2020 was the appropriate year to use the Latin expression annus horribilis, since it was a shitty year for almost everyone, something we didn't have for a very long time. Of course the jury's still out in regards to 2021 but we're only now completing the first quarter...
The truth is that in spite of COVID-19 appearing in the of 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus sequencing only occurred in January 2020, it was also during January that it spreaded all over the world and by the end of that month it reached Europe (at least officially; there are reports of people dying from a very similar disease before but only confirmed later when they analysed again the samples collected and stored back then). In February it was also the time I started writing about the epidemic (it wasn't a pandemic at the time), when it started to "explode" in Italy, when the first official COVID death occurred in Europe and when it arrived here in The Netherlands. And in March it arrived in Portugal (my homeland), the first person died here in The Netherlands and when it all began for me and for real, the whole trifecta of pandemic/isolation/quarantine.
So thus March is to me the first month of the annus horribilis on the personal level, since up to this point I was just following the pandemic. On March the 3rd I started working remotely, on the 7th I wrote my first dissertation on the subject (in portuguese) and on the 12th both me and Carolina got sick, in a way we never had been before. And although technically we didn't have COVID-19 since they tested Carolina at the hospital and told us (after insisting) it was negative, after this past Sunday I'm now 98% we did get it, since Carolina was tested again (PCR) and after it confirmed that for the test at the hospital last year, the nurse only slightly used the swab on her mouth, and didn't even collected deeper down by the throat. I also learned more about the tests and that negative tests only truly indicate less probability of being infected but that the clinic diagnose based on the symptoms displayed it's still the most important step. And to me this is case where you have to apply the rule: if it looks like shit, has the same colour as shit, feels like sheet, smells like shit and even tastes like shit, it definitely IS shit.
After that tricky week, the start of the isolation was kind of an adventure. I was on my way out from Atlassian and in good mood (decision to leave wasn't mine but I have already made piece with it and was at ease), I recorded live videos that I labelled podcasts and I had plans for a bunch of quaranokes (a merge of the words quarantine e karaoke) and TikToks. I found a new job in a company that became worldwide famous due to the pandemic and I even had my first interview on a Portuguese radio stations (and one that is national, not a local one).
But soon all went down the drain; the worst was really yet to come.
Even though my job at Zoom started very well, by Summer I started to go crazy and in a short time I was out of the game, sitting on the bench with a serious burnout and a deep depressive state (the worst I ever felt, I think I wrote before about my recurring little depressions but now I can't find where I did that). I'm planning to write at least one more detailed account on this, since my therapist also believes that writing about it might be helpful (I know that writing does me good but on the other hand it takes a lot of energy because I spend a lot of time and effort when writing, as you can easily see by the long texts I produce such as this, that was planned to be a short chronicle and it's already 4 paragraphs long); I was also supposed to have written already about the other second worst depression I felt and that I hinted about when the pandemic began last year, when I was still working. But to sum this up, half of the year was to forget and throw away.
After I searched for help (I was forced to do it, I admit), opening to others and even being honest with myself, things started to get back on track, as one can easily verify by my return to writing in the blog and producing content in the social media (but currently no plans for more elaborated stuff). And now that is the end of March, the annus horribilis is now complete because even though I'm not yet 100% well, and there's still a long road ahead, the near future looks promising and my brain and energy levels are almost at 150% (that's the way I function, sometimes at 150% and then the rest at only 50%).
And finally here's the 12 images from my Google Photos collection, one for each monthly period of my annus horribilis personalis (and there's no typo on the month labels, they are in portuguese and I don't feel like editing the images again to write new ones that match in english):
Note: This text was originally written in Portuguese and published on Mar 31, 2021 (hence that published date) but only adapted to English on Apr 27, 2022.
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