2020 left me with a feeling of no presents earned
I wasn’t naughty. I was indecisive and I don’t know what’s worse.
Please, don’t get me wrong. 2020 wasn’t a disaster for me like it was for many others. I did not lose my job; I live in the Baltic States, Europe, and we had no devastating first COVID wave, we barely felt it all. My WFH routine turned from “oh, poor thing, you have no colleagues” to something normal. I’ve been outside; not fly-away-see-places outside, but a solid part of summer and autumn was spent in open water, teaching people to dive.
The sad this about this all is zero change and development.
I had — and still have tons of options. I have a couple of brilliant app ideas which can be tested with little effort. I have fully designed plugins for Shopify and Trello which need just some polishing and launch. I still receive offers on my two years old AI articles on Medium — to write more, to advertise and collaborate or to participate in some projects.
This and a lot more were stopped by low-key anxiety brought in by 2020.
You know that primordial feeling that tells you to lie down, don’t move, don’t breathe, keep your metabolism low, because there is some unknown danger around? That thing.
That thing followed me for a year. I’ve seen it breaking people down at the speeds of a trainwreck, and it stopped me from changing literally anything about my life this year. It whispered all the time. It told me to procrastinate because procrastination is a very quiet and low-risk activity. It told me not to start new projects because I should contribute more to the existing ones generating the cashflow. It told me not to open a bicycle workshop with a friend because “no one will care about cycling during the pandemic” (well, we are actually in progress of setting it up, hoping to open early spring). It told me to stop investing because of an imminent market crash. It whispered many other things, and I was fool enough to listen.
The point is, it’s not how I wanted it to be.
I always wanted (and always tried) to make an impact. Help, educate, encourage, maybe even inspire (which is one of the reasons for becoming a diving instructor, but this is another story to tell).
These strange 366 days was enough time to think about who am I and what I want to be. I believe this applies not only to me but to a lot of people around the world.
Pandemics happened, and this will pass too. Do you know what is a perfect time to make a decision a make things better, one thing at a time?
Now is. Let’s make a difference in 2021.
And wear your masks.
