2020 Year in Review
That was… a year alright.
Last year, I didn’t just do a year in review for 2019 - in fact, I did an entire decade in review as I looked back on each year of the 2010’s and determined my best and worst years of the decade. I mentioned that 2019 itself was a bad year for me, one of the worst in my life just on the basis of my father passing away at the start. There were some good things that happened during that year - mostly me graduating and getting a Switch, but that one thing that happened just had an incredibly negative effect on the rest of the year.
But as we turned into the next decade, the 2020’s, I did have high hopes for this year. Despite what happened at the beginning of the year, I was hoping that 2020 would at least be an improvement and that maybe my life would start looking up. I pretty much experienced the worst thing that could happen to me, so… maybe the only way was up.
And I mean… I guess that wasn’t entirely untrue but this year wasn’t exactly what I hoped for either.
But I guess we should get into that, shall we?
I will say that how the year began wasn’t too bad. In fact, for what I was coming off of from 2019, I feel like the first two months were... alright all things considered. I will say one thing that I’ve been struggling with for the past few years was… honestly, trying to find my place. Trying to figure out just what I wanted to do in life as far as my future career goes. And with my Spring Semester of college, I decided to take a couple animation classes. The concept of animation as a career option wasn’t necessarily new to me, it was one I kept at the back of my mind, especially back in 2015 when I was reviewing cartoons on MLPForums and wanted to make my own, but this was the first semester I took animation classes and started learning about it in-depth. And overall I feel like I gained a lot more respect for the animation industry as a whole by taking those classes, plus became more familiar with animation software and whatnot.
And with that, I feel like in general 2020 started as a... pretty normal year for me. I was going to college, I had direction for my life, and in general, aside for the anxiety and depression I was already dealing with, I was… fairly happy. The political scene was getting interesting - I had been organizing with my local Our Revolution chapter which has helped me get more involved with the political scene (at least in the area). In addition to that, Bernie Sanders was doing well in early polling and primaries and it seemed very likely that he was on path to get the nomination.
But that was just in January and February. And once March came around...it seemed like everything just kind of started going downhill from there. I guess I could mention that I was disappointed that Bernie Sanders severely underperformed on Super Tuesday, and from there on it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to get the nomination.
But that was also around the time when the biggest theme of 2020 started. And I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about, COVID 19 and the resulting pandemic, and pretty much everything surrounding that - quarantine, a recession, and so on. Now, like a lot of people I’m sure, I remember hearing that a virus was spreading around China between late 2019 and early 2020, but frankly… I wasn’t exactly expecting it to cause so much devastation. But it seemed like I just went to sleep one night, and when I woke up the next day…my spring break had been doubled, and my college classes were being made online-only for the semester. Now everyone was in quarantine, and masks had to be worn in public. It sort of felt like things went south very quickly.
And unfortunately, with the virus continuing to spread, the quarantine has only continued. A vaccine is apparently coming soon, but even then some sources say that we can’t expect to go back to our normal lives until mid to late of next year. And along with the recent news of the virus mutating, if you were hoping COVID 19 would end with 2020… well, unfortunately I have some bad news for you.
But with being in the middle of a quarantine and everything, I of course spent a lot of time at home. Pretty much all of my classes went online only and in general I didn’t really go outside very much, at most occasionally going shopping and stuff. I guess it wasn’t too different from usual - I mean, I’m an introvert and I stay inside a lot regardless, but with me not going to my campus for class that just ended up being another reason to not leave.
And it’s kind of… odd. Truth be told, I can’t really say that my life changed that much. I’ve never really been much of an outgoing person and going to school/college was pretty much the only place I went on a day-to-day basis. I’ve still been unemployed so obviously I don’t have a job to go to (even though I did apply for a bunch this year) and I just haven’t really had many opportunities to leave my house.
Yet, at the same time, I feel somewhat… empty. Pretty much all my anxiety and depression issues that I’ve been dealing with for the past few years have still stood, and between coming off of what happened last year and the events that took place this year, I can’t really say that’s improved. It just sort of feels like every day is the same, and very little changes on a day to day basis.
And writing this year in review, I gotta be honest, I really just don’t have a lot of things to say. For as strange as this year has been for the world, nothing really exciting or terrible really happened. Life was just kind of… boring this year, honestly. I’m still just sort of depressed like I’ve been the past few years and I don’t really feel like the quarantine has really helped with that. To be honest, while I didn’t exactly enjoy getting up and walking to my campus every morning, it was a way for me to get out of the house on a daily basis, and I feel like it made getting home more… special to me. I feel like now that I have been staying home for the most part, it just feels like too much of a good thing. This isn’t necessarily a new feeling I’ve had - I felt very similarly during summer vacation of 2016 and 2017, but in those cases at least it was just three months, whereas this quarantine has been going on for about 9 at this point and doesn’t seem to have much chance to stop.
While I say that, however, I gotta be honest. For as much as I’ve heard people calling 2020 a terrible year (and although I think that’s justified especially when hearing about other peoples’ experiences)... I’m not sure I would consider 2020 to be the worst year of my life. I mean, I mentioned earlier that I felt this year was an improvement over 2019 for me personally - a slight improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. In fact, the worst thing I can say really is that this year was just kind of… mediocre for me, but I can’t really say it was outright terrible or anything.
To be honest, there were actually a few pretty good things that happened to me this year. I mentioned earlier that I had started taking animation classes during my Spring Semester of college and that they actually helped me find a career goal for myself after having so much trouble trying to settle on a major and a path forward. Frankly, that still stands - after having so much trouble trying to find a good career goal for myself, it was probably a good time for me to start looking into animation and taking classes after it was pretty much at the back of my head for a while. And now I’ve kind of settled on a major and career goal and I think that’s something for me to be happy about.
Plus I feel like along with that, I’ve become more motivated to work on and complete projects than I have in the past few years. Granted I feel like being stuck inside my house all day has helped that, but… still.
In addition to that, well… for the past few years I have been thinking about the possibility of me being transgender. It’s something that I’ve had thoughts about since I first learned about the transgender community and gender identities and in the past few years especially I’ve been sort of exploring the idea of being transgender and if I would be happier identifying as a female. Last year I began identifying as non-binary since I was still unsure, but this year… I feel like I’ve become more confident, comfortable and open about being transgender. I honestly feel like interacting with the LGBTQ+ community in the past few years has sort of encouraged me to look into myself and opened my eyes to a new possibility - ultimately coming down to if I would just be happier identifying as a female. One New Year’s resolution I have going into 2021 is to continue looking into this - coming out as trans to my family and see if I would be happier if I was identified as a female by them. It’s something I’ve talked about with my therapist too and I hope as time goes on I’m able to fully reach a conclusion and become more willing to come out to the people around me.
One topic I’d probably like to talk about is how I felt about gaming this year, because I actually felt this was a pretty interesting year as far as that goes. I think the biggest news of the year was the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X - granted I don’t think has blown me away with it’s launch and even then it’s pretty much impossible to get one right now without being price gouged on eBay but I do think it is interesting to see new hardware being released. In my personal life, well, I got an Xbox One X this year and have actually been really enjoying it, plus an NES clone that’s given me a chance to look into the NES library and collect for the system. The timing of getting an Xbox One kind of worked out too, I had originally bought it for backwards compatibility and the ability to play certain types of games in a “console” environment, but not long after I got it, came news that a new Crash Bandicoot game was releasing for the system and also the PS4 - Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time - a completely new game in one of my favorite game series, so it sort of worked out.
I also picked up a Dreamcast, but… that kind of turned out to be a disaster. I picked up the system at my local game store, but it started having an issue of consistently resetting itself so I went in for another one… which worked fine for about a few weeks, maybe a month, but for some reason just kind of stopped reading the discs. On the plus side the game store I bought it from did work with me - I was still covered under their warranty and I was able to get in-store credit for the system and games I bought after deciding it wasn’t worth keeping a system that was likely going to fail on me, so it didn’t end up being too bad but it did kind of suck considering my interest in the system.
But as far as new game releases and everything goes, I mentioned Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time which I got for Christmas and while I haven’t played too much of it (I was trying to focus on finishing Ori and the Blind Forest) I did start it and really enjoyed what I played - I could really see this being a game I really like down the road based on the levels I played so far, plus stuff like the art style. But my favorite game of this year was, hands down, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I first experienced the series in 2016 with Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS, and after hearing a lot about this game after coming out, I decided to pick it up as soon as I could. That ended up being a good thing because I really found myself loving it - I would definitely consider it a “comfort game” of mine that I can just sort of play at any time when I want to just relax.
In addition, there were also two particular “trendy” games this year - Among Us and Fall Guys, both of which I really enjoyed. The former of which I spent a lot of time playing with my friends - unfortunately I’m really terrible as the imposter, but it was still a lot of fun. I picked up Fall Guys in November, by then the game had kind of died down, but again, I still found it to be a lot of fun. I’ll probably get to reviewing those games at some point (as well as AC:NH for that matter), but I did want to shed some light on those.
Those were probably the biggest highlights of the year for me, but in addition there was also Doom Eternal, Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX which I also really enjoyed but I don’t have a lot to say about. And I know there’s a bunch of other games people like to bring up but you have to remember I haven’t played all of them and considering my somewhat niche tastes in games they may not be my kind of thing personally.
And well, to be honest, that’s kind of all I really have to say. I guess I could touch upon the election - the most I can say is that I’m not entirely satisfied with Joe Biden being president but I’m at least glad that Donald Trump’s out, but other than that, well, I think I’ve made it clear how 2020 was for me. It wasn’t a “great” year by any means, but to count my blessings a bit, I can’t really say it’s the worst year I’ve ever had. I’ll stand by what I said - considering what I experienced in 2019, I don’t think anything in 2020 in my personal life ever came down to being quite as terrible. I can understand why many others had a bad time this year - even with all the obvious stuff aside, I do know friends of mine who suffered depression really bad and in some cases lost people like I did in 2019, but for me personally, the worst I can say that 2020 was just… mediocre with some bright spots.
Last year, I didn’t just do a year in review for 2019 - in fact, I did an entire decade in review as I looked back on each year of the 2010’s and determined my best and worst years of the decade. I mentioned that 2019 itself was a bad year for me, one of the worst in my life just on the basis of my father passing away at the start. There were some good things that happened during that year - mostly me graduating and getting a Switch, but that one thing that happened just had an incredibly negative effect on the rest of the year.
But as we turned into the next decade, the 2020’s, I did have high hopes for this year. Despite what happened at the beginning of the year, I was hoping that 2020 would at least be an improvement and that maybe my life would start looking up. I pretty much experienced the worst thing that could happen to me, so… maybe the only way was up.
And I mean… I guess that wasn’t entirely untrue but this year wasn’t exactly what I hoped for either.
But I guess we should get into that, shall we?
I will say that how the year began wasn’t too bad. In fact, for what I was coming off of from 2019, I feel like the first two months were... alright all things considered. I will say one thing that I’ve been struggling with for the past few years was… honestly, trying to find my place. Trying to figure out just what I wanted to do in life as far as my future career goes. And with my Spring Semester of college, I decided to take a couple animation classes. The concept of animation as a career option wasn’t necessarily new to me, it was one I kept at the back of my mind, especially back in 2015 when I was reviewing cartoons on MLPForums and wanted to make my own, but this was the first semester I took animation classes and started learning about it in-depth. And overall I feel like I gained a lot more respect for the animation industry as a whole by taking those classes, plus became more familiar with animation software and whatnot.
And with that, I feel like in general 2020 started as a... pretty normal year for me. I was going to college, I had direction for my life, and in general, aside for the anxiety and depression I was already dealing with, I was… fairly happy. The political scene was getting interesting - I had been organizing with my local Our Revolution chapter which has helped me get more involved with the political scene (at least in the area). In addition to that, Bernie Sanders was doing well in early polling and primaries and it seemed very likely that he was on path to get the nomination.
But that was just in January and February. And once March came around...it seemed like everything just kind of started going downhill from there. I guess I could mention that I was disappointed that Bernie Sanders severely underperformed on Super Tuesday, and from there on it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to get the nomination.
But that was also around the time when the biggest theme of 2020 started. And I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about, COVID 19 and the resulting pandemic, and pretty much everything surrounding that - quarantine, a recession, and so on. Now, like a lot of people I’m sure, I remember hearing that a virus was spreading around China between late 2019 and early 2020, but frankly… I wasn’t exactly expecting it to cause so much devastation. But it seemed like I just went to sleep one night, and when I woke up the next day…my spring break had been doubled, and my college classes were being made online-only for the semester. Now everyone was in quarantine, and masks had to be worn in public. It sort of felt like things went south very quickly.
And unfortunately, with the virus continuing to spread, the quarantine has only continued. A vaccine is apparently coming soon, but even then some sources say that we can’t expect to go back to our normal lives until mid to late of next year. And along with the recent news of the virus mutating, if you were hoping COVID 19 would end with 2020… well, unfortunately I have some bad news for you.
But with being in the middle of a quarantine and everything, I of course spent a lot of time at home. Pretty much all of my classes went online only and in general I didn’t really go outside very much, at most occasionally going shopping and stuff. I guess it wasn’t too different from usual - I mean, I’m an introvert and I stay inside a lot regardless, but with me not going to my campus for class that just ended up being another reason to not leave.
And it’s kind of… odd. Truth be told, I can’t really say that my life changed that much. I’ve never really been much of an outgoing person and going to school/college was pretty much the only place I went on a day-to-day basis. I’ve still been unemployed so obviously I don’t have a job to go to (even though I did apply for a bunch this year) and I just haven’t really had many opportunities to leave my house.
Yet, at the same time, I feel somewhat… empty. Pretty much all my anxiety and depression issues that I’ve been dealing with for the past few years have still stood, and between coming off of what happened last year and the events that took place this year, I can’t really say that’s improved. It just sort of feels like every day is the same, and very little changes on a day to day basis.
And writing this year in review, I gotta be honest, I really just don’t have a lot of things to say. For as strange as this year has been for the world, nothing really exciting or terrible really happened. Life was just kind of… boring this year, honestly. I’m still just sort of depressed like I’ve been the past few years and I don’t really feel like the quarantine has really helped with that. To be honest, while I didn’t exactly enjoy getting up and walking to my campus every morning, it was a way for me to get out of the house on a daily basis, and I feel like it made getting home more… special to me. I feel like now that I have been staying home for the most part, it just feels like too much of a good thing. This isn’t necessarily a new feeling I’ve had - I felt very similarly during summer vacation of 2016 and 2017, but in those cases at least it was just three months, whereas this quarantine has been going on for about 9 at this point and doesn’t seem to have much chance to stop.
While I say that, however, I gotta be honest. For as much as I’ve heard people calling 2020 a terrible year (and although I think that’s justified especially when hearing about other peoples’ experiences)... I’m not sure I would consider 2020 to be the worst year of my life. I mean, I mentioned earlier that I felt this year was an improvement over 2019 for me personally - a slight improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. In fact, the worst thing I can say really is that this year was just kind of… mediocre for me, but I can’t really say it was outright terrible or anything.
To be honest, there were actually a few pretty good things that happened to me this year. I mentioned earlier that I had started taking animation classes during my Spring Semester of college and that they actually helped me find a career goal for myself after having so much trouble trying to settle on a major and a path forward. Frankly, that still stands - after having so much trouble trying to find a good career goal for myself, it was probably a good time for me to start looking into animation and taking classes after it was pretty much at the back of my head for a while. And now I’ve kind of settled on a major and career goal and I think that’s something for me to be happy about.
Plus I feel like along with that, I’ve become more motivated to work on and complete projects than I have in the past few years. Granted I feel like being stuck inside my house all day has helped that, but… still.
In addition to that, well… for the past few years I have been thinking about the possibility of me being transgender. It’s something that I’ve had thoughts about since I first learned about the transgender community and gender identities and in the past few years especially I’ve been sort of exploring the idea of being transgender and if I would be happier identifying as a female. Last year I began identifying as non-binary since I was still unsure, but this year… I feel like I’ve become more confident, comfortable and open about being transgender. I honestly feel like interacting with the LGBTQ+ community in the past few years has sort of encouraged me to look into myself and opened my eyes to a new possibility - ultimately coming down to if I would just be happier identifying as a female. One New Year’s resolution I have going into 2021 is to continue looking into this - coming out as trans to my family and see if I would be happier if I was identified as a female by them. It’s something I’ve talked about with my therapist too and I hope as time goes on I’m able to fully reach a conclusion and become more willing to come out to the people around me.
One topic I’d probably like to talk about is how I felt about gaming this year, because I actually felt this was a pretty interesting year as far as that goes. I think the biggest news of the year was the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X - granted I don’t think has blown me away with it’s launch and even then it’s pretty much impossible to get one right now without being price gouged on eBay but I do think it is interesting to see new hardware being released. In my personal life, well, I got an Xbox One X this year and have actually been really enjoying it, plus an NES clone that’s given me a chance to look into the NES library and collect for the system. The timing of getting an Xbox One kind of worked out too, I had originally bought it for backwards compatibility and the ability to play certain types of games in a “console” environment, but not long after I got it, came news that a new Crash Bandicoot game was releasing for the system and also the PS4 - Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time - a completely new game in one of my favorite game series, so it sort of worked out.
I also picked up a Dreamcast, but… that kind of turned out to be a disaster. I picked up the system at my local game store, but it started having an issue of consistently resetting itself so I went in for another one… which worked fine for about a few weeks, maybe a month, but for some reason just kind of stopped reading the discs. On the plus side the game store I bought it from did work with me - I was still covered under their warranty and I was able to get in-store credit for the system and games I bought after deciding it wasn’t worth keeping a system that was likely going to fail on me, so it didn’t end up being too bad but it did kind of suck considering my interest in the system.
But as far as new game releases and everything goes, I mentioned Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time which I got for Christmas and while I haven’t played too much of it (I was trying to focus on finishing Ori and the Blind Forest) I did start it and really enjoyed what I played - I could really see this being a game I really like down the road based on the levels I played so far, plus stuff like the art style. But my favorite game of this year was, hands down, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I first experienced the series in 2016 with Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS, and after hearing a lot about this game after coming out, I decided to pick it up as soon as I could. That ended up being a good thing because I really found myself loving it - I would definitely consider it a “comfort game” of mine that I can just sort of play at any time when I want to just relax.
In addition, there were also two particular “trendy” games this year - Among Us and Fall Guys, both of which I really enjoyed. The former of which I spent a lot of time playing with my friends - unfortunately I’m really terrible as the imposter, but it was still a lot of fun. I picked up Fall Guys in November, by then the game had kind of died down, but again, I still found it to be a lot of fun. I’ll probably get to reviewing those games at some point (as well as AC:NH for that matter), but I did want to shed some light on those.
Those were probably the biggest highlights of the year for me, but in addition there was also Doom Eternal, Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX which I also really enjoyed but I don’t have a lot to say about. And I know there’s a bunch of other games people like to bring up but you have to remember I haven’t played all of them and considering my somewhat niche tastes in games they may not be my kind of thing personally.
And well, to be honest, that’s kind of all I really have to say. I guess I could touch upon the election - the most I can say is that I’m not entirely satisfied with Joe Biden being president but I’m at least glad that Donald Trump’s out, but other than that, well, I think I’ve made it clear how 2020 was for me. It wasn’t a “great” year by any means, but to count my blessings a bit, I can’t really say it’s the worst year I’ve ever had. I’ll stand by what I said - considering what I experienced in 2019, I don’t think anything in 2020 in my personal life ever came down to being quite as terrible. I can understand why many others had a bad time this year - even with all the obvious stuff aside, I do know friends of mine who suffered depression really bad and in some cases lost people like I did in 2019, but for me personally, the worst I can say that 2020 was just… mediocre with some bright spots.
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