Tomorrow is never promised, and life is short are overused cliches, but it doesn’t make them any less true. Like most people, with each year we grow older, we start to realize the things we haven’t yet done, and life becomes a race against time. And of course, 2020 was going to be my year for accomplishing a few big goals, which ultimately ended in disappointment.
Many of us feel stuck because we don’t know how long this will last, when we can safely see family again, start to travel, etc. Everything is unknown, and even with the arrival of the vaccine, we can’t plan, we can’t move forward, we've been told that things will start to get worse before they getter (again), and that’s a weird and scary feeling.
This year, compounded with feelings of being stuck and not reaching our goals, we were also faced with even bigger issues of fighting for human rights, and public health under attack/made into a political issue when hundreds of thousands of lives were at stake. That, alone, affected my mental health in a very bad way, and I know I’m not the only one.
Suffice to say, this year has been draining. And it makes it hard to see anything but grief, sadness and frustration.
