2022 is Here (or, Hell, I Need a Different Year…)

1. 2021 is a Thing That Happened, But Nobody Wanted It

2021 is gone. It’s back there. Submitted to the book of time for appraisal, and it will be found guilty of being largely a miserable affair. Some scholars might even say it was an avoidable mistake.

Now, we’re in 2022, and unlike 2021, when I thought that maybe we’d get our shit together and push forward to some new future worth living in, I just don’t have a lot of good things to say about 2022. Omicron is here, and if Google statistics are anything to go by (pulled from NYT), we’re looking at yet another year of this shit. 824,000 people dead. Possibly as many as 50% of COVID survivors get some version of “long COVID,” which can, in some cases, be debilitating for months or life.

I mean, just look at it…

These conditions kept me from being able to see my girlfriend. It’s been 2 years now. And we’re not sure how long it’ll be before we’ll be able to see each other again. Maybe February. Maybe March. Maybe May. I am frustrate…

Toss into that mess a turbulent year of U.S. politics (and global politics, as fascism rises up all over the place). A year of politicizing education and healthcare, of leaving people out to dry, of cruelty unmeasurable, of voter suppression and brutality and hatred and a deepening, worsening, soul-crushing sense that only some of us actually want to live in a civilization that works…and there’s not a lot you can do about it because the world is beyond your control now.

And then there was social media. Ah, social media. You beautiful little realm of perpetual rage, mass and self-destruction, and nightmarish misery. There were so many mob actions in 2021 that the only thing I can tell you about what social media was like in the Second Year of Our Lord Turdgerbil is this: it’s just not a safe place anymore…and probably never was. Authors getting burned at the stake. People getting harassed for months or years for having a take that, at best, could be described as “complicated,” death threats en masse, coordinated efforts to get people fired for what 10 years ago might have been seen as “just a bad take,” and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

2021 was a year that felt…broken. Not just “out there” in the wilds of social media or the physical world — though it was absolutely a broken year there — but also right here in my home and my classroom. It was a year of feeling disconnected from what I do for a living, of feeling demoralized because what I value about what I do often just didn’t seem to matter (at work, on my podcast, etc.). A feeling that probably wasn’t rational but absolutely came out of an 18+ months of being perpetually and utterly exhausted by every explosion of “bad.”

I hit maximum burnout in 2021. By that, I mean that I honestly just stopped caring about a lot of things I normally cared about or felt angrier than I had ever felt or found myself with a line that kept dropping lower and lower and lower until even something I might have called minor in pre-COVID years sent me down a spiral of not wanting to do the things I need to do. Podcasts and grading and official duties all got pushed back. I lost track of time. I watched a lot of TV…

And I had it easy. I do not envy frontline healthcare workers the task that has been put before them, but I am grateful to their resolve to fight every day to save people’s lives even when those people won’t do the easiest thing to save themselves. Y’all shouldn’t have had to be this strong. But you were. And I will continue to be the polite and grateful patient for y’all. I’ll keep trying to bring a laugh or two because y’all deserve it.

As I write this, it dawns on me that I’m airing a lot of exhaustion and hurt and anger and bitterness about what kind of year 2021 turned out to be…

2. Diamonds Might Be Forever, But 2021 Liked to Hid Them

But 2021 wasn’t ALL bad. It had some good things in it. What good things, you might ask? Well…

1. I started submitting fiction again in 2021 after a hiatus of nearly a decade. I also started writing more frequently, topping out 142,721 total words (mostly non-fiction).
2. I sold a short story to Curiouser Magazine (Issue 2)! It’s called “What Family is Made Of” and features a humorous and macabre tale of a futuristic funeral service designed to help family members deal with grief.
3. I became a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast…again! This was my fourth nomination for The Skiffy and Fanty Show. We didn’t win. But I’m cool with it. FOUR times, y’all!
4. Brandon O’Brien became my new main co-host on The Skiffy and Fanty Show, and it has been an absolute blast to share the space with him. Plus, there were amazing contributions from longtime co-hosts (David Annandale, Paul Weimer, Trish Matson, Alex Acks, Mike Underwood, Jen Zink, Becca Evans, etc.), increased contributions by Iori Kusano (yay), and brand-new contributions from new member, Tonia Ransom! It was a pretty good year for the podcast — even if it was a stressful one…
5. I made new friends! Some of these friends came on my podcast. Some of these friends hung out with me at DisCon III.
6. Speaking of friends: while it was a risk, I did attend DisCon III in Washington, D.C., which was masked all the way up and full of COVID vaccines. This represented a stressful but otherwise positive moment in life, as I’ve spent most of my time since March 2020 within the confines of my house, barring a couple of very careful excursions with close friends who also live in this small, isolated town. Needless to say, DisCon III let me hang with old friends, including some really close ones.
7. I presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts…again! It was virtual this time around, and I took a deep dive into Tobias Buckell’s climate change novels. Fun fact: you can find the audio presentation on my Patreon!
8. I discovered the wonderful world of cocktails, and I’ve been mixing them for most of the year. I even have favorites! 😛
9. I started streaming at AlphabetStreams. It started as an effort to go through my extensive video game catalogue on Steam, and it’s now morphed into “I play silly games with friends because I just don’t have the energy to pee my pants playing horror games I bought because I’m a weirdo.” I don’t know what 2022 will do for my streaming activities. Much assessing needs to be done…
10. I joined a gym! Wee! No, I don’t go as often as I should.

So, it wasn’t a total loss, right? RIGHT?

3. 2022 is Upon Us, and It is a Hungry Hippo of OMGWHATWILLHAPPENNOWSCREAM

With all of that said, I guess we’re at the point in all this when you’re supposed to tell everyone what your New Year’s resolutions will be… And, well, I’ve got three, and all of them revolve around the same things: doing less of the stuff that isn’t paying the bills and isn’t actually making my life better and isn’t ethically serving the communities and friendships I care about.

None of these “resolutions” will have firm numbers or be absolute. I’m too tired to put myself on some kind of quota or to set myself up for the guilt of not doing what I said I would do. Instead, I’m going to treat these as habit makers. If I successfully start a new habit, great. If I don’t, oh well…

So, here goes…

Books, Books, Books, and Other Things That Involve Pages

I’ve said this before in many places. My reading tanked around the mid-period of my grad school period and still hasn’t returned to pre-grad school levels. I used to down a book in a day. And while I doubt I’ll get back to that same level due to all the responsibilities I now have as a Fully Grown Human Thing™, I’d like to do a better job of reading in 2022. There are too many things worth reading, and I own entirely too many books not to get my read on.

So, I’m going to TRY to read more this year. I especially want to read more stuff relevant to my job, in part because I’m in this gig as a professor because I supposedly love reading things. Ideally, I’d like to write about these things in a public space such as this blog, but it’s too early to tell if I’ll be able to do that. Point is: I’m going to allocate more time to reading and less time to do certain other activities (see #3 below).

Writing Word Objects Into Sentence Machines for Brain Consumptions

Last year, I picked up fiction writing again. I even completed three new stories last year, which I hope to edit soon. Not keeping track of my schedule and letting myself get bogged down in other nonsense made maintaining this a little difficult. And I want to change that for myself.

This year, I want to write more (both fiction and non-fiction). I also want to set up times dedicated to writing. No social media. No games. No TV. Just writing. So, I’m gonna give it a try!

Less But More Meaningful Socials to Avoid the Madness

If there’s one thing that 2021 made clearer than ever, it’s this: I don’t think social media is good for us; worse, I think social media is actively harmful without deliberate effort on the part of the user to adjust their behavior, and even then, it’s probably still not good for us. Of course, I already knew this as early as 2016; I jokingly say that my Digital Writing courses at my job are about how social media is destroying western civilization — and I wish that were only a joke.

But 2021 added a new element to this: even the seemingly good activities we use social media for can be co-opted and abused. There is a contingent of the social web whose modus operandi is basically “I will destroy you entirely even over the tiniest of transgression because you deserve it.” It might be a bad take. It might be a lukewarm take. It doesn’t matter. If you happen to emerge on their radar, they will come for you, and they will hound you for months or years, sometimes with death threats and calls for you to kill yourself. They’ll say it’s not harassment. They’ll say it isn’t harm. But the toll is clear: very real, very regular, and even very unproblematic (or close enough) people feel the brunt of this often coordinated and sometimes organic abuse. And there’s not much you can do to stop it except block a lot of people. No apology will be accepted by the mob, no matter how sincerely or necessary it was, and the mob often doesn’t care if you actually transgressed, as merely being accused is often enough to change what people believe.

Almost nobody can process months of people telling you they hate you, and even less can handle coordinated harassment against their social media handles or real lives when it comes with death threats. To think otherwise is to court an alternate dimension in which humans are actually unfeeling robots. We are not unfeeling. We often feel (and share) too much.

None of that is necessarily new. There’s way more of it than there used to be, but it’s not new. 2021, however, clarified for me that there is a new dynamic to this: that even the sincerest and least abusive call-out or pushback can be co-opted by a mob and turned into brutal and seemingly unending abuse. As such, I personally find myself unconvinced that we can continue to ethically engage in public call-outs in the social media sphere, with exception to extreme circumstances (police brutality, for example). I’ve been thinking about this for over a month now, and I keep coming to the same place. How can we ethically call people out in public who we would agree do not deserve unending abuse when we know that even our most sincere and fair actions could be turned into unending abuse by people who absolutely do not give a flying fuck about the mental health of their targets? How can we do that knowing that a segment of the online community will uncritically amplify (by sharing or expanding) a comparatively minor criticism into a bold assertion that someone is absolutely a monster?

I just don’t know that we can right now. The environment of social media is, to be frank, a giant shitshow (Twitter especially).

All of this leads me to a substantial change I plan to make this year: I’m gonna reduce and change how I engage on social media going forward. This will take two forms:

1. I will treat social media more as a place of celebration (of my things, my friends’ things, other people’s things) and as a place to share my love of genre. That means you’ll probably see a rosier picture of my life on social media, including sharing more stuff I write here (and elsewhere).
2. I will significantly reduce the amount of time I spend on social media AND the amount of time I spend on its most negative aspects. Frankly, I just can’t anymore. I need for there to be a more forgiving, fair, measured community, and SM doesn’t offer that right now. So, I’m going to reduce my involvement in political discourse and Twitter pile-ons. The former is easy; I already do that because I find political discourse in the U.S. largely disastrous anyway. The latter will be complicated because I still must fight to make my communities safer while not engaging in the most toxic forms of behavior SM makes possible; with that in mind, I’m going to opt for a “if I know them, reach out directly” approach until I can figure out how best to deal with the ramifications of the social media amplification and abuse problem.

And there we have it. A whole lot of thoughts that you probably weren’t expecting. You’re welcome.

If you feel inclined, comments are open (but moderated). Share your resolutions and thoughts there. Anywhoodles!