Hey Friends –

I have a proposition.

I’m thinking that its time we start being a little kinder to 2020.

Before you get your pitchforks hear me out!

I have reasons! Real ones! In multiples!!

I 100% agree that the strife taking place during this particular span of days feels disproportionately more severe than in years past. I have laughed at many genius memes that illustrate this fact. Many many memes.

However, I truly think it might be in our best interest to lay off the Chicken Littlesque 2020 rhetoric.

My first reason is I think we are trying the Law of Expectations.

In my experience working with kids for decades now, it’s been my observation that the Law of Expectations is very strong. If there is a kid who everyone believes to be trouble, they will, in part because of that group think, figure out ways to make it more and more true. The same is true for the opposite. If there is a kid that everyone believes to be smart, talented, and or “good”, they will, for the most part, figure out ways to make that more and more true. The more we think of 2020 as a villainous septic tank of a year, the more it will be.

The second reason is a little more involved.

When I was going through the grief process when each of my parents died I realized something. Grief is a big feeling with lots of facets and living with it day in and out took up the majority of the capacity of my emotional CPU. All of my crisis mechanisms were tied up with grief so when something came along that required an ordinary level of emotional bandwidth to process (read: Hallmark commercials or Adele songs) I only had 10% of my emotional faculties available. And you, you bright things, I’m sure can imagine how well that went down.  I was usually left in tears or disproportionately annoyed or both. I felt so unstable but in retrospect, anyone with only a fraction of their emotional reserves available to cope with life would be.

I feel like the entire world is experiencing something similar with 2020.

I think the literal mortal peril that living through a pandemic presents is more overwhelming that we’ve let ourselves realize. All of our internal Weasley clocks are pointing to midnight, they have been for months, and we are trying to navigate the going ons of a normal year with only a fraction of our emotional CPUs available.  I know some of us have acclimated to the stress, to the “new normal”,  but on a base instinct level, we are not meant to feel in mortal peril all the time every day. We just aren’t.

So when something else comes along that is also a big deal or significant, like, say a social upheaval or long overdue cultural shifts and unpacking 400 years of anger and/or guilt during said pandemic, we only have about 10% of our faculties to deal with it and it all overwhelms us. And then an earthquakes wakes us up and we have 10% to deal with that too. And in rapid fire craziness we attempt to manage and feel more and more buried under the 2020 docket.

I always thought living through history would be dynamic and exciting. Turns out its terrifying and exhausting and I am so sorry if you’ve been beat up by 2020.

I guess what I’m trying to say is try to imagine living through the 2020 headlines independent of the burden of ALSO living through a pandemic and then compare what you feel against what has transpired in previous years.

When I try, it feels a little bit easier than the normal 2020 weight to me. All the feelings and stress and worry feel manageable and that tells me that 2020 is not this Megatron-grade villain of a year, the pandemic is. It’s one thing to laugh at the crazy but don’t surrender your hope that good things can come along too. Maybe even try to go on a treasure hunt to start seeing all of the miracles that are coming up from the ashes of recent months. Give 2020 the grace it needs, that we all need, take a deep breath, and let the entropy diffuse as it will. Let it be a mechanism to find the treasure that both Calvin and Hobbs have assured me is everywhere and decide to stay healthy and alive long enough to find it.