There are days when life is off the rails before I ever get to a cup of coffee. On those days, I never feel like I have actually started my day until I get that first cup, even if it’s 2 p.m. By that time I usually feel the need for a “do-over.” I feel the same way about 2020. Merriam Webster defines “do-over” as “a new attempt or opportunity to do something after a previous attempt has been unsuccessful or unsatisfactory.” Sounds like an antidote for 2020 doesn’t it? If only we could do it over and get it right this time! As I vision for 2021, consider goals and contemplate choosing a word for the year, the phrase “do-over” keeps coming to the surface. If you are anything like me though, you have exactly zero desire to repeat 2020. Even if we could get it right, I am done. This year has been so shattering, that I have felt unable to imagine 2021 without taking stock of what has come before. Somehow I have needed that reflection to help me call up my resilience.
Two years ago I chose “nest” as my world for the year. It was time to get our house in order. As a social worker owning and running a small adult day program for folks living with dementia and maintaining a private counseling practice I worked a lot. If it was possible to work both too much and not enough simultaneously, that was me. Home and hearth neglected, we needed to focus on making our home a more ordered and comfortable place to foster rest, verses being the “landing strip” between mad dashes to endless deadlines it had been for far too long. With a fresh new year before me, the business finally on steady footing and a year of ideas and growth for career and home ready to harvest after years of endless toil, I was feeling energized, focused and ready to dig in to an exciting year of leveling up. This was going to be the year of returning work life balance while realizing some big goals both professionally and personally. I felt excited, capable and ready. Our staff was excited and ready too. This was our year! Four days later, I was hit while driving home from work and sustained a concussion that would change my life.
Instead of leveling up, I spent most of 2019 sleeping and going to rehab, working to get my eyes to focus together instead of wobbling around like a googly-eyed doll, regaining verbal fluency, attempting to walk without holding onto a counter or another person, trying to read a recipe (read anything actually) without the gears in my brain grinding to a halt. I would not exactly call that “nesting” but I certainly did not leave the house for much of anything not related to rehab or a medical appointment.
For 2020 I chose the world “nourish.” Nourish seemed liked a word that would help me continue healing while also helping me set boundaries about where and how to commit my limited cognitive energy and make healthy choices for our family around work, home life, nutrition and activities. While very much still on the path of brain healing, “nourish” was a concept that could help me continue to rebuild myself while beginning to turn outward again. It also offered bumper rails as I was feeling vulnerable about the transition required for returning to work and evaluating what was possible with these new limits. At the time I had not yet realized that it would also refer to the way 2020 would require me to shift into more conscious living, forcing reconsideration of priorities, patterns and personal safety thrust upon us all by a global pandemic.
As 2020 draws to a close, there has been so much to assess and grieve that I dare not catalog it here. I certainly would not call having to close my beloved business due first to brain injury and next to due to a public health crisis nourishing. The grief is big and real. I am still in numb shock from losing our business, national politics, and the secondary trauma of supporting dozens of friends and colleagues working the front lines in health care and education. What I do know is that I have tried hard to embrace the gifts of found time, the positives in this forced change of routine and the ability to reset personal wellness and priorities in a way that no personal effort would have ever allowed had this mash up of insanity not been thrown at us.
In so many ways, I would like a “do over” for the last two years. But right now, it’s best to keep moving. I am still settling on my world of the year for 2021. If only
“magic unicorn” seemed like a viable option! Of course I know that despite my fantasizing, that life won’t magically change at midnight on December 31. What I do know, is that I can choose how I enter 2021. So with that in mind, I am choosing to live with intention, to acknowledge the realities of how I am really doing and speaking my truth about it, choosing my priorities carefully and to the maximum extent that life’s circumstances allow. Whatever your goals and visions for 2021, I hope that you are able to do the same.
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