2020 Gave Us One Thing

2020 was absolute garbage overall; and at this point, it's kind of a 50/50 for 2021 too.

I've said it before; TikTok definitely saved my sanity and I know I'm not alone.

I'm not a millennial who surfs social media all day. I don't have a twitter account, I don't really care about Facebook, Instagram is annoying, and Pinterest kind of bores me after awhile.

TikTok though is something else entirely. At first, I just focused on comedic users, I just wanted to laugh and feel something other than despair when we got put into lockdown that first time around. Then I got into #BookTok , with fellow writers and reviewers and found so many new books to love that others did too. Then it was skits, people writing and dueting each other with anything from famous movie scenes to unique ones from fanfiction to original plays.

How inspiring is it to find so many people that are suddenly free to post what they love and find friendship and love across the same platform? TikTok is the app of 2020.

I've seen people succeed and sometimes fail at trending dances, watch people write a Ratatouille musical, see their reactions to shows we all have seen together, and fall in love oceans away. I've honestly never seen another app do these things in a genuine way.

I mean, if you wrote a song based on Bridgerton and posted a video of you singing it on Facebook, suddenly your Aunt Karen comes in and says all the negative comments. She might not even be your aunt, but they definitely will come out and say something mean. Not to say that doesn't happen on TikTok, but its easier to drown them out on that app because then you have hundreds of people dueting or stitching your video giving their own renditions of your song.

It's beautiful, to see these people who might not have met on any other social media app and suddenly their collaborating as if they knew each other for years.

That's the thing in 2020 that gave me the hope that everything will be okay in the end; that even in the darkest times of history, there's always someone out there creating something beautiful. In chaos, sometimes we can find peace if we look hard enough for it.

2020 was hell. People rioting, protesting, dying, getting sick, being lock indoors, having to pick between which bills to pay, what food you can afford, how long you can pay rent, what to do when you lose your job. So much pain, stress, anxiety. So much fighting. So much of everything that threatened our lives on a daily basis.

An average day for me is convincing people to wear masks and wash their hands, and them arguing with me and telling me to stop telling them how to live their lives. Every day. The exhaustion sets in and I have just even energy and willpower to drive back home and crawl into bed to do it all again the next day. With nothing else to do, to ease the stress or find any kind of relief, it weighed down on me quickly and most nights I cried myself to sleep.

Then my sister sent me a video through TikTok last April. It was a man who was laid off from being a CGI artist and spent his time in quarantine creating different worlds outside his apartment window. Beautiful, hyperrealistic work. Then I created an account and thus my journey began. Sometimes I post content, sometimes I just scroll through and view trends. As someone who works in Social Media, I love seeing how trends go viral and watching people take a trend and put their own, unique spin on it.

I had the same thought roll through my head as I watched all these different genres of TikTok content; everything will be okay.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. Hell, maybe not even a month from now.

But things do get better, bit by bit, every day. Watching people on New Years Eve record themselves shouting Jumanji at midnight all around the world, one of the most unifying things I've ever seen in my life.

Everything will be okay in the end, because those who choose to see and be the good in the world will find it.