My 2022, Wrapped
Last year, I wrote an acceptance speech for 2021 to process the year and induce the final (and least fun) stage of grief. This year, I’m taking a look back, Spotify-style, with an eloquent, data-driven summary of my habits, coping mechanisms, and mental breakdowns in 2022.
Welcome to your 2022 wrapped, Amanda…
From sunrise to sunset, you kept it interesting.
You started the morning with Positive Affirmations (on TikTok) and Literal Methamphetamines (from Adderall). Both on repeat and both used to lessen the hardship of being an overthinking, over-feeling, over-all-of-it person trying to co-exist with ADHD.
You seized the day with Corporate Goblincore and spent 4,703 minutes letting out primal screams and scouring the office fridge for cubes of cheese.
You embraced the night with Gently Rocking Back-and-Forth and spent 2,956 minutes reading articles about “buccal fat removal,” “quiet quitting,” and “how to achieve skin like silken tofu.”
Last year, you listened to Up First on NPR for 3,130 minutes. While everyone else was asleep, you were listening to NPR at the dark asshole of dawn, likely in the fetal position.
You spent 1,822 minutes on first dates asking grown men who they had emotionally traumatized recently, and said it with your full chest.
Your taste in men improved a little, which resulted in 75% less crying. That’s still more crying than 55% of people in the United States who date men.
You actually found a lot to cry about last year: violence against women and youths in Iran, mass shootings as the zeitgeist of the American Pie generation, the war against access to reproductive health care, and literal war.
And while financial institutions collapsed and crypto was in retrograde, you had one mantra on repeat all year long: why wasn’t I born into generational wealth?
In 2022, you spent 2,945 minutes in therapy, unburdening yourself from fresh, stale, and pervasive trauma. This was 250% more therapy than anyone you’ve ever dated. You also spent 937 minutes on the phone with Aetna fighting to pay in-network prices for your in-network therapist, and we think that’s really beautiful.
Top Therapy Breakthrough:
After you broke the emergency glass, let the tiny shards rip through your finger pads, collected the pieces forever displaced from the safety of being whole, and duct-taped that bitch back together, you realized that endemic trauma might be the reason why you’re both funny and insufferable. Huzzah.
Therapy wasn’t the only coping mechanism in your rotation, you also mainlined podcasts about true crime and scoured the internet for pictures of Jimin from BTS.
You were the main character last year—and while the genre may have been horror, you somehow made it out alive. And even though we’re already four months into 2023, and it is, in fact, not your year, you still hold the steadfast and delusional belief that it will be soon.