The worst year of my life also turned out to be the best
By: Jennifer Bergman
Tags: Friendship, Reflections, Self Improvement, Love, Personal Growth

I know I’m not alone in stating that 2020 will go down in the books as one of the most challenging, tumult, years of my life. Happily unknowing I started January this year with a sense of excitement of the possibilities that this year would have in store. I graduated from my master, had discovered my love for teaching yoga and started volunteering in the non-profit sector. I was so sure that I was at the beginning of my dream career, a belief that strengthened when I landed an internship at the beginning of March through no effort of my own. Looking back now, of course, I see those first few months of this year with completely different eyes.

The day after my graduation my sleep issues started. Having been blessed through my entire life with the ability to fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow this was like a lightning from a clear sky. If you’ve never experienced sleep issues you don’t know how lucky you are. There is no way of explaining how miserable it makes you until you are the one who is laying wide awake in bed knowing that your alarm is going off any minute. I became ashamed of all the times I had suggested herbal remedies to people who had discussed their sleep issues with me. If someone tells you they have trouble sleeping, you best believe that they have tried pretty much everything that’s out there to make it better.

At this point, I was working in a boutique fitness studio in East London. I had decided that I would take a year out after graduating my master, to figure out what I really wanted to do before jumping on the career ladder. This job was great in so many ways, it allowed me to teach yoga and meet the most wonderful people, both students and co-workers. Yet every day I would be filled with this sense of knowing that I was in the completely wrong place. Some point in those first few months I read Marie Forleo’s “Everything is figureoutable” and I don’t think I have ever related to anything more than when she describes the voice inside her head that used to pop up after a few months in a new job. A voice telling her that this was not where she was meant to be. Checking people into their spinning class was clearly not where my inner voice thought I should be.

But as usual, my determination to a vision of how I think my life should look have a tendency to drown out any gut feeling that tells me something is wrong. I told myself that things would get better if I just stuck it out. I tried to practice gratitude. I stayed. My sleeping got worse and worse as did my mental state. It’s funny how it creeps up on you bit by bit, you don’t notice yourself slipping further away and then one day you feel like you’re on the outside of your life looking in. The saving grace was an email I opened when I was killing time in Zara on High Street Kensington before another one of my jobs. Someone had been given my CV at the place I was volunteering at and wondered if I was interested in an internship with him. Having never heard of the organisation I did my research and decided that this sounded exactly like something that would fit into the plan of my life. One meeting later and I had landed an internship in a notoriously hard industry. Wow, that was easy, or so I thought.

Looking back, I should probably have been able to foresee what was going to happen. I mean I had studied Global Health and written my Bachelor thesis on epidemic outbreaks. Come March the internship and all my plans surrounding it had come crashing down. When the UK went into lockdown I was both anxious and a bit relieved. Finally, some time for me to sleep I thought, and gather my strength so I could come back better than before. By that time I thought I was only going to be away from work a few weeks, I was of course very wrong. Nevertheless, I was one of the people blessed with being put on furlough by the UK government, meaning I could survive doing nothing for a few months. A few months is exactly what I lasted in London lockdown until the end of May when I decided I couldn’t take being locked in a house anymore and made my way back to Sweden where I would stay with my parents until the whole thing blew over.

The summer that followed was probably the worst summer of my life but also the most beautiful in a sense. My sleep worsened after a period of having been better. I had never felt as lost in my entire life. I could only describe it as being in the middle of a forest with massive pine trees towering over me, not being able to find my way out. Ironically I did spend a lot of my time in the forest. I also spent a lot of time crying, sometimes for no apparent reason. I watched eight seasons of Greys Anatomy in a alarmingly short time and then cried while telling my mom that “I’m such a failure all I do is lay in the sofa and watch Grey’s Anatomy”. I mean, the latter part of that was true, the first part not so much.

I found myself surrounded by friends who were going through the same experience as I was, all in their own way. We were each other’s rocks. We took turns holding each other through panic attacks, tears, and losses. I remember one moment when I was holding one of my closest friends as she was crying in my arms and thinking how beautiful this was. That this is all so incredibly shitty but this is life, with all its ups and downs, all its pain, and we are right here in it together. In the midst of my worst months, there were these pockets of pure love that I will never forget.

As the summer progressed I realised that I couldn’t go back to London. First of all, I wasn’t mentally strong enough to do so, and second of all, I didn’t want to go back to a job I hadn’t wanted to be at in the first place. Deciding to leave London for the moment was one of the hardest, but also easiest decisions once I actually made my mind up. I had called it home for the past seven years, and it had become a part of my identity. I saw myself as the girl that had left, the girl who lived in London. What was I to do back in my hometown? I think a lot of people who have left a small town to then return, permanently or temporary, struggle with coming to terms with it. There is a period of acceptance that you have to go through, acceptance I found myself resisting. But as Carl Jung said, “what you resist not only persist, but it will grow in size”. A summer spent resisting being back home only made me more miserable.

Coupled with being back home, I was going through a major quarter-life crisis. I know quarter-life crises are talked about as a joke, something millennials suffer from due to an excess of life choices. But anyone who has lived through this knows that the actual experience is anything but a joke. The turning point of this crisis came when I arrived at the realisation that the root of my existential crisis stemmed from the fact that I had completely lost my sense of self. At some point at the beginning of my teens, around the time that you become acutely aware of the people around you and friends matter more than family I started peeling off bits of myself. In place of those, I had taken personality traits from all my friends as well as society and used them to construct a persona that I genuinely believed was me. But holding up a mask is exhausting, even if it’s one that you’re not aware you’re holding. Coming back home physically also meant coming back home to myself, and this meant coming face to face with the fact that I didn’t actually know myself.

What followed has been a journey of self-discovery. What sort of music do I want to listen to? How do I want to dress? I’ve been fortunate enough to be blessed with the most amazing, creative friends but now, instead of adopting their traits as my own, I became inspired by their authenticity. I started taking contemporary dance classes, something I had been wanting to do for years. I as good as abandoned fast fashion (which now feels so completely un-original) and started discovering the joys of shopping second hand. I’ve painted so many paintings and read even more books. Lastly and most importantly, I took up writing again. Something I loved doing when I was younger, back when my biggest dream was to become an author. I always have, and probably always will feel most at home with a pen in my hand and a piece of paper in front of me. Or in this instance, with my fingers typing away at a keyboard.

So how did 2020 end? I still feel lost, although not as lost as I did during my lowest points this summer. I’m aware that I’m in a tremendously privileged position to say that what happened this year has been a blessing in disguise, for so many people it hasn’t. We will have to work hard as a society to undo the damage done by the pandemic. But I would lie if I say that this year didn’t in a way save me, it forced me to course-correct from a path I thought I wanted. I’ve realised that it’s hard to know what you want to do in life when you don’t fully know yourself. By having to take several steps back it allowed me to examine how I thought I wanted my life to look like and actually get to know myself again. It really is through our darkest moment that we grow the most.