2020 has been a tough year, there’s no denying that. I don’t want to speak for everyone when I say what I’m about to because I do realize that many people have severely struggled this year with their mental health, with losing a loved one or with losing a job. However, now that we are reaching the end of the year, I’ve started to realize something that some people may need to hear. Everyone that is saying 2020 sucked is absolutely right, but on a lighter note, it might actually be okay that it didn’t go as planned and I’m going to tell you why.
While I realize that lots of terrible things have happened this year such as the Australian wildfires that started the year or the pandemic that shortly followed the wildfires and has been ongoing since, there has been one positive thing I’ve seen come from all the negativity. I am by no means saying that the pandemic hasn’t put a damper on everyone’s lives at the moment, because it certainly has, my own life included. However, think of all the negative things that you’ve seen happen this year and then try to look at them from the opposite side. Let’s take the Australian wildfires as an example. Yes, they were an extremely negative event that started off 2020 but if you look at it from a different perspective, you’ll see that the world came together to try and support them in every way possible. There was a ton of fundraisers and Go-Fund-Me pages, almost every celebrity that I follow on Instagram was putting some kind of effort forward in order to try and help the crisis. On top of all the celebrity attention that it received, everyone else around the world came together as well. While it started as an Australian crisis, the entire world took it upon themselves to make it a world-wide crisis. Food, supplies and money were all donated and humanity came together as one again.
If this example isn’t enough then let’s look at the one that we’re all currently still living through. Yes, this pandemic sucks, there’s no getting around that. However, if we look at it, or at least try to look at it from a positive perspective you might actually see that positive things have come out of it. Call me crazy if you’d like to but when I look at this year, of course, I see the negative impacts that it’s taken, but I also see that people have been connecting more and using their phones less. People have started talking to people that they haven’t talked to in a while, they have connected with family more and relied on technology less. Overall, while it seemed like hope for humanity was gone, a light has resurfaced this year. People came together to try and fight the unfortunate state that we’re currently living in. This is the most that I’ve seen the world come together. While the state of the world is crumbling around us, I would argue that humanity is rising above.
Just to really put things in perspective as to why it’s okay that this year didn’t go as planned, there were some positive things that happened. I want to point out the obvious first and say that Trump is not going to be the president of the United States in the years to come. This is one thing that I think most can agree is a positive thing, but I won’t digress into politics. Another thing that was incredibly moving and powerful that happened this year was the BLM protest. I realize that the movement and protests stemmed out of negative events, but the positive outcome that followed these negative events created and sparked a change that is still going on and is still being fought for.
Overall, I realize that this year seems like a bit of a bust, but I wanted to try and get us thinking about why we need to focus on some of the positive things that have happened in spite of all the negative. In our society today, it’s so easy to become wrapped up in only the negative and let it swallow you completely. We have to remember that where there is negative, there’s going to be some kind of positive too; everything works in balance and everything will work itself out. If we don’t believe that things will work themselves out, then we’ll just get stuck drowning in the negative and that won’t end well for anyone. I’m not saying we need to be positive people all the time, but that we need to believe that positive things being out there aren’t the worst things for us, especially with the year we’ve all just had.