personal essay: emma friary
2020: Not the Hero We Wanted But the Hero We Deserved
On December 31st every year, people around the globe make promises to themselves. I will lose weight, I will write the next great American novel, I will be promoted, I will do more of everything, I will succeed. The 2010’s was a time that everyone seemed anxious to leave behind, myself included. I entered 2010 as a shy 13 year old girl and left as a reserved 23 year old woman. I traveled, I went to school, I graduated, fell in love half a dozen times and swore off love as many. I made numerous friendships that came and went, I wrote and published my first works, and I tried to figure out what my next step was going to be moments before fate came knocking each time.
I started off 2020 with a lot of plans. I wanted to travel, I wanted to make more friends, I wanted to look at buying a house, I wanted to adopt a dog. I wanted to write more, publish more, work on my novel, and I wanted to fall back in love with life. January kept its resolutions but as February came, I slowly started to slip into the slump that comes from the constant cold and drear and waited for the spring to come. Nothing makes dreams look more appealing than the promise of nice weather in the background of your life story. But before that nice weather could come, March 13 happened and I was called into work on my day off to collect all my belongings because we would be shut down and working from home two hours later. They said a month; it's been nine.
Seasonal depression could not have prepared me for that spring. It was cold, rainy, sometimes snowing in New England. I watched my newsfeed and social media show the thousands of people dying around the world, the tallied numbers of all the natural disasters that had occurred so far this year coming up to staggering numbers of lives lost, the shooting and killing of US citizens sworn by those meant to protect us, and wondered why everyone had said 2020 would be the best year yet. Jinx!
There were certain days I didn’t want to leave bed because time was not passing. Every day was the same. I woke up, I ate, I worked, I ate again, I fell asleep. I broke up with my boyfriend at the time because entering a pandemic with someone is a harsh look on the rest of your life and if you don’t want to see someone when the world around you is falling down, you probably don’t want to spend the rest of your life with them either. I woke around in a daze, crying often and over things that I could not control and generally felt a feeling of hopelessness. What a bummer.
I woke up one day and decided to change. I went out and bought clothes that made me feel good. I bought and made things for my apartment that made me feel safe, happy, and warm. I talked more to my friends and reconnected with a friend I hadn’t spoken to in years. There is nothing like an isolating time in your life to make you realize who you want to be in it. I went on a date on a whim. I wanted to go but also didn’t want to enter another relationship after just getting out of one. But six months later and we have an apartment together and I get to hang out with animals all day. He was the ultimate score.
I continued to write more and to read more than I had since I was a child. I had always loved books but had somehow never realized exactly how happy it made me to lose myself within a book. I read obsessively and knew this hobby was back with a vengeance. I continued to write and submitted one of my rough drafts to an editor which was declined. I was delighted. Never once had I been so happy to fail because I had tried at something! I read it through and thought I actually don’t like this. But I have a new idea. And I have continued to write and let that idea consume me.
I was not able to travel the world as I was hoping to but I was able to travel within New England up to the mountains to get fresh air. I have had horrible allergies for years but something about being inside all the time makes you desperate to get out, no matter the repercussions. Yes, I sneezed my way through the White Mountains but I also hadn’t realized how absolutely breath-taking nature was. I had read countless poems about the beauty of nature and realized it when I was outside on occasion but every day since being able to leave my apartment and go outside has brought a new appreciation for the beauty of something that does not exist to be beautiful. I have become someone who now goes for nightly walks and I take pictures of the stars. For all the thousands of nights they have been above me, I rarely gazed at them. If they came out once every hundred years, the world would stop and stare in amazement. I think it is time we start noticing things.
2020 has been a year of healing and of hope. This country has stopped standing for racial injustice. We have applauded the doctors and nurses of this country for saving countless lives. We have the greatest voter turnout rate ever, because people believe in the people we are electing. We have hope for a greater future than anyone ever did at the beginning of this year. We have seen the lowest of the low and are ready for something greater than we can imagine. We started off this year hoping for growth, to better ourselves, and instead came to heal from things we did not know we were letting hurt us.
Growth is different to everyone. Usually there is some type of end goal to all the plans in our heads. I personally had a goal of staying home, writing, and being able to drink tea all day long. 2020 has allowed me to live out that virtually unattainable goal. I feel as happy as I did as a child and a thought occurred to me one day this summer: would she be happy with where I am in life? Where would she have seen me? I was sitting in my boyfriend's truck, driving through beautiful mountains, listening to old country music my mom would play when I was a child and there was a dog hanging its head out the window before me. I think this is exactly where she would have wanted me to be.
