2020: The Year Of Surrender
By: Kevin Folz
Tags: Trauma, Love, Agape, Surrender, Romance

It’s one week before the new year. How swift this whole year came down upon us. How swift, and how grueling. Cries for a new year, for a fresh and delicate beginning, ripple out of the collective mind, yearning for 2020 to be over, done, kaput. Nothing but a bad taste left in the mouth, wishing for 2021 to provide the Listerine needed to sanitize our sanity. All the while, I have witnessed this global crisis with a slightly bemused eye. It is strange, but I haven’t felt particularly traumatized by the whole thing. It’s not that it hasn’t affected me, obviously. I responded by upending my living situation, moving back home with my mom, trying out a new outfit. For a while, the rules didn’t seem to apply anymore. And to an extent, they still don’t. I think everybody sees this. The old ways are like stale glue that is starting to peel off, and while many of us are caught up in pointing it out, there are many who are pretending not to notice. I’m noticing, for certain, but I’m not despairing.

Despite the pandemic, the riots, the economic crisis, and even moving back home, the year 2020 has affected me in a deeper way than all of these things. In ways that I couldn’t even begin to describe here.

2020 emerged as a year of self-deconstruction and recovery. It was the very beginning of a phase change where my selfhood was shedding old and unneeded parts of itself, leaving me empty, open, and quite vulnerable. From those open wounds, I was able to feel into the deepest layers of my trauma. From these parts, I slowly began my recovery phase. The rest of the world’s upheaval seemed to me like a collectively symbolic reflection of my own personal process. A voice inside me feels compelled to admit that this statement might appear callus, or self-absorbed. Maybe it is. But I would challenge that. I have written about right relationship with playing the game of narcissism elsewhere.

The major event for me was a trauma I experienced at a music festival during the Summer of 2019. I was with someone who I thought was my partner at the time, and sometime during a peak moment my heart instantaneously opened up to her. I don’t recall ever knowing this kind of soul love before. I stupidly declared she was the love of my life. But I think I was quite empty of myself then, living in the abundance of the moment. Later, I saw her spending time with another dude. She didn’t come back to our tent the following night, and I found out she spent the night with the other guy.

Something in me rose out of the basement of my soul that night, hiding for my life. I regressed to an infant, all too literally. I lay in the tent wailing for hours, swaddling myself, obviously causing distress to my neighbors. I had an impossible flashback to when I was several weeks after being born, separated from my mother during an adoption. It was happening all over again, being partially released, strapped to my side.

What comes up for me as I write about this is that nothing can be released until it is acknowledged. That moment was an acknowledgment that I don’t think could have otherwise happened. It certainly unfolded in the most dramatic possible way. But I also challenge the extent of how necessary our suffering is. The suffering that takes one to the brink, ready to self-terminate. I have observed well how easy it is to give suffering undue weight. Even our attachment to suffering needs to be released. Total surrender. It takes time. For me, it took a whole year, at least.

2020, the year of total surrender.

All melodrama aside, this year has been about tracing the horizon of love and soul. There are different qualities of love. I’m not alone in pointing out the fact that we have one word for something that has many sides to it. Agape is the Greek word meaning to love without reserve, without attachment. Certainly, I felt the meaning of that. But although I discovered that I can love without attachment, I discovered that another part of us can hijack it for its own purposes. Agape gets messy when it’s wrapped up in romantic love. I believe it is possible for them to co-exist, but if the ego takes over, then it spells disaster — a fault in the stars. This year has been about learning how to surrender to agape, when the ego is no longer behind it. The work is still unfinished, and maybe it will be a life-long process.