The cynical optimist

I had plans to write this on any number of days leading up to an including New Year’s Eve, However my job and life itself had very different plans in mind. So, instead here I am on the third day of  2022 bringing you my year in review, as well as my hopes of what the new year may bring.

2021 began on a global level with an insurrection, with a pandemic that raged on and with the hope of a new chapter beginning as a new president assumed the office.

On a personal level 2021 began with the hope that out of the darkness that has become so fundamental over the previous years, we would rise and that the light soaked days were coming. I have struggled as the year has gone on to hold onto that hope as new variants emerged and more people got sick and died and as more news of people protesting the measures being put into place to protect them, as my father spent time going in and out of the hospitals I’ve felt that flame of hope fade, something that has been so fundamentally a part of me that I have felt lost lately without it.

On top of that I spent a lot of the year worrying about turning 30 as I mentioned in the few blog posts that I actually got off the ground last year. I spent so much of the year in my own head stressed at my job, stressed because of family life and stressing about what was still to come, my 30th birthday and beyond that marriage and moving away from my family, and of course there was the pandemic that was tainting every one of the decisions and plans that needed to be made.

Of course there were the small moments that made 2021 a year that wasn’t a complete disaster, celebrating my Fiance’s birthday, doing our annual Relay For Life that took a step closer to being its normal huge celebration, laughing with coworkers despite being stressed, laughing with family and friends. Each of these moments though small in their time, as I think back on the year those moments are what helped me through.

However, despite the ups and downs of last year we are now three days into 2022 and it feels like an eye of the hurricane moment, right now the bruising and battering storm 2021 is over, and all of 2022 is yet to come, but for this moment, the sky is clear, time is stopped and hope can be rekindled and I can once again believe that as spoken by John Green “The light soaked days are coming.”

That feeling and this moment are what I intend to try to hold onto going into 2022, When the inevitable storms of the new year hit, I will try to remember this moment. This moment of silence, this moment of hope, because in the darkness it’s hard to believe that the light will ever come again, but we’ve all been there before, we’ve seen the light, we know it is possible, we just have to ride out the storm to see it again.

Some of the things I intend to do in 2022 to remind me of this is to read more books, write more things and connect with people and hopefully if I do it right, even in the darkest days of 2022 I will remember the truth that no matter how dark it gets… “the light soaked days are coming.”