Self-improvement? New Year's resolutions feel more like self-flagellation
Merry Twixmas, aka the period between Christmas and the New Year when it is obligatory to spend a larger than usual amount of time sitting on your bum in your own sweat and self-loathing, trying to work out where it all went so wrong.
During this, the hap-happiest time of the year, or so we are told, we are encouraged to reflect on the trials and tribulations of the past 12 months, the events that have shaped us and made us see why people go to work on research stations in the Antarctic for years at a time. I never quite saw the appeal myself, until it dawned on me that a reality TV host really is Leader of the Free World and we all started squabbling about the colour of our passports. Blue, burgundy, bright pink with penises drawn all over it, I don’t care, just as long as it gets me safe passage on the first ship out to the South Pole.
This week is a strange hinterland where we are encouraged to look both backwards and forwards at the same time. It’s hard to do that, isn’t it? It makes your eyes swivel in their sockets and gives you a headache. And personally, I’m done with it this year. Through with it. Not the year itself, you understand, but the annual process that is analysing every mistake I have made in the past 12 months, and searching through my empty soul for all the ways I might fill it in the forthcoming 12 months.
I’m all for self-reflection and self-improvement, but at this time of the year it can feel more like self-flagellation
Perhaps if I’d eaten less and exercised more, I would have been more successful; maybe if I’d done that a different way, he or she wouldn’t have left me; probably if I had read more hardback non-fiction books, I could have solved the crisis in the Middle East and found the cure for cancer. So many ifs – and who wants a life filled with those?
I’m all for self-reflection and self-improvement, but at this time of the year it can feel more like self-flagellation. Like a way to self-destruct, even.
How many times have you found yourself on a cold, dark afternoon in late December, muttering horrible things to yourself that you would never in a million years dream of saying to someone else? Of course, January 1st is as good a moment as any to make those changes you’ve always meant to – but it isn’t the only opportunity you have, so there’s no need to panic that the window to be moral and good closes at midnight on Monday.
I did not have a Dry January in 2017, but I did have a dry June, September, October, November and, fingers-crossed, December (don’t ask what happened in July and August. I don’t want to go back there). I have no problem with the “New Year, new you” features with which we are bombarded every January, largely because I have had to write a great deal of them during my career. But I think it’s worth remembering that the old you is not so bad; the old you is actually quite awesome.
Sure, the old you may drink, smoke and have a thing for sugar, the old you might be incapable of doing a single squat and have not the slightest idea how to put together a piece of flat-pack furniture, the old you might have promised for years to remember to put the toilet seat down but never quite followed through. But I bet the old you also makes people laugh, holds people up, gives people love.
My point is: we all have flaws. We all have things we could do better. But how about we focus on our good bits, on the things we do well enough? How about you stop trying to be a new version of you, and instead resolve to be the best version of the one you already are?
I have always started a year with the rather binary belief that it is going to be a good one or a bad one, and that there is no possibility for anything in between. Honestly, I’m so superstitious it almost embarrasses me. On January 1, I was saying “white rabbits” over and over again, making sure that I had cheers-ed everyone in the room and looked them right in the eye as I said it, because if I didn’t… what did I think would happen, exactly? That an asteroid might fall on my head? It never occurred to me that 2017 might contain some of the very best moments of my life so far, as well as some of the very worst. It certainly never occurred to me that it might involve interviewing princes or going to rehab, or managing to run a marathon and living to tell the tale (again and again and again, to anyone who will listen).
So I’d wish you a happy new year, but there will probably also be some sadness in it. Some anger, some madness and, hopefully, some jubilation and fun. Mostly, I hope that you go forth and be fearlessly, unapologetically, you.