Category: Personal Retrospective

I had to laugh. I just had to.

Lying in the dentist’s chair, I wanted to burst out laughing. But seeing as his hands and several pieces of dental equipment were in my mouth, I couldn’t. I couldn’t laugh when he said that the pain that had been plaguing me for the past year and a bit, the pain that had me spending most of 2021 in his chair, may not have been tooth related at all.

“You should go see a doctor and see what they say,” he told me.

So it wasn’t my fault. The thorough flossing, the three different toothbrushes, the extra attention to my gums – it turns out all that had been enough, and I had been taking care of my teeth adequately. The mysterious headaches were not due to poor dental hygiene. Just as with so many other things in my life, I was not to blame for my woes. I had done my best, but life refused to relent.

Continue reading “2022”

A blip. That’s what 2021 was. A 365 day week in which almost absolutely nothing happened. If I were to have mysteriously gone into a coma on January 1st 2021 and awakened on January 1st 2022, totally physically and mentally inert for the whole year, I would be in the exact same spot as I currently am. Nothing has changed. Only two notable things transpired this year and they were both very sad. The rest was mostly mental turmoil as I withered away from loneliness. Cool, OK, let’s get right into it.

Continue reading “2021”

Days, weeks and months- if there were any age old institutions that fell this year it was these long established divisions of the calendar. The entire world paused halfway through March, and the timeless morass that followed could not be measured in these increments. It fell to each individual to make their own routine demarcations.

I separated 2020 into different walking routes; roughly eight different journeys which I stuck to for varying lengths. Some were brief; some felt like entire years unto themselves. These were those journeys.

Continue reading “2020”

Even so many years later it’s hard to believe that all the events of 2009 happened within the span of twelve months. It’s not that there was some enormous quantity of them, but rather that the realities were so vastly different. I went from one fully defined paradigm to another in a matter of months, setting up my trajectory for the next decade almost immediately after finishing school.

Continue reading “2009”

I’ve long looked back at this year through rose-coloured glasses, regarding it almost as highly as 2005 in terms of formative moments and general good times. A closer glance reveals that while it was still an eventful and important year, the best part wouldn’t come until all the way into September. There was a lot of mundane filler on the way there.

Continue reading “2008”