2020: A Year of Discovery, Life Lessons, Trauma and Healing
I wanted this to be a happier and more optimistic post, but I don’t know if it will be. As my city is plunged into tier three, and my parent's city reaches tier four, I am stuck welcoming the new year on my own. The new year is always something spent with my family, it is usually the only time of year we have off at the same time with my dad and sister out of school, and I usually have time off work a few days after.
But, this new year it is spent on my own. Hearing that news really broke me, not just because of the tier raising, but because I had just gotten myself to a really good mental space. I had let go of a lot of things and began affirming and manifesting good for the future, and now I can’t see a reason to continue putting that effort in doing so.
I feel like every time I try and try at making the positive out of this shitty world situation, I am knocked down again. I had just picked myself up and regained a level of security and stability after November’s lockdown, and thirty days later I find myself falling into that same place again. I just don’t know how many more knocks I can take, how many more breaks before I am too broken to put the pieces back together.
I learned a lot this year. I learned how to pick myself up from a number of difficult places. I learned that my friendships were stronger than ever with limited contact. I learned the real value of family, with both my parents catching the virus (recovered). The bond I have with my sister is something incredibly special.
I learned to open my heart, let it feel love, and express my feelings openly and honestly. Despite things not working out the way I wished they would, I am thankful for the lessons it taught me about how to care for another, about how to take that risk with my heart, something I stopped myself from allowing to happen. But, also how no matter how much you try to stop it, your heart is much stronger and reckless than the mind, it will have you feeling things your mind cannot even begin to comprehend.
I learned to feel my emotions and not shut them off. I learned what it is like to lose control over your body and how to gain that control back.
Lastly, I learned to not be afraid to ask for help.
Now we have entered 2021, I entered it with one of my best friends, who the last time I saw was in January 2020. We video called, which what a lot this year consisted of. I felt peaceful, I had meditated earlier before the countdown and reflected on a lot of things that had been weighing on my mind.
I listened to SZA’s Good Days for the first time, and it really spoke to me. Moving away from past and present negativity, and having hope. SZA is someone I have loved for a long-time, they way she sings with raw emotion. It’s like she says everything I am feeling, Normal Girl is my favourite song because I feel it embodies a lot of how I have felt over the last year.
Good Days focuses on finding positivity in the present and letting go of the negativity. It’s the line “you be heavy on my mind” and the repetitiveness of “always on my mind,” that I felt to my core. I have had a lot of heaviness on my mind this year, but with the lines “Got me a war in my mind
Gotta let go of weight, can’t keep what’s holdin’ me,” it’s all about letting go about that heaviness. Whatever that heaviness be for you, I am learning to let go of the heaviness in my life.
Meditation and a set of affirmations I curated for myself is helping with that. With anxiety, it is all about re-training your brain and though patterns, to not let it get the best of you, to challenge those thoughts that bring that weight down. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes you lost the battle and you have those difficult days, and you have to wallow in them. But, you can always pull yourself out, and it doesn’t have to be on your own.
The last few lines that resonate with me are “I still wanna try, still believe in good days, good days, always,” because as you will read in this I always try to have hope. Hope that the world will get better, and hope that my mind will get better. This was the song I needed to take me into 2021.
2021 is a year for me. A year to look after me and build what 2020 took away from me. To not lose myself in the worries of the world, to not lose myself in work and others. When I feel myself getting like that, I ground.
I am letting go of the need to know and control the future, and instead take each day as one. I am prioritising myself, filling my own cup first before I try to fill others because you cannot give from an empty cup. It can seem selfish to put oneself first, but sometimes we just need to. That doesn’t mean you forget about your friends, family and partners, it’s just that when you are not emotionally strong enough for yourself, you need not be for others.
I started the healing process again, working through things I should have worked through years ago. I am becoming more comfortable talking about my mental health openly, which is incredibly important for South Asians to do, especially women because we go through a lot and in our culture it is not talked about enough. I see it happening everyday with the new writers and magazines, and it warms my heart.
Things are getting better day by day. I will not beat myself up for the bad days and will let myself feel all my emotions authentically and loudly. Something I usually repress or overwork myself until I have to feel them. Now, no matter how small the sadness is, I let myself feel it. I cry it out, fully and then once it is released, I can process and move on from it.
I am also accepting no less than what I deserve in all aspects of my life, including how I treat myself. Practicing self-love is hard because it means you have to tell yourself all the things you tell your loved ones when they are down, and it is not as easy to see the good we see in others in ourselves. But, it is a practice I am learning through guided meditation and slowly I am beginning to believe in my own love, beauty, intelligence and strength.
Below are some pieces I wrote in the last few days of December reflecting on this year. Re-reading them now has given me a new perspective, I will now talk you through them.
This one is really how I feel right now, as I write this. The message of this is really how hard it is to have hope in a world, which by day gives us reasons not to have faith in it anymore. This year has really pushed the boundaries of my optimism by killing it off, resurrecting it, and then breaking it down once again. Yet, I still entertain the notion of hope and improvement because it really is the one thing keeping me going. Without hope, I don’t think many of us would survive.
This one is a lot nicer, it actually makes me smile because even in all the bad I entered December with so much good. This year more than any truly showed the purity in my friendships, and how much love there really is there. It is painful not being able to see my friends properly and often as I would have liked but to know the love is so strong despite the world circumstances is one of the good things to have happened this year.
The bond with my parents and my sister has strengthened immensely. I had to go through the thought of both parents potentially being taken by COVID in the space of a few weeks of each other during the first lockdown. It was terrifying and painful, but now they have recovered I am so grateful that they were the lucky ones to not make it into the statistics.
Christmas this year has to be in the top three moments of my 2020. I spent the few days I had off completely switched off, just cuddling with my sister and watching movie after movie. I am so happy to have a closeness like that with her because not everyone gets that. That is what is going to make this new year so much more difficult because every new year I have entered it with her. Whether we spent it at our grandparents or at home with our parents, she has been my constant for the seventeen years she has been alive.
Going verse by verse, the next one is one of the bittersweet parts of this year. I learned how to open my heart open to another. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time. I took risks, I learned to open my heart and despite the ending, I know I would do it again. I have been told the universe has a way of making things work and if it wills what is meant to be will find its way back together. Who knows? As the theme of everything, hope is all we can have.
The final two. I was taken to the darkest parts of myself, but even those times I managed to find a way back to the light. That is possible for us all. These dark times may be longer than we expect, but we can make it back to the light.
Hope is the theme of all of this. Hope is something that I always have in the darkest of times, it can very hard to hold onto, crippling in fact. But, it is what keeps us alive.
Like SZA says, I still believe in good days, good days always, good days in my mind.
