We made it to 2021.  Honestly just that feels like an accomplishment.  And with the new year, an aura of hope hangs in the air: a vaccine and a chance for humanity to get back to the things we love this year.  To be honest, I think it will probably be towards the end of the year that we start to really feel like things are shifting, but hope is definitely in the air and that alone, I think, will help us get through these next several daunting months.

I’ve written several times about last year, about the pandemic, about my depression, about Nick going through COVID in December.  And in the many aches that 2020 brought, I think one of the things it brought that offered anything positive were the lessons we learned.  We learned about love last year, we saw the humanity in each other, we realized who the people are in our lives that really care, the ones who reach out to deliver groceries when we can’t, the ones who helped support each other’s businesses.  We learned to be in the moment, to enjoy the smaller moments with people we love, in places we love because we weren’t sure when they would happen again.  We learned resilience this past year, we found out what it meant to fight, to not give up, to rise above the water that seemed like it kept spilling over our heads, lost in a sea with no help coming.

For me personally, this past year was the hardest emotionally that I’ve ever endured, experiencing depression like never before, watching friends of mine go through intense heartache and pain, loosing a student to cancer, a loss that affected me much more than I knew as time went on.  I watched my husband fight COVID, a terrifying few weeks where each day was a new rollercoaster with an unknown ending.  I watched my state burn and be ravaged by wildfires and family have to evacuate their homes.  Emotionally, I was a mess most of the year but I also look back and remember the moments that lifted me.

Moments like eating takeout Chipotle with my grandparents in their backyard, socially distanced just to see them a few times while the weather was good enough to be outside and to be safe.  Moments like being the first to welcome my parents to their new home in Southern California in May and spending days putting together Ikea furniture, order after order from Amazon and helping them move during the height of California’s lockdown when nothing was open.  Moments like Nick and I going for drives, just to see our city, missing its energy, missing those date night dinners out.  Moments like that early morning light falling over the San Gabriel Mountains in my parents new backyard in California, the sun dappling the light and the pink glow on the palm trees before the world wakes up.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel hope, finally.  After a year mostly devoid of that feeling, that alone feels like enough to get us through.  I know 2021 won’t be all that great and I know that we’ve got a long, hard road ahead.  But I also would like to think that we can heal, we can grow, we can finally see the sunrise at the end of the road, and I have a feeling that once we make it there, it will be more beautiful than we know.

So much is out of our control, so much is happening that it’s hard to keep ourselves centered, but the one thing we can do is hope, to offer only good into the universe this year.  So my wish for 2021 is that we all take a look at ourselves, at our lives and offer hope, offer light, offer goodness.  May we offer love, may we offer grace, may we offer hope and perhaps, humanity will show just how resilient we are and move forward into the light.