Last year, as you coated your insides with moist turkey and sweet chess cake, surrounded by loved ones and problematic aunts, what were you thankful for? It’s difficult to muster genuine sadness for anyone harmed deep-frying a turkey, but last year’s reasons to be thankful were still plentiful. We genuinely didn’t realize how good we had it, did we, in those precedented times? Our ever-present 2019 ungratefulness was thrown into harsh relief this year when the coronavirus struck, stomach-churning turbulence to our voyages of personal growth. There we were in stilettos, ready to girl-boss the year, but our heel got stuck in the journey from January to December. 

Indoor months led to indoor thinking. As each of us grew intimately close with our couches, we had to survive our own brains, the eerie quiet between content binges filled with tremulous mind chatter. It is impossible to be caged without reflecting on yourself (and yes, yes, of course you can still care for other people, and wear a mask, and stop publicly socializing while the fire of a personal crisis rages within). All the things that made us feel fabulous were suddenly fallible, everything felt shallow and expendable. Social media didn’t exactly help with the gloomy worldview. The convenience of all online connection that once only supplemented a full life became the main meal. Twitter wasn’t a side dish to living, as much as a constantly replenishing buffet of polarizing views. Human connection is vital lubrication for modern life, but our joints seized every time we opened the app and fell down the rabbit hole of another public argument without speaking out loud to another human being. 

The enforced summer hibernation was full of fight-or-flight energy. Adrenaline coursing through our veins with nowhere to go. It was primal and visceral and full of “when we get back out” forecasting. There was an excitable and fleeting moment when everything was cake. This autumn is more sedate, more comatose, more hunker-down-and-wait-for-the-storm-to-pass. It is less hopeful, frankly, while we bide our time. I’m not so keen to maintain my cutting edge, to exfoliate like Pharrell (the ageless Benjamin Button of modern times), to ready my liver for a Christmas season partying like Capote. Though I’m happily distracted by cultural mulch—Orlando Bloom’s backside, Grammy nominations, Nicole’s coat in The Undoing—I’m also inundated with misery: near-constant civil unrest; climate dysmorphia; terf-a-geddon. Winter is drawing closer and it’s just going to be us and our screens, and I can already feel the usual merriment being superseded with digital comms, Santa himself coming down the chimney with an email every 30 seconds. Despite my best intentions, I’m still picking at the online scab, increasing my thirst for instant gratification. On Twitter, after crashing waves of not-great news and not-great views, I feel dejected, keen to close the app and climb back into bed and restart my day, my year, like a video game. 

It’s difficult to stay enthusiastic through the online onslaught, in a volatile and flammable climate with the viscosity of treacle. Apathy feels like death, but it’s getting harder and harder to be grateful. To sit back and survey the wreckage of the year and pick through the debris for morsels of thank you. What is there to be thankful for? What slither of positivity can be garnered from staying alive in a pandemic? Staying alive in a pandemic is a good place to start; there’s certainly merit to not being sick and de-spreading the virus. I am unfathomably lucky in other ways, too, and I’m making the time this week to count my blessings offline. Of course, I could still use a few days’ vacation from thinking about myself, but I’m starting to feel hopeful again (it’s a slow process because I keep checking my emails). I edge forward, and not to sound like a crappy positive affirmation on Instagram, you can edge forward too. Perhaps, when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s, we’ll all be able to cut open 2020 and see the cake.