Ark of the Lost Angels

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2024 was a difficult year. I entered it with optimism, but I’m leaving it with a dreary wariness the way a storm cloud just hangs above a place and washes out the sounds and the sights of the world with seemingly endless rain.

Certainly, there were some victories, such as me finding gainful employment after an exhausting eighteen months of searching, and a triumphant return to therapy to deal with the various weights which life hung around my neck in recent years. However, I would mostly characterize this year mostly by its challenges, and its losses.

At the beginning of the year, I was best friends with someone who turned out to be incredibly harmful and manipulative. I have spent the better part of the year unpacking the lies and manipulations from the six months we were close. A large portion of that has been to figure out what was real and what wasn’t, and to sort out the negative self-image this person pushed onto me.

And I’ve said goodbye to other people whom I cared about greatly this year too. Friends whose time had just come and gone, and it fills me with sorrow. I am grateful they were part of my life, and I am saddened by their departure. I’ve never been one to like goodbyes, I am a firm believer in working to keep the people you care about around so much, and it takes a lot for me to stop caring about someone once I start. However, it’s a fruitless endeavor to keep trying to keep someone who keeps trying to leave.

I think the world has seen more of the bitterness, division, and violence that represent the worst of humanity. I think a lot of people, myself included, are tired of reliving the same cycles of regression when there is so much progress to be made. We can see the better world, but we can’t seem to get out of our own way on the road there. That’s hard to deal with and still find smiles for the days ahead.

Back in 2019, I discovered something interesting. Someone had recorded the entirety of ABC’s coverage of the dawn of the new millennium and uploaded it to YouTube. With my interest in history being what it is, and the dawn of a new decade imminent, I decided to relive New Year’s Eve from twenty years prior. And I was met with amazing celebrations across the world to celebrate the stroke of a very special midnight, and to celebrate both the end of both a millennium, and a century of tremendous progress. It was a very uplifting experience, in all honesty, and made me appreciate how far we’ve come as a society, how far we have yet to go, and all the challenges we faced before and will have to face in the future. The old commercials and standard definition 4:3 aspect ratio gave me a sense of nostalgia for my childhood. Every age has its challenges, and the problems of today seem so daunting because they are the problems we face presently. It’s easier to think of something as being a bigger deal when it’s staring you in the face. On that broadcast, they checked in with the Y2K Command Center in Washington DC to manage fallout from the Y2K bug, which turned out to be a non-issue thanks to the diligent work of scores of people all over the world in remediation efforts. Looking back on what we were talking about in 1999 put things into perspective for me, and rewatching that broadcast became part of my New Year’s Eve tradition every year.

My inclination this year is to say that this year was not a good year, and that I have very little reason to believe the new year will be much better. And perhaps my negative assessment is being clouded by my current foggy state of mind. However, such hopelessness feels antithetical to who I am as a person. These are dark, dangerous, and frightening times. They are a far cry from the hopefulness we felt in the 1990s or in 2008 or coming out of the pandemic. However, it is important to look for the sunlight piercing through the clouds.

I have witnessed friends reach tremendous victories, watched family persevere, found smiles and warmth in moments where I never thought I would. I know there was good this year, and I feel like at the very least that I have learned from it. I rekindled my love of baseball which had been dormant since I was a child. I sincerely hope my Orioles will win it all next year. I started writing in a way I previously hadn’t before and pushed forward a great many projects which laid dormant because I had never put the discipline to myself to work on them.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and I’d like to think of myself as a hopeful person. Sometimes to a delusional extent. I am guardedly hopeful for 2025, and while it is not in the same ways nor to the same extent as it was when entering into 2024, I don’t think a life without hope is a life worth living.

So, here we are, at the precipice of a new chapter in this grand story. Yes, it will be filled with hardships. Yes, it will not be easy. Yes, we will struggle. But we will struggle together. We will laugh and cry together. We will celebrate triumphs and failures together. We will find our way through the confusion of life together.

I have often said that my favorite time of year is the Monday before Thanksgiving through January 2^nd. People always react with confusion. But from the beginning of final preparations for Thanksgiving through after New Year’s Day, the prevailing theme is a time for people to come together, to spend time with loved ones and celebrate the joy which comes with family, whether it’s family by birth or family you have found along the way. I love New Year’s Eve because it’s something special in all of this, a day to say, “Whatever has happened this year will be carried with me, but it does not define me, and I have a whole new chapter of 365 pages that starts in just a few hours to do something new with.”

In conclusion, I am grateful for the life I have led up until now. And I appreciate every last one of you. Whether you’ve been here since my very beginning or come aboard this train somewhere along the way, I want to say thank you. I would not be who I am or be able to do what I do without you here. I love the all of you.

Happy New Year!