2024 In the Rearview

2024 in the rearview

By T.A. Akimoff

Let me start by saying that 2024 was not the worst year of my life. That was, in fact, 2023.

If you read my last essay on the absurdity of years, then you know that I know that my experiences in 2024 were influenced by my experiences in 1974 and the lived experiences of everyone who has ever touched my life. My 2024 was also influenced by my ability to have hope in the future.

But 2024 was also a year of very high, highs and extremely low, lows.

This Year-In-The-Rearview should be so easy to write, because I journaled the entire year, something I didn’t actually know I could do until these last few days really.

Looking back through, I’m aware of how much of 2024 was punctuated by elation and loss and therefore the mundane, as it often does, has escaped my attention. Of course, if I tried to capture all of it, this would be a book and not an essay.

I turned 50 in January, and my wonderful partner treated me to several days in Las Vegas and a chance to see U2 perform live at The Sphere, which is simply how all live music should be experienced. To see the band that has provided the soundtrack to my life at this particular intersection was one of those mile markers, maybe not the halfway point, but a significant one nonetheless.

Our youngest daughter, Gabrielle, turned 18 in February, marking the transition of the last of our three children from childhood to adulthood. I felt this milestone in my bones. There was the joy associated with having accomplished something for which there was no manual. And there was sadness at the passing of an era that greatly defined me and us.

We bought a hybrid vehicle in April and drove it down to Palm Springs for a conference I was attending with thousands of other government social media coordinators. Freedom from the tyranny of the gas pump more than made up for any discomfort of traveling long distances in a small car.

What I didn’t write about in my 2023 Year In The Rearview was how much I’ve suffered from imposter syndrome the last few years. I was a journalist, a writer, really, living an entirely different existence as a social media manager. As if I had walked away from who I was supposed to be in order to fit better into the world as I saw it.

That imposter syndrome tore me up inside and cratered my confidence.

When I was awarded the GSMCON Social Media Professional of the Year at that conference in Palm Springs, it was the first time I’d confronted the imposter syndrome and the reality of following my passions even if it meant forsaking the thing I thought I was.

Though the award was given to me mostly for things I did in the background of government social media, it was the vaccination against imposter syndrome I needed most and came at a time that likely saved my career.

We drove down to Ensenada, Mexico the week after the conference and spent a few days in that southern sunshine reflecting on all of it.

I had surgery to repair a bad knee in May, a surgery that cleaned up a lot of garbage in a knee that had been problematic for decades, especially on rainy days. A few short months later, at another conference, this one on the other side of the country in Arlington, Virginia, I was presented with another prestigious award by the Association for Conservation Information, the Kay Ellerhoff Spirit of ACI Award. In a few short months, I went from a dry well to believing in myself again, largely through the generous recognition of colleagues whom I’ve come to call friends.

June and July were for recovery and long trips to Eastern Oregon and down the John Day River. They were also the last months of optimism as my mother-in-law’s jaw condition turned from a toothache to mouth cancer. 

The timeframe that encompassed July through October is a bit of a blur, as our personal lives were overturned as we jumped into parental care mode. The gap between our last child turning 18 and graduating from high school and putting a parent in the ground was painfully short and poignant for being so.

Our cancer journey was short and not sweet. Here I am on the other side of Christmas, which is within the months that my sweet mother-in-law was given to live, and I’m mourning her already these two long months.

She had hoped to live through Christmas, a time she loved, and to see The Nutcracker, something she had never experienced.

We lost her on October 23, just a few short months after we fully understood her prognosis. Her daughter, whom I’m lucky enough to call my partner in life, spent so many months running from medical appointment to ice cream runs to financial meetings that her phone would automatically assume she was headed to the retirement home every time she got in the car.

It was just the second loss of a grandparent for our children, but it was fast and vicious and left us all reeling.

A few weeks after she left us, our fellow citizens in this United States of America, elected a convicted felon, a serial rapist, a misogynist and misanthrope back into the White House, sentencing all of us to an unknown fate that may or may not result in the loss of the fragile democracy we’ve all been benefiting from our entire lives.

In the following weeks, we were made aware just how quickly the U.S. could fall into the greedy hands of the oligarchy.

From the excitement of voting with my daughter for the potential first female president of the United States to experiencing the utter disappointment in our fellow citizens and the uncomfortable realization of another term in office by an incompetent 78-year-old moron and his zero-experience running mate who believes women only matter if they have children, continues to color my view of the world and has shattered my daughter’s hopes and dreams.

See what I mean about highs and lows?

Most of the rest of the year paled in comparison to a few events that shook us to our core.

I’m at the point in life where I’d like a year without drama, but I’m trying not to live in year-long timeframes these days. Our lives are a series of stories that play out on a roiling sea of highs and lows, all of which shape us into who we are and how we spend the time allotted to us.

To have to buy my kids water filters for Christmas and to put a generator in my garage against the possibility of civil conflict or bad management is not how I thought I’d be spending the end of this year.  

Because all of the increments of life that we call years are influenced one by another, I feel like I should’ve known in 2016 that humanity wasn’t necessarily heading in a generally upward-tending line. But until you take a significant drop, you sometimes take the gradual dips and rises for granted.

If this then is the future, if hope and optimism are now blinded by greed and revenge, then my hope for everyone is that we can find our commonality in the chaos of the next four years. That in the destruction of the institutions we’ve put up, for good or for ill, will result in a more meaningful construction of something that will truly protect our freedoms. Either that, or we’re going to have to go back to the drawing table regarding the key fictions we humans have agreed upon.