If you want to get an entire room of people to roll their eyes at you, start talking about your New Year’s Resolutions and use the phrase. “New Year, new me!”. Seriously, try it out. And then sneak out the back door before the angry mob can get their hands on you.
If you’re like the rest of us, trying desperately to reach at least one goal from last year’s drunken declarations of, “I’ll work out more” or “I’m going to delete my ex’s number and stop trying to find him on Tinder”, then rest assured that you’re not going to explode into a pile of sequins, cheap champagne and poor decisions when the clock strikes midnight on the thirty first of December.
Let’s be realistic with our resolutions this year. Let’s vow to stop loving people who don’t love us back. Let’s vow to stop chugging vodka right from the bottle on a Tuesday night, not because it’s irresponsible, but because all day Wednesday you’ll cringe when you get a whiff of yourself and the adult thing to do is to save your sick days for the morning’s after you get your hands on a tequila bottle. Let’s vow to stop being so hard on ourselves when we don’t meet the expectations of others, whether those others are strangers or our parents. Disappointment has no room in the New Year, even if it’s something we feel going into it. Everything will be okay.
In the next three hundred and sixty five days, a lot could happen. You could lose your job, crash your car, lose the love of your life or stub your toe on the way to the bathroom. Maybe you rip the only pair of jeans that make your butt look nice. Maybe you leave yesterday’s lunch in the back of your car too long. Maybe your ex calls and says he misses you, but then a week from that late-night phone call you run into him at a random bar and he introduces a new woman who looks an awful lot like the girl who came before, and maybe that girl looked like you, because he has consistent taste and a wandering eye. So you walk outside for fresh air and step into the last snowbank in the entire city that hasn’t been packed down by foot traffic, and decide to call it a night and head home because now your socks are wet and your toes are cold. You don’t know it yet, but every decision you make in the previous three hundred and sixty four days has been leading to this one, because you go home and you don’t have to watch him leave with her, and that’s as close to moving on as you’ll get.
In the New Year, stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe the last bad thing to happen to you is the last bad thing to happen to you. Maybe the guy who shows up to take you to coffee and tells you to watch your step because your landlord hasn’t salted the walkway is as good as this year will get. Stop waiting for approval from people who don’t even know what standards they need you to meet. Forgive friends who don’t share the same commitment and dedication to your friendship because we all define these things differently, and to demand that another person meet you halfway without stopping to ask what their halfway point would be isn’t fair. Forgive your parents for not teaching you how to properly file your taxes. Maybe someone hurt you last year and you’re determined to make sure that doesn’t happen again. You can’t rush your healing. Open your door Monday morning and look up at the sun, or duck under an umbrella to hide from rain or snow. Breathe deeply outside and recognize what toxic air smells like and what it feels like. Stick to pattern and routines if they make you feel safe, and to hell with anyone who tells you otherwise. If you want to leave baggage at the door, do that. Leave it there, and let someone else pick it up on trash day, because no one is telling you that you have to carry around the weight of everyone else’s disappointments or expectations.You’ll be grateful in thirty years when your back’s not bent because no one told you it was okay to let go of things and you never thought to ask yourself if it was.
A History of Overthinking 