How Will 2020 Affect Future You?
Plus, that time I asked out a Trader Joe's employee and my pop culture "bests" of the year.
Do you ever wonder what could’ve been? It feels like we’ve all imagined how 2020 might have played out had our lives not been muted by a global pandemic. The choices we made (or were unable to make), the people we surrounded ourselves with (or never met), didn’t just affect our year, they likely influenced our lives 10, 20 years from now too.
From big global events to small everyday encounters, you never know what might shape your future. Life, then, is a constellation of unled lives. We’re defined as much by the person we could’ve been as the person we actually are. “Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space,” Joshua Rothman writes in The New Yorker.
The negative space I used to fixate on is the life I might have inhabited if my mom hadn’t overcome the two percent odds of surviving the brain injury she had when I was eight. If she died then, I could’ve ended up in foster care. Who I am today has everything to do with who I didn’t end up be…