Around the beginning of every year, like existential clockwork, people start to question the beliefs underpinning their lives. I am going to eat healthier, they say. Also yoga - I’m going to do so much yoga I’ll be able to kiss my own ass and therefore, presumably, shall need less external validation. Or perhaps they may wonder, as I do, why one feels compelled to eat cheese after sundown? Is cheese a substitute for love? Or, in a meta-matrix-style truth bomb, could it be that love is really just a substitute for cheese?
You may be going through the same revolutions in your own head. The beginning of a New Year has a similar effect to dying in a computer game and being suddenly reborn with 10 more power points on another level. It’s fresh and fun. Everything bad that happened has now happened ‘last year’, and there is a deep satisfaction in drawing a line under those events that the Bad Feelings can’t cross. You’re safe here, in this New Year space. You haven’t yet cracked the façade of your perfection: perhaps you haven’t smoked a cigarette yet, or had a single drink. Relatedly, perhaps your New Year’s Eve hangover was so bad that it bullied you into monastic submission. Everything is possible now. Your novel, your screenplay, your raise, college admission, PhD thesis, marriage, baby, abortion, divorce, world travels and mid-range jeep purchase - all are mere months away. Everything is possible.
And terrifying.
I’m a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, as I am of anything that lets me drown out the demonic voices in my head. But the vast expanse of possibility that extends after Jan 1 becomes, for me at least, a sea of anxiety. Much like New Year’s Eve itself. The night is supposed to be so storied, so filled with laughter, twinkling lights and memories on the make that the very prospect of it is stressful. If I’m at a party (in itself a feat, because it means I’m liked) and find myself, even for thirty seconds, without my head tilted back in roaring laughter like a deranged postcard from the 30s then I seriously begin to question if something is wrong. This isn’t right. No night can be this good.
And after all New Year’s is just a day. For most of the decade it isn’t even a weekend day, which means you’re basically stressing out over a Tuesday. No one can reinvent themselves on a Tuesday. Thursday maybe, but good things rarely happen on Tuesdays. No. Instead, I make my resolutions like I chose my belief system, like a sushi counter of globalised culture.
Jan 1 comes round and I make some broad strokes on my blank canvas. Where do I want to visit, whom do I want to kill and so on. Then around Chinese New Year’s I whittle down the exact dates I want to travel and the precise means I want do use to kill someone. I finalize the resolutions around Islamic New Year’s, which in case you didn’t know falls on Muharram the 1st, and so death is in the air anyway and one feels less self-conscious talking offhandedly about decapitation.
Exercise is always a good habit to commit to around this time. I try and go to the gym regularly anyway, and since my body dysmorphia is a yearlong companion it seems petty to sully NY resolutions with it. To add fat to my wound, I got an email from my gym in New York recently telling me that they have gone bankrupt and all locations have closed overnight. This is both a shock and, if I am honest, a relief. Now I have resolved to not be one of those chumps sitting in the confines of the gym but to become an aerial acrobat that leaps from building to wall like a well-dressed Spiderman. Perhaps I’ll do some martial arts, or boxing, or swimming, something that gets me out of my large and pudgy comfort zone.
But my only real resolution is to be kinder to myself. It’s not a grandiose one like learning how to fly a plane, nor is it a selfless one as when people begin volunteering at orphanages. Still, I think it’s important. Especially at the one time of the year that focuses on what is not good about you and what you have to change, I propose it might be nicer to focus on what you like about yourself.
Lord knows I don’t do it often. Like anyone I’m guilty of sometimes inflating my fragile ego with (self invented) tales of my genius and bravado, but what I mean is to acknowledge the things about you that you aren’t happy about and saying “that’s OK.” It’s a powerful act, to do that, and it’s not easy. But if you start hating yourself for being something, it holds less power over you. So let’s try it together. Take a breath and say ‘I love me!” Now go have some cheese, because it loves you too. And even if it doesn’t, hate can’t taste that good.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com
You may be going through the same revolutions in your own head. The beginning of a New Year has a similar effect to dying in a computer game and being suddenly reborn with 10 more power points on another level. It’s fresh and fun. Everything bad that happened has now happened ‘last year’, and there is a deep satisfaction in drawing a line under those events that the Bad Feelings can’t cross. You’re safe here, in this New Year space. You haven’t yet cracked the façade of your perfection: perhaps you haven’t smoked a cigarette yet, or had a single drink. Relatedly, perhaps your New Year’s Eve hangover was so bad that it bullied you into monastic submission. Everything is possible now. Your novel, your screenplay, your raise, college admission, PhD thesis, marriage, baby, abortion, divorce, world travels and mid-range jeep purchase - all are mere months away. Everything is possible.
And terrifying.
I’m a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, as I am of anything that lets me drown out the demonic voices in my head. But the vast expanse of possibility that extends after Jan 1 becomes, for me at least, a sea of anxiety. Much like New Year’s Eve itself. The night is supposed to be so storied, so filled with laughter, twinkling lights and memories on the make that the very prospect of it is stressful. If I’m at a party (in itself a feat, because it means I’m liked) and find myself, even for thirty seconds, without my head tilted back in roaring laughter like a deranged postcard from the 30s then I seriously begin to question if something is wrong. This isn’t right. No night can be this good.
And after all New Year’s is just a day. For most of the decade it isn’t even a weekend day, which means you’re basically stressing out over a Tuesday. No one can reinvent themselves on a Tuesday. Thursday maybe, but good things rarely happen on Tuesdays. No. Instead, I make my resolutions like I chose my belief system, like a sushi counter of globalised culture.
The Islamic New Year falls on Muharram the 1st, so death is very much in the air
Jan 1 comes round and I make some broad strokes on my blank canvas. Where do I want to visit, whom do I want to kill and so on. Then around Chinese New Year’s I whittle down the exact dates I want to travel and the precise means I want do use to kill someone. I finalize the resolutions around Islamic New Year’s, which in case you didn’t know falls on Muharram the 1st, and so death is in the air anyway and one feels less self-conscious talking offhandedly about decapitation.
Exercise is always a good habit to commit to around this time. I try and go to the gym regularly anyway, and since my body dysmorphia is a yearlong companion it seems petty to sully NY resolutions with it. To add fat to my wound, I got an email from my gym in New York recently telling me that they have gone bankrupt and all locations have closed overnight. This is both a shock and, if I am honest, a relief. Now I have resolved to not be one of those chumps sitting in the confines of the gym but to become an aerial acrobat that leaps from building to wall like a well-dressed Spiderman. Perhaps I’ll do some martial arts, or boxing, or swimming, something that gets me out of my large and pudgy comfort zone.
But my only real resolution is to be kinder to myself. It’s not a grandiose one like learning how to fly a plane, nor is it a selfless one as when people begin volunteering at orphanages. Still, I think it’s important. Especially at the one time of the year that focuses on what is not good about you and what you have to change, I propose it might be nicer to focus on what you like about yourself.
Lord knows I don’t do it often. Like anyone I’m guilty of sometimes inflating my fragile ego with (self invented) tales of my genius and bravado, but what I mean is to acknowledge the things about you that you aren’t happy about and saying “that’s OK.” It’s a powerful act, to do that, and it’s not easy. But if you start hating yourself for being something, it holds less power over you. So let’s try it together. Take a breath and say ‘I love me!” Now go have some cheese, because it loves you too. And even if it doesn’t, hate can’t taste that good.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com