What happened to 2021
I lost my newspaper column. I lost my close friends. I lost my love affair with San Francisco.
The year began as something so different, a carry-over from the new normal of 2020 and me, still trying to hold onto who I was before the pandemic. I spent a lot of time resisting change— In 2020, I papered the Castro neighborhood with flyers from my apparel business; I wrote emphatic essays in the newspaper and elsewhere; I dated. I remained optimistic when I could, and positivity flowed out of that: people bought garments and subscribed to Patreon. I was offered a new job and, separately, promised a car from someone local who only witnessed me online.
When 2021 came, though, I don’t know, I think exhaustion won out. I slept a lot. I stopped trying to maintain relationships with people who no longer called or messaged, who moved away without saying goodbye. The change in social life was profoundly depressing, and then SF Examiner pulled the plug on my column, which was not a performance issue, but moreso part of an over-all gutting of veteran staff as they transitioned to new ownership.
So I slept more. I didn’t want to feel depressed because I really felt tired of experiencing that and writing about it, so instead I denied it to myself. I didn’t publicly announce it, and I lashed out passive aggressively to deserved professional colleagues and acquaintances. I experienced profound loss and in it, I realized, the five stages of grief.
Life this year has been as good as it has been bad. I found new friends, grew closer to past ones, and also have worked with some of the nicest, most respectful, fairest bosses of my adult career. New writing opportunities appeared, and belatedly, I realized that in 2021, I had written the most ambitious, resonant, and publicly exposed content in my entire journalism career. The car gift also materialized, and I began an artistic collaboration that took my fashion knowledge and experience much faster and more profoundly than I would have reached on my own.
Relatedly, I found comfort promoting other voices instead of my own. I created narratives, imagery, essays, videos, emails, and other designs for Hendricks Law—a small firm of queer lawyers who saved me from total financial destruction—and Paul Gallo, my mentor in fashion and friend I met in his class last year.
We began together offering simpler service exchanges but grew much closer, and for a long while this year, he was among the only people I regularly spent time with in person. We skated many weeks this fall and winter in Golden Gate Park.
We shared our birthdays together, went to Pride together, and many moments in between that time sitting at the breakfast table, talking creative ideas, gossiping, and unpacking what it meant to emote and process this continued altered existence.
My experience in isolation this year reminds me so much of my undergraduate years: As a transfer student, I lived alone and not in dorms. I did not have roommates. I did not make close friends in that time, and it was insufferably worse because I also did not understand my relationship with anxiety, and separately, my relationship with insecurity. That time of my life was punctuated by many sleepless nights worrying about what others thought of me.
In ways, 2021 re-treaded that at least as much as feeling isolation, but now having experienced such a rich kaleidoscope of a social life, and having accomplished so many creative feats, I no longer felt insecure or worried about who I was, no longer concerned about what others thought. I have only been sad that this part of my life—one containing so much joy and color and bravery and fierceness in the Bay Area for many years—was now changing into something else, and closing in many ways.
I don’t know what 2022 brings, but I am grateful as always to experience what I have, to dissect it, write about it, understand it, and carry it with me on a unique path I continue to make for myself. I am grateful for the people who were once close to me and for the ones who are now. I am much more hopeful than I am bitter, and today is not a day I am bitching, only reflecting. I am looking forward to what happens tomorrow and the rest of the coming year.
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