New Year Same You (2022)

I usually love New Years. The fading of one year into the next brings about the perfect time for reflection on where we have been and where we want to go. The downside is that it can bring about pressure to set high standards for the year ahead without any reasonable plan to change all the underlying habits that are keeping you from doing this stuff already anyway, we figure we suck and that we can try again next year. Even the best laid plans advising that we don’t use the word “resolution “ and instead change it to “goal “ along with breaking things down into steps can be limited.  I know all of this and love it anyway, but this year is different. Why? Because too many things are the same. 

2021 was a mixed bag. I’m still a therapist working during a global pandemic and in my experience I think 2021 might be worse in many ways psychologically than 2020. In the early stages of the pandemic there was stress, fear and terror sure. There was division. People were arguing about their rights and it being a hoax and government mind control. It was new for everyone though and as scary as that was, there are moments  I’ll take it over the weird gaslighting that things are somehow back to normal because there is a vaccine and the president isn’t actively rage tweeting anymore. Any relief I felt from reduced restrictions and increased vaccination rates late last summer was short lived. It seems we have entered the territory of people needing to learn to “live with it.” No more unemployment type financial support. No more understanding employers that don’t want to risk COVID infecting their staff. We are back to people having to go to work sick because they can’t miss work, breakouts in schools and increased hospitalizations taxing an already depleted healthcare staff. Schools will remain open because we lack childcare and appropriate family supports. They can call it concern for kids mental health all day long -I call bullshit. If any policy decision was actually made with the goal of improving kids mental health we wouldn’t even recognize the world for the changes that need to be made for that to happen. So we have a new administration, vaccines and the world continues to burn. Profit over people. Anti-vaxxers see this as proof of their conspiracy theories and around we go. 

Let’s look at the ambiguous grief of 2021. Ambiguous means open to more than one interpretation so when we are talking ambiguous grief, the weight of the loss or it even being seen as a loss is going to vary. People died due to COVID. That’s terrible and awful and what we usually think of when we think of grief because we think of death. I’m not discounting that. The ambiguous part kicks in when we don’t have funerals or memorials the way we would have in other circumstances. When we are excited concerts and shows and travel are back but also- not so fast. Will it get cancelled again? Do we even make plans anymore? Is it actually safe to go? That kind of thing used to be a straight shot to happiness- activity I enjoy to I get to do it meant happiness and something to look forward to. Now that part is tainted because you have to consider unpleasant things as part of the planning process whether you have safety concerns for your health or you think the government is overreaching by letting venues requiring proof of vaccination for you to go. 

Rayelle Davis is a Nationally Board Certified Counselor licensed in Maryland and West Virginia. She is an expert content reviewer for highered.com and a faculty trainer for the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Her research on the diseases of despair and Appalachia fuels her mission to build community centered around accurate and decolonized mental health education.