Hey December, guess I’m feeling unmoored; can’t remember what I used to fight for

In competitive running, they call it hitting the wall: the moment near the end of a race, usually a long, arduous one, where all the fight goes out of you. Your legs feel like lead, your heart is hammering on overdrive, your lungs are screaming at you to stop, and your mind is sounding every alarm bell it knows how to hit, all in a desperate attempt to override any motivation, goals, or positive self-talk you have left. Suddenly, everything inside of you is screaming the same word at maximum volume: quit, quit, QUIT.

When Taylor Swift released evermore, her second surprise album of 2020, on Friday the 13th of that December, I felt like a man who had hit the wall – not in my ability to run a race, but in my ability to weather a particularly fraught chapter in human history. When the sun rose that morning, it marked nine months to the day since the year’s other Friday the 13th – the March day when the world had turned upside down in the face of the incoming COVID-19 pandemic. And, for my part, I wasn’t sure if I could take any more months.

Writing about evermore on my favorite albums of 2020 list (it came in at number 3), I wrote that it “dropped on a chilly December Friday that just so happened to be the end of one of the worst weeks of my life.” At the time, I did not elaborate. I felt like everyone’s lives were in disarray, and I thought the sentiment would be more relatable if I didn’t tell my full story of why Taylor Swift’s saddest album came to mean so much to me as 2020 drew to its (merciful) conclusion. After all, who couldn’t relate to feeling down about a Christmas season where the very things that make the holidays special – namely, the warmth of togetherness with family and friends – were going to be all but impossible?

Five years later, I’m ready to share what happened that week, and that year, and how it tore my family apart, changed my entire life, and reframed my whole damn worldview. And I’m ready to tell that story because every time I listen to evermore, particularly the beautifully, exhaustedly sad title track, I can’t help but flash back to where I was the first time I heard it.