2022 the Year my Life is Shattered

Copied from my friend Casey about this year: “No one I know began this year on a full tank. Given the vicious onslaught of the previous two years (let’s just call it what it was) most of us dragged ourselves across the finish line of 2021… frazzled, spent, running on aged adrenaline fumes.

We crawled into 2022 still carrying shock, trauma, grief, heaviness, disbelief…“

No question about it, 2022 was my worst year ever and I have been through some pretty tough times.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

I have thought of nothing else since Medium published the 2022 writing prompt. My life will never be the same, I am a completely changed woman. What I see is different than anything I have ever seen in my life before. Granted, part of my new insight is a product of age and experience, yet all of it has and does happen to others with differing results.

From the broad, to the very specific, everything has been wrong or personally painful and uncomfortable. My beliefs about the structure of life, the structure of America and the spectacular-ness of love have been shattered

Specifically, love doesn’t always win everything, nor everyone over. I’ve always believed that love could transform anyone and there are happy endings because of love.

So not true!

Ten years ago, I married the man that I had been living with for two years. I am so crazy about this guy, even now. We started dating nine months after his first wife’s death and his daughters were infuriated. I can tell you all of the reasons that we dated that early, my husband had been dealing with anticipatory grief for several years. He took care of his sick and handicapped wife for those years after her ability to move was gone. He likely experienced PTSD by the time his beloved wife passed away. At almost ten months post widowhood we started seeing each other. I fell in love with him immediately, it wasn’t hard. After six months I moved in with him.

His house, decorated by him and his lovely wife with all the style effected to her. That, in itself was difficult enough, but it is beside the point of this paper.

I began believing that my natural love could win over his family and his daughters. Those women were vicious. From the very first…