Turning the page on 2020 last year, it seemed as though the new year would bring about a theme of reemergence. Vaccines were on the horizon, and despite a holiday surge of COVID, we were going to get this thing licked by the spring. Sleepy Joe beat the Orange Crush to become the 46th president of the U.S., so we would finally be rid of one type of evil in favor of the stat quo. Businesses and places for public gathering were going to re-open, and students would return to classrooms in full force, mostly forsaking their virtual education for the in-person learning they once bemoaned but now favored — “cherished” for a few students who learned the value in not taking certain things for granted. 2020 was supposed to be but a bad dream once we hit March. The NYE ball dropped in Times Square without much fanfare. Fireworks popped and sizzled around the world without much cheering. For those of us who survived 2020, we held nervous hope for 2021.

“If only we can turn the corner, things will be better next year.”

Yeah right.

2021 was not the tremendous leap forward that we all hoped it would be. We were caught in a state of arrested development; Trump was gone but Trumpism lingered and festered and became one of the saddest days in American history on January 6. None of us lived through the U.S. Civil War, but we all got a sense of what it must have been like as we watched the Capitol building get besieged by far-right extremists who were just “fighting for democracy” by attacking one of the great institutions of said democracy. Six days into the new year, and we were hit with that shit, and it all kind of just rolled downhill from there. Biden is who most of his detractors thought he was, a senile old man incapable of uniting the country, doing what politicians do best (i.e., make promises that they can’t keep for one reason or another). He sealed his fate in August with his poorly executed withdrawal from Afghanistan. A 20-year war to eliminate the Taliban’s control over the country and eliminate the “terrorist threat” to U.S. interests that existed there was all for naught when the time came to pull American forces from the region. The Taliban swept through Afghanistan like a mid-summer wildfire fueled by acres of kindling and a ferocious wind.

Before that went down, the global economy, put in a chokehold in 2020, started to break free in early 2021, but quickly got thrown into submission again in March when some dumb mother-effer wedged an absolute unit of a ship in the Suez Canal.

That happened and, oh by the way, COVID had no chill this past year. It wasn’t at its 2020 peak run, thank god, but it was still making people sick and taking loved ones away from us. Where there’s COVID, there are mask and vaccine debates, and we had both ad nauseam.  “The fight for freedom” began and ended with the stand against mask mandates. How fucking silly. We became crazier as the pandemic stretched on, getting into tussles on commercial airlines, mid-air, because we were tired of “being lemmings!” We were burnt out of being conscious of health and safety (if not of our own, certainly that of others). Before we knew it, Labor Day had come and gone, and things were still pretty weird.

Yet here we are at the end of another 365, each day a little stranger than the previous one, further removed from the “before times,” aka the “never going back to them again times.” Personally, 2021 has wrapped up in a significantly different place from which it unwrapped. One major job change, what can only be viewed as a step back on paper, is (hopefully) the first step to achieving a seemingly impossible goal. That’s up to me, and the grit I show as I ramp up the push for a new career. This year also brought another major loss to our family. The rhythms of 2020 reverberated in 2021.

The year dragged, and somehow it also flew by. Weird how that happens. It was revelatory. It was repulsive. There were some uplifting moments, and there were tragedies. Now, we are on the precipice of 2022, and I’ve entered middle-age with more questions than answers, into uncharted waters. Anyone else out there in the same boat? I am optimistic about what the upcoming year holds for me, but I have some doubts about the long-term future of our species. Should we be concerned about this?

Or these damn dancing robot quadrupeds?

My gut tells me, “yes,” but I’m also blown away by what I saw in those videos. It only seems natural to have a healthy dose of awe and fear when you see where brilliant minds are taking us. Pair these advances in robo-tech (this is the industry term) with the sudden push by billionaires to launch commercial space travel into viability, and one could argue that the smartest and wealthiest among us don’t believe there’s much of a sustainable future available for humans on Earth. That’s not promising.

Yet, the turning of a page brings hope and the cleansing of yesterday’s demons. It ushers in the promise of tomorrow’s dreams, and I hope the winds of change carry us into good fortune this upcoming year. 2022 can’t be any worse, right?