My dearest Moni,
This year I don't know where to begin. 2020 is turning out to be a year very different from any of the years you spent with us, a year you'd never have imagined you'd live through. A virus has forced the whole world to stop for months. Many times I've had the feeling of living in a horror film: entire families shut inside their homes, bans on travelling or on living a normal life, people wearing masks or plastic shields on their faces, some even covering their whole bodies as if they were astronauts. Terrifying news on the TV bulletins and on social media; it looked like the end of the world. If someone had shown you these images in the past, you wouldn't have believed something like this could happen in our day, you'd have thought it was science fiction.
But as always, there's a positive side to everything. This year most of us have been given the gift we've always wished for. We've been given time. We've suddenly been freed from many of our daily obligations. For the first time in my life, I found myself without work and without the chance to meet up with friends. So, for the first time in my life, I've felt completely responsible for deciding what I devote every hour of the day to, without a boss or a client to organise me, I no longer had anyone to blame for the lack of time. I'd spent a few months turning over the idea of creating a professional blog and, faced with this new situation, I ran out of excuses not to do it. I've set about updating my knowledge and working on that, among other things. I've discovered that when you don't have someone setting your goals for you, it's much harder to be productive. It's very easy to get lost in the thousand things you could do or learn. I'm still working on getting better at that.
I think this year has been a year of awakening for many, or for everyone, this year we've seen that, without warning, overnight, life can change radically. My conclusion after everything that's happened is that it's very important to keep a flexible attitude towards life. If you analyse it, life is full of crises, stability only lasts for a while and then something comes along that changes everything: a coronavirus, a financial crisis, a natural disaster... I think it's very important to know where you want to steer your life so that those crises affect you as little as possible. When you have clear goals, you have reasons to keep fighting no matter what happens. Crises are just bumps in the road, but the road goes on. In my case, a very clear example of something that changed my life completely was your passing. When you left, it broke the hearts of many of us, the world fell away beneath our feet, but I learned that life goes on and that can't be changed. Changes and crises are inevitable, you have to accept it and carry on.
These last few months I've been a rollercoaster of emotions. From the despair of getting no replies to the CVs I was sending, to the euphoria of thinking that, if I make the most of this time life has given me, I can do great things. We still don't know how long this situation will last, it could be a few more months or even a few years... So the best thing is to accept it as soon as possible and stop denying reality. Simply waiting for it all to be over won't get us anywhere. In the future I want to look back and feel proud of not having wasted this time. I hope that in the coming years I can write to you telling you about the fruits of that work.
I have many more things to tell you but I don't want to write an endlessly long letter, so I'll leave the other very good things that have happened to me for private ground. I still keep you very present in certain situations. There are things I would have loved to share with you this year, but I trust that you're following my steps wherever you are. I send you a kiss and a great big, big hug. You'll always be in my heart, Mónica.
Your sister Cristina