2019 was a good year for me. I started playing ukulele, met a lot cool people, and took an amazing trip to South Korea. It was a year of new beginnings, and I wanted that to continue through the next year and beyond.
I’m not one to post motivational captions on social media, but I felt inspired to write something to set the tone for the new year. On January 1, 2020, I posted a little rant about how this year was going to be the year we get weird. This was going to be the year that I’d stop saying “I wish I could,” and just start doing.
It begins
I spent most of my life being afraid of starting new things, waiting for permission to be able to do the things that I wanted to do.
The first time I performed at an open mic, I literally waited for someone to call on me to allow me to perform. They’d run out of performers (it was a small open mic), and the host looked around the room and asked, “Would anyone else like to perform?” And I said nothing. I looked intently, as if to say, “Please let me perform.” I could’ve just said it. What would’ve been so bad about saying that I wanted to perform?
The host looked at me and said, “How about you?” And inside, I was ecstatic. Finally, someone has given me permission to be up on stage and sing. I’m sure this performance wasn’t all that great (who chooses Damien Rice’s “The Blower’s Daughter” as their first ever song to sing?), but it eventually led me down the road of picking up the piano again, performing regularly at open mics, writing my own songs, and then learning the ukulele.
So that was all fine and dandy, but I could have started this so much earlier in my life. I already had a penchant for music, so there was no reason to wait for someone to tell me that I could start playing. The only thing stopping me was me.
Following through
I wrote this rant on Instagram because I didn’t want people to have that same anxiety in the back of their head like I did. So many people take the start of a new year as a chance to start anew, and I wanted to impart that wisdom onto others. Of course, this meant that I had to follow through with what I’d said. Didn’t want to come across as a hypocrite, right?
On New Year’s Eve, my sister-in-law talked me into doing the Polar Bear Dip. For the uninitiated, the Polar Bear Dip is a charity event where you go swimming in a lake in the middle of winter. In Canada, these generally take place on New Years Day, which meant that within a span of eight hours, I went from ringing in the new year to taking a dip in a frozen lake. This post isn’t about that experience, but for the record: it felt like death and I don’t want to do it again.
A friend started a bi-weekly open mic at a Starbucks, and I participated in each of them. I did four open mics in January alone, which is a leap from the one a month I performed at in 2019. For me and my friends, it was a chance to hang out on a regular basis that we didn’t have before.
I was so excited for the potential of this year that I made a list of things I wanted to do in 2020. I’m not going to embarass myself and post the entire list here, but it included things like “learn how to play the guitar” and “see the east coast of Canada.”
But then… well, you know what happened.
Despite everything, it’s still weird
I had intended for this post to end with “whoops that didn’t happen lol.” Indeed, my motivation to do new things disappeared the moment the lockdown hit. Any attempts at writing songs resulted in a handful of chords and a few loosely-connected lyrics. My sentence-a-day journal remained sentence-less. I occasionally took my camera out on my daily walks, but there are only so many pictures you can take of the same tree.
But if I’m being honest with myself, I still made the year of weird happen. I started working from home, which required rejiggering my desk, buying (and borrowing) new equipment, and dealing with our two dogs distracting me. I hosted a weekly game night with friends on Discord, which quickly became the highlight of my week, every week. To take advantage of my new fancy PC, I started playing games on it. (That sounds like a minor thing, but as a lifetime console gamer, believe me that it’s a major shift.) I also took a more honest shot at streaming on Twitch; jury’s still out on whether I enjoy it enough to keep it going.
This wasn’t the year I expected, but if it weren’t for the pandemic, I wouldn’t have done half of the new stuff I did this year. Plus, being at home gave me even more appreciation for the people, activities, and places I hold so dearly. This year shook things up in a way that I wouldn’t have myself.
That said, I’ve got my fingers crossed that we can start up that bi-weely friend hangout again soon.