What I Learned in 2021

I shared the following thoughts with our church community on February 13 as part of a series to start the year called “What We Learned in 2021.” Images added for blog purposes.

A friend recently shared a meme on Facebook that said: “What I learned in 2021: no one learned anything in 2020.”

Obviously, that’s meant to be a joke, but on some of my worst days in 2021, I could believe it. 

What I learned in 2021 is rooted in 2020, though. Last year, after the summer lull of COVID cases that gave us a sense of normality, fall brought us more of what the early days of the pandemic did: rising numbers, uncertainty, confusion. Except that this time, we were still expected as a society to sort of carry on as normal. 

Sometime late in 2021, I realized that I was happier in lockdown. 

Remember lockdown? It feels like a lifetime ago. And maybe “happier” is the wrong word because I definitely didn’t enjoy being unemployed, and my kids were struggling with online school, and I was afraid for my husband’s health and safety because he worked with the public. But there was something good about that time for me. Life was boiled down to its simplest elements. We spent a lot of time together as a family, which can be a blessing and a curse. We hiked almost every week. I sent a hand-written letter or card snail mail to a different person every week. We reached out to more friends and family via zoom and FaceTime. Some of my best memories from that time are things we never would have done if we weren’t in lockdown: a board game night with friends in Pittsburgh and North Carolina via Zoom; watching a parade of teachers from my kids’ school as they visited all the neighborhoods where students lived; virtual adventures (we picked a destination at random and watched a documentary and made some food that reflected the culture of that area).

The expectations from society during lockdown matched my own longings: to slow down and stay home more and take care of people. There was a sense of camaraderie, like we were all in this together.

Generally, I’m the kind of person who will just keep going along on a certain path until I’m forced to make a change. I don’t seek out change. That’s an unhealthy go-with-the-flow kind of attitude because I let other people or outside circumstances determine the “flow” of my life. Before March 2020, life was hectic and busy, and even if I wanted things to be different, I didn’t know how different things could be or how to make them different.

Lockdown changed all of that.

So when life tried to get back to some kind of normal, first in the fall of 2020, then in the fall of 2021, I was anxious and conflicted. I still wanted some of that lockdown life, but now I felt pressure to abandon it for what life was like before the pandemic began. The desire to get back to “normal” is a strong one, but I started to wonder what exactly “normal” meant.

Before I go on, I want to say that I understand that my experience of lockdown came with some privilege, and I don’t want to ignore that. Yes, I was unemployed, but I was receiving unemployment and my husband was still working. Yes, I was stuck at home with my kids, but they’re pre-teen or teenage and moderately self-sufficient. Lockdown was more challenging for some people than others: like those who live alone or who have small children and for those of us who struggle with mental illness. I don’t want you to hear me say “Life was better in lockdown” and tune me out because that’s not how it was for you. Lockdown was hard. I know that.

But I like how author Matt Haig, who openly writes about mental illness, evaluated the tension between lockdown life and “normal” life. In May of 2021, he posted on Twitter: “Lockdown posed massive mental health challenges. But our ‘normal’ world of long working hours, stressful commutes, overstretched lives, hectic crowds, shopping centres, pointless meetings, eco-destruction and 24/7 everything was hardly a mental health utopia. A new normal please.”

That’s the tension I felt. That I no longer wanted the kind of life where I was stretched to the extremes daily, where my health suffered because I was trying to meet all the expectations of work, family and society. Lockdown gave me a glimpse of what life could look like and helped me evaluate what I want it to include. I realized I have more choice than I thought about the kind of life I want to live.

That sounds really simple in theory. Putting it into practice is another thing entirely. It’s definitely a work in progress because aren’t we all? But I’m trying to pay attention to what adds meaning to my life and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s little things like lighting a candle for no special reason or sitting in silence. Sometimes it’s a choice that seems counterproductive but adds to my overall health like taking a walk before starting on dinner prep or napping before finishing some household chore. I’m trying to cure myself of always needing to DO something and letting myself just BE from time to time.

In 2021, though, it also looked like taking my anxiety seriously. Late in the year, I started taking a daily anxiety medication. I have lived with anxiety for so long that I didn’t know life could be any different. I was scared to make a change because I had learned how to “manage” my anxiety. But the pandemic has also taught me that I don’t just want to “manage” through life. I don’t just want to survive. Some days, that’s all I’ve got, but in the long run, I want to live a whole life. 

2021 was also the year that brought our family to Life Church. We had been stuck in our previous church community and our faith was becoming stagnant or starting to die out. We felt like we needed to leave but weren’t sure how or when until COVID hit. 

I remember the first few Sundays that we tuned in online to Life Church and as the songs played, I felt angry. Not at Life Church; I was angry that I’d been experiencing such a limited piece of the Kingdom of God. There were inclusive songs? Songs about justice? Songs of lament that didn’t have choruses with easy answers? As with my anxiety, I didn’t know my experience of faith could be like this. But we’d had to leave what we’d always known and venture out toward something relatively unknown.  

We recently watched the movie “Free Guy” as a family, and I won’t give anything away if you haven’t seen it, but at one point, the main character says “Life doesn’t have to be something that just happens to us.” So much of my life has felt like it was happening to me and those words stir something inside of me. That also scares me a little because it requires change.

So I guess if I had to sum up what I learned in 2021 in just one sentence, I would say: “It doesn’t have to be this way.” I hope that doesn’t sound naive because I know that sometimes, for a season, life does have to be a certain way. There are things I can do now that I could never do when I had babies at home. And there will be things that I can do years from now that I can’t do now because I have teenagers at home.

Maybe the changes I’m looking for can be made immediately. Maybe others will take more time and planning. But when I feel tension about the way life is going, this is what I keep coming back to. 

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Which leads to some follow-up questions: if it doesn’t have to be THIS way, then how do I want it to be? And what can I do to work toward that?