#BN2020Epilogues: For Fumbi, 2020 is the Year We All Held Our Breaths

For many, 2020 has been a year of ups, downs, and many stories. We know you have a lot to tell us and we have asked that, as one big family, we all share our stories, joy, pain, wins, losses, and successes through the year.

2020 has been tough for many of us but Fumbi Olaolu believes we’ll have a happy ending. 

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If you suffer from intense anxiety, I have to greet you specially for surviving this year: well done. We went into the year 2020 with high hopes; we had just wrapped up a rather eventful Detty December, and the vastly talked about and highly anticipated “vision 2020” era was finally upon us. It was about to be a cruise.

Well, a cruise it was but not the type we had banked on. 2020 was like cruising on a convulsing volcano, with one molten eruption after the other. And when you thought it had taken a break, pow! pow! Something new hits.

The year started off with the passing of Kobe Bryant, unknown to us that coronavirus was gearing up the take the baton. Gradually and then speedily, deaths caused by the virus began to increase. Here, I have to pause and take a deep sigh because, omooooo!

COVID-19 not only expanded our vocabulary, it greatly simplified my wardrobe, made Zoom and Amazon a shitload of money. Most importantly, it exposed a lot of our insecurities and shortcomings as a people, so we aren’t all that after all? So you mean at the end of the day, underneath all the political power struggles, ever-widening wealth gap, and social inequality, we are all just humans trying to live?

The deaths were painful, the conspiracy theories were both upsetting and hilarious: 5G was coming; the world was about to go ablaze; China was the antichrist and they were set to take over – first with the virus and then with their devious new technology… The conspiracy theories were really doing the absolute most.

You’d think the year would be exhausted at this point, but no, this is the part where it slows down a bit before taking you through another gut-wrenching rush down the tunnel.

In 2020, everyone is woke! Feminism is at an all-time peak, people are more sensitive to things, Donald Trump is being trumped for the most of it and oh, Muhammadu Buhari might not actually be Buhari after all. Just on the heels of this, the social and political unrest around the world kept us all on our toes.

We needed to remind the world, yet again, that #BlackLivesMatter. Sadly, not only in the western communities but right here at home, the fight for basic human rights became louder and more assertive.

20/10/2020 came like a variation of 9/11, only this time, the terrorists were domestic – the government against its own people. The Nigerian government chose to bully the sorosoke generation into keeping quiet.

The people have vowed never to forget and it seemed to have given birth to a new wave of political consciousness and activism. We love to see it.

One arguably good thing, as the year comes to a close, is that Donald Trump has lost the US election, so it’s looking like 2020 is not so bad after all but yet again, he has us all clutching our pearls until further notice or at least until he officially decides to concede.

This year had us wearing masks and figuratively holding our breaths as to what new drama each month was going to bring. In the end, 2020 is one of those years where you really just have to be grateful to have made it through. You have to be deeply retrospective and see that to be alive and well, in itself, is a whole lot of blessing this year.

Looking forward to 2021? Hopefully, 2020 was not just the preamble. We’re keeping this December as squeaky clean as possible – you all really need to stay off Jesus’s nerves.

Here’s to a sweet ending to a rather traumatic movie. Have a beautiful 2021.

Cheers.

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Have a story to share? We’ll love to hear it. Send in your essay to features(at)bellanaija(dot)com with the subject: 2020 Epilogues. Let us know all the twists, turns and successes 2020 came with.