I just typed out this entire blog post, was ready to post it, and somehow lost the entire thing. I guess that’s pretty ironic considering the content of this post. So as I try to push through my extreme frustration and rewrite it all, I want to take this moment to stress that this year has tested our patience and strength in ways I don’t think any of us would have expected. When I left school on March 16th, I packed enough clothes to last me two weeks, which was how long I planned on staying home before returning to campus. Obviously I was mistaken. While I most certainly never say that I’m grateful for this year, what I will say is that I’m glad I had some of the experiences, and learned some of the lessons that I did this year.

At the beginning, when we were in quarantine, I spent a lot of time on FaceTime and Zoom, drinking wine, playing “Psych”, and just fucking around on Instagram with my friends. This taught me the importance of constant communication and staying in touch with the people you care about. In high school, nearly all of my closest friends lived about a half a dozen state borders away, and I saw them twice a year if I was lucky. What that taught me about communication, doesn’t hold a candle to what I’ve learned this year. It’s so easy to lose touch with people, but in a time when that ease is amplified nearly tenfold, consciously staying in touch is so incredibly important.

When I got back to campus in the fall, my mental health took a turn, and I experienced anxiety for what was probably the first time in my life. This was when I was able to see who really cared about me, who showed up when I needed them to. A lot of my friends surprised me in that regard. Many were actively supportive, many were passively supportive, and I couldn’t be more appreciative. At the beginning of this year, I had a really bad falling out with one of my closest friends. The reason was that the relationship was negatively impacting my mental wellbeing in a way that got to be way too much for me to handle. I didn’t want this to happen with any of my other close friends, so I made as much of an effort as I could to ensure that it didn’t happen. What I didn’t realize until recently, however, was that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It’s okay to distance yourself from a friend who might be a little tough to be around when you’re struggling mentally, and that’s not something you have to feel guilty about. I’m not usually one to put myself first when the people close to me are going through a tough time as well; that’s why I typically feel guilty and like I’m doing something wrong when I distance myself from the people who do more to hurt than help in my time of need. This year has taught me that I really do not need to do that, it’s more important to take care of yourself first. One of my favorite sayings is that you can’t pour from an empty cup, and that’s something I really hope to carry with me into 2021.

Something I am extremely grateful for in 2020, are the friendships that I’ve made. I have grown much closer to a lot of my friends in Wolverine Support Network this year, and these are incredibly meaningful, authentic friendships that I really didn’t expect to make in my last year of college. This year I spoke out about getting outed in middle school, and how that has affected my relationship with my sexuality to this day. I didn’t realize it before, but as much as I thought I was living my life as an open book since coming out voluntarily in 2016, there has been a lot about my relationship with my sexuality that I’ve been too embarrassed, or ashamed of to ever talk about with most of my friends. These friends that I’ve made this semester, I think I owe it to them that I’ve gotten to the point of being able to talk about this experience publicly. They make me feel understood in ways that I didn’t even know I needed, and they’ve been by my side through every up and down of this semester, and I think everyone deserves at least one friend like that.

Arguably one of the best things to come out of this year was that I reconnected with an old friend. This was a friend with whom I went through a friendship-ending rough patch, but when I saw her at a small gathering this semester, we ended up talking and picking up as if we never had a stopping point in the first place. I’m not sure how deep our respective grudges ran, and while I don’t think either of us still held a grudge at this point, it still felt really nice to be able to hang out normally under the pretense of a sort of nonverbal agreement to let bygones be bygones. Since I opened up about my experience getting outed in middle school, the level of comfort I’ve felt around my friends has been proportionate to the level of discomfort I’ve had around the people who knew me at the time I was outed. It was really really nice to be able to have someone I felt comfortable around who both knew me then, and who knows me now. When I posted about that experience, the girl who outed me blocked me, and a lot of her friends followed suit. To have reconnected with this old friend at this particular point in time felt really important, and really great. No grudge is worth holding for extended periods of time, and I’m glad that I no longer have to carry the weight of this one.

While obviously when I think of 2020, my first thought is going to be how much hurt this year caused, I hope that my second thought can be the few benefits of 2020. Like how many friendships I forged, and how many I strengthened, how much grief I left behind this year, and even some direction in terms of what it is I want to do with my life. I’m hopeful for 2021. I’m hopeful that the vaccine will start to make an impact, that the new leadership of our country will help those who have been ignored by past leadership, and that people are a little more understanding, and caring. The last time there was a pandemic before a ‘21 year, the years that followed became known for their partying and shared love of happiness and relief: the roaring ‘20s. As someone who has never set foot in a club since turning 21, I feel so lucky and so excited to have two distinct, but equally fantastic, groups of friends, and a crazy family to ring in the next set of roaring ‘20s with.

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