3 Things I Learned Last Year: Relationships, Race, & Resilience

Everything that could possibly be said about 2020 has been said, and, well, here are three more. In a year that has taken about 1.8 million lives from COVID-19 around the world and caused economic devastation, it made us face some things we have been putting off. From the personal to the societal: How does a movement on race reckoning come to fruition? What makes our worldview so different from others? Which relationships are truly important to us?

Listen for a quick exploration of the questions we faced this year. (Also, because you have exhausted everything on Netflix.)

Episode Transcript

(00:00):

Y'all, you know what I cannot stand right now? People who have not been quarantining, social distancing, mask wearing, complaining about how bad 2020 was. When the rest of us were sitting at home, running out of things to watch on Netflix, not seeing people for months and months on end, the people who've been going out to bars, movies, restaurants, doing the whole nine are talking about how hard this year is. Really? Please stop. You get one thing. You either ignore public health recommendations that is leading to the deaths of thousands and thousands of people, or you complain about 2020. You don't get both.

(00:39):

Anyway, I digress. I kind of wanted to do a little bit of like a reflective episode because it's the end of the year, and obviously 2020 was something, to say the least. So I wanted to talk about the three things that I learned this year. This is The World We Inherit, and I'm your host, Anita Kirti.

(01:10):

Before we get started, I highly recommend that you click subscribe so that you can get more of this amazing content in your feed. Or if you use me as background noise when you're doing the dishes, that works too. Whatever it is, go ahead and subscribe to the channel.

(01:25):

So the number one thing I learned about this year was just relationships. The pandemic brought a really unique situation for us. We were isolated and most of us were under a lot of stress, whether it be about the health of your family or keeping your job, whatever that was. So all of that combined basically made us sift out the people who matter most to us and the people who are not so great for us.

(01:53):

After we started quarantining, I realized the number of people that I talk to and meet on a daily basis that I genuinely have no need for. And I know that sounds super harsh, but it's not even about the value that they bring to me, it's more about how they fit into my life and how I saw them. So there are a bunch of people, I'm sure you have this too, that you have in your life where you seek validation from. You share the things you're doing or tell them the cool new job you have or whatever it is, and you want them to validate who you are. And I was wondering to myself, why do we pine for people who don't like us?

(02:37):

I have a theory about that. I feel like people, including me, don't feel secure in themselves personally, so they go out into the world seeking acceptance from others. So they seek out the people who treat them badly, who make them feel like they're not deserving of acceptance. So if you get that kind of person to validate you, to like you, then it somehow makes you feel more secure about yourself.

(03:01):

And over the past nine months of this pandemic, I neither had the energy or the time to keep up with those relationships. Now I'm choosing to spend time with people that readily accept me, that I don't feel like I need to prove myself to or feel challenged by. Because to be honest, the pandemic has been a perfect excuse to cut those kind of people out. If you want to hang out, it's like, "Oh, sorry, no pandemic. We can't go out." But the people that I do want to be around, I will go out of my way to sit outside in the cold, like 10 feet apart and talk to them for hours. That being said, I think what I want to carry into 2021 is the ability to recognize true, honest friendships.

(03:49):

Okay. Number two, I really have always loved this quote from William Osler, the eyes see what the mind knows. And to me, it has always been a reminder of how important it is to continuously grow and learn so that you're able to actually see the world around you for what it is. And a quick book recommendation on that front that I'm currently reading is The Hidden Elephant in the Brain. It's about the blind spots we have and why we do the things we do. So that's a really interesting read that kind of fits into this.

(04:24):

Anyway, that quote got an additional dimension to it this year, because I realized after interviewing a bunch of Trump supporters that it is extremely important to rely on factual information. In speaking with them, I realized that we lived in two parallel realities. The kind of information they were consuming from Fox News and Newsmax and posts on social media were chock full of disinformation. So the world that they saw was not what truly exists, so it's impossible to really have a debate with them or have them understand your perspective because they're operating in a completely different world. So in that sense, I've gained an appreciation for journalism and education and science, basically everything that keeps us in touch with reality, regardless of whether it fits our opinions or what we wish were true.

(05:21):

Okay, so that was number two. Number three. Okay, hold on. I wrote a little list here because I forget things very easily. Oh, okay. Yeah. I don't think a reflection on 2020 would be complete without mentioning the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of this year. I remember reading the book, The New Jim Crow, which was about how the prison system is being used as a way to imprison hundreds of thousands of black men and its origins. And I remember reading it and being shell shocked, honestly, because I couldn't understand why nobody was talking about this. It felt like something that was so horrific and painful and in our faces, something that happens every single day to not just hundreds of people, but thousands and thousands of black lives that I couldn't understand why this was not a mainstream conversation yet.

(06:16):

And it was frustrating to be honest, because I would bring up this book and people would just kind of see it as like this weird conspiracy theory thing or didn't really ever hear about it. And about two years after I read the book, the Black Lives Matter movement exponentially grows. The same people who were kind of on the fence about police brutality or didn't really care to voice their opinion were all ardently supportive of this movement.

(06:45):

I kind of sat back and realized that all of this time, that for years and years there were people who were fighting the good fight without any recognition. And honestly, without the promise that something like this would ever happen, but they continued. And that was just something amazing to me because people talk about what happened in June of 2020, but I think the more amazing part is all of the work that went into the movement prior to that moment and all of the people that gave up their lives for it. And they essentially put police brutality on the map of the Biden administration. And maybe it's a generational thing, but I'm finding that I highly value instant gratification. So I was so, so humbled to read about the founders of the movement and see how much work they had done to get to this point. Anyway, that's just so amazing to me.

(07:43):

Yeah, so those are the three things that I learned this year. Kind of revelations, I guess. Things that even regardless of how hard 2020 was, and I don't know why I'm saying how hard 2020 was. Honestly, I'm fine. I still have my home, all of my family is in good health. I was able to get our clinic staff completely through this thing without a single case of COVID. So I really have nothing to complain about. But as relatively difficult this year was for me, I have been genuinely humbled by the things I've learned. I hope those are some things that resonate with you or you feel like you've experienced as well in 2020, or is a more positive way to look at this year, because by and large, it sucked.

(08:27):

So I guess I'm not going to hope for a better year in 2020. I think that's a little presumptuous. So I'll say that I hope we continue learning in 2021, and I hope that you're still listening to my podcast in 2021. I have some really exciting things planned. I have a website coming where you can go on there and I'll have all of the episode notes and resources and all of that stuff in one place so you have somewhere to go and a place where you can put your comments and whatnot. Stay tuned for that.

(08:59):

I think that's it. This is The World We Inherit, and I'm your host, Anita Kirti. Thanks for listening.