Séamas O'Reilly: Looking back on this year, I don’t know what to make of it

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

It’s customary at new year’s to look back on the past 12 months and come to some natty conclusions about what’s gone on.

I should be good at this, since I write about my life professionally, but I find it increasingly hard to sort through the jumble and contrive much from it.

It’s not like I don’t enjoy looking back. For about five or six years now, I’ve used an app that connects to my photo cloud and social media accounts. Every day, it tells me what I was doing this day last year, or two years ago, and on and on into the digital regress of an infinite horizon. I’m pretty obsessive about it.

There’s something within me that loves that specificity of knowing exactly what I was doing on this day, some other year, like a glimpse into an alternate timeline composed – entirely arbitrarily - of that one day. There’s no real reason why it should make any difference that it’s exactly this day and not some other, but it does, and I can’t quite work out why, nor summon the requisite mental energy to query how.

The app works backwards, beginning with last year. From there, you travel into the deeper past; post by post, photo by photo. Those from this day last year are always the most shocking. They usually have that vague, mind-bending frisson you get when you realise that a year has passed faster than you can possibly believe. A trip to the pub you could have sworn was two months ago. A photo you took of a wi-fi code in some unfamiliar place you can no longer identify. A jumper you wore for two weeks and never saw again. This quickly gives way to more vaguely remembered events, as you plough through photos and posts from more distant years. More and more often, I’m left utterly mystified by anything from longer than three years ago. The psychic assault of becoming a parent has collapsed my understanding of space and time to the point that anything I did between the age of 18 and 33 feels like it took place in one single month, 200 years ago. Sometimes, the content is more baffling still. Why, this day eight years ago, did I take a picture of a crisp? More accurately, why did I take 18 pictures of said crisp? No time to ponder, I must continue swiping to see something I tweeted the year before that. It’s the words “haha yes” written below a post that has since been deleted. It is, in a sense, my entire life preserved in digital amber, revealing so much, but keeping mysteries too.

The human mind craves patterns, and these are easily found when you spend ten minutes every day staring blankly into your own navel.

A swipe through my birthday, or St Patrick’s Day, or Christmas Morning, will show a perfectly calibrated sequence of images of me doing the same thing, across an entire decade, mostly with the same people and often in the same places. I get thinner and shinier as I swipe, shedding wrinkles, jowls and children as I go. Sometimes the patterns are more oblique, as when I thumb past a random day and find I’ve spent it with a beloved friend three years out of the last ten, and wonder why I haven’t seen them since.

Inarguably the biggest wrench is the stretch between 2020 and 2021 where all my pictures are suddenly indoors, before gradually disappearing altogether. I didn’t feel like I was taking less photos then, but of course I was. There was nothing to take a picture of. Lockdown now threads through the app like a sedimentary layer of sadness, boredom and, occasionally, laughable self-pity.

My interactions with friends and family disappear from view, while my online posts become more numerous and self-involved. I read a jokey tweet about the horrors of confinement and chuckle when I work out it was posted after just 11 days of lockdown. I am laughing at the expense of my former self, knowing more than they do about what’s to come.

In the moment, I take my photos and move on. I don’t really use Instagram and rarely upload pictures to Twitter or Facebook, so aside from those I send to my family WhatsApp groups, the vast majority of the images I record from my life go into the cloud unshared.

Their only audience, it turns out, is me. But not the me of now - the me of next year, or the year after that.

This has made me more attuned to the passage of time, and even recalibrated how I act in the present. More than once, I’ve taken a photo of a happy, bustling, family scene and thought – there and then – that I can put my phone away, as I’ll look forward to seeing it a year from now, on some cold, boring day when I won’t be around loved ones, and will have forgotten this event took place. In actuality, what happens is that I remember these events much better now I’m not taking, sharing and posting photos all the time.

As such, one weird, unexpected consequence of looking back at my photos on a regular basis, is that it’s made me more present.

Looking back on this year, I don’t know what to make of it. Part of this is due to the self-imposed lockdown of having a new baby, which has meant I’ve left the house less than I did during lockdown. Things like moving house and jobs, and throwing myself into challenging new ventures, would have been tentpole moments in previous years, but have this year been done at such breakneck pace, and on so little sleep, that I haven’t secured them to my film of memory.

Maybe I’m just getting older. Either way, I can’t really remember 2022 just yet. But I will. Just ask me this day next year.