jeremysglidden
- Jan 8, 2021
- 5 min read

2020 in Review

Updated: Dec 19, 2021

Hello everyone!

I am in the routine of writing a blog post reviewing the previous year (check out 2019 and 2018). This serves as the Christmas card type update for everyone, as well as a way for me to reflect and look back on my year. Because I have a mid-January birthday (18th), I also consider each year to be "Year X" of my life. So 2020 is considered "Year 26" (1994 is referred to as "Year 0" for those who want to be all "buuuuut 2020 is actually the 27th year you've been alive!")

As everyone knows, 2020 was a strange year for the world. A global pandemic certainly has an enormous impact on daily life, and there's a lot of hyperbolic rhetoric out there that 2020 was the worst year of all of our lives. This type of Christmas card blog post is ultimately an answer to the question "how are you?"

During 2020, that question has a lot more layers to it.

Christmas Photo with Peak - look at his lil' tongue!!

My true answer to that question is that I am perfectly fine. To say otherwise would be to be ungrateful for actually having a decent year, and therefore minimizing the true actual problems that other people had to deal with in 2020. So as I breakdown why I had a good year in 2020, it is not to brag about how my life is better than other people who really struggled, or to make light of any of the real tough times other people had. It is instead to properly be thankful and appreciative of my life situation because it was mostly ideal for the year of the pandemic.

Before the pandemic even hit, I was saying to people: "26 has hit me like no other age has." I started the year by getting an MRI for my knee after I've had a lingering injury from a race back in the fall of 2018. But the fact that year 26 was going to be different became clear to me when I ate everything in sight for my birthday weekend during a trip to Charleston, and the weight didn't immediately fall off in the week afterwards, which was the norm up until then. Spending my free time intentionally losing fat (not muscle) weight and thinking about joint problems really made me recognize that I was closer to 30 than 20. In regards to feeling old, the difference between 25 and 26 was night and day.

Regardless, I was still in the routine of my typical activities. Highlights were attending basketball games of the students in our church's student ministry, dog/house sitting for friends, sweating in Paul Maki's sauna, Survivor viewing parties on Wednesday nights, basketball, and flag football. When pandemic hit, life was certainly different, but not horrible. I truly consider myself very lucky for where I was in life for the pandemic, for three reasons:

1. Financial Security - I am fortunate enough to work in health care so I have always been secure in having a job and continuous work. The typical downside of working in health care is the risk of actual direct exposure to the virus, and I am lucky enough to not even worry about that because my position is administrative in nature. I was able to work from home plenty, and still go into the office when needed and shut myself in the volunteer workspace - that has a window and sunlight!

I want to give a special thanks to my direct team and other coworkers at Four Seasons, because it legitimately has been an excellent place to work and provided financial security in a time when a lot of people didn't have that.

Staff appreciation fun at work

2. Living Situation - If I had to pick one's ideal family dynamic for a pandemic year, I'd probably choose being part of a married couple. But a close second would be what I did: living WITH a married couple! I was never socially isolated, my roommates are some of my best friends, and they have two awesome dogs! Sure, dating in a pandemic is essentially nonexistent, and we also have a cat living with us, but everything other than that has been ideal for this year. I didn't all of a sudden become a home school teacher because of having kids, and we even had friends in the same apartment complex that we got to quarantine with. I'm sure some would argue that my living situation was even better than being married and having to deal with a stressed out spouse, but I'll let them make that argument for themselves in their own blog posts.

From L to R: roommate Jon (he's special), Cody, Emily, roommate Aubrey

3. Living in Asheville - For a pandemic, you want to be in a place that is not urban/densely populated, and has many outdoor activity opportunities. Asheville is the perfect city for that. Being a city, it does have some areas of dense population, but I live just south of the city where things are a little more spread out. There are so many mountain hikes, waterfalls, and parks in the area that have been fantastic for socially distanced fun. In my experience, Asheville was very cautious and safe in regards to the pandemic without having problematic over-the-top micromanagement by government (looking at you, New York), so I have no complaints whatsoever in regards to my location.

Lookout Mountain, weekend before Thanksgiving, still warm weather

With that all said, there isn't too much else to say about 2020. I went to work, physical therapy, vacationed to Charleston twice, created a fall Spikeball league, and then hung out at home most of the time. Sure, it was a less than stellar year because of the appropriate limitations of slowing a pandemic, but I cannot rightfully look at my situation this year in comparison to others' and complain. I truly am grateful, and I want to be positive as well as focus on the reasons that I should be thankful.

Last I checked, I can still walk, I can still talk, and I have many other reasons to be happy with my circumstances. I hope 2021 is a better year for anyone, and I'm looking forward to what happens! Year 27, let's do this!

...oh my dear lord, I'm almost 30