Member-only story
This Year Has Been the Worst Year of My Life So Far
Here’s What I’ve Learned
This year has been a rollercoaster, but like… Not a normal rollercoaster. Like the kind of roller coaster where at the end you throw up, and you have to go home early from Disneyland even though you already paid full price for the tickets, and the ride that made you throw up was actually just It’s a Small World, so now you’re sick and you look lame for having such a sensitive stomach. Or like the kind in the Scooby-Doo movie where the team visits Spooky Island, and then every theme park attraction is full of monsters that want to kill you, or convert you to their weird Scrappy-Doo cult. Needless to say, there’s been no shortage of drama and disappointment, and heartbreak seems to have been in full supply for months now.
When bad things begin to pile up and happen consecutively, it’s hard to see an escape route. Before long, you just begin to expect that things will turn out badly, that they won’t go your way. It’s almost easier to shield yourself if you already expect that things are going to go wrong. And that’s exactly what started to happen to me. Nothing really mattered anymore, because it was all going to suck anyway, right? Who cares. I won’t bore you with the details (unless you want all of them, in which case I will write them all out in excruciating colour), but it seems like everything that could have possibly gone wrong has. Family trouble, issues at work, financial anxiety, stress from having multiple jobs and going to school, indecision about if I’m on the right path, and as I mentioned before, a lot of heartbreak. It’s been a lot.
Everything seeming bad and scary for a prolonged period does a lot of things to the soul. It made me forget how to breathe. A lot of nights, I went to sleep in tears, and I am not someone who cries easily. I forgot about all of the things I liked to do, because for the past year or so, the only thing I really found solace in was watching tv and reading AITA Reddit posts. I started reading a lot of rage-bait posts online (AITA has a LOT of this). Things that probably never happened, but made me feel a little bit better about my own situation because I could be angry at something else for a moment. I stopped seeing my friends, and even at some points, my family.
