2022 Recap and Making Up for Lost Time

Every January, I do a recap of the things I want to remember about the previous year. It’s always a jumble of obsessively documented and hoarded memories that I scribble in illegible lists and notebooks and iPhone notes. I list the number of books I read and miles I traveled, the cities I visited and the biggest highlights—a lot of things that matter to no one else but help me differentiate the years from one another.

I wrote more in 2022 than I think I have in the past 7 years (since finishing grad school) combined, but writing a simple blog post to summarize the year has felt near-impossible. 2022 felt like making up for lost time and trying to cram in everything that 2020 and 2021 lacked. In my recap of 2021, I wrote about how I spent the whole year feeling like I was waiting. In 2022, I decided there were things I didn’t want to wait for anymore.

2022 was 2 surgeries and 3 hospital stays for my mom. It was me going with her to her last week of chemo when my dad and sister got Covid at the same time. It was months of intense quarantining when her immune system was at its weakest so I could go with her to appointments. It was canceled vacations and missing friends’ weddings and friends’ graduations and my 10-year-college reunion because of Covid. It was managing to squeeze in a family trip to Florida and feeling elated that we’d all made it there. It was the doctor telling us after her surgery that she was cancer-free.

It was priorities changing and deciding what mattered most to me, moving out of my apartment and quitting my job and bringing my little travel-coin jar to the bank that I used to stuff $20s into after tutoring jobs. It was teaching my 8^th college class. It was dozens and dozens of hours spent calculating and figuring and researching and planning and practice-packing and repacking and finally going to the airport to catch my flight only to bail and head back home, defeated. It was rescheduling that flight 2 more times before I finally got on the plane.

In 2022, I read 65 books, edited 1, filled 4 journals, and wrote 18 blog posts. I visited 24 countries and 76 cities, rode on 70 (I think) trains, at least 35 buses, 9 ferries, 7 boats, and 2 planes.

2022 was flying on a trapeze in Montreal, petting a highland cow in Scotland, drinking butterbeer at the Harry Potter studios in England (and for breakfast in New York City). It was swimming in the Adriatic and the Aegean Seas, smelling like sulfur after a mud bath near Dalyan, floating in the thermal baths in Budapest after Michael joined me, hearing the Call to Prayer over the rooftops of Istanbul and Sarajevo,  and getting caught in a squall with the strongest winds of my life in the Isle of Skye. It was horse-back riding in the black sands of Santorini, seeing the bears at the refuge in Brasov, hiking trails so steep in Cinque Terre that I had to hold onto grape vines to keep my balance, hiking up to the fortress in Kotor with Michael, and the view from the top of Delphi. It was losing a debit card in a rainstorm and then having another one stolen on the metro. It was riding over 1,700 miles around Turkey with 40 new friends and sharing rooms with dozens of strangers and sleeping in a former prison cell. It was quiet days of isolation when I had Covid in Zagreb and then more days of isolation just two weeks later with a stomach virus in Split. It was learning to be okay with limited phone service and internet for days at a time. It was shopping in more bookstores than I can count even though I couldn’t read the languages, learning to say “thank you” in a dozen languages and then immediately forgetting, re-reading all the Harry Potter books and taking a 2-week pilgrimage through Scotland and England to relive it. It was lonely days and freezing nights and un-airconditioned trains and canceled trains and language barriers and sickness and all of those things being worth it. It was the sunrise from the hospital room overlooking the Mississippi River and the Sunset over the Caldera in Santorini. It was teaching Michael the Macarena in the haunted Airbnb in Syros and the fog lifting over the fields in Bosnia, the first cold night in Sofia and watching the leaves change out the train window in Romania. It was the new friends I met in Montreal, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Bucharest, Zagreb, Mostar, Bologna, and Rome. It was finding my mom in the airport in Rome and getting to see her face as she saw the Colosseum, St. Peter’s, the Duomo, and Venice for the first time. It was a dozen Christmas markets in 6 different cities and not getting tired of it. It was a tumultuous journey back home and anxiety and fear and deciding to do things that feel scary in spite of it. It was celebrating Chewie’s 16^th birthday (twice) and our reunion when I came home. It was celebrating my 33^rd birthday at a castle in Ljubljana and celebrating Christmas with my family in Mississippi. It was finally seeing things that I’ve spent 25 years hoping that one day I might see.

The end of 2022 found me jobless and having spent nearly all my money, and I feel pretty okay with that. I don’t have a plan for what’s next or where it will take me. But I feel like the past 3 years have been the most important lesson in what to not take for granted, what’s really important, and what to spend time worrying about. I feel so thankful for everything this year gave me.