Letter to 2020
By: Michal Goldstein
Tags: Letters, New Years Resolutions, Covid 19, New Year, 2020

Letter to 2020

Dear 2020,

The first time I wrote about you was December 31st, 2019. In blue marker, I scrawled this into my journal: “January 2020 → Into the Unknown.” I had no idea what I was wishing for. You ended up being every unknown. You ended up being all the things that I never expected.

You gave me two and a half good months. You let me watch “Little Women” in theaters with my angel of a friend before she moved across the world. You flew me to a new city with two teachers, and watched as we cried from laughter in the back of an Uber stuck in traffic. You taught me to dance on stage unafraid. You snubbed Scarlett Johansson at the Oscars but still let me yell at the TV about it with my best friends. You spent hours each weekend seeing me paint cardboard, saw through wood, and cut out confetti, preparing for an event that would never happen; I still don’t regret it. You gave me my last high school formal, and my best high school formal, because my friends did my hair, and I got to wear my pink heels, and we all ate pizza and strangely, also cereal, before the dance had even started. You walked with me to the voting booth as I cast my first ever in-person vote on Super Tuesday. You cloaked me in red for what ended up being my last day of school.

And then, on March 13th, you took my anticipations for the future, pounded them into a gray dust, and threw them into the wind: gone and to be forgotten. In the next months, you crossed out prom and graduation and summer traditions from my calendar, then left the rest of the year blank for me to fill in. At the end of July, you flattened out the page of my new year’s resolutions and painted over “start college” in black, only to crumple the paper and throw it out after. In September, you watched me start two jobs that would change my life, but which would never be strong enough to change the reality of my year. I feel lucky despite this. In October, you brought me an anxiety I have never known, eased slightly by nervous time calling and writing to voters; it was barely enough. In November, you sent me to the hospital and declared Biden president-elect in the same week. It was overwhelming and exhausting and glorious. The news brought me hope for the first time all year. Healing brought me clarity.

2020, you have frustrated me beyond belief but given me nowhere to let out the anger. You have hollowed out a longing space in my stomach for the friends who I cannot walk within six feet of. You have filled me with wonder about who I could’ve been, who I might’ve been, if this year had not unfolded the way that it has. Often, you made me feel like I was moving backwards. You made me question myself over and over. You berated me with judgement over whether or not I was spending my time meaningfully, but then forced me to realize that no one gets to decide what has meaning but me.

You have taught me, the hard way, that I have a purpose untethered to the labels that this year has stripped from me. You have left goodness on my front porch to remind me that it exists in this world regardless of cumulative negativity. You have given me long talks with good friends on the phone. You have shown me how deeply the people in my life care for me, fully, without restraint. You have taught me the significance of friendship: it counts for so much. You have brought old friends back into my life. You have strengthened friendships that could’ve faded with distance, but which remained. You have comforted me in the truth that no one has had it easy, no one has evaded this pain. You have comforted me in the truth that my struggles have been valid, and still that my privilege is immense, too grand to comprehend, a gift that I can never repay. You have wrapped this gratitude around me like an invisible scarf, unwilling to let it slip, unwilling to let me forget it at the door.

I don’t know what 2021 will bring, but I’m not as caught up in the new year as I used to be. I believe that things will happen for a reason or for no reason, will happen whether I want them to or not. But I enter January with a novel acceptance for the elements of life which I cannot change. For all the good and all the bad of the past, I am warming up to the future. I am thanking it for another day, another month, another year, I am thanking it for health and safety and stability. 2020, I leave you stronger than when you first met me. Here is to another year of meeting myself where I am. Here is to hoping despite it all.

- M