A few years ago I went through a really difficult time. I had just broken up, had a lot of problems at work and anxiety had started to visit me with increasingly severe attacks. At that time I met a person who suggested two things that I ignored at the moment, but which I thought about in these last months of the most absurd year I have ever experienced: meditation and the diary of gratitude. I tried the first one occasionally last year when the anxiety became so heavy that I burst into tears on the buses: I am too little constant to benefit from it but at least I have learned how to use the breath, and when you miss it. the air knowing that there is a way to stop drowning is no small wild card.
The second instead came back to me this morning when I thought about this 2020 and the impact it had on my life. And I realized that, although it was unquestionably a shit year, it offered me possibilities that I probably wouldn’t have in a normal year. or I would not have been able to grasp / exploit to the maximum, and made me understand things that obviously were not very clear to me.
In conclusion, paradoxically I should be grateful for 2020 for having been a terrible year.
I mean, see you: hallucinating. But yet.
First of all, thanks to 2020 I am much better at work than before. Not being able to do things in the usual way challenged me to find alternative solutions, and when I got new assignments I had time to dedicate myself 100%, without having to choose between being at the computer on a Friday night or going out. I know: I’m looking at the glass half full. But on the other hand, the water is there, it’s up to me to look at it in the right way. And if while I was standing there stuck to the screen I sent all the damn things in the world to 2020, now I know that it would take me two years to make the leap I did in 6 months. So, thank you.
2020 then taught me to be with others. But in what sense, you say? If the mantra is “stay away” as much as possible! Sure, you are right. But being alone for me has never been a problem and I spent the months of the total lockdown peacefully at home watching TV series, reading and working, without any need to go out: I am a social animal but I need my space and I think I had accumulated so much need to disconnect from people that perhaps those months simply served to recharge the batteries (see, here’s another reason for gratitude. But think of you). The difficult thing, if anything, was being stuck at my parents’ house in a sudden forced and unexpected quarantine at their home: after 16 years of living alone, finding myself with 3 other people in the house 24/7 was really a mess. Yet there is nothing that I needed anymore. Having to adapt to the rhythms of others, making them live with yours without constantly being a frustration or a problem, having to interact even when you are angry, sad, nervous, forced me to review the way I interact with people. To see my limits and to face them slowly. 2020 forced me to do it, and who knows how else I could have done that but this?
The third thing I’m grateful for in 2020 is making me clearly identify which is mine support bubble. I borrow the term with which outside Italy (because here we are still in the Middle Ages and we speak only of family, as if nothing existed outside of love relationships and blood ties), people who are essential for your emotional well-being, those that in short, in difficult times are next to you, and you next to them. I know many people and for my work I frequent many, yet after all these months of forced separation I can count on my fingers those I want to be always present in my life, in joy and pain, to quote the marriage formula. I can count them not in the sense that they are few, but that I know for sure what they are, and it is an immense fortune to know. And among those maybe there are some that I will want closer still, once all this is over. Because there may not be the time we always think is infinite, so you better know who you want to be there, and how you want them to be there.
Time, I said. Here: you know when someone says he would like to do many things but does not have time? Let’s say we’ve had plenty of time this year, so what we haven’t done is simply because we just don’t want to do it. Therefore another thing I’m grateful for in 2020 is taking my apology away: I know what I want to do and what I will never want to do (like going for a run, even if it is an excuse to go out) even if I had 48 hours days. And by the same principle I know what I will want to use my time for when I also have the freedom, that is I know what are the things that I have been missing in these months and that I will never postpone. That this is a lie and another thing I am grateful for in 2020: seeing things as they are. Because I know very well that I will continue to procrastinate as before and I will miss the exhibitions, the concerts and stuff because I am a person who lives last minute and oh well. I said I’m grateful for what he taught me this year, not that he worked the miracle. And despite the gratitude, my feeling towards 2020 is all summed up in this song:
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