I’m sure I’m not the only blogger who’s starting off her post by saying that 2020 sucked. For a year I’ve been looking forward to for such a long time (cough cough COLLEGE GRADUATION), it was, in one word, a bummer. Big time. I think we can all agree on that much.
I’ve become more active on my Instagram this year, which I’ve loved doing. I try to give y’all a glimpse into my personal life through my captions and stories, but those can only do so much and they’re usually only read in the moment then never revisited later on. I thought it would be fun to share a recap of what was going on in all the months of 2020, complete with photos from each!
January
In January, I started my last semester of college at UNC-Chapel Hill. Though it didn’t exactly pan out the way I expected it to, I will say that this was the semester I was most excited for. Not only was I looking forward to senior traditions like going the Duke game, but I was taking a schedule of classes that I was, for the most part, thrilled about. That semester, my course load consisted of my public relations capstone class, the last class for my business minor, media law and a journalism research class centered on the Iowa Caucuses. For my PR capstone, I worked with a team of other students to develop a communications plan for an actual client, our local NHL team (the Carolina Hurricanes). I knew next to nothing about hockey, but my professor got tickets for our whole class to see a game and it was so much fun. However, I will say that the Iowa class was hands-down my favorite class I’ve ever taken, and I still reminisce about it to this day. The biggest part of it was actually going to Iowa for a few days on a school-funded trip, which started at the end of January. I’ll recap more about it in the February section, but I had a blast on that trip, and it was probably the highlight of my entire life.
February
I didn’t realize just how jam-packed with events the month of February was for me until I started going through photos from it. I apologize in advance for the amount of pictures I have from it, but hopefully my lack of photos from the rest of the year will make up for it. Like I said earlier, February started off for me in Iowa. I spent five days there with two professors and nine other classmates going to rallies and campaign events to interview attendees about how identity factors into their political decision-making. That’s a mouthful taken straight from my resume but in simpler terms: we were researching why people vote the way they do. It was absolutely fascinating to me, but I won’t bore you with the details on it since I could go on and on about it for days. We drove all around the state from rally to rally, seeing every major candidate at least once. For my little political nerd heart, I was thriving. Coming back to school once the trip ended was difficult, but I had a whole slew of fun events to look forward to that month, starting off with sorority recruitment!
For those of you who don’t know, I was in a sorority (Phi Beta Chi) all four years of college, and I absolutely loved it. I was on exec for two years, with my last position being Recruitment Chair. Recruitment was always one of my favorite events, and in all my time in the sorority, I never missed a recruitment event up until February. The only drawback of my Iowa trip was that I missed every event except for Pref Night and Bid Day, but I’m so glad I got to go to those (especially Bid Day!). It was bittersweet with it being my last session, but I was so excited to pass the torch on to a new Recruitment Chair and welcome a new pledge class!
The next major event in February was the UNC vs. Duke basketball game. If you follow college basketball at all, then you know what a big deal the rivalry is. Seniors get priority for this game, and I had never gone to it before so I was super excited to finally score tickets. I will say that UNC’s basketball season that year was pretty lackluster (read: disappointing), but I still held out hope. The game was actually going pretty well for us… until we went into overtime and had our souls crushed by a Duke win at home. Hopefully, UNC can pull out a win over them in 2021 though!
Finally (I told y’all February was busy for me), I ended off the month with two formal events: my sorority chapter’s 20th anniversary gala and my last formal. It was so much fun to get all dressed up two weekends in a row, and I had a blast dancing the night away with some of my closest friends from school! Of all the events that got canceled because of my senior year, I’m so happy that formal wasn’t one of them.
March
Ah, March. The month when everything truly hit the fan. I left for spring break this month not knowing that I’d never go back to campus again as a student. I spent my spring break in Charleston with some friends, shopping til we dropped and eating some of the most delicious food. Then our break got extended an extra week until everything went online indefinitely… I spent the rest of my semester in my hometown, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The only photos I have from March are my spring break ones, which makes sense since everything after that was, quite frankly, a total dumpster fire.
April
I have virtually no photos from April other than some random screenshots, which makes sense. I spent the entire month cooped up at home trying to finish out my degree online. Like everyone else, I was terrified of catching COVID-19 so I stayed locked up in my house and saw no one except the people I lived with for pretty much all of April. Sorry for the lack of photos, but can you really blame me on this one?
May
I graduated from college! I finally completed my degree in Public Relations and Political Science that honestly, I worked my ass off to get done. While it wasn’t the graduation I expected, it was still a relief to finish all my classes and finally be done with undergrad. On the day that was supposed to be UNC’s graduation day, I got dressed up for the first time in weeks, put on my cap and gown and took some grad photos! The fact that I was posing in my hometown and not my college town was definitely weird, but it was still a fun way to celebrate that I was finished with college. My mom even arranged a drive-by graduation celebration for me from family and friends in the area, which was a total surprise for me. It may not have been the day I envisioned when I first started school, but it was nonetheless incredibly special.
June
Without any homework or assignments hovering over me anymore, I was able to concentrate fully on trying to find a full-time job. I had been looking basically since the spring semester started, but I really shifted into gear in June. To be frank, it was really hard. I know job-searching is never easy, but doing so during a pandemic and economic crisis threw a whole new wrench into things that I simply was not prepared for. I made good grades in college, I had a degree from a great program and my resume was full of experiences, so I thought I was in a decent spot. Boy, was I wrong about that. I sent in more applications than I could count and was interviewed so many times only to be ghosted or flat-out rejected. I even made it to the final round of interviews for a position that I felt I’d be perfect for at a super cool company but was ultimately denied. For these reasons, June and honestly the whole summer were really hard for me. On a lighter note, to fill my time with something more than endless job apps, I got more into Instagram and posting cute photos.
July
July might’ve been my most exciting month since the pandemic started. I turned 22, started looking for apartments in DC, took my real graduation photos and moved out of my college house! My 22nd birthday was spent pretty much how you might expect a pandemic birthday to be: relaxing at home most of the day and getting takeout from a nice restaurant for dinner. I told my boyfriend that I wanted to wear “real clothes” so we got dressed up to eat dinner at home. As for grad photos, my best friend from college, Sarah, and I decided way earlier during our senior year that we would take our grad pics together. We won a photography session at a silent auction back in February and were planning on doing them sometime in April or May until we got kicked off of campus. This presented some problems for us because I lived three hours from Chapel Hill and Sarah lived in Minneapolis. I could easily drive up to campus for a day trip, while she could not. We decided to get our pictures done when Sarah came down to move out of her apartment before her lease was up. Being back on campus was bittersweet for sure, but I loved being able to soak everything in one last time. Plus, taking pictures during the summer was nice because no virtually no one else was there. During the peak times for senior pictures, there can be lines of groups in their caps and gowns waiting to get pictures in front of the iconic spots on campus, so we luckily avoided all of that.
August
A lot of changes happened for me in August. First of all, things finally started looking up for me on the career front! I began applying for fall internships towards the end of July and the beginning of August, which got me a lot more positive results than looking for full-time jobs did. I was offered, accepted and started my current position at a small PR firm that focuses on healthcare clients, which I’ve been working since the end of August and will continue through May! It felt so nice to be able to actually have something to do every day and finally have a schedule again. I also signed the lease for my apartment in DC and started plans to move there in early September! Like April, I don’t have any photos from this month (weird that it’s both of the A months, right?) apart from some photos of pieces I found while furniture shopping, which I’ve since deleted because I didn’t even know they were still on my phone.
September
I! Moved! To! DC!!!!!! This has been an absolute DREAM of mine for years, and I cannot describe how blessed and fortunate I am that I was able to do it. In early September, my mom and brother helped me move to where I currently live in a lovely little studio apartment in the DC-area. Ross had moved up there about a month before I did, so we were also no longer doing long-distance like we’d done for all of college! September was also the month that one of my heroes, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, passed away. Since I lived in the area, I was able to visit the Supreme Court, where I was blown away by all of the mementos people left there to mourn her. It was truly a beautiful sight, even during a dark time.
October
This was my first full month of living on my own. I settled in at my new place and really got into the swing of things with work. Also, I took a trip back home to North Carolina so I could vote early in the election. I decided to keep my registration at home instead of changing it to Virginia (which is where it would’ve been) because NC is more of a swing state for the presidency and there was a very competitive Senate seat up for grabs. Oddly enough, my early voting site was my old high school, which was pretty weird for me.
November
I remember when November was happening, I thought it was the longest month ever (probably because of the incredibly drawn-out election). If you weren’t around then, I’ll have you know that I followed the election religiously. My TV rotated between different news livestreams all day, every day, plus I had multiple tabs up on my laptop with electoral maps and projections. I slept on my couch basically every night that week so that I could fall asleep while watching NBC. Was it healthy? Probably not. But it was so worth it when things started looking up, lean red states flipped blue as more votes were counted and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were called as the next president and vice president! I cried when Pennsylvania was called and pushed them over 270 electoral votes. I could go on and on about it but I’ll end off my little election tangent with the following: I am absolutely pumped to have a woman in the White House. Apart from election drama, Ross and I took a weekend trip to a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. We booked with Airbnb so we had contactless check-in and only got takeout (plus we wore masks every time we were out). It was my first “vacation” in months and such a nice way to relax and unwind for a weekend. The only other thing I did in November was head home for my very first small Thanksgiving celebration. I have a very large extended family (I’m the second-oldest of 17 cousins), so I’m used to big crowds for holiday celebrations. Obviously, that wasn’t possible this year. Most of my family is pretty local though, so all the different households made a couple of dishes, portioned them up and dropped them at my cousin’s house where we did a contactless to-go potluck style pickup. I even got to make the turkey, my first time ever doing so! Since I spent the holiday in my sweats on the couch, I have no photos from it, but trust me when I say that I had a great time on Thanksgiving this year, despite how different it was from what I’m used to.
December
We made it to the final month of 2020! It was certainly a tumultuous year to say the least. However, this was the month I decided to launch Dresses & Democracy and made my first post! I spent the last two weeks of December back home in North Carolina for the holidays, but I did get to enjoy some Christmas lights up in DC before I left. I’ll end off this post by saying that this recap is mainly a highlight reel from the year, especially my photos. This was one of the hardest years of my life, and though I can look back and see some good things, I had plenty of bad times as well that didn’t make it into this post. Let’s hope that in 2021, we can finally and, most importantly, safely return to some sense of normalcy like we had pre-pandemic.
