2022 Review

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For the last couple years I’ve tried to end the year with a sort of wrap up of how the year went. I look at what my plans were, what I accomplished, what happened, things like that. Then after that I do a look ahead to the next year where I lay out what I want to do for the year ahead and the direction I hope all my projects go in. And since this is the last Sunday of December it’s time for the review post.

I’ll get straight to the point. 2022 was bad. Like really bad. It should have been a great year. I got married. I was in a great short film that a friend of mine shot. I got a new job and stopped teaching. Those three things should have made it a standout year.

But then there was China’s zero COVID policy. Omicron started near the beginning of the year. At first it seemed like everything other time there was a COVID flareup. We had to do a weekend of tests or something. And then in-person classes got delayed. But all of that had happened before. But then we had more tests. And more tests. And there were more entry and exit rules for cities. And more tests. For more than six months I took a COVID test every day. If you even went to another city you might risk quarantine or at the minimum not being able to do anything in the city you went to. For example Max and I went to Shanghai in November and we were worried about whether or not we’d be able to do things or get back to Shenzhen. In addition I had far less free time to even try to travel since I’m now working a more regular office job.

Now of course there was good stuff I mentioned. My slow march of meeting people and then getting to be in the projects which are much better than mine because I’m better at acting than filmmaking (I’m working on it) continued with the biggest short film to date. We filmed it in the middle of the year and I can’t wait for everyone to see it. I got married, which is obviously an important part of life. And after a couple of years of looking to transition out of teaching I managed to land a job as a social media manager. Of course all of that was great. But it was nearly impossible to escape the overwhelming gloom (to put it nicely) of China’s zero COVID policy ramping up to try to deal with Omicron. It’s been largely dismantled in the last month but that’s too little too late to save 2022.

2022 should have been an incredible year. One of the best I’ve ever had. And don’t get me wrong the good stuff was great. But zero COVID was inescapable.

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