This Christmas I was given guilt as a gift but, naturally, with the state of the postal service, it arrived just in time for New Year’s Day. Perfect timing: New Year, new me, right? Bollocks.
I’ve never really understood this perverse annual self-depreciation contest, feeling bad about yourself or your indulgences. We roll off the back of Christmas joy and well-wishing straight into hating ourselves, before even the Yule-tide has come to an end and we miserably rip tinsel off the wall. It’s a time where we decide to break ourselves down into positives and negatives instead of building ourselves up. These usually stem from things that we’ve always been self-conscious about – there’s nothing really novel about New Year’s resolutions – and we usually make the same promises every year. ‘This year will be the one where it all changes’, we tell ourselves, only to feel crushed when we give in and give up, delicately balancing our self-worth on a vain hope.
New Year, new me, right? Bollocks.
Collectively around New Year, we allow ourselves more indulgences to do away with the guilt. We lie to ourselves that we’ll be healthier, we’ll quit smoking, we’ll stop drinking but, as the miserable month of January draws to a close, I wonder how many of us will have persevered with our resolutions?
We roll off the back of Christmas joy and well-wishing straight into hating ourselves
The spirit of New Year is a lie, predicated on our belief that it’s a magical time, that as soon as the clocks strike twelve we’re transformed like Cinderella. Need we recall that, at twelve, Cinderella turns from a princess to a pauper – not the other way round. I hate to break it to you, dear readers, but you probably won’t do all the things you promised yourself you would.
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely advocate for self-care and I de finitely believe that making informed choices and setting goals are positive things. You want to lose weight? I say ‘go you!’ You want to quit smoking? I say ‘that’s incredible, I’m so proud’. But hearing the words ‘New Year, new me’ brings with it a sigh.
The change has to come from you: it has no timer and no calendar.
There’s a marked difference between making an informed choice and genuinely wanting to be better or change, and making a resolution for the sake of New Year. The change has to come from you: it has no timer and no calendar. There’s no magical best-before date for the things you don’t like about yourself and if you don’t really want to change deep down then a superficial and vain resolution is unlikely to change that.
Take me last year. I made so many promises because I felt rubbish about myself, my body, my lifestyle. I decided to make all the cliche changes to my life: I joined the gym, I bought fancy exercise clothes to motivate myself, I bought a lunchbox so I could bring healthy sandwiches to campus. Do you see the common denominator?
You got it! It’s capitalism. I bought all these things and spent all this money to make myself feel like I was making a change. But really all I was buying into was the consumerist milieu of, what I’m going to call, resolution-profiteering. It’s no surprise that gyms advertise around this time with free sign ups and trials, and it’s neither a shock to me that exercise clothes are on sale. Companies know that, as the Christmas season comes to an end, there’s a perfect balance of the ‘treat yourself’ mentality that comes with Christmas cash and resolutions that point customers towards certain products. They make millions off selling us back our own self-hatred by convincing us that the way to change and become better is to spend money. I, for one, don’t want to buy into that. I don’t want to be manipulated by money and good advertising.
They make millions off selling us back our own self-hatred by convincing us that the way to change and become better is to spend money
So, I’m at a loss. People keep asking what my resolutions are and I seem so pious when I tell them I think it’s stupid, kind of like the New Year version of the Grinch. My not-making-resolutions makes other people feel bad, as if I think I’m superior, like there’s nothing I could change about myself. But that’s not it, I’m just convinced that the construction of resolutions sets us up to fail.
Live and let live, make your resolutions, but don’t come crying to me when you’ve got no money, and no motivation left to go to the gym.
I’ve decided, therefore, that I will try to make resolutions that mean something; I will thank people more often and stop being sorry all the time.
I will remind my friends and family that I think they’re great more often, I will try to practise self-care, take time out to think about myself and, last but not least, I will promise you, readers, that I will try to write more positive articles, rather than hating everything like my articles often point to.
Live and let live, make your resolutions, but don’t come crying to me when you’ve got no money, and no motivation left to go to the gym.