2020

This year has been... 2020. You know what that means. We've all been through the same shitstorm this year, all around the world. Personally, we have been mercifully safe so far, but it's been at the cost of my job (via redundancies at a company which relied heavily on live events to keep the cashflow going) and all my career momentum with it... not to mention mental momentum. Everything has kicked off and gone apeshit all around the world, nothing makes sense anymore, nobody knows what to believe anymore, the passing of time has never meant less to any of us that it does now... and yet we still know to celebrate the New Year as if everything horrifying about right now has an expiry date of 1/1/2021.

But as is conventional at this changing of the year, we must put aside the existential dread of a global pandemic, the increasing success of disinformation campaigns and the realities of Brexit that are about to hit us like a freight train... and instead, we must recognise that we have survived another rotation of the Earth, commemorate those who did not, and look for optimism before putting up the new calendar we got for Xmas. We know now, much more acutely, who and what we value. We have a chance to reset some things in out lives and (hopefully, dear god...) in society. With vaccinations come a light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel. At some point, everything that makes people anxious and wired all the time will subside and become past tense. We'll have a new Roaring Twenties as a result of what we're going through right now. It won't happen immediately, but it will happen inevitably. In the meantime, hang on and focus on controlling the controllables. That's all you can do for now.

Happy new year. Never stop looking for hope.