January 3, 2021 was an in-between kind of day: a Sunday, the first of the year, a day off for most of our diarists, and for many a day of stock-taking, reflection, and preparation. A day filled with ordinary activities—waking, eating, housework, daydreaming—but also a day set out of the stream of routine.
With the pandemic and acute political anxiety added to the mix, writer’s accounts of Jan. 3 depict both a temporary suspension of routine and the looming re-entry to what has, of late, been an unusually taxing and disruption-prone everyday life.
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For many it was the last day of the holidays, the last day off before returning to work. People took down their Christmas decorations, “a slightly sad exercise.” Or, they put off taking them down:
“We haven’t decorated a Christmas tree for four or five years. This year we broke a self-imposed standard. We put one up at the end of November as we needed as much Christmas as we could manage. Tree 2020 has a gorgeous shape; it has now become a good friend, greeting us each morning as we come down the hall.”
“…If all goes well this year, we will go west again on Christmas Day. When will we put up a large tree again? And so we decide to postpone the dismantling.”
Many others express this tension between getting ready to re-immerse and wanting to milk the last hours of freedom. “I have felt the pressure of work building since Saturday afternoon” wrote one diarist. “Mentally, it’s draining my energy and I am having to put extra effort into feeling good.” Another’s mind evoked work only long enough to dismiss it: “I need to think about upcoming classes, but I don’t want to. Work can wait.”
January 3 dawned damp and cloudy and stayed that way. This seasonally typical weather intertwined with feelings of avoidance towards the return to work and routine: “it was the last day of my break from work and that stress, along with the gloom of the weather, most assuredly made this day not a favorite of mine.”
With people avoiding the public gyms, though, the weather did not keep our writers inside. Long outdoor walks, “despite the hanging gloom” were occasions for mental as well as physical wandering. One writer toted up the personal losses of 2020; another viewed the clouds with curiosity, noting that not all overcast days are alike.
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As the last day of the extended New Year’s holiday, this Sunday turned many people’s minds to resolutions, goals for the new year, or reflections on 2020. The diary is by convention a reflective genre; this orientation combined with the timing of the Jan. 3 diary day to prompt a good deal of thought about hopes and plans for 2021, professional and personal inventories of the year passed, and expressions of gratitude at having survived the infamous 2020.
Even some who are skeptical of the symbolism of the New Year indulged.
“I have not been a ‘New Year’s’ person for many years but the upheaval of 2020 makes me hungry for a ‘new start,’…and some fresh hope,” wrote one diarist.
“Nothing like a road trip to contemplate life goals and reflect on the shit-show that was 2020,” wrote another, who also observed “It is a widely known fact that New Year’s resolutions don’t work…. I make them anyway.” She goes on to list: staying away from alcohol for “Dry January,” going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, getting more houseplants, doing more yoga and meditation, and donating more “food, money, and other goods.”
Another, recognizing the poor record of New Year’s resolutions, instead declared “intentions,” settling on a repeat of last year’s declaration: “to intentionally treasure both large and small events, a major accomplishment or a glimpse of a bird on the wing. Treasure relationships, my happiness, good health and security. Oh, what I didn’t know a year ago when I wrote that. But I can’t think of any better focus or intention as 2021 unfolds.”
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The day was in-between in another way, not visible in the moment of these diaries, but acutely and poignantly so now: the diaries pre-date by three days the storming of the U.S. Capitol at the conclusion of the “Stop the Steal” rally—an all-too real embodiment of contemporary political dysfunction, which is expressed as anger and anxiety in most of the Jan. 3 diaries.
The diaries register a moment between the election and the catastrophic turn of events on January 6, and they fall at the midpoint between the start of 2021 and its first major news story. They also precede and look ahead to January 6’s (incredibly) second biggest political story: the announcement of the results of the Georgia run-off elections for U.S. Senate, giving Democrats control of the chamber and underscoring the ambiguity of the political moment.
The political news on this day was led by the revelation that former President Trump held a phone conversation with the Georgia Secretary of State, asking if he could “find 11,780 votes.” This news, and the larger political crisis of which it was a part—inform the diaries in ways subtle (“a song and a senator I don’t like are in my head,” writes one diarist) and explicit—“Tonight we have a lot to talk about—the upcoming runoff election in Georgia and the president’s infamous call to Georgia’s Secretary of State.”
If the pandemic has scrambled people’s experience of time, making long- and even-mid-term planning impossible, the political crisis has painted the ambiguity of even the near future in dark tones. With our knowledge of what was to happen three days later, it feels uncanny to read a diarist, with consummate gallows humor, addressing a reader of the future in this vein: “An anxious world cries out, What will happen? Only you know the answer, future reader.”
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January 3, then, was for many of our writers a space for contemplation—for personal stock-taking—but also a space which gave play to the intense, shared anxieties of our moment. If the day was, as one writer suggested, “one of those out-of-the-stream-of-things, way-station kind of days….sabbath-like,” it was a troubled sabbath.
The housekeeping on Jan. 3 was not only psychological or metaphorical. As they were doing the psychological work of making sense of 2020 and preparing for 2021, our diarists were also tidying, putting the objects in their home in order. Dismantling and storing the Christmas decorations is at once a seasonal chore and a way of putting a period at the end of the holidays and the expired year.
Housekeeping enacted the desire to create order, whether consciously or unconsciously. One writer practiced mindfulness while cleaning the bathroom; another, committed to a day of “not doing anything,” grocery shopped and changed his windshield wipers; a third acknowledged January housecleaning as a seasonal, cyclical marker: “January is usually the time of year when I clean closets and generally get the house in order after the holidays.”
All of this speaks to one of the central paradoxes of everyday life: it is both a source of solace and comforting routine and the arena in which our anxieties and discontents play out. With our movement either restricted or tinged with threat because of the pandemic, ordinary activities can feel like the routinized motions of a prisoner, or they can feel like outlets for agency. And they can feel like both at once, and more, marking the ways in which the pandemic has made our world smaller but also providing a field for activity and meaning-making, as one diarist suggests:
“Small tasks feel like big accomplishments these days. I’m looking at you, coat closet with newly cleaned-up and organized scarves, hats, and gloves. Energy has to go somewhere, and quick, visible accomplishments feel real these days. So, I managed to wrench something positive out of the day, and my do those scarves look nice all hanging together there.”