2021: Challenge Accepted

Photo by **Karolina Grabowska** from **Pexels**

There is so much I could say about 2020, but honestly I don’t know if there’s anything left that hasn’t been said. It was a weird year. In order to survive, and as a collective, humanity had to make proverbial lemonade out of iron-clad lemons. Life during an international pandemic is difficult at best, with the pandemic’s unequally distributed consequences adding stress to already deep societal divisions. I can’t think of anyone who isn’t ready for 2020 to be over.

And it finally is! I love New Years. I love the opportunity to reflect, set goals, reset. Just like everything else, New Years feels differently this year. First, there’s the obvious fact that most of us spent New Years Eve differently than we usually would. Secondly, I feel more motivated than ever to reflect on, and learn from, the many lessons of the last year.

Because 2020 held many lessons. Both for me as an individual, and humanity as a whole. The failure to reflect and act on lessons learned leaves us stuck in old patterns. Ignoring opportunities for growth, like those presented in 2020, causes stagnation and decay. And if there’s anything we all need as 2020 comes to a close, it is growth. If humanity is to survive for much longer we need to evolve. We need to break out of old patterns and create new ones that work for more people. I’m not exaggerating, I know you can feel it too. We’re going through something important right now. How we move forward from it will be even more important.

In the spirit of growth, I decided to use my 2020 reflections this year to focus on the lessons I’ve learned, and what they mean for me for the next year:

Lesson 1: Resilience is a tool for survival

Almost everything changed this year. Many bad things got worse, and/or more apparent to more people. We had to unlearn human habits like hugging our loved ones and touching our faces. Things that used to be ordinary and mundane became anxiety-inducing. For many of us, our lifestyles turned completely upside down.

How you react to change impacts your mental health. The ability to cope with change is called resilience. Building resilience allows you to process the grief that comes with change without completely shutting down. When you are resilient, you accept that change can cause discomfort rather than trying to avoid it by remaining stoic and “pushing through.” Resilience allows you to recognize the positive aspects of change because you don’t spend as much energy on the things you can’t control. Building resilience helps you identify when your anxiety is lying to you, and therefore helps you calm down when it does. All of this impacts your mental health. If you are not resilient, if you struggle with change, your mental health will be poor.

I think it’s safe to say we all struggled with our mental health at some point in 2020. But if you never got a break from the struggle, if you spent the entire year on one uphill incline, if you spent most of your energy desperately wishing for things to “Go back to normal,” you likely need to work on your resilience. Building resilience is not easy because we don’t build resilience by living easy lives. Resilience comes with mindfulness about the opportunity of every moment rather than succumbing to anxiety about the past or future. To be resilient you often must confront past failures in order to learn from them. Resilience means leaning on others for support. It means working through your problems instead of ignoring them. These are not easy things to do and I’m not going to pretend they are. But intentionally taking on opportunities to push through discomfort in order to grow is always worth it. At least it always has been for me. Working on my resilience helped me survive 2020. And as we step cautiously into the possibility of 2021, resilience will help me take control of my survival so I can thrive.

Lesson 2: Community matters

The structure of our economy and the western culture that has grown around it does not promote community. Our society’s history of colonialism and patriarchy does not promote community. Rugged individualism, competition, and domination — the very opposite of community — are inherent parts of how we socialize children in the American education system. They are qualities we glorify through characters in movies and on TV. Capitalism rewards workers for exhibiting these qualities.

These qualities degrade our sense of community and breed mistrust and coldness between people. But we definitely learned this year that people need each other. Humans are social animals. Establishing connections with others as part of a community gives us a sense of purpose. It alleviates our anxiety and makes us feel happy and entertained. We learned this first-hand this year as most of us were denied access to many of the people who sustain us. We experienced the true importance of community as the virus deprived us of it.

Let’s think about what this experience means for us moving forward. What would it look like if we resisted the cultural current and lived our lives as if community matters? How might our behavior or choices change if we considered more people as part of our community? Because that’s the beautiful thing about community; it’s something we actually have control over. We get to decide who we value and feel obligated to care for. Each individual has agency over how they support members of their community, or whether or not they do. We have the choice to either extend community to others, or deprive them of it. We play out these choices every day in our actions, our votes, our words. What if, in 2021, we made a better effort to recognize the humanity in others by expanding our ideas and values around community?

What if?

Lesson 3: Rest is good for us and we all need to do it more

I have been thinking a lot lately about the lessons I can take from nature in the way I live my life. Capitalism asks us to use nature, manipulate it, bend it to our will. In prioritizing money over everything else, people in capitalist societies often act counter to nature in order to remain competitive. I’ll give you an example:

Capitalism asks us to never rest. We live in an economic system that expects the labor force to act as if it runs on batteries, or risk being replaced by something that does. We conduct our lives as if every waking moment is an opportunity to make money, and therefore must be spent working on achieving that goal. “The hustle, “the grind,” this notion that we should never stop working, is toxic to our mental and physical health.

We know this. The health consequences of living in this state of chronic stress are widely known and felt by many. Americans are stressed out. They were stressed out before 2020, before Covid-19, before the Trump presidency. In 2007 (which, for context, was written during the second Bush presidency and before the Great Recession of 2008) the American Psychological Association found that one-third of Americans reported feeling extreme stress, with money and work being the most common cause.

Then, it would be an understatement to say the stress levels of people around the world have been off the charts in 2020. This was a year that amplified divisions and robbed people of their dignity, their livelihood, and their lives. But for the purpose of this conversation it is most notable to think about the ways people’s stress levels increased when they were forced to do less this year. Many people experienced severe mental health consequences when they were forced to stop working, stop filling their schedules, stop networking, just stop.

There are several reasons for this whiplash effect, and our institutional, socio-cultural, and political contexts matter. First of all, since capitalism doesn’t value rest we don’t have institutions in place to support the humanity and survival of all the members of our community in the event that we are forced to stop. Programs like welfare, unemployment, universal healthcare, etc are designed to literally help people survive when stuff like this happens. The thing is, the classism and individualism inherent in our society has allowed politicians to convince people these programs aren’t worth funding. Receiving support from the government is vilified as lazy, a sign of personal failure, evidence of a desire to live off of someone else’s hard work. This rhetoric is incredibly effective in convincing people to vote against these programs. So effective that our healthcare and welfare systems literally couldn’t support the amount of people who needed it this year.

And people died. Hundreds of thousands of them in the U.S alone. And that’s stressful (especially for the disabled, elderly, and houseless populations who are both at the most risk for dying from Covid-19 and the populations who lose the most when we cut funding to welfare, healthcare, and unemployment programs). In 2020, many people learned the stress of figuring out how to survive as Covid-19 took job security away from groups of Americans who do not typically face the risk of literally losing the ability to work.

A second reason it became stressful when we ground to halt in 2020 is: since capitalism doesn’t value rest, we don’t know how to rest. As a culture, we are so obsessed with the hustle, we actually manifest feelings of guilt, shame, and uselessness when we can’t work. When we can’t fulfill everyone’s expectations and win every competition. When we can’t keep grinding. These feelings impact our self esteem. They increase our anxiety and make us depressed. They probably affected your opinion of others who can’t work in the past, and give you complicated feelings about yourself if you are now in that situation.

This is what 2020 did to us. It forced us to rest. It forced us to not do, to not go, to not be productive. And that’s really difficult for a society of people who value work and money over everything else. But rest is an important part of many natural cycles. Species in ecosystems all over the earth hibernate when there is no food available, and therefore no work to be done. They literally rest. What if we rested more? What if, as a society, we didn’t see rest as lazy? What if we valued it as an important part of being human?

Rest allows your brain and body to restore. It heals. It rejuvenates. This December, as a second wave of quarantine hit, I decided to take my cue from my natural surroundings and allow myself to rest. I took breaks from social media. I forgave myself for falling asleep on the couch at 7pm once it started getting dark at 4. I prioritized activities that felt restful. I gave myself time and space to reflect. I embraced healthy solitude and focused on getting my basic needs met. I took the pressure off. It wasn’t necessarily easy. Like I said above, humans are social creatures and I hated being away from my loved ones over the holidays.

And, I really, really needed to rest.

As 2020 drew to a close, I realized more than anything 2021 is going to be a challenge. Hopes are high for 2021. Expectations that “Everything will go back to normal” are swirling through conversations, tap dancing across our brains. That’s a lot of pressure on one year. The New York Times morning briefings and my friends who are nurses have tempered my optimism for 2021. We still have a long way to go, and honestly I don’t know if there is, or should be, any “going back to normal.” New Years gives us the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start over. But here’s the thing y’all, there is no wiping the slate clean right now. There is work to do. I’m sure we would all love to forget the trauma from 2020 and move on, but this year I would like to caution you against it. For, we can find the blueprint for the work to be done in 2021 within the lessons we learned in 2020. I implore you, remember the lessons from 2020. Use them to fuel your action, your choices, your movements. Work on building your resilience, love each other a little more, and give yourself permission to rest. If we can keep all these things in mind then I feel fully confident saying, 2021: Challenge Accepted.

How One Depressed Person is Coping with Social Distancing

Covid-19, Coronavirus, Social Distancing, Quarantine. Potential economic collapse. A president who can’t even speak in complete sentences. Our current context is incredibly difficult for anyone to cope with. I can only really speak from my perspective, though, and as someone who suffers from depression and anxiety I’m here to report: we are not ok.

Holy shit, this is scary. People with anxiety are prone to catastrophizing: jumping directly to the worst-case-scenario possible in literally any situation. This is a legitimate thought distortion that many people experience during times of great stress. The general hysteria leading regular, every-day people to ransack big box stores for toilet paper, Ramen, and peanut butter is all evidence of this.

But when you spend a good deal of your daily energy trying to keep yourself from dissolving into paranoid hysterics on a regular day, the rest of the world succumbing to those kinds of thoughts is a horrifying trigger. One tried and true method for bringing yourself back from the edge of a panic attack while catastrophizing, is trying to find evidence for how likely that worst-case-scenario would be. Usually, it is really difficult to find that evidence because our worst-case-scenarios are super unlikely. But right now, our worst-case-scenarios are what everyone else believes will happen too.

So, what the fuck do we do now?

What we’re going through as a collective is tough. As always, I have been on a little bit of a roller coaster because of it. That being said, I’m doing ok. And I want everyone to be ok. So I’m here to tell you what I’m doing, and how I’m coping; in case it helps anyone out there. No strategy will ever be 100% successful, but together we can help each other survive.

Radical Acceptance

Radical Acceptance is something I learned at my partial hospitalization program I did in December. Essentially, this strategy acknowledges that fighting against painful realities achieves nothing but suffering. In other words, desperately wishing a painful aspect of your current reality out of existence achieves nothing but anxiety. If you are practicing radical acceptance you are: accepting the situation as true and final, understanding what you can and cannot control about the situation, being non-judgemental, allowing yourself to feel your negative emotions rather than pushing them away. Once you engage in radical acceptance, you free yourself from the burden of worrying about the outcome of a situation you have no control over. You allow yourself to build a reality that works for you within the boundaries of what is possible, even if it’s not ideal.

How have I been practicing radical acceptance while social distancing? Well, we are not supposed to spend time in public, in situations with 10+ people, we shouldn’t touch our faces, or go to work, we can’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. All of that is fact. I can’t change it, no matter how much I want it to not be true.

But there are things I can control about the situation. I can use the privilege of my able body and salaried position to help others however possible. On one hand, that means social distancing so I don’t contribute to others contracting something that could impact them worse than it would me. It also means giving the money I’m not spending on recreation due to business closures to those who don’t have financial privilege to get them through this mess (if you haven’t seen people posting about ways to share your disposable income with those who need it, scroll down and check the links at the bottom of this page).

I can also control how I use my time during this crisis. I could spend my days stressing about the rate my supplies are depleting, missing my friends, desperate to leave my house. Or I could see this time that’s been given to me as a gift.

We could all really use a vacation

I want to start this section by acknowledging my privilege. I understand for many reasons this time off of work is stressful to many not in my situation (this is why I have been venmo-ing various people and organizations money for the last week).

I also believe that if we take care of each other, and take it upon ourselves to redistribute resources to support members of our community, we all could take advantage of this time off.

Capitalism is hard, dude. Whether you believe in it or not, the colonial capitalist system we live in is not easy to navigate. There’s a lot of stress in capitalism. There’s always pressure to be the best. There’s a constant race to cover your bills and afford the material goods that prove your worth to those around you, while only ever looking out for “number one.” Our culture doesn’t value breaks. It doesn’t value down time. It doesn’t value taking time out to refuel and support your mental health.

Well, regardless of whether or not Capitalism values it, we are all officially on a break. Seeing this time as a “break” doesn’t erase the fact that it’s scary, it’s difficult, it’s overwhelming, That being said, spending your time being scared and overwhelmed won’t fix anything either. So we’re on break.

What have you been refusing to do because you don’t have time? What hasn’t fit into your schedule because of work and family obligations? How long has it been since you’ve taken a walk in the sunshine? How long has it been since you’ve written a poem? Or learned a new skill? Or practiced meditation? Or made a scrapbook? Or baked cookies? Or learned a new language?

Within the parameters of what will keep you and your community safe, what could you use this time for if you weren’t scared?

Let’s make art

A new friend I’ve recently gotten close to reminded me that destruction is a gift.

This is kind of a radical idea but, what if everything falling apart was clearing the way for new growth? What if desperately clinging to the safe reality we had before is keeping us from creating something that will actually work for more of us in the future? What if accepting destruction will clear the path for creation and growth?

Basically what I’m saying is: during this quarantine, if we’re not making art, finding ways to laugh, and orgasming as much as possible, what are we doing, really?

Links to where you should send your money (I’ll post more as I find them):

Navajo and Hopi Family Covid-19 relief fund

Help youth climate activist Daphne Frias fight Covid-19

No Kid Hungry

Unified Phoenix Service Relief Fund for people in the service industry in Phoenix going without pay right now

Donate to help Navajo families maintain their access to fresh water

29 and alive af

On Saturday February 22, I turn 29. I haven’t historically been a huge “birthday person,” but this is going to be a big one. Not only will it be the last year of my 20s, but I wasn’t even sure I would make it to 29, so I’m fairly excited it’s happening.

My 20s were a hard fucking decade. I think that phenomenon is pretty common for people in general. During my 20s, I: survived sexual assault, married my partner, earned 2 degrees, got my first big girl job, bought and renovated a house, was inducted into three academic honors societies, won an award for educational excellence from the MEA, got diagnosed with anxiety, and depression, and PTSD, and ADHD, and endometriosis. I traveled the world, became an aunt twice over, helped my sister through a divorce, stood as a bridesmaid a million times, got at least 25 tattoos (I’ve honestly lost count), made friends, lost friends, survived suicide, fell in love with New Orleans jazz, started a blog, and came out as bisexual.

I’ve been so low I didn’t think I would make it out. I’ve had adventures. I’ve accomplished goals. I’ve coped with failure, death, and pain.

Those were my 20s. Doubtlessly the most formative decade of the three I’ve been alive.

And standing here, looking down the barrel of my last year of my 20s, it is difficult how to adequately express the extent of my happiness that I am still alive.

The knowledge and understanding that I almost committed suiced in October has weighed on my mind in interesting ways over the last four-ish months. Considering I had no plans to wake up on October 30, 2019, I could have never predicted the ways that fact would ultimately bring an end to many chapters of my life, and a beginning to many others.

What I can no longer do is…

Look, I made a suicide plan and scheduled a time to follow-through on it. We have a detached garage, and I therefore knew my Subaru and I could poison myself with carbon monoxide without harming my dog and cats in the process. But, on the day I was planning on doing it, I went to the hospital instead. And here I am.

I consider this event a “mental breakdown” in the very purest sense of the term. I survived my 20s by gathering up all of my symptoms from PTSD, anxiety, and depression, all of my endometriosis pain, all of my emotional needs, and shoving them deep into a well in the pit of my stomach. Within me lies a Mariana Trench packed with the ghosts of my past I refused to acknowledge. And it totally worked. I had everyone convinced that I was “normal.” Better than normal, actually. Ask my bosses and/or teachers from this time period and they would describe me as high achieving, exceeding expectations.

But as I tried to keep them captive, those ghosts fused together like the Power Rangers once they transform into that robot thing. They became stronger, angrier. A demonic beast that ate me alive and almost killed me.

And now that I’ve fought that demon, and won, I can’t lock it back up anymore. Like, I literally can’t. My brain has literally lost the ability to perform that function. I think about mental health every single day. I talk about mental health every single day. I have to. My near-suicide didn’t kill me, but it did kill my ability to suppress. I have completely lost my ability to pretend. I can no longer “fake it til I make it.”

This means I acknowledge and work through every thought distortion, every distressing emotion, and every trigger as it comes. This is exhausting. Some days it feels like all I am capable of is surviving. It also means that there are lots of things I was able to do well before, that I can’t do at all anymore.

For instance, I can’t commit to plans. I hate myself for it, but I’ve bailed kind of a lot lately. I usually make plans with someone ahead of time, and will spend the intervening days fully committed to going. But if something triggers me on the day of said plans, I bail. I have to. Because I learned the hard way that, if I don’t put my mental health first, it could kill me.

I also can’t take control in chaotic situations. Honestly, most large crowds give me anxiety right now. But, if I don’t have to be in control, if I don’t have to be the one that makes sure everyone gets home safely and nothing gets lost, I can relax. On the other hand, if I am given any kind of responsibility in chaotic situations, I completely shut down. This has made doing my job almost impossible. I don’t know how many of you have spent time in middle school lately, but it’s a pretty chaotic place. Teachers constantly need to be on guard and in control or everything will fall apart. Everything often falls apart anyway, even if we teachers think we are in control. And I cannot handle it anymore. Luckily, my coworkers and administration have been incredibly supportive. But still, every day is an uphill climb. Every morning I start back at the bottom of the hill.

What I can do now that I couldn’t before…

I can be honest. I can be the most honest version of myself possible now. This is momentous for me. I no longer have the energy to try to “get” people to like me, or impress anyone, so I don’t anymore. Obviously, I still have low self esteem. It will take much longer than four-ish months for me to topple that mountain. That being said, I no longer let it change my behavior. I no longer let my low self esteem stop me from asserting exactly what I want and need.

And I can assert myself now. My long history of perfectionism made it impossible for me to ask for help. Both in and outside of my school career, I limped my way through many things I could have made easier for myself if I would have just asked. Then, asking for help literally saved my life. I was self-aware enough to realize what I was going through was an emergency, and I reached out to a coworker who took me to the hospital. More than anything else in my life, this event made me realize it is OK to ask for help. I would love to say that asking for help is easy for me now, but that would be a lie. Still, I can ask for help now, and that is a triumph. I can assert my existence and validate my own needs. I can lean on the people in my life who have been desperate for me to do so in the face of my lifetime of fierce independence.

Finally, I can talk about and work through my emotions, rather than letting them conquer me. That demonic beast of suppressed needs that almost killed me in October? I calmed it. I gave it the validation it so desperately needed. I gave it a home in my life, and my heart, and my brain.

I shake hands with the symptoms of my PTSD, and my anxiety, and my depression. I acknowledge their existence. I acknowledge their importance. And I allow myself to walk away.

I ask myself what I’m feeling regularly. I allow myself the time to define my emotions. I am compassionate with myself. I utilize my skills and my support system to fulfill the needs of my emotions. And I put them to bed.

Then, there’s grief…

I don’t know about anyone else, but I was never told that humans can experience grief for many types of loss; only one of which is the death of a loved-one. I have cycled through many different and unexpected iterations of the five stages of grief over and over again since October.

I’ve had to grieve my former, “perfect,” self. As I mentioned above, my ability to exceed everyone’s expectations was fueled by my ability to suppress all of my trauma, emotions, and needs. Therefore, my inability to suppress those things has resulted in a considerable drop in performance. I can no longer do the things I once did, to the standard to which I once did them. And this is really difficult for me to handle.

Releasing myself from needing to be perfect has not taken away my feelings of failure every time I fall short. I relied on my former perfection to prove my self worth to the world. I derived self esteem from my productivity. I am currently in a time of life where self esteem and feelings of worth are running in short supply. Additionally, I no longer have my perfect performance to draw from. I therefore am experiencing an intense loss.

A loss of identity (as the “best” at whatever I’m doing). A loss of confidence in whether or not I’m still meeting expectations. A loss of confidence in how my bosses and colleagues feel about me.

Furthermore, I am daily coming to new understandings of the roots and consequences of my mental health. I have a lifetime’s worth of connections being forged in my brain as I truly analyze my emotions for the first time. These connections often result in epiphanies, often that knock me on my ass.

I’ll give you an example: while talking to my partner about something unrelated the other day, it hit me that I have spent the last decade of our relationship truly believing that I was unworthy of his love. I literally believed that I had nothing to offer a partner. I believed that, in order to keep his love, I had to prove myself worthy over and over again. I lived my life in an intense state of anxiety that, at any moment, I was under threat of losing the love of my life once he realized I couldn’t maintain the standard of domestic excellence that I was pretending I could.

That’s fucking depressing.

My self esteem was so low, I wasted an entire decade of life refusing to allow myself to feel loved, when I had an overabundance of love available to me.

Please tell me I don’t have to illustrate for you what I lost in this scenario.

Happy Birthday to Me

My point is that my 29th birthday is a big deal to me. This year, I will shamelessly celebrate myself to the fullest. I will be loud, outrageous, and silly. I will overdress for the bar I’m going to.

And everywhere I go, I will let everyone know that it’s my birthday.

Because it is not just a birthday.

It is more than an anniversary of the year I was born.

It is a symbol of the hellfire I walked through.

It is a trophy forged out of the ashes of my old life, and reborn in the phoenix of my new.

2019, The Triumphant Year

It’s New Years Eve and, like many, I’ve been doing a lot of reflection. Looking back, I cycled through many adjectives before I could find the right one to apply to 2019. I landed on triumphant. When looking at the year as a whole, 2019 was not exactly good. There were important moments of joy, but there were just as many important moments of heartache, and even near tragedy. I worked hard this year; at work, for grad school, on myself. I not only went through changes, I went through complete transformations. All in all though, 2019 was a triumph for me. Here, I have included a brief reflection on the events of this year that made it so damn triumphant.

The Joy

On January 23, 2019, my sister’s divorce was finalized. This may seem like a weird event to include in the “joy” category, but believe me, it was the right choice. Sometimes marriages need to end. My sister’s marriage was one of them. And when it did, I got my sister back in a big way. This event also started out our theme for 2019 with a bang. This year, my sister and I decided, the theme would be “Taking out the Trash.” Basically, that’s our asshole way of goal setting. The goal being that we would spend 2019 ridding our lives of anything toxic that no longer served us. And we totally did. Toxic relationships, toxic thoughts, toxic habits; we systematically deleted as many as we could from our lives throughout the course of the year. And believe me when I tell you, I felt a sense of increased joy and freedom with each deletion.

On the other side of the coin, I opened myself up to new kinds of connections this year. I brought new people into my life. And, in 2019, I built connections with these new people by being genuinely myself. As someone with a lifetime of low self esteem under my belt, I attracted a lot of people based on how I could serve them. I made many friends and relationships over the years by being a people-pleaser. I became a pro at morphing myself into exactly who each individual wanted me to be (a pattern which widely led to our theme this year, see above). In 2019, I quit doing that. I worked on building my confidence. I committed myself to being honest, to allowing myself to take up space. And, as a result, both the old relationships I kept, and the new relationships I made, are stronger, more loving, and more supportive than I’ve ever experienced.

These people are what brought me joy in 2019. I traveled with them, I traveled to see them. I had silly drunk dance parties with them. Explored new outlets for creativity and worked on fun projects with them. Stayed up all night talking to them. Sang Celine Dion with them. Watched every single movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in order with them. Taught them. Learned from them. Laughed with them. Cried with them. Leaned on them for support. So, to all the people who helped make 2019 a triumph for me, thank you. Thank you so much.

The Tragedy

Whereas some of the highs I had in 2019 were the highest highs of my life, I also experienced the lowest lows. The first half of the calendar year was the last half of my 2018/19 school year as a teacher. That was a really difficult school year. I had a high population of students with childhood trauma, a high rate of suicide attempts among my 8th graders, rampant issues with homophobic bullying in my school (that my school district handled inappropriately regardless of how hard I fought for change). By the end of it, I was questioning whether or not I still wanted to be a teacher. Those questions immediately sent me into an identity crisis, as teaching is all I ever planned on doing, and all I ever felt I was good at. The school year ended with me witnessing an episode of gender-based violence in my classroom that triggered my trauma.

When summer rolled around, I really should’ve taken a break. Taken care of myself. But another stressor I’ve been struggling with is money. So, I taught summer school and I enrolled full time in grad school for the winter, spring, and summer semesters. Overall in my life, I’ve used work and school as a coping mechanism to avoid thinking about my inner turmoil. If I’m busy, I’m not thinking, so I have to stay busy. In 2019, this habit almost broke me.

Then the 2019/2020 school year unfortunately started with more triggers. On September 9, 2019, a student from our school was kidnapped by a member of the community. She was held and raped inside my school building which was open after hours for a community event. The man was caught and is being appropriately sentenced. But this event made my place of employment a rape trauma trigger that made going to work almost impossible.

When October rolled around, I was primed for a breakdown. October is always already a difficult month for me. I was raped at a Halloween party in college. Therefore, as much as I love it, the Halloween season is an incredibly salient trigger for me. All of the sights, sounds, and smells of Halloween spark flashbacks that plague me all month long. Combine that with the triggers I had already experienced this year, and I walked into October on a razor-thin edge. Then, on October 19, 2019 I was volunteering at a Halloween event in Detroit. I basically volunteered to pick up litter and empty cups off the tables so I could get free entry. I was in my own world, cleaning up the balcony of a ballroom at the Masonic Temple while a goddess of burlesque performed down below, when a drunk man I had never seen before grabbed me. My official insignia as event staff didn’t protect me from being dragged into a shadowy corner as anonymous drunk asshole attempted to stick his tongue down my throat.

I fought him off.

I went and told my supervisor.

Security found him and, no questions asked, kicked him out immediately.

I thought I was fine.

10 days later I almost killed myself.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know the rest.

The Future

Both the joys and tragedies of this year taught me a lot. They actually led to some of the most important transformations I’ve ever been through. Every single thing that happened in 2019 helped me understand myself, my needs, and my mental illnesses much better. They convinced me to seek help and make the changes that I desperately needed to make. The therapy I engaged in was the best choice I’ve ever made for myself, and I am looking at starting a new year, and a new decade, in the best emotional, mental, and relational space I’ve ever been in.

And, for 2020, my sister and I have officially decided on our new theme: I Come to Slay. In other words, 2020 will be a year of continued deference to my best self, my strongest needs, and my most important desires. I will take up space. I will be assertive. I will love myself as much as I love others. I will try my best to make positive changes in the world.

I’m ready for you, 2020. Let’s do this.