2024 in Review
or, how am I still alive?
Empty. If there is a single word that I would use to describe this year, in the context of my life, I would use “empty”. Not that things didn’t happen, I didn’t feel anything, or that things didn’t change, I just spent most of the year feeling empty. My soul spent most of this year outside of my body than actually feeling my blood pulse or heart beat.
The start of the year involved an impromptu escape from my immediate family following my car being stolen by my uncle. Meeting someone wonderful by sheer chance and getting to feel appreciated for who I was. A few months later, I started a medication that has been making me feel much better than the cocktail from months prior. Then my father died the following week. I had to be the one to tell the doctors to pull the plug. I don’t remember much of my year after that. The days happened. They trailed on. I just don’t have much in the way of memories regarding anything but when it felt like things just got worse and worse. I felt flat. Like, having anything beating in my chest or any thought was just resulting in me going back to a net zero. I couldn’t see past 5-feet in front of me, and even then, that space felt like a thick smoke that choked me if I was standing.
I numbed myself through so much of the year that it feels excessive to even think I lived through it. I feel like I’ve been coiled up and holding my legs to my chest in the hopes that the pain will fade before it gets a chance to even be felt. “Isn’t this enough? Haven’t I been through enough? Why can’t it stop, why won’t it stop, what did I do to deserve this constant feeling of death strangling me?” This year felt like I was in a constant state of pain, and that was before even thinking of the world on a larger scale or even the rampant hatred that seeps through the concrete on the very ground. There’s so much anger in my heart that feels dowsed. There’s flickers. Smoldering embers that want to ignite and show that they can be something… but the cold wind starves it of anything it could use to sustain itself.
I think most people would consider what I’m describing as depression and, congratulations, but you’re only 1/5th right (which means you’re wrong). There was this constant desire to do something. How I wanted to stream more, how I wanted to act more, how I wanted to write more, I wanted to find something I could do that I could do while avoiding panic attacks or having thoughts that would make me a hazard to myself and those around me during stressful situations. I just, couldn’t feel. This entire year, I felt like I lost my ability to feel myself.
But there were sparks. There were moments that felt like they jumped out to feel my heart. They didn’t seek to warm me, but they felt like chances to cry. Multiple different games, movies, shows, and moments that all felt made just to let me know those emotions were real. Even for stories I had experienced before, the same old moments felt new as my heart was too weak to brush them off as a nicety as it would have done before. Most of my strongest memories of this year comes from crying. Looking back, this year is probably the most weak I’ve ever felt. Too weak to bolster friends the way I used to, to make real connections, to feel inspired, to feel… anything really.
That feeling of weakness just spiraling further and further down as well. The muck felt like it was up to my eyes, and I was drawing breath more by sheer chance than determination. It felt like a stasis where I was floating aimlessly for what felt eternal. Only waking up in different moments to realize I was still feeling something, and feeling that just made me more tired than before. Like a Snow White kept asleep by her own traumatic feelings and thoughts. “I’m exhausted” was probably my most used statement of the year.
Yet I’m still here. I’m still drawing breath. Even in my weakened state, I still am trying to push forward. I’m not sure if I have any right to call it “determination” or if it comes off more as spite. But I’m so exhausted living my life out of spite. I don’t want to live as a reaction to the things constantly happening to me. I want to move forward with my own fate in my hands, and driven by little more than my own choices. That doesn’t mean living like a vagabond, or never doing something I feel is displeasing. A life free of stress sounds just as displeasing as a life filled with nothing but strife. I just want a life that feels like mine.
I want to feel secure in that I can make real choices that’ll push my life in the direction I want. Even if it comes at costs, or some things may be more challenging than anticipated, I want to meet those challenges by my own desire. If I am to be tested, my desire is to be tested by my own choice, and to overcome those tests with my own power. In the face of all that I am powerless to face, I want for nothing more than to face what I do have the power to change and overcome it.
My resolution for the next year is to move forward. I want to keep living. I have dreams I want to achieve, places I want to go, and things I want to do. Living in this stasis won’t save me. There’s no hero that can save me. I am my own hero, and only I can hold myself accountable for making my life better. I have to do what I can not only for myself, but for the father who loved me. My heart still needs time to heal, but I’ve been growing restless. I want to keep moving. I want to keep reaching for what I want, and do things that would make my father proud, even if he never gets the chance to see them. I want him to know that I’ll be alright.
