As I think we all are I’m reflecting on 2020 today, relaxing in my writing space sipping a coffee, the dog snoring at my feet. It was not the year that we expected it to be, was it? I was hopeful at the end of 2019 I felt like the turning of the year would magically put behind me so much turmoil. I was looking to 2020 as a new beginning after so many personal endings. I was looking to rebuild and create. I wanted a calm year, where I could rebuild and find some peace after the biggest battle of my life.
Not all of that came to fruition. A global pandemic shifted a few things around.
I did find more peace; in the lockdown that cultural idea of busy as a badge of honor was shattered for me. I am still not sure how this change will affect my life as a whole, how it will colour my perception when we move into the post pandemic landscapes. Right now, I like the new pace of my life has taken.
The last part of the year I have been posting less even though I am writing more. I made a writing goal in Feb 2020 and so far I have kept it. With this goal has come a change in my writing. The flavour of what I scribble has shifted form tear filled emotional vomit to a more processing reflective thing. It means I’m posting less, even though pages are being filled up. This blog you are reading and the Instagram account that accompanies it, were first though on in Jan 2018. It didn’t go live until that fall, but it still feels like a birthday of sorts this Jan. Into 2021 I am not sure how it will grow, it’s a bit of an unknown right now. The writing I am doing had been very healing, unlocking a new flavour of grief, personal insight, and self knowledge. It feels too personal and underdeveloped to share much of it yet…. leaving a suspended feeling around the Diary of the Phoenix. I know that the fire is out, the smoke and ashes are cleared. Maybe this is the regrowing of feathers phase. What I have descoved is that the mess of it and the not knowing is totally ok.
All in all, I am grateful for the year that was 2020. It was not what I planned or hoped for, yet somehow on the whole it managed to be very healing and re-centering for me. A bunch of things I had planned and set out to do, did not happen. The anxiety that came up for me within the illolation, the stress of my work in healthcare, and the ever changeing landscape as the world reacted, got in the way of most of my plans. I think the theme for me was one of acceptance. Acceptance of my circumstances, my states of mental health, my limits, of peoples reactions to fear. I had to embrace a new kind of unknown, things that I believed to be stable and permanant weavered, weakness in our economies and culture were exposed. Even now the impact on our word and what it will look like a year from now is blury.
In spite of it all I am ok. I found a new sence of freedom in this crazy year of restricted movement and contact. I’m still processing it all.
I have no idea what 2021 will bring me, or the world in general. How ever this unfolds I will be am almost sure that I will be ok.
Diary of the Phoenix 