I wish I had some wisdom to share from 2022, our first year back to ‘normality’. But the truth is, I’ve got nothing. In fact, the only sense I can make of the past twelve months is that they were the logical conclusion of a completely illogical time. It has been a year of total pandemonium – of Hinge, of heatwaves, of head loss – and life in London, at least, took on the aspect of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, everyone aged between 27 and 33 licking each other or at least desperate to, the air gone wild and static while the Queen died in the background.
As such, I don’t think we’re supposed to come away from this period with anything useful to say. It has been a time for feeling and doing and discovering. Prior to this, I spent two years in my flat thinking so hard that I wrote an entire novel I now can’t bear to look at. In 2022, thinking was over, and chaos took the lead.
2022 was the first full year out of lockdown, and you felt that in every pulsating moment of the thing. Buoyed by all of the sudden activity, the news cycle went into overdrive, and current events started feeling even more like they were being churned out by a random word generator (“Elon Musk Twitter purchase”, “Wagatha Christie libel trial”, “Kate Bush renaissance”, “the rats don’t run this city, we do”, “UK second place Eurovision”, “Kendall Jenner horse surrogate”, and so on). This, paired with the sense of stasis that was slowly lifting in people’s personal lives, set the scene for another pandemic – one caused by the disease known scientifically as “moving mad”.
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Even if you’ve managed to avoid it yourself you’ll definitely have heard more than usual this year about people you know making massive, life-altering choices – leaving long-term relationships, deciding to have kids, running away abroad – apparently egged on by the stillness of 2020 and most of 2021, and the comparative feeling that living in 2022, as the world properly opened back up, was suddenly kind of like going on Oblivion at Alton Towers.
While the entire year has crackled with a particularly live type of insanity, this intensity increased during the summer: hedonism made a comeback as live events, holidays and festivals all returned at once, with full force. Meanwhile it got so record-breakingly hot that the pavements were full of melted rubbish. The sense of slightly wired freedom that travelled on the humid air, I think, got up a lot of people’s noses, and so it makes sense that it was around that time that every couple seemed to be shitting (marriage) or getting off the pot (becoming slutty on Instagram), an uncanny soundtrack of Beyoncé and banal daytime TV segments about the end of the world: frightening temperatures, drownings, and the best cooling mats for pets.
You get cast adrift at most times of significant change like this in general, let alone during a period like 2022, when the country went through three Prime Ministers like £1 shots, and the single biggest news event was people queuing up overnight in a 10 mile long line to get a look at the dead Queen, for up to 30 hours. So when our personal lives implode — my own long-term relationship ended during the summer, and this year I also moved in alone, and left two jobs — and the stability of the world around you is compromised too, as it has been both environmentally and politically this year, it’s compelling in some ways to succumb to the chaotic forces at play, and just behave accordingly.
But even in times where things have felt farcical or reckless or abject or all of the above, I don’t think I can really say any of it has been bad. In some ways, the havoc of 2022 has been a sort of fact-finding mission for us all, undertaken through saying yes, having new experiences, and letting the strangeness inherent to this odd year take its seat at our table.
As was the case for most people, lockdown told me I was one person – apparently, I was into knitting – but since it has eased, I have realised that the past couple of years crinkled me up a bit. I am in my late twenties (cope), and previously I thought of this time – when many of your friends start getting married or having children or generally doing things that aren’t staying out until three on a Wednesday because ‘it’s funny’ – as the bit of life where you become a fully-realised adult person who has a pretty decent handle on who they are. But as so many circumstances in my life began to change, I found that I still had a lot to learn.
Some things I discovered were superficial. I found, for example, that I am someone who enjoys a cowboy boot; who is not, does not want to be, and will never be “chic”; who has accepted that “furry cuffs” are a cornerstone of her personality; who likes anchovies. Other things felt more significant: I am eminently sociable, despite what I might have believed this time last year. I am, as my behaviour sometimes reflects, not actually completely “healed” from bad experiences I have had in the past, and while realising this has sometimes been painful and embarrassing, I am grateful for the circumstances that brought it to my attention, because at least now I know. It’s all useful information in the filing cabinet labelled “Being a Person,” and without the chaos of 2022 shaking out the way it did, it wouldn’t be there.
It has been a year of so much personal change for so many people – challenging enough without adding on the fact that the world you live in has become so ambiently demented that the World Cup fully sucks now, ‘goblin mode’ became the word of the year and Matt Hancock came third on I’m a Celebrity. Under conditions like that, it makes sense that people might feel unmoored, but as grim as the events we have lived through this year and in recent history have been, it’s compelling to remember that it is good, and useful, to be uncomfortable.
For many, this has not been a year for any special achievement, but it has been a time for growth, and for understanding who we are again, or who we could be if we wanted. 2022, for a lot of us, has just been about opening yourself back up, and admitting that actually you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. Sometimes you just have to take the universe at surface value – and when the universe throws chaos at you, it’s a genuine option to simply reflect it right back.