end-of-year round ups and other inconsequential lists

(content warning)

I never used to hate end-of-year rounds ups, but now I do. Which is a little hypocritical of me as I just tweeted one about the number of writing rejections and acceptances I’ve accrued in 2023. And actually, it made me feel a little better about my writing itself: I’ve made progress. But I still dislike them because I know there’s someone out there who’s had an awful year, and who, upon seeing these lists of achievements, feels even worse.

(I know, I’m not in control of someone else’s feelings.)

At the end of 2019 I was the lowest I have ever been. This was the end of the second decade of the 2000s and plenty of people had posted comparisons, lists, achievements and photos between the beginning of the 2010s and its end. And I would have been one of those, too. I think that’s why I hate these lists even more; that could have been me, celebrating ten years of transforming from an awkward teen to an awkward adult.

It was the lowest point in my life because I had just discovered I was sexually harassed and bullied by a colleague. I was low because I felt that I allowed it to happen. (Fast forward 4 years and I know that this is not, and never was, the case. It's alright 2019-me. You did your best.) At the end of 2019, I was off work for a few weeks. I was physically unwell once I realised what had happened. Trauma is a funny thing; you’ll hold it and hold it and hold it until the realisation hits and all that cortisol and adrenaline comes rushing through your blood vessels and tissues and organs and you just… stop. You enter a weird limbo between the world you thought you knew and the one you now occupy. Nothing made sense to me.

In this limbo, I no longer recognised myself. Forget 2010, I didn’t even know the person I was only two months before. Part of the abuse—a small but poisonous sliver of it—was directed towards my writing. It was then that I stopped writing, as it was now associated with something vile and disgusting. I was scared to write about the abuse because it, too, was vile and disgusting. So I stopped writing, save for etching out the shortest of journal entries. I had written since I was a child; to be divorced from something I found as natural as breathing shattered my entire world. I did not recognise this scared, broken woman I had become.

I’d scroll through Instagram and Twitter, seeing all these comparisons, wide smiling faces, glorious achievements. Seeing beauty. And none of that was mine, none of that was for me to hold. I had achieved nothing but a net negative balance. (Again, 2019-me, this isn’t true. You’d achieved so much before and after, and you survived what happened and that is the biggest thing you could have done.)

When I tweeted my little list of writing achievements, all those feelings came back. What had I done to deserve making this list? How could I do that when there might be someone else out there who hated themselves, stuck in a pit of self-loathing? Why did I dare to make them feel bad? Perhaps someone does feel that way, and I am so sorry if you do. I wish that pain did not exist. I wish we could celebrate joy without the barriers of our grief. But that happens, because we’re human. We hold all the emotions because we’re capable of doing that. Perhaps 2023 was the worst year of your life, but that means there’s a better one coming. Saccharine hope is not something I cling to, but I also refuse to bow down to despair. There’s a better thing coming.