Abandon your resolutions

Already broken your New Year’s resolutions? Don’t worry, I have too.

Every year, in the last week in December, I start to feel anxious. It’s coming for me and I’m not ready. I’m not prepared. I have no idea what to do with it.

And then it’s here.

The New Year.

Does anyone else find it as intimidating as I do?

Blogs, websites and magazines are all urging us to reinvent ourselves. Everyone I see asks if I have any New Year’s resolutions. There’s an unspoken pressure to have grand plans. But what if I don’t have any?

Well, after many years of scratching my head and searching frantically for a resolution to grasp onto, I’ve realised I don’t need one. And that’s okay.

You can reinvent yourself whenever you want to.

When I think back to moments when I made lifechanging decisions, I can’t think of one that happened on 31st December. I decided to take a Master’s degree in my early thirties. That January, I hadn’t even dreamt of going back to university. All I knew was that I needed to prioritise my writing again, like I used to do before I started my current employment. The decision to enroll on that course was one of the best decisions in my adult life, and it didn’t happen in the depths of winter, it came to me while drying off after an evening swim at the beach, in May.

If you want to change your life in May, don’t wait for January, just go for it!

It’s fine to break New Year’s resolutions.

The day I lost my 177 day Duolingo streak was traumatic. Sometimes I exaggerate, but I had been so invested in improving my Indonesian language skills that my daily trip to the app had become a ritual with a ridiculous amount of faux importance attached to it. If I practice every day I will surely become fluent by the end of the year, I thought. Seeing my ‘streak’ reset to zero felt like the ultimate judgement of the type of language student I’d become. A green cartoon owl was crying at me from my phone screen, and I took that to mean I was a failure.

But not managing to fit in my ten minutes of Duolingo that day didn’t actually take away the hours and hours I’d put into learning it up until then. It didn’t take into account the iTalki language lessons I’d been having with Nurul, my tutor, or the films I’d been watching with the subtitles on, or trying to speak the language with my colleagues. Breaking my resolution to ‘do Duolingo’ for a year didn’t actually mean anything at all. Not being able to fit something in every day of your life doesn’t mean you’re not committed to it. Sometimes, life gets in the way.

I’ll carry on setting myself goals, but not ones that carry a huge amount of pressure, and not in the run up to New Year’s Eve. The final week of December is, surely, designed for curling up with good books and leftover festive food, catching up with old friends, and enjoying a proper, well-earned, break.

Grand plans can happen anytime.

I have grand plans regularly. Thinking of grand plans is not the issue, having the time and resources to carry them out is the problem. Trips to take, books to write, projects to dive into… these things will torture me while doing the most menial and necessary tasks, but paying the rent, sadly, often has to be prioritised over my sudden aching desire to take the train from New York to Chile because I just finished reading about it in The Old Patagonian Express.

So, I don’t feel I need any extra pressure to invent new plans just because the ‘New Year’ is upon us. I have enough old plans I can pull out of the bag if I ever find myself free of responsibility and financial constraints.

Abandon your resolutions without guilt.

If you’ve been having that mid-January slump, having resolution regret, or wishing you had picked a different goal, you don’t have to wait until next year to re-plan. Perhaps your New Year starts on February 1st? Write your own rules and whatever you do, don’t feel guilty if you break them; they’re yours to break with guilt free abandon!

As for me, my mid-January resolution might be to go and buy a lucky lottery ticket so I can put some of those long-pondered grand plans into action.

January isn’t the only time you can step back and evaluate things. Looking down over Bath in November after an inspiring day of talks was enough to get my imagination going.