This isn’t a list of things I’ve done this year.
This isn’t a list of things I’m grateful for or things I’ve achieved, and it definitely isn’t instagram-mindfulness-quote-account positive sentiment about how changing two numbers in the date instead of one will make some sort of difference.
(TW: Mental ill-health)
For the last couple of years on New Year’s Eve, I have written a few lines and posted it on social media with one of my favourite photos of me from the previous twelve months. Those carefully curated sentences attempted to pick out the highlights from my year, ignoring the difficult parts.
This year, however, I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.
It’s a difficult thing to say, considering the state of the world today, the fecundity of suffering and my relative place within it, but I have found this year incredibly difficult. In a lot of ways, it’s been genuinely awful.
I have wrestled with how to express this to those who’ve asked about my lockdown experience or just reflected on how I am. I have not to my knowledge had COVID, nor have my family; no-one in my immediate circles has experienced long COVID, and no-one I know has died. Despite that relative luck, I find myself profoundly hurting in so many ways, longing for rest and respite from a truly unforgiving year.
But this is not an entirely new feeling to me. I’ve suffered deeply from mental illness — chronic depression, anxiety and similar — for a number of years, something for a long time I was deeply ashamed of, a fact that increased my suffering as it caused me to avoid help, deny my pain and hide my true state when even those closest asked me “how are you doing?”. It was then that I learnt in the most painful ways the incredible dangers of toxic masculinity and toxic positivity society equipped me to threaten myself with.
The great conflict of our social contract is found in wrestling with trying to relate personal suffering to that of others. I believed for years that my pain was simply not valid or worth talking about when compared to the suffering of others — something I have struggled with afresh in 2020 as the world has been wearied by collective loss. I felt guilty, and continue to feel so as I write this, when I realise the degree to which that I have found this year horrible, lonely and sad.
Wrestling with the justification of your own emotions has been new, and terrifying, for a lot of people in the pandemic. Many of us have experienced the torment held in the questions of whether it is fair for us to express our experienced negativity when in the grand scheme of things, we’ve been lucky?
As someone who loves social media, a place where I can fangirl over my spectacular friends and share with them in everything from the mundane to the life-changing, it’s been difficult for me to admit just how painful a place it has been for me this year.
The “on this day” nostalgiaporn our apps insist we engage with enforces comparison between our today and our past, or at least the content our past selves permitted into our caricature social media accounts. In a year unlike anything we’ve ever experienced, to be forced to constantly see how the human race existed in ancient history BC (before COVID) has given me temporal whiplash as photos of myself in pubs and parks are advertised to me like the flashbacks in the prologue of a dystopia-set video game.
Seeing loved ones and friends sharing their annual review posts, New Year’s Eve reflections and year highlights have been incredibly painful for me. I’m aware so many of us find ourselves feeling like we’ve been in a simultaneous holding pattern and freefall since March; that we have in parallel failed to achieve, rest or be productive in any way in 2020. The bookshelves of my mind earmarked for 2020 remain decidedly empty, with all that’s present being hazy and sporadic. As I compare my year to that of others, a perfect storm of struggle and restriction, I find it nigh on impossible to not feel as though I’ve simply had this year taken from me. That’s a heartbreaking thing to have to try and come to terms with.
In addition, the challenge of social media in 2020 has been to not be consumed by anger and jealousy when seeing the actions of others. Whether friends were breaching rules or living in places which did not experience the same ones, it has been hard not to watch on as people apparently experienced more joyful interaction than you were able to without feeling cheated.
This year for so many of us has been traversed only by trying our hardest to cope when it all seemed a bit pointless. The boredom, loneliness, hopelessness and bitterness are not glam enough for the ‘gram, but that doesn’t make them any less valid or real. Their frequent presence and apparent uselessness, nonetheless, should not be an excuse for their minimisation — not everything we experience has some sort of lesson or demands a productive response, I pray one day for mental freedom from the binds of the hustle culture which forces our three-dimensional humanity through an internalised economic scale. Our feelings are licit even if we can’t cope with or understand them.
What I’m trying to justify, whether to myself or to you, dear reader, is that I simply don’t feel capable of “remembering” this year in anything like the conventional sense. I’m trying for the first time to put long-form words to the Euan experience [please read like a pun on human experience, not a very self-centred world view] by filling a void that should have been an Instagram highlight and a Happy New Year message.
This year has left me tired, stressed and leaving with very little more than I was able to bring from 2019. I survived by means of increasingly powerful medication, obsessively feeding a sourdough starter and some beautiful people in my life who helped to provide fleeting distractions from despair. If you’re still here at the end of this ramble, thank you. This is the first time I’ve ever mentioned my mental ill-health in writing like this and is probably the most honest I’ve been with anyone other than one or two people about my experience of the year.
In essence, I want to be part of a reclamation of public emotionality. We’re like someone trapped in a room complaining about the darkness without addressing the fact we have our eyes closed; our common pain has never resulted in collectivised emotion. As I write this I am not holding on to some grandiose notion that I hold the answers to solving this ‘other pandemic’, instead these words serve largely myself as I try and coax myself into some honesty with myself and the world, to put words to my reality which at the end of this year feels cripplingly lonely. I hope, though, there is hope somewhere in these lines.
Happy New Year.
I am an occasional writer and journalist usually on topics around politics, elections and history. I am on twitter @euanspeaks.
