(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Twitter. And check out her latest book, Out of Water, now available where books are sold!)
It's been a rough year for us all. No one's come through unscathed. My planner is no exception. Sometimes I go back and look through my old planners, and I couldn't help but wonder what it might be like, years from now, looking back at this book of my 2020 life.
It started off normal. I had a planner party in November last year, where a handful of friends brought their stationery over and we all decorated and prepped our planners for a productive year. Welp. That was the last time I had a gathering of friends, and all the plans we planned went awry.
I have lost count of how many times I had to plan my plans, change my plans, reroute everything and turn it all upside down. When things got scary in March, My work closed, the schools closed--I had to figure out how to watch my kids and supervise their learning while working from home. We thought it would be a rough few weeks, and then we'd get back to normal. I had a few trips rescheduled. I had to cancel hotels and flights. They were moved to later dates, so I rebooked it all. Then my work opened back up, and I had to change all my shifts so someone was always home with my kids, who were still doing school from home. And then all the rescheduled events started toppling like dominoes.
This pattern repeated several times. Everything I wrote was crossed out at least twice. Somewhere in the summer, I gave up. There are about seven weeks where I just stopped writing anything down.
Then my own school started! And I had to live by the planner. There was too much to organize, and too much to remember, and it all needed to be written down, or it would be forgotten--except things were still shifting and changing. Quarantines crept in and shook the schedule again. And on every page are my attempts to stay on track, to keep control. Mostly those didn't work out.
I'm running out of pages in the planner, now. My ribbon bookmark is shredded and it's a whole mood. A new planner sits on my desk with no idea what's coming for it. Do I really think 2021 is going to be any less chaotic? I don't know.
I thought, at first, that maybe I should do my planning in pencil this year. But I like my crossed-out plans, my scribbled-out appointments, my arrows that lead to nowhere, and even the pages where I stopped trying to control the situation. It's all the documentation of resilience and flexibility--the things we all needed just to make it this far in 2020. One thing I will change in my 2021 planner is that I'll leave more open space--room for change to happen.
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