Another Year Over, A New One Just Begun...

Well, 2016 is over. If you're to believe the mainstream media, it's been the worst year ever, and it's fairly easy to see why. With Britain voting to leave the EU and Donald Trump now President-elect of the United States, many liberal-leaning people will have found this a fairly disasterous 12 months. Even if you're a right wing Euroskeptic, there have been so many celebrity deaths that it has at times felt like a sick joke. That said, there have been many positives too. I'm not a huge sports fan, but even I think TeamGB having their most successful Olympics to date is pretty cool. Globally, carbon emissions have stalled and poverty has fallen. The tiger population has increased for the first time in a century. Hyperbole and drama may sell newspapers, but they're unlikely to reveal the full story.

For me personally, 2016 has been a pretty successful year. I (finally) passed my membership exams, started working at registrar level, graduated from my MSc and moved in with my boyfriend - can't complain at that! Of course, some things haven't gone quite so well. I didn't record my resolutions last year, but no doubt they'll have included weight loss, which hasn't happened to any significant level, and increased exercise, which has happened on occasion but hasn't really been sustained. Nonetheless, on the whole, it's not been a bad year for me.

So, will I be making resolutions this year? It's difficult not to, but it seems silly making the same ones  I've made (without much success, obviously), year on year for over a decade. Whilst I'd love to be slimmer and fitter, they're relatively superficial goals. Instead, I'm going to set myself some other challenges:

- I am someone who looks after other people, both in my work as a doctor and at home when I like to feed and generally "mother" my friends and family, however I'm pretty bad at looking after myself. Therefore, I am going to try much harder with self care this year. There are lots of little things I can do, but mostly it's about remembering that I'm actually worthy of being looked after.

- I tend to be quite a negative thinker. I assume the worst in most situations, and almost always assume that I have done the wrong thing, annoyed people and am generally a terrible human. Linked in with my self care resolution, I'm going to try to think more positively, particularly about myself. There are plenty of things I'm probably good at, and believing in myself doesn't make me a dreadful person.

- I compulsively apologise for everything - sometimes I even say sorry when I'm not sure what I'm sorry for. It's silly and to be honest, probably quite annoying that I basically apologise for existing. So, I'm going to stop saying sorry unless it's actually warranted.

As I've stated on many occasions before, I've struggled with my mood for a long time, and I'm hoping that these resolutions will help with that. We live in a world where we are constantly shown how well everyone is doing. One of the lovely things about social media is that we are able the share our friends' good news and happy occasions quickly. Engagements, weddings, graduations, pregnancies, holidays and nights out are all photographed and shared within minutes. It's therefore easy to believe that everyone else is living a perfect life whilst we're barely holding it together. To borrow an excellent quote from a friend's daughter, the problem here is comparing our friends' "highlights" with our own "outtakes". So the next time I scroll through facebook and feel miserable that everyone else is partying, holidaying, succeeding and being perfect, I need to remember that my own profile looks just the same. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with watching Netflix in your onesie with a cup of tea - it just doesn't make a great photo!

Je Suis Brusseleir?

This week, Europe was rocked once again by the news of a terrorist attack. Only months after the senseless loss of life which occurred in Paris, this time Brussels was the target. My Facebook newsfeed is filled with friends and acquaintances adding a Belgian flag to their profile pictures in a show of solidarity. There are photos from cities around the world lighting up major attractions in black, yellow and red. "We stand with you, people of Brussels!", people are keen to proclaim, in much the same way that the Tricolore was plastered over the much of the internet and the developed world back in November and all of social media stood in unity and defiantly stated "Nous sommes Charlie" after the Charlie Hebdo shootings in January of last year.

On the one hand, I get it, I really do. These attacks have lead to suffering and loss of life in the alleged pursuit of an ideology I will never understand. Of course people want to show unity, sympathy, solidarity. We want to shout, loud and clear to any terrorists who may be passing, that we will not allow these attacks to alter our way of life. To cancel mass events and stop drawing potentially offensive cartoons is, we assume, precisely what they want - and so we will not let them win. We will carry on our daily life. The Londoners will get the tube. The Parisians will go to gigs. The Brusseleir will make their way to work, to school, to the shops in their usual way.

The thing is though, that I start to feel uncomfortable when I think of the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who we don't automatically show solidarity for. If I don't stick a Belgian flag overlay on my Facebook profile, there are some who may assume (incorrectly) that I don't care about the recent devastation in Brussels. But if I do, I worry that I am suggesting European life (or perhaps just life in the "Western" world) is somehow more valuable that that elsewhere.

If you're interested, you can easily find a list of terrorist incidents which have happened just this year - and there are a lot of them. Perhaps we don't really pay attention to attacks in Somalia or Iraq because we have grown accustomed to the violence which is sadly ongoing in those nations, but war or no war, the loss of life is still tragic. Maybe the events in Turkey or Libya simply haven't been on our radar because those places seem too far away from the world we know, but they still resulted in the deaths of innocent people.

Don't get me wrong, I stand with the people of Brussels, as I did with the people of Paris and London and Belfast before them. But whilst "je suis Charlie", because any of us face the risk that one day we could head to our workplace and not return, I am also the 3 year old girl killed in and Iraqi chemical attack. I'm a Nigerian mother blown up at the market. I'm the Somalian blown up whilst enjoying a meal in a restaurant. I'm all of these people, and thousands of of others too.

The sad fact is that I cannot keep up with all of these attacks. They are happening almost daily, with even more violence which is not classed as terrorism continuing to ruin the lives of many people. And for that reason, I cannot bring myself to stick a Belgian flag over my profile pictures, although I do not judge those who do. I stand with the people of Brussels, but more than that, I stand with the people of the world. It is simply a happy accident of birth and a chance arrangement of schedules that mean I have not been directly affected by any of these terrible events. As my sadly-missed Grandma would have said, "there, but by the grace of God, go I". So yes, I am Charlie and Paris and Brussels, and I am Baghdad and Tel Aviv too. But mostly I am a human, and I stand by all of my fellow humans through whatever atrocity we face. I believe that only in truly realising that we are all people with hopes, dreams and ambitions which are not defined by creed, colour or national boundary will there ever be peace.

 

"Imagine all the people, living life in peace..."