2022 was a hard year for my family
and me, but it also included some fun highlights. Here are the
good moments and some noteworthy downsides in roughly chronological
order.
1. 2022 started off with a literal bang when a shooting happened on our street. Two men who were passing by had an altercation, and one shot the other. The wounded man ran to our porch because we still had the lights on after midnight, and Mom called 911. The emergency vehicles arrived in moments and the man survived, but it was very disturbing.
2. I started playing Wordle and German Wordle. I normally avoid trendy online games, but I have enjoyed the daily brain teasers and the social element of discussing Wordle results in a group chat.
3. I got experience with library programs during my internship. I discovered a passion for storytime, since I am a very childish person who enjoys picture books, puppets, and random weird songs, and I also worked with school-age kids and teens. I helped plan and present a successful teen murder mystery program, and even got paid to make a hate letter!
4. My mother's uncle Paul died this winter, and we attended his funeral. I appreciated the stories shared during the
service about his long, fruitful life and faith, and it was
wonderful to spend time with other relatives. Also, my siblings and I
came home with two giant garbage bags full of stuffed animals that Aunt
Eunice hadn't had the heart to drop off at a thrift store yet. We kept several of them, including the iguana that Matthew bonded with on the way home.
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5. I watched lots of Spiderman movies. I saw Spiderman: No Way Home in theaters with Matthew, and I loved it. The character development and twists were perfect. I watched older Spiderman movies with Lydia to prepare her for this one, and it was a fun trip down memory lane for me. We both got really invested, and when our theater showed No Way Home again over Labor Day weekend, I took her to see it on the big screen.
6. I enjoyed thrift shopping with Lydia and friends. In the spring, we found a zip-up dragon costume in the formal wear section at Goodwill. I wore it for a fantasy-themed week at work, and I also wore it to vote in the primary, since I was running late and preferred to vote in costume instead of missing part of my lunch break.
More recently, I acquired the most perfect, comfortable pair of jeans I have ever owned. I have historically hated jeans, but I got this amazing pair in like new condition for about four dollars. Goodwill is a magical place, and I wish blessings on whoever originally bought and donated these.
At another thrift store that day, I found
American Girl books for about a dollar apiece, including a used journal. The previous owner mentioned her
crush multiple times, but our favorite page was the one where she admitted to picking and eating the contents of her nose.
7. Cousin Olivia got married! Her spring 2020 wedding got rescheduled twice, but it finally happened, and it was a joy. One of my favorite
moments was when Uncle Judson did a split on the dance floor. These are the kinds of relatives you go hiking with, not the kind of people you expect to dance with, and it was so silly and fun.
8. Grandma died on Easter Sunday, and my family went to her funeral in May. Because she was almost ninety-two and had been suffering from dementia for years, we were happy for her to be with Jesus and Papa in heaven. A lot of the grief over losing her had already happened, and the funeral was a celebration of her life and our extended family.
Although I loved seeing relatives, traveling was grueling. I had my first experiences of being awake for over twenty-four hours, and Dad's truck got a flat tire by the Ohio border around nine in the morning. When we got to a gas station, the spare was stuck and wouldn't come out, but after about two hours, a FedEx repairman who was passing by rescued us. His shady-looking van contained just the right tools to solve the problem, and he refused all offers of payment. He said, "Just thank my mother for raising me right."
Every time we told this story during the trip, people appreciated how special that was. They would also say, "Wow. That sounds terrible. But at least it happened in daylight, and you weren't on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere!" That's called foreshadowing, folks. On the trip back, Mom's van got a flat tire around 3 AM in the middle of nowhere by the other Ohio border! But we survived, and we eventually made it back.
In July, Dad and I went back to Michigan for a family reunion. That trip was almost entirely complication-free, and we had a wonderful time hanging out with family and looking at old photos that people had brought to display. I am thankful for the ways that I have been able to connect with extended family members I wouldn't know aside from the reunions, and I didn't disgrace myself while playing a fast-paced dice game!
9. I finished grad school this May, earning my master's degree in Library Science. It was surreal and wonderful to realize that I will never have to do homework again.
10. We had COVID in the house twice. In
January, only Lydia got it, but we all got sick in May. I was miserable for a while, but I enjoyed finishing dozens of in-progress stories through the rest of my recovery.
11. Lydia and I are Muppets fans now. It's all thanks to this clickbait article, which I couldn't resist. The Great Muppet Caper was a delight, and we look forward to watching more Muppet entertainment.
12. We went to the beach twice! Before
this year, Lydia had never been, and this fact produced shock and horror from all who heard it. This June, part of our family went for a day trip while her friends were visiting, and we had a great time. We also dug "a Bro Time hole," which is a running joke in one of my stories. Lydia was pleased to complete this bucket list item, and the following photo has been her lock screen since.
We
went to the beach again in July when Uncle Judson's family was there, and
had a great time visiting. Uncle Judson took us for a ride on his boat, and we saw dolphins from a distance and collected
shark teeth. It was a wonderful day.
13. Because of all the book reviews I post on Amazon, Amazon invited me to join their reviewer program. I can claim free stuff up to a certain limit in exchange for honest reviews, and it has been a great gig. I've gotten to review lots more books, but my favorite thing I've received is the multi-level desk organizer. It has been a game-changer for the books and notebooks on my desk.
14. I got invested in two wildly different vintage book series. One
is the Malone series by Lenora Mattingly Weber. These midcentury novels about a family in Colorado are charming and realistic, and I liked the first book so much that I immediately hunted
down the other thirteen. They brought me great delight, and I am thankful that my older sister started me on the series by giving me Meet the Malones for Christmas.
I also got into the Animorphs series from the nineties. No one ever saw this coming, and I have enjoyed friends' laughter at the news. Even though the covers look revolting and freaked me out when I was a child, this high-concept science fiction saga is incredibly gripping and creative, and includes sophisticated existential themes I wouldn't have expected from a Scholastic pulp fiction series.
15.
After my internship ended, I got hired at
another library branch. I have benefits now, and have been living my best life with a
weekly storytime! This job has been a great fit. I love my
coworkers, have enjoyed new opportunities, and haven't even minded the
longer commute. I forgot how much I enjoy hanging out with myself in
the car.
As a bonus, my commute has helped me get over the last trauma memory that always reduced me to a fight-or-flight state. I didn't want to drive past the random church building that I associated with a particularly awful mental health episode, but I also knew that if I stopped reacting, I could get to a point of feeling neutral. Ultimately, partly thanks to some well-timed songs that my iPod played on shuffle, I have turned this around into a positive experience.
I now actually look forward to driving past the beautiful church building that never did me any harm. I'll sing the bridge of the Mumford and Sons song "The Cave" and look up at the steeple, knowing that God was faithful, and that if I could have zoomed out from my traumatic mental picture of the situation sooner, I would have remembered that this was a church, and that the steeple and cross symbolize the forgiveness, hope, and healing I could experience even in the midst of my brokenness.
16. We celebrated Lydia's sixteenth birthday, and I narrated mafia games for her party. It
was really fun. She and I also went to the mall with
two of her friends to go to
Build-a-Bear. She got a frog with some of her birthday money and named him Theodore.
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17. I watched more Doctor Who episodes on the 10th anniversaries of when I first saw them, and I bawled again at the departure episode for my favorite companions. A
lot has changed in my life since 2012 for better and for worse, but I
still love Amy and Rory and feel profoundly invested in their story arc.
18. This fall, I have been deeply encouraged by listening to Self-Titled, the solo album by Marcus Mumford.
It delves into his healing journey from childhood sexual abuse, and
even though this is a very heavy topic, the album is profoundly
meaningful. I admire his choice to leverage his celebrity to talk about
something that is still so taboo for men, and I have found the album
encouraging while continuing to heal from my own, different traumas.
I
also appreciate Mumford's powerful testimony of choosing to forgive
again and again and again. One of my favorite songs on the album is
"Stonecatcher." Like many of the others, it is filled with biblical
references, but they are especially overt here. I now regularly sing the
bridge when I am angry about Injustice In The World or something
someone said to me several years ago:
"All we can hope
Is that we suffer well
When the cycle ends
When there's tales to tell
When it reaches me
Let me be a stonecatcher, please"
19.
I went to multiple concerts this year! I saw Jeremy Camp, Ben Rector, Andrew Peterson, and
Switchfoot again, and when Dad, Lydia, and I went to a concert for Matthew West and Katy Nichole, we got to meet Matthew West.
20. I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the thirteenth time, writing 136,000 words. I also kept my word count graph symmetrical for the whole month, which was incredibly extra. I completed multiple in-progress drafts, wrote new stories, and got close to finishing last year's novel.
21. I got a new phone under duress. It's a flip phone, since nobody makes slide phones anymore, but it has a touchscreen keyboard and is compatible with current networks.
22.
I can't attend my church right now, thanks to my chemical sensitivities and the theater group that has been changing our shared rental space. I have to avoid the building because of all the fresh paint and plywood, and the whole thing fills me with fury and disappointment because of my efforts to rebuild a sense of community after the pandemic and how much these relationships mean to me.
That is a negative place to end this post, but it was also a negative way to end the year. To finish with something happier, here is a cute photo of Teefty road-tripping with us on the way to the beach!
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