Disconnected thoughts at year’s end

I miss blogging. Weird way to start a blog post, I know, but I’ve written an average of three posts per year for the past few years. I haven’t even really wanted to do my big end/beginning of the year goal-setting post, which used to be really important to me. It isn’t that I don’t set goals, but it does feel like very few of them last the year, given recent circumstances. Still, here I am, giving it a try.

This is the paragraph where I talk about the ways in which 2021 stunk. Of course, I mean that collectively: hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and people disabled by Long COVID, increasing numbers of “natural” disasters, a dress rehearsal for the fall of American democracy, and the near-demise of reproductive freedom. But I also mean it personally, on the individual level, for me, specifically. Two beloved pets died, one of them in the last week. I lost a tenure-track job, not because of anything I’d done wrong (it is not egotistical or incorrect to say I was great at that job; objectively, I was), but because of my former employer’s poorly-considered return-to-campus policy. My new job is currently turbulent and stressful, and I’m unsure how things will look by the end of the first quarter of 2022. (That’s on me; I took a job at a startup, knowing that’s sometimes how these things go.) I am ending the year burned out and sad, frustrated, lonely, and angry.

This is the first paragraph (of two) in which I talk about the good things of 2021; there were some, and while I believe in shining light on problems (in life, but also professionally, since I’ve been doing QA for the past few months), I also believe in finding silver linings and moments of hope where they exist. Probably the most positive thing to come out of 2021, for me personally, is that I adopted a bird, the first hand-raised baby I’ve ever brought into my home in my 20+ years of having birds. It’s been quite an experience, because baby parrots are precocious and adorable and clumsy. The new bird’s name is Pumpkin; they were hatched the week of August 11; we met them on September 11; we brought them home on October 11; and they have been living in our shared home office and spending most of each day on one of our shoulders (or attacking our keyboards or cords), with breaks only for really important meetings and bird-naps. We won’t know Pumpkin’s gender until they go through their first big molt (between 6 and 12 months), at which point adult feathers will come in, and we should be able to tell for sure by their coloration.

Other good things: Dale and I are both employed, and his job’s going well. I’ve learned a whole lot in my job, and my 90-day review was extremely positive; by those metrics, I believe my job is also going well. For my birthday a bunch of friends and family donated money to the National Aviary (through a gofundme that Dale set up), and assuming it’s ever safe for me to go inside, I’ll get to see a small plaque with my name on it. Dale and I also spent several evenings last winter and early spring listening for great horned owls hooting in the park closest to our house, then got to spend quite a lot of time this summer watching the owlets who hatched near one of the hiking trails; that was a really bright spot in this last year, for both of us. And finally, this one’s not really my news, but it is bringing me great joy: two friends who were supposed to move in together in 2020, but were separated across the world from each other by the pandemic (one in the US, one in Australia), were reunited this month and are getting married at the start of next year!

Which, all right, brings us to 2022. And I have so little idea what to expect, societally or in my own life, that I don’t really want to go too deep into planning. Safe and reasonable goals and options, though: I do want to balance work and life better, find sustainable patterns for myself; I maybe actually want to start that (online, paced to work alongside a full-time job) PhD; I want to try to get Pumpkin harness trained so they can go on walks with me; I want to stick with Duolingo but also find some resource for learning queer-friendly Spanish; and I want to 1) acquire and 2) get back on an outdoor bike, because I really miss it. I think the pandemic will still be enough of a force to keep my immune-suppressed self physically isolated through all of 2022, so I don’t expect to see a lot of people face-to-face, unless it’s outdoors. That’s hard to contemplate, but it feels likely enough to be worth recording here.

Even so, I hope that we all have a lot more silver linings in 2022 and fewer ominous clouds.