The Tamesis
I’ve always been a New Year’s girl, not a Christmas girl. Of course, Christmas has its perks (spending time with family, drinking Baileys at 11am, lugging crispy roast potatoes through the gravy, etc.). But there is a sense of promise in the New Year that has always attracted me. I love hitting reset. If it wasn’t completely weird and unsustainable, I would throw away everything I owned at the stroke of midnight and become a new me – cleansed of everything that had happened before.
I’m also always a big fan of New Year’s resolutions for this reason. I love their rituals. inventory. I threw my New Year’s resolutions into the ocean and burned them under the full moon. I wrote long, color-coded lists, and even during a year of insanity, I wrote them on a piece of paper that I tore up and scattered around the city (I think it was after a breakup). But a few years ago, I kind of gave up. It’s not because I’m too lazy to bother, or because I’m not studying Atomic Habits Author: James Clare. I just figured out something that worked better for me and I still do it to this day.
Every New Year’s Eve, I like to give the year ahead a specific theme. Last year’s theme was “Travel” – and it worked. I was working as a freelancer at the time and every month or so I would definitely travel to a different country. Whenever someone says something like “you’ve been to a lot of places” I reply yes I have because traveling is mine theme. This year I changed the theme completely and decided it was time to “work”. While this doesn’t sound like much fun, it actually feels good to have a single focus. If I ever feel guilty for not going out as much as I’d like, I remind myself that it’s not This year’s theme. I’ve had plenty of time to do this in my “party” years – which I probably already have (I’m looking at you, 2017).
In 2007, psychology professor Richard Wiseman tracked about 3,000 people who made various resolutions, from going to the gym to drinking less. By the end of the year, a whopping 88% of people failed to stick to their goals. A similar study from the University of Scranton found the numbers were slightly better, with 77% of people sticking to their resolutions within a week, but only 19% sticking to them two years later. It’s not that I think these things are important in and of themselves – I mean, who cares if you don’t go to the gym? – It’s more that I personally don’t want resolution-making to become an exercise in futility.
