2020 has been the year that everything and nothing happened.
As Coronavirus forcibly took the wheel, we put aside nearly all plans and instead steered straight into a pandemic that broke our spirits and our brains. Meanwhile, we experienced both a nation-wide reckoning with systemic anti-Blackness and an election season that felt ripped out of a dystopian fiction. With those things to process, there wasn’t much more that our anxiety-ridden, quarantine-melted minds could entertain.
But the world did, in fact, go on. The ice caps continued melting. Celebrities continued to make fools of themselves. And as news became increasingly difficult to follow, the internet felt more united than ever—clamoring around memes, pop culture controversies, and new Netflix content like campfires in an otherwise dark and terrifying new wilderness.
To aid in your annual reflection, here is a list of everything you likely already forgot happened, or didn’t even realize occurred, in 2020. These events may fall under any of the following categories: news you simply decided to reject for the time being (not today, aliens), dumb shit you probably enjoyed for one day and then immediately erased from your mind to make room for fresh horrors, and actually important stuff you probably just missed while you were obsessively washing your hands (read: crying). In other words, it’s—aptly—a chaotic mess…