2020 Hindsight: A new hope

If the end result of this past decade is that I have become more aware of how big the world is, and how interconnected, the irony is that for my personal life my world has gotten much smaller. Yes, every now and then I say something that helps someone or clarifies something, but most of my effort goes into one person, and I don't get out much. (Hence my post from last week; I am working on it.)

However, there is an answer in this review of the past ten years that may give me hope for the future, because 2010 started off badly. I was underemployed, got sick trying to manage a job that was not paying well despite it being skilled labor, and behind on everything. I finally got a new job right before my 20-year reunion, averting some humiliation, but everything got worse before it got better. In learning the new job, refinancing the house, trying to get Mom through her knee surgery while her memory was starting to slip, having a writing partner who needed to talk for hours every night regardless of how exhausted I was... I just wasn't doing well. By the time I got through all of that, there wasn't any creativity left in me, and there wasn't much joy.

I thought 2011 was looking up, with going on Jeopardy! and a vacation finally planned again after four years, but I also came down with pneumonia in December. I used up all my time off for that and was really close to cancelling the trip.

But then I got on Twitter, and I found not just one band I loved, but a lot of music, of all kinds, and I had things to say again. I blogged and wrote screenplays and novels and short scripts and comics. It was an amazing time. It felt like coming back to life, but I hadn't really been dead, just dormant.

So the hope I have is that I am just dormant again, and that it won't last.

The hardest times of my life have been when I have lost something that was part of my identity. There was the time when it was my ability to be cheerful, which turned out to be directly related to my ability to compartmentalize and deny. I needed to lose that, but the process was hard. There was my ability to make a good living and make things easier for people. I guess I hadn't learned enough there.

Maybe I needed to get it really knocked out of me that I will ever be able to make money by writing. To be fair, I often wrote too fast because I so needed some type of income, but it never worked out like that. It's better to avoid being financially desperate, if you can.

In terms of being successful, yes, I have taken excellent care of my mother, but I will not succeed. Her brain has continued to decline. It will until she dies, and she will die. That's a losing battle, and for all the pain it has accumulated along the way, there is more pain in store. It may very well include an even bigger identity crisis, because this has been so much of a focus for so long. I like to think that some of the thinking and preparing and reading will help me not be so messed up, but there is no guarantee of that.

But no matter how much I lose, I do get refined. The dross gets burned off, and what is truest and realest stays, or comes back. Sometimes it is just a matter of hanging in there long enough.

When that thing about your top three accomplishments of the decade started going around, a lot of people felt like they didn't have much to show for it. I saw one post that if you are still here, that is an accomplishment.

I'm still  here. I may still be happy again.