2020 was a whirlwind of a year. Even in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined that our generation would be experiencing a pandemic let alone a pandemic that lasted an entire year and crippled lots of people’s life. I am grateful for being one of the privileged few who could work from home and didn’t have to worry about making ends meet and my heart is filled with gratitude for the frontline workers who risked their lives to make sure that essentials were delivered, patients were nursed and people were fed just to name a few. This post is a reflection of my life in the year 2020 and in atypical 2020 fashion, I will talk about the things that I am grateful for first and then talk about the less happy bits of the year.

The good stuff

As a popular saying goes “Never forget 3 kinds of people 1.Who helped you during difficult times 2.Who left you during difficult times 3.Who put you in difficult times”, I am going to add a fourth category to this “4.Who are with you during a global pandemic”. I am deeply indebted to my friends and family for riding with me during this tough time and making 2020 bearable. I am pretty damn sure without these folks this past year would have been tougher and harder on me. From the numerous zoom calls to the late-night biking trips in and around Berlin, from cooking with friends to hiking I will cherish all these memories.

The next couple of paragraphs are narcissistic IMO, but once in a while, I give myself license to be proud of what I have accomplished, however small the accomplishments might be 😀

I had a lot of time to spare during the lockdown. An upside to having a lot of spare time is getting to upskill yourself. I have always wanted to do pushups and a year ago I couldn’t do a single decent pushup. Today I can proudly say that I can do 15 pushups in good form and not only that I can even do 5-6 variations not quite effortlessly 😅. Like everyone else in the world, I took to baking as a stress buster and baked buns, biscuits and also managed to make pizzas from scratch - dough and et al. I also am learning to play the ukulele and can badly strum two songs.

After spending 5 years in Germany, I am legally allowed to drive on the great German Autobahn. All those years spent playing NFS has finally paid off. I even managed to learn a thing or two about investing in the stock market and DeFi. I am immensely proud that I can now understand stock market jargon like bearish and bullish market, long and short position(that’s pretty much about it though😅). I will also be starting a new gig in the month of February.

The not so good stuff

My mental health took a huge toll when the lockdown began. During the initial days of the pandemic, I felt like a complete wasteman - a good for nothing chap who is just making ends meet. I was beating myself up for nothing and would get anxious about petty and insignificant parts of my life. For the major part of 2020, I couldn’t meet most of my friends who are like my family and this impacted my mental state too. I also experienced a bit of burning out because I would continue working deep into the night without realizing how late it was. Although online meetings were a lifeline I felt quite mentally exhausted after these meetings. But as time progressed I started getting used to what is now the most overused term of the century “the new normal”. I started focusing on the more positive aspects of my life and made peace with myself.

From mental to physical health, I experienced a sharp pain in the posterior shin of my left leg after one of my regular runs in November and this aggravated as time progressed. After visiting a couple of doctors and getting multiple scans done, and the doctors are still quite not sure what is wrong with my leg. It pains me to write this statement, but as of writing this post I have stopped running for 2 months and I miss it majorly. I will be getting a third opinion soon and the third time’s a charm, right? I hope so 😀

Almost all of my travel plans including my yearly pilgrimage to the holy motherland of Bengaluru were shelved. My friends and I had planned a bunch of trips ranging from going to the US to learning to surf in Portugal. I even missed attending the wedding of a very dear friend of mine sigh!

2020 was hard and taught me a lot of things. It was a year where I did a lot of self-reflection and self-introspection and realized that I overthink even about the smallest things in life and this ruin the joy of being. I am making an earnest attempt to overcome this by trying to follow the below “mantra”

• Focusing more on my mental health which I had taken for granted until now.
• Stopping taking the obvious things in your life for granted and cherish every moment.
• Stoping thinking far ahead in the future. Live in the present and enjoy it.