We Achieved More This Year Than We Give Ourselves Credit For
By: Mutasim Billah
Tags: Society, Pandemic, 2020, Motivation, Self Love

We Achieved More This Year Than We Give Ourselves Credit For

When merely surviving is an accomplishment

Photo by Michelangelo Buonarroti from Pexels

For many of us it’s been the most difficult year of our lives. Even if worse things have happened to us in the years before, most of us haven’t spent a whole year in confusion and paranoia.

Even the most powerful governments and renowned experts were not prepared for this, so we can’t blame ourselves for waking up into chaos one morning and not knowing what to do next.

At first, it may have felt like we’re handling this pretty well, but the cost of living in lockdown kept piling up week after week.

Maybe that’s why showing some kindness to ourselves is overdue.

Despite the worsening woes of lockdown life, we have made it this far. The fact that we’re alive and breathing right now is indicative of the right steps we have taken and the luck we had on our side.

That’s a great place to grow gratefulness.

We’ve had to accept life within four walls as the new normal

As much as we love coming home, being home all the time and bringing home everything we did elsewhere — like work and exercise — are challenges none of us signed up for.

We gave up our temples and turned them into trains in a loop, living in the irony of constant restlessness in a place meant for resting.

We accepted looking at faces we love only through a flat-screen, and showing our battlegrounds-of-residence to strangers on camera.

We shared our losses and griefs from a distance and came up with creative ideas to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations in front of blue light emitters we were already overexposed to.

We accepted Zoom as a household name, something most of us would probably never know of in different circumstances.

We cheered and protested, supported and voted, taught and learned, loved and protected, all within an ever-shrinking walled perimeter.

And we still continue to hold our own.

The last thing we need is undeserved guilt

We need to rid ourselves of wild expectations, of perfection and invincibility, on top of everything we’ve been carrying already.

Yes, we lost jobs, but we also spent months brainstorming to fortify our fragile livelihoods going forward. We learned new skills, found new opportunities, came across ideas that we probably wouldn’t have in another reality.

Yes, we lost loved ones and opened our hearts to others who suffered the same, but we learned to embrace uncertainty as an inevitable component of life, vowing to express love and thankfulness more often, more sincerely.

All of that means we owe ourselves a pat on the back, a hug for the soul, and a high-five to our nerves.

It wasn’t a year of setbacks and slowdowns

It’s rather been a year of finding better solutions for survival. We’re ending a year knowing we’re united not only in our battles but in our triumphs too, as long as we count ourselves as a part of a larger entity: Humanity.

Even when some of us find these simple truths to be obvious, it’s not that hard to forget them when we measure ourselves against astronomical expectations in circumstances where merely surviving is an accomplishment.

So let’s take a kind look at the mirror and say, “You did great!”

And remember that each of us, and by aggregation all of us, reached a milestone worthy of celebration.