2016, the worst year ever, best confined to Room 101? No, I can’t agree with that. Just as I can’t say my personal 2016 was the best year of my life, but it was pretty damn great nevertheless.

My personal 2016 and the public 2016 were culminations of events that were a long time coming. The election of Donald Trump was a giant shit-storm of an election, a disgrace to the United States, and has reaffirmed the dreaded fear that in the US it is easier to elect an unqualified, vile white male than it is to elect any woman. Brexit – in my humble leftist opinion – was the wrong decision for the UK, a referendum which should never have been put to the people in the first place. Trump and Brexit are not the result of the curse of 2016; they are systemic results of events that have been growing for the past five or more years. Trumpiness is as old as politics, only now in our hyper-media aware society are we fully noticing it. Brexit has its roots in British isolationism, the negative insular factor of our island nation, stemming from Henry VIII’s break with Rome – the original Brexit.

“We need to focus less on the ‘snaps’, more on the lasting impact that we, people, can leave over time.”

‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’; Change is like a rubber band, eventually it snaps back. True, the rubber band will never go back to its original shape, but that is how progress and change should be – not immediate, not bound to a year, but slow, incremental, and lasting. We need to focus less on the ‘snaps’, more on the lasting impact that we, people, can leave over time.  

Trump is not the worst president the US has or will ever have; and in a way I find that a comfort. Obama has led with grace, it has been a decently progressive eight years, and there will be more elections; 2016 did not witness the fall of democracy, as simple and convenient as it would be to see it that way.

The year of the voiceless? 2016 in Varsity Interviews

My own 2016 was one of great change and excitement, but, now in 2017, I am still more or less the same person I was last year. Two-thirds of my 2016 was gap year; I held down three different jobs, volunteered, travelled alone, and sometimes just lay on the sofa writing dystopian fiction – as is my way. Yes, things changed, but ultimately I’m back at school, writing essays and working hard – it’s a different kind of hard to waiting tables at 1am, but it’s still hard. The gap year cliché is true to an extent: I did grow, I did mature. But I didn’t find myself, because just as the world and current affairs will change, and there will be defining moments and boring moments, we’re never going to find a perfect way to do 365 or 366 days as a society, let alone form the ‘perfect self’ in that time.

We shouldn’t limit ourselves to arbitrary measures of time; if we did that, then we would constantly be letting the bad things slip by, with no desire to change then, simply waiting for the next year and the next fresh start. The bad of 2016 did not define me, and it did not define us: we will not let it be the final word