Some of the things I won’t miss about 2019.

As the year runs out of breath, it feels instinctive that one should feel great about what they’ve done, and what they’ve achieved and all that. Not me, not this time. 2019 has been my first full year of ‘adulting’, which is just one way of saying I have lived alone without parental support in the form of monthly financial contributions. 

There is just too much I won’t miss. 

Like, the financial mess I’ve lived in all year. I won’t miss going broke by the 12th of every new month because of lousy budgeting. I won’t miss having to pay off loans every time before I can spend any cent. I definitely won’t miss never having enough to spend on myself despite having a salary that’s promising. Those walks in shops and the fleeting seconds I spend wishing I could buy a certain item I really need – won’t miss that at all. To sit out every concert and outing with friends because they would be too expensive – I won’t miss that either. 

And that’s not all. I won’t miss the deaths that happened or the sadness that followed. I won’t miss the uncertainty that comes with temporary employment, or the introversion that comes with public anxiety. I can’t miss my time with the landlord this year – he’s hovered around my door too much. I won’t miss my usual habit of planning and planning and never actually doing anything. My internet addiction – hard to shake but I won’t miss it. Thank heaven for failing to love Snapchat this year. I won’t miss Ugandan Twitter either, with all those influencers that define it. 

I definitely won’t miss the political buffoonery going on in the country either. It’s waiting for me in 2020, but 2019’s People Power mess was over the top. I’d like to call out many other teeny tiny things I disliked about this year but that would be petty. This mini-essay is petty enough. The optimist in me would like to think 2019 was a great year but I have such a hard time believing it. 2020 – and the new decade – can’t come soon enough.