A year ago, we were spending the last day of a once in a lifetime trip to Japan trying to fit in every last thing we wanted to do. My boyfriend fiancé (that’s still so exciting to correct myself on!) is a bartender and wanted some Japanese bar tools, and I just wanted to stuff myself with as much takoyaki as I could before we left. I also, in typical me fashion, left my postcard sending to the last possible moment, so we not only had to find a post office and navigate it, but then figure out how to buy postage and send my cards. I love, love, love postcards so much, so I always make it a point to send them from wherever I go!
I knew I’d be reflecting on this trip no matter what, but over the last two weeks of reminiscing over the photos popping up in my Timehop app or new ones shared from our friends we went with, I realized that this trip is more definitive for me in terms of my 2019 vs. 2020 comparison. I’m having such a hard time looking at these photos and believing that it was an entire year ago. Time stood still in March thanks to COVID, so to have such a significant reminder of exactly how much time really has passed is wild.
A year ago, I had what I thought was my dream job. I had pitched a new events program that I was so excited to execute, and I was coming off of a pretty successful test season of our outdoor pop-up bar. My salary was actually commensurate with the all-encompassing duties of a cocktail bar General Manager, I respected the people I worked for, and for the first time, I actually felt like I was getting to show my business acumen and affect some change, instead of just following orders and executing someone else’s vision.
It would be easy for me to sit here and compare all of that to the negatives that 2020 has brought. I lost my job (twice, actually!). The “dream job” closed quite unexpectedly in January, and then only 6 weeks after I started a new one, my entire industry was shut down thanks to COVID. My 30th birthday was spent deep in a “stay at home” order (to think, I wanted to go to Paris, lol!), and my career industry which was built on the idea of creating magical, unforgettable cocktail experiences for guests has been reduced to take-out windows, tables set up in NYC street gutters, and ever-changing executive order rules seemingly designed to only keep up appearances of safety and not actually keep me or any of my colleagues and friends safe, none of which even touches upon the much more significant destruction this year has brought upon the world…
Somehow, though, I found a lot of good in this year. Good for my relationship, for my mind, for my home, for my future. Some of it was easy to find – I got engaged (!!!) to the love of my life and two of my best friends had beautiful babies that I’m absolutely obsessed with. Some of it was unexpected – thanks to being unemployed, I qualified for actually affordable health insurance for the first time ever, Taylor Swift surprised us with the release of a FIRE new album, and now that I’ve actually had time to put into making our apartment an actual home, I don’t feel the incessant need to move somewhere nicer (and consequently more expensive) like I used to. And some of it was totally and completely needed – my fiancé and I had unending time to focus on us instead of our jobs.
I wouldn’t have chosen the way 2020 has ended up. It’s been ROUGH. It’s been heartbreaking, life changing, and soul shattering. I will never, ever forget what it was like to live in NYC in March and April during our peak or even now, eight months later, as we stare down the barrel of a second lockdown. I recognize the privilege in my personal situation, and sometimes it feels like I shouldn’t be allowed to have found happiness in quarantine, but occasionally we have to take the win where we can. I might have been in Japan a year ago and I would have given you my best divalicious “I don’t know her,” if you said the word COVID, but today I told my fiancé that I was happy – and for the first time in a really long time, I actually meant it. ♡
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