Some thoughts for 2020…

I can’t believe it’s 2020 now. It’s crazy, right? I wanted to write a kind of life update around New Years, but unfortunately I was crazy busy moving to a new place, working, and just dealing with all the stress of the holidays. It’s been a stressful month for me, but luckily things are finally starting to slow down a bit. And I’m so glad too, because I really missed getting to write here and share my dorky thoughts with y’all 🙂

2019 was kind of a shitshow all around for me. I dealt with a huge amount in the beginning of the year especially. I had to get out of a toxic living situation and was bouncing around on friend’s couches for a bit. I was also addicted to benzodiazepines (anti-anxiety pills like Xanax) and realized that I needed to get clean. The withdrawal period was brutal and I was pretty much constantly sick for almost an entire month. But I’m happy to say that I’ve been sober for almost a whole year now. I’ve also been seeing a regular therapist, and overall I’m doing a lot better.

It was through all of this that I started reconnecting with a lot of things I used to love, but sort of forgot about over the years. Chief among them was anime! I loved watching anime from being a kid all the way through college, but I had stopped watching it in my 20’s when my idiot younger, closeted self decided that drinking and partying was more worth my time. Honestly, anime, specifically the My Hero Academia series, inspired me to get sober. It seems silly, but seeing Izuku Midoriya work so hard against seemingly impossible odds made me feel like I could do the same thing, and not give up. And that’s how I became a diehard otaku all over again. Plus Ultra!

The other big thing that I reconnected with was, well, writing in this blog. I had always enjoyed writing and kept blogs in the past, but after a while it just became too time consuming to maintain. I used social media a lot to broadcast my thoughts, but this year I realized that being on Facebook and Instagram for so much of the day was really damaging my mental and emotional health. I decided to detox from social media entirely, and started this blog so I could get back into long-form writing.

And honestly, I love doing this way more than I ever did with social media. I feel like people on WordPress are so much kinder and more thoughtful than on most of those other platforms. Maybe it’s just because our community is smaller and our posts take more time to digest, but I’ve just had such a better time reading and writing on here than anywhere else. Y’all are the best!

So even though 2019 was a rough year for me, there was still a lot to love about it, and I hope that 2020 will have even more to love. It’s going to be a wild year, with everything going on in the world right now, but I’m going to try to be optimistic and hope things will work out in the end. And there’s a lot of things I want to do this year. I never really do New Years resolutions, but this year I decided to write down some things I wanted to accomplish. In short, I want to get more in touch with my creative side, through writing, art and music. I have always enjoyed drawing and want to get better at it!

And I want to write a lot more in my blog. I have some ideas for new posts I want to do, like maybe some in-depth character analysis or expanding my scope to include other hobbies of mine like video games and music. I’ve been reading a lot more than I used to, both online and in print. I hope that this will help make me a better writer and make this blog more fun for all of us.

But most importantly, I want 2020 to be a year where I grow and try to be a better person. I don’t really like to talk about politics and other topical stuff on here, but suffice to say it’s a scary time for a lot of people right now. It feels like every other day something is on fire or there’s some kind of terrifying international incident. And I’m not smart enough to have a good solution to all of this, but I think one of the things that we can all do is try to be a little kinder to each other. So many people are struggling and carrying a heavy load that no one else even knows about. And even though there are so many of us and we’re all different, I think we all want love, kindness, and respect in this world. So I want to spend some time this year volunteering, helping out in the community, and standing up for what I believe in – freedom, equality, no more live action anime adaptations, all that jazz.

Anyway, that’s enough from me about my life for now. I’ll be working on some new anime-related posts later this month, so look forward to that. Y’all are amazing if you’ve read this far. ❤