How to survive January, and other resolutions
[Image description: Drawing of hands in contact with each other; fingers
overlapping or touching, along with text (from left to right) reading "the
world tried to burn all the mercy outta me but you know I wouldn't let
it"]
By Sam Moore
Art by Amelia
A J Foy
I
Don’t make any resolutions. They’re
always a recipe for disaster, an act of setting expectations far too high for a
year that’s only just begun, tying an unnecessary albatross around your neck,
when there’s already enough weight on your shoulders as it is.
In spite of this, you resolve to cut as
much meat out of your diet as possible. That’s the shorthand, because
“pescetarian” sounds a little pretentious; it’s even greeted with the red
underline of a typo on Microsoft Word, as if the application doesn’t
recognise the ways in which language, and people, change. It probably doesn’t.
That’s a lot to ask of a version of Word that’s just become ten years old.
You feel called out when you watch the
second season of You, and hear the line “is it bisexual
pescetarian week already?” because, given you aren’t even a week into the new
year, that’s technically true. It’s a truth that you don’t know what to do
with, so you accept it with a laugh, instead of laughing it off like you
normally would.
The pescetarian thing is more about the
nebulous act of “being healthy” than anything else, of finding energy and
structure, avoiding the strange combination of being burnt out and spaced out
that creeps up in the afternoon on slow workdays. You don’t make any
resolutions about work, you just aim, in an uncertain way that’s synonymous
with January, - not knowing what to do but feeling like you should do something
- to do better this year, in spite of not really knowing what that means. On
New Year’s Eve, you saw lots of jokes from Peep Show on Twitter and Instagram, all of them
around the social pressure that comes with New Year’s Eve.
But that pressure isn’t just social; in
spite of making jokes about it, and wanting to rename one of your group chats
“New Year, New Meme” you still get caught up in the opportunity for reinvention
that comes with another year. Even if you don’t act on it, or don’t tell people
you’re making resolutions (after all, step one of this plan is not to make
any), there’s something about it that’s tempting, the potential to make this
year your year.
Because of the immense pressure, you
don’t go out on New Year’s Eve. It’s a quiet night, but not a bad one by any
stretch. Going out on New Year’s Eve is, like so many other things associated
with it, an exercise in dashed expectations. Everywhere is too expensive, too
busy, and in the end, not really worth it. You’ve never been the type to go out
for New Year anyway; your family sound a little more surprised each year that
it’s a night you’re still happy to spend in their company. You spend it with
them; you’re happy to do so. And, in a way, you’re happy. You’ve always gotten
on well with your family, and never really understood why it was all of your
old friends went through adolescence seemingly determined to hate their
parents. You say that your parents are friends, even as you hide things from
them.
Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel, Less Than Zero, was apparently first going to be
titled Winter Break, and is about exactly that, inasmuch as it’s about
anything. Clay, a college student comes home over winter to see his friends and
barely see his absent parents (it isn’t a novel with a very strong adult
presence; no parents or guardians were harmed in the writing of this book), as
everything else seems to crumble to pieces around him, his old home on the West
Coast is a world that’s still turning, even as it hurtles towards something
approaching oblivion. Clay survives January, but that isn’t true of everyone he
knows; and isn’t true of everyone at all.
On billboards, and seemingly everywhere
else, one phrase recurs, calling out to Clay like a voice from beyond. Disappear
here. (Bret Easton Ellis)
January is a time that’s ripe for
disappearance; disappearing into old habits and old places, letting a version
of yourself vanish in the hopes that a new, better one will emerge like a
phoenix alongside the fireworks happening in London, fireworks that you watch
on TV. There’s a sense of fear in January, the kind that comes with
expectations, but in the end, it doesn’t materialise. Maybe because you go out
of your way to avoid it, go out of your way not to build up expectations that
you’re convinced the night, the resolutions, the year, will all fall short of. Fear never shows up and the
party ends early.
(Ibid)
This makes New Year sound sad, and it
is, in a way. This kind of taking stock, the kind that’s mandatory, even if
it’s just a mental inventory, will always have a kind melancholy attached to
it. Looking back on where you’ve come from, and the places you got to, all of
that will be imbued with the loss and longing of what’s been lost.
One of the ways to survive this sadness
is to acknowledge it; to know where it comes from, to understand that not all
changes will be painless, that even growing is something that can hurt.
II
Spend time with your parents, even as
you’re asked too many questions that you don’t have answers for. Say “yeah,” in
that slightly non-committal way when your mum says that “so many people must
find each other with online dating these days.” Be thankful for the time that
you spend together, for the things that you are asked, and the things that
you’re not. Be grateful that you have parents and a home to go back to, as you
look at statistics from a government report on figures from April to June 2019
(published in December of the same year) saying that “the number of
households assessed by Local Authorities as either homeless or threatened with
homelessness has increased by 11.4% from April to June 2018 to 68,170 this
quarter.” (DCLG)
You think about the election. It’s
impossible not to, it was always going to come up in conversation one way or
another. You think about a deceptive headline, leading with the idea that 1
fifth of people think they’ll be better off by the end of 2020, even when over
a quarter of people expected things to get worse. Surviving January is one
thing, but surviving the year is another entirely; you’re grateful that you’ll
be able to do that, and always aware of the fact that it won’t be that easy for
everyone. You wonder if the government will eat its own children, like Goya’s Saturn.
Winter doesn’t seem natural as a time
for change, and the idea of it has obviously been reduced to jokes, punchlines
around “new year new me,” and saying that this year being your year is already
impossible after three or four or five days. But you still survive it, as best
you can. You understand that the new year doesn’t have to be a new you, that
renewal isn’t something that’s forced, but gradually worked towards. That any
step in the right direction, no matter how small it might be, is still a step
in the right direction.
You resolve, if anything, to simply be
kinder to yourself. You’ll allow yourself to make mistakes, to be imperfect, to
miss things up. You’re not exactly zen about it; after all, you didn’t make a resolution
to meditate and do yoga. But still, you think about a folk poem quoted in a
book that you’ve been reading.
It’s impossible to go through a year
without falling down, to do everything perfectly, or to avoid being hurt. Like
Lawrence with his hand over a candle, you try to teach yourself that the trick is not minding that
it hurts. (Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson) You’ve been teaching yourself how to
survive for years now, for what feels like forever. This year, you’re a little
better at it than you were the year before, and, in the end, that’s all you can
ever ask to be. A little better, a little stronger, a little more able to carry
the weight on your shoulders or the albatross around your neck. You find
strength in these things instead of weakness; so many martial arts are about
using the strength or weight of your opponent or sparring partner or sensei
against them, so you resolve to do this, to use the things around you that
others might see as burdens as a source of strength, something that can carry
you forward, instead of hold you back.