Out with the Old

A goodbye to 2021!

A picture I took recently. When on the way home from university, on a nine hour bus trip that earlier this year would have genuinely proven impossible. Visual progress. I also like the lights.

& in with the new. Or: Making an awkward transition from the worst year of my life to, hopefully, one of the best. A celebration and acceptance of 2021.

Recently, I spoke out briefly about my experience of being bedridden by anxiety for around a month in the first half of this year. Needless to say, I wasn’t having the greatest time then. The first half of this year simply presented one too many challenges — the end of 2020 saw COVID still rife, my university dreams just holding on to their life as I was forced home and stuck there by government lockdowns which that same government chose consistently not to follow and the start of 2021 saw the collapse of that university social life, then saw my one solid constant — my home — lost, with a really tough transition to moving into a new place which needed and still does need a hell of a lot of work done to it. On Wednesday of this week, for example, I took a metal shard to the eye whilst working on some coving for my younger brother’s bedroom — I’m not experienced with DIY, but our normal poverty is being exacerbated further by insane price hikes in electricity and heating (to the point that we have spent the winter huddling in 3 layers most of the time, buried beneath blankets), so needless to say we cannot afford to hire workmen either. The experience is good, the danger of naivety is not so good.