‘I’m Alive’ was supposed to be my song for the end of 2020. I had no idea

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In the final months of 2019 and the early months of 2020, I knew what song I wanted to be drunkenly singing along to in the waning moments of the Trump era (as I then could only hope). Then came March through December of 2020, and holy crap, did this song gain resonance.

Australian country singer-songwriter Kasey Chambers has been one of my favorite musicians for closing in on 20 years, someone I’ve seen live more times and in more places than I can count. When my father died, her song “Go On Your Way” put words to my deepest prayer.

But for the closing days of the Trump era, I was waiting to play the song “I’m Alive,” to get to the fiercely triumphant “I made it through the hardest fucking year.” In the middle of a workout, I would put on a burst of speed as that line approached, imagining the moment I’d be able to feel like it was really true that I had made it through. Well, 2020 showed me.

Too many of us didn’t make it through this hardest fucking year, so many that it almost seems crass to celebrate that we did.

Even before the pandemic, the forms of pain piled up one on another: The constantly reinforced and growing knowledge of how deeply many people in this country embrace and celebrate hatred and division and selfishness. The years in which our government doubled down on environmental damage that will take so many lives and ensure that our children grow up in a broken world. One mass shooting after another, and the prayerful inaction that followed each one.

Then the pandemic, highlighting and further cementing so many systems of inequality in the United States, from the meatpacking companies that the government allowed to treat their workers as disposable to the racial disparities in who got sick and who died to the dismantling of generations of progress for women on the job to the massive damage to the futures of children supposed to be learning remotely but without the computers or internet access required to make even a gesture at it. The job loss, the food lines, the suffering, the deaths. So many deaths.

It’s been a time that came with so much personal pain even if you got lucky and didn’t lose either a job or a loved one. Yet. There’s the time we haven’t been able to spend with loved ones we fear we may yet lose. The fact that our kids left school one day and just … didn’t go back, and had to cope with that in whatever ways they were developmentally able to. The interruptions in other forms of medical care. The fear and depression and distressing dreams so many people have experienced.

If this year has knocked you down in a way you fear you may never recover from, be it physically, emotionally, or financially, there’s no shame in that. This is an amazing and dreadful time we have been living in.

But maybe you can get to the end of this song and fully feel the defiance of that line. Maybe it will come with a grimace or a snarl. But can you pull out even a small sense of triumph that yes, you made it through?

Me? I made it through the hardest fucking year. That doesn’t mean next year will be a picnic. But I’m going to try to go into it feeling the triumph and the promise of having come this far, not the accumulated weariness and wounds of what it took to get here.