2020(+1) and the year of goodbyes

Every week for the past few months I thought to myself this is going to be the week that I make my online return. It has been 5 months since I last uploaded on my YouTube channel and written on this blog; nearly 12 since I stopped using Facebook and Instagram for killing time.

What I want to say to the world is: "I didn't mean to ghost you."

In many ways I feel that 2020 and 2021 was a long, overdrawn goodbye to the life I had prior to the pandemic that I haven't yet fully found closure for. I reacted to challenges I was facing in my life by completely withdrawing from the public sphere in many ways. Reflecting on this brings up a heavy feeling of shame. I'm finding it difficult to come out of hiding, but writing this is the first step.

Recently in my MSW studies, we've discussed the topic of shame, defining it as the inability to live up to a personal ideal. Shame is what fills the space between how I want to show up in the world and how I've been showing up. When it comes to endings, whether that be to a significant other, social group, employer, life stage, or former belief system, I believe it's important to find closure by facing the ending head on. For those of us in helping professions, we cannot avoid the significance of "termination" in the process of serving others.

When I was a youth worker running a mentoring program, one of the stages of mentoring that I wanted to bring mentors' attention to was the end. The reality of it was that a lot of the time these adults that volunteered to commit to spending at least a year supporting a young person in achieving their goals just ran out of steam and the relationships fizzled out, leaving the young person thinking, "What happened to this person who was supposed to be there for me? Is it even okay if I reach out to them? They are probably too busy to care about me."

In mid-2020, I actually went through the process of closing this whole mentoring program, which I spent 3 years revitalizing from the state in which I inherited it. Long story short, the organization hadn't had a sustainable way of funding the program for a while, which I was not aware of until the very end, multiple positions supporting the program were "restructured," and I picked up about three times the responsibilities to keep it going.

Once I said "goodbye" to those youth, I soon put in my own four week's notice. I was tapped out juggling all these responsibilities during the first wave of the pandemic. In the proceeding months, I transitioned a romantic relationship back to a platonic one, started and terminated my first social work field placement early, went on to withdraw from my previous graduate program, moved houses, quit most of my social media use, went through significantly difficult interpersonal challenges, and moved houses again, this time relocating to a different city. All the while, organizing groups that I was a part of also faced internal tensions and dysfunction, leading me to distance myself from most movement work and, thus, many of the social relationships I had cultivated over the past six years.

An example of an ecomap, source: www.edrawmax.com/

For one of my assignments in the new MSW program I transferred to in Fall 2021 I had to create an ecomap for myself. An ecomap is a social work tool that assesses the connections between a client and the social systems in their environment. I remember sitting down to do this assignment and felt a wave of sadness after realizing that many important social connections I had at the beginning of 2020 had deteriorated or disappeared completely.

For many of these endings, for pandemic reasons or otherwise, I didn't get closure. The life I had before 2020 lingers and haunts me. While I have been able to draw many lessons from the tumultuous happenings of the last two years, sometimes I still fault myself for not being "healed enough" to overcome the circumstances and push through. I saw all of these endings as personal failures. At the same time I've wondered how many times do I have to be the bigger person at the expense of my own needs?

I don't want this shame anymore. I want to make peace with the fact that endings don't always come neatly wrapped in a bow no matter how hard I try to control the process. I am not the same person I was before the pandemic; there is no "back to normal." There is today and how I choose to dwell on the past or let it go.