Side Note: My Reflections on 2020

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I’m not overly a Christmas person, but the holidays are a time for me to reflect on whatever the year held. In short, this year was trash and there’s no way around it.

Self-help gurus and bubbly Instagram accounts will keep up the cliché that there is good in the bad and whatnot, but let’s not mince words here. This year has been especially difficult for everyone. I can’t remember a time where humans collectively shared this much grief and frustration at once. 

I thought I’d share my experience and my reflections.

2020 started with my tradition of drinking champagne by myself on New Year’s. It’s not as sad as it sounds, I promise. Half drunk, I told myself that this year was going to hold the fruits of all the labor I’ve put in the last half decade.

I was a senior in college with a passion so intense for success and creativity that it hurt. The only thing that drove me more than my lust for success was my fear of failure. I very much hated myself in January. Not for how I looked or what I have done in my life, but rather for the things I haven’t done yet. I pictured success as a white-hot flash that shuttles you to the tippy top of whatever mountain you wanted to climb. I thought that at 22, I needed to be further along and the fact that I wasn’t was my fault. 

Satisfaction was impossible. 

COVID took my graduation ceremony. It was moved to Facebook Live. I slept-in that morning but I woke up in time to catch the end of the ceremony. I scrubbed through the video until I saw my name pop up on screen. Hector Salas, Magna Cum Laude. With sleep still in my eyes and bad breath, I stood up. Then came the tears. I didn’t know graduating was such a big deal. I always thought it was a thing that was expected of me. Never mind the fact that I was the first in my family to graduate. I thought it was a means to an end. Watching the Facebook Live was like holding a mirror into my self-worth and realizing that I’ve come an extraordinarily long way. 

But the celebrations didn’t last long.

I will now introduce you to my first anxiety attack. Mental health wasn’t something I knew existed until I became a Resident Assistant at my college. Before then, I thought people just had to weather storms and be tough as iron when facing the trauma and challenges one goes through. One night, I listened to a surgeon somewhere in California as he described how there weren’t enough ventilators to give everyone in the hospital proper care due to the surge in COVID. My mind then spun a terrible web of thoughts.

Man, people are really dying. This virus is not a joke. Why is it spreading so easily? Are there too many people on earth? We’re really overpopulated. There are so many things wrong with life right now and no one is listening. We’re just a bunch of people flowing down the stream of life without any real worry about what happens because in the end there are too many humans for us to fail. Even if some of us die, it’s okay because the species still survives. We don’t have to worry about survival anymore because risk is outweighed by sheer volume of people. So that’s why we do art and try to do other things apart from survival while we slowly inch towards our death. So what’s the point of championing activism when only a few people hear? So what’s the point of my dreams if I die at the end? What’s the point of being a part of this stream of people? What’s the point to living? Living has no point. 

I stayed on campus the summer after “graduation” in hopes that I could land a job. Starting in January, I scoured the internet for potential internships and jobs that I was qualified for. I landed an internship with a photographer in Oregon writing copy for social media. In short, it was a goose chase gone bad. No direction. No goals. No communication. After I dropped that, I started believing I wasn’t good enough to land the jobs I wanted. So, to combat this feeling I wrote every day (which I still do now). Yet, I wrote from a place of panic and self-loathing over the summer. I would write to make myself believe I was making progress, but when I did I’d tell myself my content wasn’t good enough. When I took a break, I’d have anxiety about not spending enough time getting better at my craft. It was a vicious cycle that dwindled my concept of who I was.

I landed a job at my university. Something familiar and a good jumping off point for my next career move. I was nervous but I was grateful to have a job in the uncertain COVID job market.

I thought a lot about my anxiety attack as I transitioned into the fall. It felt as though a chisel had cracked the clear ice block that was my innocent view of the world right down the middle. I didn’t feel all the way healed. But I continued and made friends in my new job and steadily found footing in the pandemic world. 

Barring a few hiccups, work was going well. I was in better spirits just in time for the election to come around. Election season is my drug. I love election season. I get heated, passionate, sad, happy and so many other emotions because it’s what I care about.

Politics for me is a 365 day-a-year sport. And the presidential election is the whole reason I play the game. I published an article titled “Rifle’s Lament: A Town’s Inability to Elect Honorable Leadership,” early in the fall. The next day, someone reached out to me through my website. We got to talking and the man eventually offered to sponsor some of my political writing. This was the first time that anyone has ever paid me to write. 

It shook my world. 

I wrote four pieces in total. Each one that came out was better than the last. I was white hot and full of energy. My county in Colorado was particularly lucky in how COVID had played out up to this point so I only had to be careful and write. I was blessed. 

After my four articles, COVID’s second surge (if you even want to call it a second surge) had come. It felt like the virus was slowly creeping in on my life. This person I knew contracted it, then that person did. My friend, my coworker, my employee. It felt suffocating and the momentum I had gained from the articles was strangled when my job essentially turned into COVID response. It was (and still is) important work that needs to be done, but it is taxing. 

I’ll take a moment to say that if you work in healthcare right now and at any point really, you have one of the most important, least appreciated and unbelievably draining jobs out there. I work with the threat of COVID present in the back of mind mind at all times. I think a lot about those healthcare professionals that have worked tirelessly to combat this pandemic. The steadfast approach to care shown by these workers should never be forgotten. Thank you. 

I was drained physically and mentally. I soon received news that I was a close contact to a positive person. It sent me into my fourth quarantine period. Soon after my cousin passed away, potentially due to COVID-19 complications. The next night, I was making naan bread when I lost it. Tears just came out of me. If you know me, you know I’m in touch with my emotions yet struggle to fully express them. 

I called my mom. And I cried all the tears I saved up since January. My mom urged me to let it out, telling me she had no idea there was this much stuck inside of me. She preached the importance of pushing out the grief stuck inside me. It was an exorcism. My tears were deep and they were heavy. And it felt relieving. I don’t know where I picked up the idea that crying was a painful process. Crying was unpleasant for me in the past. I didn’t like the feeling of crying so I just held things in and thought I’d be stronger for it. Only now do I see that crying is a thing we do to process emotions. Crying doesn’t suck. Our stressors suck. Our anxieties suck. I wanted for so long to “turn off” so that I don’t have to face the bad emotions in my life but it turns out I just needed to let those bad things in my psyche and allow myself to struggle. I’ve been playing defense against my stressors for so long that it became tiring. Holding off my negative emotions had worn me down where the solution was to let them come and wrestle with them so that I can process and heal. 

It was an hour and half of crying before I hung up. After the call ended, I found myself sitting on the floor. I felt like fancy dishware. Like new shoes. Like I could move forward from where I was emotionally but had to be careful with damaging myself in the day-to-day.

I looked around and saw my apartment that I hadn’t spent any more than two days inside of at a time. 

I walked the perimeter of my apartment like a tight rope walker and noticed all the corners and nooks and crannies that I hadn’t before. My schedule up to that point was set. I went to work and went to bed and went to work and went to bed and went to work and went to bed and so on. There was a mental groove that I’ve dug for myself that when I finally walked off the path and sat on a little brown couch that I hadn’t since I moved in, I felt at home. 

And some healing started soon after. I’m nicer to myself and brazen in how I express myself. I’m cognizant of the gravity I hold and I’m ready to go on the offensive and do what I want to do. As much as this pandemic has shown us the value of others, it has also shown the importance of putting yourself and those you care about first. There’s a difference between kindness and being a pushover. There’s a difference between altruism and spinelessness. Give more than you take but still take enough and don’t shame yourself for giving yourself what you need. 

COVID had forced me to slow down. I was like an NFL running back that keeps moving their legs in hopes of trudging through the obstacles in front of me but COVID was something I couldn’t just push through like the rest of my problems. This pandemic and this year have been a rock in my shoe to say the least. It has killed too many people and slowed too much progress. It will be what our time is remembered for, barring any other extraordinary events in our world. But I still learned and I changed. Maybe those cutsy Instagram pages have something to them. Even at the end of my fifth quarantine period, I see the value in looking at everything as a lesson. A clue how to make sense of it all.

So, let’s go back to my anxiety attack. Even if nothing matters and we all have to buy into a man-made reality to survive in it then I choose to buy in. I choose to participate in this terrible journey that is the present day. I hate here but I love it here. I view life today as a great puzzle that will never be truly solved which makes it even more interesting. It frustrates me that I won’t have all the answers by the time I die but that makes me work harder to collect as many answers as I can while I’m here. Life is perplexing. It’s progress then it’s a fog. It’s trying your best and comparing notes with other people. It’s a question with many answers but no way to get to them quickly. It’s whatever you want it to be, but too much to handle at once. At times it seems as though we’re stuck while other times we’re in mid-stride. What works one day won’t work the next. Truly puzzling and truly beautiful. 

I’ll leave my heart open for the intense ending to 2020 and the continuation of the bedlam in 2021. Next year might wear me down even more than this one but now I understand that I must not wear myself down in my effort to persevere. Withstanding is overrated. I’m not a subject to the universe. I’m a participator. 

I am reminded of the biblical story of Abraham who was told to sacrifice his son Isaac. This command was his test of faith. Before he took his knife and killed his son on the altar he built, an angel called for him.

“Here I am,” Abraham responded. A proud statement in his faith, moments away from killing his only son. He had remorse for what was transpiring but he did have faith it was for a good reason.

I’m not at all religious but the universe is asking a lot of us at this moment in time. It surely will ask more of us as we move forward. And as we approach the final moments of 2020, I say back:

Here I am.

Not happy. But willing.

Happy holidays.

-Hec