I’ve always been a person of introspection; deeply affected by dates, music, weather, light, and smells. It’s a rather treacherous way to live. My days can turn on a dime. And yet I’m not certain I would change it if I could.

Each year on the 4th of July, my birthday and New Years Eve I am overcome by it, introspection. I will generally shed tears off an on throughout the day, as I find myself doing today.

2020. My heart goes out to the thousands, the millions of people who were irrevocably changed by this year. I know more than one person who lost multiple family members to coronavirus, sometimes within the same week. The PTSD our medical workers will have when they, at last, get a chance to process the events of this year will be significant. Warzone-like. The many families who suddenly lost their incomes. Those who found themselves facing evictions, who found themselves for the first time in their lives in food distribution lines. I saw you.

2020 could have been any of those things for me. I am no more deserving than any other person. It was chance and nothing more that prevented my name from being drawn. 2014-2019 were treacherous years for me. I faced a very serious medical crisis. I faced a multi-state move that was the most emotionally difficult thing I’ve ever done. I faced the most deadly depressive episode of my life. I lost people and places that I did not want to lose. Although my grief ran deep, it was written in the book of life that I would lose them. I was unable to stop it.

These events, however, did not “earn” me the right to sit 2020 out. There are others with similar stories to mine except that 2020 still came in and started flipping tables. All of us weathered the same storm this year – but we were far from being in the same boat.

I find myself filled with gratitude for 2020. I find myself sad to tell it goodbye. I don’t imagine that many people feel this way tonight. Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug. There were an outstanding amount of bugs in 2020.

It was frightening, the space I found myself in the third week of March. I was healing from my depression but had also kept running from it. I did this by keeping a very busy schedule. This stopped, immediately. I felt an almost overwhelming fear when my husband went to bed before me. I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, in the silence. What are you running from? Why is it you can never sit down? Because it will catch me. Because my dark thoughts will consume me. Because my pain will swallow me. I can only survive by staying ahead of it. And then, I couldn’t. Staying ahead of it ceased to be an option. The gyms closed, my work shut down, I couldn’t even run errands. Nothing felt normal. The grocery store I had visited multiple times each week without a second thought became an unfamiliar place of scarcity. Seeing no canned goods, no pasta, no meat. No cleaning supplies, no toilet paper or paper towels. These things were stark reminders of how drastically the world had changed.

They caught up with me. The demons. The fear. My dark thoughts. My pain. They were on my skin, they were crawling inside of me, they were in my brain. The thing I feared had happened.

I can’t call it pleasant. During this time my soul made the sound that brakes make when you put them off too long long and get down to the rotors. There is a grating of metal on metal. There is a vibration that shakes everything.

Out it came. I was unable to stop it. It came out here, in my blog. It came out in my dancing. It came out in the way I tore through my closets and drawers, doing physical violence to any pair of shoes or article of clothing that carried bad associations. It came out in aggressively transforming the room where I had spent the 3 most dangerous days of my 2019 episode. It came out in the merciless way I tore plants and bushes from my landscaping. It came out in the way I loaded my car with paint buckets and leftover cement blocks, boxes, the entire contents of closets and drawers. It was seen in the angry way I threw these things off the precipice of the city landfill. It came out on numerous online forums, the poison purging itself through my fingertips. I tiptoed around my crisis anniversaries of 2019, the dates I could easily have ended my life a year earlier. I felt the echo of pain from each one. I saged my home. I cast spells upon my enemies. I walked into the ocean with my hands full of ashes from the unsent letters I had burned. I tantrumed at the lack of justice in my life. I screamed into my pillows and beat my fists against the mattress of my bed.

When it was purged from me, finally, there was peace.

This peace brought me into the truest “me” that I have ever been in my life. My hair had grown long and dark in this time. A changed woman met me in the mirror each morning. The Butterly Queen, the grown five-year-old in flower crowns and petticoats. Pigtails and saxophone lessons. My darkness had been transformed into a radiant shade of scarlet. My panic has been transformed into power. The realization of how little I truly needed was followed by the realization that I already had it.

It’s a journey I likely wouldn’t have taken had I not been forced to sit in the stillness of the night. Been forced to face all of it. The woman who rose from the embers of the past is equal parts darkness and light. I have been this way since my birth. It is what I was always meant to be. Both sides of myself, glowing with more intensity and purity than ever before.

What is ahead of me in 2021? I kept myself at a torturous pace on this blog through most of the year. I enjoyed it, I definitely had the time and vitriol to spare. My entry “Lilith” changed things for me. It is the work I’m most proud of. It took forever to write. Weeks and weeks of frustration trying to transform my feelings to words. Trying to strike just the right tone. I must have scrapped it 20 times and started over. It was worth it. It showed me that magic can happen when I allow my process to take the time it needs. My entries became irregular after that. The madness driving me to write and write and write had subsided.

I plan to write a memoir this year. My blog will become more like journal entries than researched topics. I will be discontinuing my Gloaming FB page. Originally I had planned to use that platform to push information on narcissistic abuse and suicide awareness. I’m just feeling kind of done talking about that right now. Not keeping the page up fills me with guilt and I plan to deactivate it and move on to focusing on my book.

People know me as a funny, friendly, silly person. I am that, definitely. But my writing has always been my dark art. My darkness is beautiful and hard earned. It speaks to the pain I have known in my life. It speaks to my empathy. I would not choose to have it taken from me. If I’m being honest, it is the part of me that I treasure most because it holds my true essence. Even at my happiest, it is with me. My writing and dancing are both directly born of it. My ability to take the stage, to speak publicly, to help others not feel so alone in their darkest hours. My vibrancy. These are all born from my darkness. I make no apologies for it.

Thank you, 2020. Thank you for the stillness, the quiet. Thank you for day after day with the man that I love. Thank you for butterflies and flower crowns. Thank you for the reminder of what truly is important. Thank you for the racial strife that forced me to action. Finally. Thank you for zoom. Thank you for Amazon. Thank you for the tears I shed thanking grocery store and retail workers. This is a gratitude I would have missed otherwise. Thank you for the growth and the loss of privilege. Thank you for the purge and the clarity. Thank you for the peace that came later. Thank you for the painful lessons that I finally learned. Thank you for the realization that none of us can control the uncontrollable.

Thank you for everything, 2020. Fare thee well.