First of all, happy new year to everyone, whether you've been watching since I started or just watched. This year has been a wild ride for all of us. I just want to take some time to reflect on this year a bit and share my thoughts about the year.

I think we can safely say that 2020 was a hard year for everyone, with SARS-Cov2 becoming a real life game of Plague Inc in a sense and changing the lives of everyone. March-May was especially tough as I had to finish my junior year of high school all online, and with how I tend to get distracted by anything even remotely more fun than school, it was tough. I remember having to do essentially a month's worth of schoolwork all in the span of 2 weeks. It wasn't fun. The summer really wasn't interesting since most of us were following stay-at-home orders. I started my senior year of high school in the fall and experienced in-classroom school with all the precautions taken to avoid spreading the coronavirus. It's become a sense of normal now.

The real stuff I want to talk about is the ending of this year, especially from October onwards.

In October I turned 18, which is a big milestone in anyone's life. You're legally an adult and can really do anything you want essentially since you're not bound to your parents. What I didn't know is how turning 18 would be the biggest effect in my life online thus far.

November is where everything took a reality turn for me. If you haven't read about it, you can read up about it here. It was a hard reality check that was hard to overcome, but I knew what I was doing was very, very wrong of me and I still lament about it to this day. The entire month was filled with my depression and thoughts about what happened. I could barely focus in school and every time I came home, I would cry for about 20 minutes. I remember one day I even contemplated about even going to school or whether my life mattered up to that point. It was a hard time that I had to make right before Thanksgiving break happened. I talked to my counselor before Thanksgiving break and told her about what happened. She was very understanding and knew that I'm not that kind of person to do it purposefully. It took a lot of weight off my shoulders for the time being knowing I had at least someone that understood my situation.

December was not as bad as November, but I still struggled mentally. My discord account was disabled by discord on 1 Dec and they said they would not be reinstating it, so it's essentially gone now; with it I lost all of the friends I've added over the 2 years I've had that account. I don't know when I'll make a new account, but for now, I'm staying away from discord while I recover. Twitter I might make a slow comeback eventually, but for now I still find depression on there all the time whether I want to or not. In fact, seeing any kind of diaper art at all just fills me with sad thoughts about the whole ordeal. All the friends I lost/lost contact with especially. I may look happy, but in reality I don't. I feel like I may have an undiagnosed mental condition, but I'm not sure. My parents both noticed I can't stay still for long periods of time and I fidget a lot when I'm sitting for a long time. I too noticed this while at school. Only time will tell I guess whether I have a condition or not.

December did have some good parts for me though. I had my winter band concert and that was the most fun I'd had since the incident. Playing an instrument really picked up my thoughts and mind and I'm glad I play one because of how much it has helped. I did standardized testing on the 12th and got a decent score on it that I'm happy with. The highlight of it was Christmas by far.

On Christmas I got several nice things, but by far the most significant one was a gaming pc. Up until the 25th, I've been using an HP laptop from 2012 that we got on New Years 2012. It was good for the time, but by the time 2018 rolled around, it really took a hit, especially with Chrome being such a RAM hog. Pages would take 30 seconds to load and booting up would take about 5 minutes. It was a nightmare, but it was all I had. Now I have an actually decent pc with decent specs that I can actually multitask on without one program not responding, and even game on. It was like I was taken into a portal into the modern day. How much of a difference 12 more GB of RAM makes. Dual monitors are also really cool since I can play a game and watch a video at the same time or do some neat stuff that I didn't even know Windows 10 could even do.

So yeah. Those were my thoughts about how this year went. It was super crappy and will certainly be a year to remember not just for me, but for all of us.
2021 will be a big year. Big changes for sure. I will still be here, but will look nothing like the Ivan from years past. 2021 will be the year of responsibility, change, and amending problems.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Happy New Year and here's to an optimistic view of 2021.
-Ivan Koopa

_{Also, if you want to contact me in any way, right now the best way is FA Notes and Twitter DMs.}