Hi Darling Ones,
I really want to crow about how we made it through this interminable year, but I don’t want to jinx anything.
People magazine jinxed the shit out of Betty White turning 100 in a couple weeks and we all see how that turned out. On top of that, my niece and her boyfriend thought they were gonna make it out of Minnesota yesterday after a few delays only to get to Rapid City, South Dakota where the plane turned around and brought them back to Minneapolis. They’re hopeful they’ll get out of here tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for them. They really miss their cats.
Speaking of Jaycie’s boyfriend, he’s a reader, which means I already adore him. Because he’s a reader we’ve spent a lot of the past three days talking about books. Amor Towles is his favorite, which means my goal in 2022 is to finally read A Gentleman in Moscow, which the Tea Ladies have been telling me to read for literally years.
He, along with most every body I know, is super impressed that I read 180 books this year. At face value, it sounds impressive and makes me seem like a super smarty lit person. If you look at that fun fact too long you can see the darker side of it.
You couple this with with a few other fun facts, that my most listened to records were “Midnight Organ Fight” by Frightened Rabbit and “Little Oblivions” by Julien Baker, and you’ll see that I had a dark, dark year that involved a continuous effort to escape my circumstances.
Franky, I am surprised I made it through 2021. While I wasn’t actively suicidal, there were more days than I can count where I thought, if I died right now laying on this couch that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
This year broke me in ways I am not ready to face. Simply thinking about 2021 makes my eyes sting with tears. I went thirty-two days without human contact, and I don’t think I can recover from what that says about me as a person.
As someone who has been a pretty sensitive crybaby my entire life, I am more fragile and brittle than ever before. It’s as though my emotional filter was deleted and I’ve lost the capability to deal with, well, anything. I’m either ice robot or sobbing pile of good. There is no in between, and I hate it. It sucks. Hard.
Despite all that I remain ever hopeful. I know this brittleness is temporary and I will likely feel something new sometime soon. Maybe tomorrow with a fresh new year? Maybe next week?
Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t die on the couch and made it through this wretched year. Thanks for making it through with me,
Jodi
I’m glad you didn’t “shuffle off this mortal coil” on the couch, or anywhere else, either. Funny story: I told my psychiatrist and therapist that I was feeling disconnected from life and people, and they burst out laughing! “Everybody is feeling the same way!” So yeah, I know it doesn’t always help to know others are going through the same or something similar. But they must know what they’re talking about, since their job is talking to people about their emotional and mental health all day. At least we know we’re not alone. Hard to remember when you’ve been isolated for more than a month. Internet only goes so far. Please don’t go anywhere.