2016 was not a good year for me. Or for a lot of people. Many of our heroes died. There were garbage elections in several places. It has been tough.
I definitely had a rough time on a personal level. My health was worse than usual: I had to have a tooth out, I had the second worst respiratory infection of my adult life, I had a foot injury. All of this had an effect on other areas of my life, too. It took over two months to unpack after we moved, and I got behind on my paid work. I had to let two private clients go this year, and haven’t been able to work as many hours outside the house as usual, either.
My 86 year old grandmother’s memory is finally starting to fail, my 64 year old father has become frighteningly frail, and our cat went suddenly blind this year. Misery not only loves company, but seems to have a house full of guests at the moment.
It has been a year of terrible decision making — both on the micro and macro level. I see both the American election and the earlier Brexit vote as an aspect of this, and our personal choice to move house. We decided to move over some pretty petty bullshit, without clearly thinking through the consequences, and it was a big mistake. But just like the US and the UK, the Crowder-Chan household will just have to deal with the consequences and make plans to better our situation later.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say that it wasn’t all bad in 2016, and of course it wasn’t — not in its entirety. It just feels like it was. Sure, I got to visit my family in Missouri for the first time in seven years, and I started work on my second novel. I read like a maniac this year, and plowed through 421 books. But does that outweigh the stresses and tribulations this year wrought? Realistically, no. No, it doesn’t.
The usual platitudes don’t help. “You’ve still got your health!” Do I? Please see above. “Next year is a blank slate — surely it will be better!” Will it? It looks pretty grim to me. “Well you’ve just got to stay positive, and…” Nope. Let me stop you right there. I don’t. Just let me wallow for a while. I have legitimate reasons to feel legitimately bad right now, and although this wallowing won’t be a permanent condition, I’m allowed to feel like shit when my world is shitty. You and Pollyanna can show yourselves right out, thank you very much.
2016 has been a garbage nightmare year. The best I can say for it is that it’s finally over.