Lessons Learned From 2020

Image description: Today's post, which centers on the lessons I've learned from this tough year, features a lesson from Star Trek: Generations, courtesy of the amazing Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg). Image obtained from TrekCore. 

If you’re reading this from America, you know that Thanksgiving is in a little under a week. Whatever your personal feelings may be about the holiday itself, I think we can all agree it's more important than ever to reflect on the things we’re thankful for and how to integrate those things into our lives more completely. If you’re reading this from a place that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, you can instead celebrate another day of having made it through an absolute roller coaster of a year, one that at times may have seemed insurmountable. That is a lesson we all share, no matter our circumstances, identities, or anything else, and we should be proud. This year serves as an excellent opportunity, even outside of the bounds of a holiday about thankfulness, for taking a long look at ourselves and for looking back with gratitude, even in a year like 2020.

For me, constantly reflecting has been the only way I’ve managed to retain my sanity this past year. Whether through journaling, writing poetry, or pouring my thoughts into this blog, not a day has gone by when I haven’t reflected on myself or my life in one way or another. Over the course of all that reflecting, I have come to one very valuable conclusion that I would like to discuss in more depth with you today as part of this celebration of thankfulness and gratitude – 2020 has not actually been a waste. In fact, even though I think I can speak for everyone when I say we would have rather just slept through 2020, there are several lessons I was able to pick up this year that I don’t think I would have been able to learn otherwise. And, perhaps because this year is the year I launched this blog and was constantly reflecting on asexuality as part of that, many of these lessons can be tied directly to my aspec identity. So, without further ado, these are a few of the invaluable lessons I’ve learned in 2020.

Spoiler warning! 

Star Trek: Voyager ("One")

Star Trek: Generations

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“I will adapt”

As I’m sure regular readers of this blog are aware, I love the character of Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager. In fact, if you were to take a drink every time I reference her in one of my posts, you’d be under the table faster than you can say “resistance is futile.” But that’s because she as a character is incredibly important to me and I find myself relating to her more and more with every rewatch I do of the series. I have talked endlessly about the aspec parallels I see in her, and the way I relate them to my own aspec identity. But this year, rewatching some of her episodes in preparation for various blog posts, I have also come to identify with something even deeper, the reason why I chose to title my Seven-specific post after her quote from the episode “One” – “I am alone, but I will adapt.”

Image description: Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager gives me my first key lesson of this year - the ability to adapt, even to extremely adverse circumstances. Image obtained from TrekCore. 

The importance of the theme of adaptation to Seven is often played in Voyager as a leftover quirk from her days as a Borg drone. But throughout the series, we see it’s so much more. In fact, in the aforementioned quote from “One”, the idea of adapting is a mantra Seven uses to keep herself sane when she is faced with being truly alone for the first time in her life. In a year where being alone has become an accepted norm for a lot of people, this is something I think a lot of us can relate to. Personally, I have been remarkably lucky this year – and every day I not only express my gratitude for that fact, but acknowledge the privilege of it. Although people in my family lost their jobs due to the shutdown, I myself was lucky enough to not take a major financial hit due to my living situation, and I’m already used to not having regular contact with people I know due to living in different states. But being cut off from the usual avenues of “normalcy” I had come to expect in my life nevertheless took its toll at times. I turned twenty-five this year and thus am officially in my mid-twenties, but despite the fact that the calendar tells me I’ve technically been an “adult” for just shy of a decade, somehow this year felt like it forced me to grow up in a way few things ever have. Like Seven, I felt that sense of having to adapt to a situation I never expected to find myself in, just as we all have had to.

Naturally, when I think about the idea of adapting, I think too about how I've had to adapt to the world around me when it comes to being asexual. As I mentioned earlier, having this blog as one of my only constant sources of output this year means that I have been seeing aspec parallels everywhere – even more than I usually do. Especially because I see aspec parallels in Seven’s journey already, this appropriate quote becomes even more appropriate for me and how I’ve had to evolve as a person, not just this year, but every year. 2020 has been a lonely year for a lot of people due to social distancing and sheltering in place, but for me, that loneliness feels oddly familiar.

I, like Seven, often feel alone in the world and I, like Seven and like millions of people this year, have to adapt my way of understanding myself and my surroundings in order to survive. 2020 made that very stark to me and made me realize that’s how I must live my aspec life as well. In many ways, it’s how I already have been living it – by understanding the things I can and can’t have, and adapting accordingly. I will never stop hoping and working towards greater understanding and representation for people like me, and sometimes it will still hurt to examine the many things in life I find myself shut out of because of who I am. But like Seven learns to adapt to being an individual throughout Voyager and we have all learned how to adapt to the new normal of a tumultuous year, I too will keep challenging myself to adapt whenever life throws me a tough new challenge simply because I’m aspec.

“I learned to live with that”

Keeping with the Star Trek theme is a lesson that came to me when I was watching the movie Star Trek: Generations as research for my Data-specific post. It’s admittedly a subpar movie and thus one I was not expecting to give me the framework for describing such an important concept. The plot centers on an extra-dimensional place called the Nexus, a realm where a person’s deepest wishes can be made manifest; but the “doorway” to this place is a destructive, ribbon-like energy force that travels through space sporadically. During the prologue of the movie, set decades before the main plot, we see the ribbon threatening a ship that includes the movie’s eventual villain, Dr. Soran, as well as a familiar face – Guinan, the Enterprise’s wise bartender who often gives advice to the crew. Guinan, Soran, and the rest of their crew were all inside the Nexus until they are ripped away by the attempt to save them from the energy ribbon. Soran, however, does not give up his pursuit of the perfection that exists within the Nexus, and his desperation to return, even years later, forms the movie’s main conflict.

Image description: Guinan and Captain Picard within the Nexus in Star Trek: Generations. The movie's themes include coping with loss and uncontrollable circumstances, apt for a year like this. Image obtained from TrekCore. 

So how did this teach me a lesson? Well, if you’ve read my BTS-specific post or my Ace Safe Space list, you know that I’m a BTS fan. What most people don’t know is that I had tickets to see them in May of this year – an event that, like most things in 2020, went by the wayside. So, when Guinan describes the Nexus as a realm of tangible joy in the film, a place where time has no meaning and you never want to leave, I jokingly began referring to it as the “cosmic BTS concert.” While that notion started off as a joke, it actually became something I've thought a lot about since then. For me, BTS is not just a group I really wanted to see perform; they are my lifeline and, often, one of the only things that makes me feel safe or understood. I think the common misconception about BTS – thanks to the associations people assign to terms like “K-Pop” or “boy band” – is that they’re just fun and cute. And certainly, they do have fun, cute, upbeat songs that don’t require extensive deep-diving (their recent entirely-English smash “Dynamite” comes to mind). But they are so much more than that, and their songs, performances, and live concerts go deeper than I think most people understand, which a recent article written for Rolling Stone India by Ambika Muttoo sums up well. In it, Muttoo talks about the deep impact BTS’s lyrics have had on her since she first discovered them with their loss-and-friendship-driven masterpiece, “Spring Day.”

“Heartbreak doesn’t get easier,” Muttoo writes when discussing her own personal relationship with the song and how it sparked her interest in BTS’s artistry. “Neither does letting go, even though I believe that when you lose something, you gain something else. Perspective, if you’re lucky. […] With life, heartbreak, and childhood alike, you have to move on.” She relates this fact back to the song’s line that “no darkness, no season is eternal.” Indeed, not just “Spring Day,” but a great deal of BTS’s songs focus on themes of acceptance of circumstances you can’t help and how to move on. But more than moving on, their music encourages people to learn how to live with the hurt, a lesson which is likewise embodied in Guinan and her own experiences with the “cosmic BTS concert” in Star Trek: Generations.

“I would have done anything to get back there,” Guinan says when asked about the Nexus. “And once I realized that wasn’t possible, I learned to live with that.” This idea hit me hard because I too have had to learn to let go… and I haven’t always succeeded. There have definitely been times when I’ve felt more like Soran than Guinan, or times when I’ve been unable to see the “spring day” set to come at the end of the long winter, a feeling made worse by uncertainty about BTS’s future. While most groups whose cancelled concerts can simply be rescheduled, BTS, as Korean men, are required to do military service. I don’t quite understand what this entails or what it means for the group, but I do know the eldest member hits the required age this December. If my worst fears about this pending service come true with no delays or exemptions, my beloved boys could each be military-bound for nearly two years apiece, one after the other after the other. It’s possible I never get a chance to see this concert, which would have been my very first; in fact, it’s possible I may never get to see them at all.

Image description: A picture from BTS's previous "Love Yourself" concert. My big unrealized dream of 2020 was to attend a BTS concert and to experience the safety and healing of their music in person. Not being able to and having to live with that has been this year's toughest personal lesson.

The worst part of this is that I don’t even know if it’s actually true. Am I blowing it all out of proportion? Or am I somehow underestimating it and will find it worse than I had imagined? That murkiness is a huge source of stress for me, a strange duality of hope and despair that I have trouble living in between. Like Soran, there is part of me that wants to believe it’s possible to get to the things I want; like Guinan, there is a part of me that feels like I have to let go. The sting of that has not healed easily and is, in fact, still very raw. It’s not been easily explained to people or understood. Even writing about it in this post brings tears to my eyes. But as much as it hurts, that pain has been valuable. It has helped me see my strengths and weaknesses in a new light, has helped me examine how I communicate with those around me, and has been vital in my continuing quest to live by BTS’s own “love yourself, speak yourself” philosophy. And it has fed into the continued maturing of my aspec identity and how I process that. As I mentioned with the previous lesson about learning to adapt, this year has also taught me the value of learning how to live with the things I cannot change. There are some things in my life that frustrate me, sadden me, or hurt me, and often times it will feel unfair; but no matter how many times I beat against them, I will not be able to change them. I am who I am.

Just as Guinan was able to make a life for herself that didn’t involve the Nexus, I may have to learn to let go of certain expectations. I have a quote on my computer desktop to that effect – “In the end, only three things matter: how much you love, how gently you live, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” I’m still working on all of those things and 2020 has especially made me aware of the value of the last one of those, which I believe is the hardest. But I have come to believe that part of loving yourself means learning to accept the things you can’t change and not letting them hold sway over you. Learning to live with things not meant for me also means I’ve thought a lot about the things I should chase in my pursuit of acceptance and the things I should let go. Some things in this world are never going to be for me – I will probably never feel one hundred percent comfortable in certain social circles, for instance, or will always have to watch television through the cracks in my fingers. I will probably always live my life in an uncomfortable zone of longing for things not meant for me and dealing with my circumstances. And, just as I’ve had to do in 2020, I have to learn how to live with that.

“Life goes on”

I have done an unbelievable amount of work on myself this year, but I’m not perfect. In many ways, I still care too deeply about what others think of me and one of my biggest fears is being seen as selfish. I find myself asking, who am I to complain about my struggles in 2020 when millions of people have gone through pain I can’t even begin to imagine? Who am I to lament what I’ve gone through as an aspec person when I have a good support system and a platform on which to express myself? But over the years – and especially this year – I have come to understand that it’s not selfish to feel sad, uncertain, or misunderstood, even when you otherwise have a great deal to be thankful for. And through that thought process, I have come to realize something unexpected about myself: I am actually more resilient than I give myself credit for. I’ve always seen myself as someone who crumbles in a crisis, but 2020 has shown me I’m better equipped than I thought to play the hand that life has dealt me.

I don’t need to describe this year to anyone. We all know exactly how tough it has been and we each have our own personal ways we are experiencing it and processing it. But something that has been very helpful for me this year – and all the time – is looking back in order to look forward. I did that unintentionally while writing last week’s post, in which I cited a New Yorker opinion piece about the character of Charlotte Lucas in the novel Pride and Prejudice. The article in question was from 2013; the novel in question is from 200 years before that. But even so, the points made by the article highlight the lessons of this year astonishingly well. “From Charlotte, who will always live an imperfect life, [main character Elizabeth Bennet] learns that imperfect things matter just as much as perfect ones,” it says about Charlotte’s limited choices as a woman of the time period. This analysis takes a deep dive into her unexpected bravery and how through it, Elizabeth “learns to trust in the sturdiness of individuals - in their ability to persist, to survive, even to thrive, through the most dramatic changes and upheavals.” Quotes like that about a story like that remind me that everyone in every time has had their share of difficult circumstances to navigate. I am drawn to stories about people who are thrown into the deep end and have to swim through their own sheer force of will alone. I’m drawn to that because that’s what life is about; it’s certainly what my life has been about and what my aspec journey has been about too.

I have not always done well when it comes to coping with aphobia or navigating the rapids of a world that feels like it doesn’t want me. I have not always done well this year with keeping my cool when it comes to adapting and learning to live with what I can’t change. But I’ve done a better job than I ever would have expected. A global pandemic is a struggle none of us anticipated, but for me, as unique as it’s been trying to handle this crisis, it’s also been strangely familiar too. As I always have, I’ve used the pain to fuel a lot of positive self-growth and reflection and I’ve come out better for the experience, even when I was at my lowest points. That fact inspires the last and most important lesson I have come to take away from 2020: to move on, to keep going, to never stop. There are many aspec people out there who understand this lesson too as their life circumstances mean differing from the established norm of what people expect. So many of us will not follow life’s usual timetables and our futures are murky, uncertain, or obscure. We have no blueprints for how to build a life, just like no one has a blueprint for 2020 and how to move forward, what to do, how to plan, or what to expect. But that’s a part of life. As Kim Namjoon (RM of BTS) himself said during one of the band’s many virtual speeches this year, “the fear of an obscure future is a moment of realization of the self.”

Returning to the article about Charlotte, the end in particular really stuck with me, which talks about how people can be themselves even in adverse circumstances. I’m not a woman in the 1800’s forced to marry for social status, but I too live a life full of imperfect things, things I have come to understand and value more this year than ever before. The world is imperfect and how I relate to it is imperfect, but that’s okay. As the article says, “it turns out that people can change their minds, their circumstances, their opinions, their plans, their rules, their lives, without losing track of themselves. There’s something miraculous in people - a resilience, an infiniteness - which can survive constraint, transformation, reversal, and anything else imaginable… People, Austen seems to say, are not so easily dominated by their own lives. Charlotte will always be a little apart from her circumstances. Her life will go on.”

Today, as I finish this post while listening to BTS’s newly released single, aptly titled “Life Goes On,” I think that lesson is very valuable indeed. It’s a lesson I’m still learning, like I am still learning all of these lessons, and one I will have to remind myself of constantly. But, how ever slowly, I am learning it all the same.