On New New Year’s Resolutions
A quick 2020 Google search for the top New Year’s resolutions returns: Eat Healthier. Exercise More. Spend Less.
This list immediately raises red flags for me as a social justice-focused therapist. I read the implied: Be thin. Be attractive. Be wealthy. I think about what this list says about what our culture values, and then whose values those even are. I think about advertising and capitalism and diet culture and individualism. Reader, I see this list and I get worked up.
But I am not quite willing to throw out the whole idea of New Year’s resolutions. As a therapist, I think that a lot of my job is about change and, as a person, I sincerely believe that change is possible. I also think that you can never have enough metaphors or frameworks or ways to understand the world.
why do we make new year’s resolutions?
So, because I am a person soothed by research, I started looking into the history of New Year’s resolutions. If you do this, it quickly becomes apparent that humanity has long held an impulse to nostalgically review the past and look forward to the future, but that when we have decided to do this has been somewhat arbitrary. As the dominant ideologies/religious frameworks for understanding the world have shifted over time, so too has the calendar and subsequently the day on which we officially declare the start of a new year.
To be clear: that this tradition is arbitrary does not render it meaningless. I think acknowledging that the very idea of the new year is a product of human invention allows us to regain some agency. If humans are the ones who came up with the idea, we can also change it! We can explore the possibilities of resolutions and the systems that underlie them. We can use what we learn to create our own rituals to honor transitioning into a new year, as well as our own choices.
My favorite image that I encountered in my research was that of the old Roman god, Janus. With two faces on opposite sides of a single head, Janus was the god of transition, time, passages, beginnings, endings. He stood in the doorway between the future and the past, looking in each direction.
What I like about Janus is that he’s looking both ways but still the one being. I think sometimes, especially around transitions, we look only forward, trying to get ourselves away from the past. We want to Exercise More and forget all the reasons why this year we weren’t able to exercise enough. We want the new year to be different, we want to be different, but we don’t often hold much space or tenderness for why we are the way we are in the first place.
the importance of making more complex new year’s resolutions
But what if this January, for our New Year’s resolutions, we were able to approach an old concept with new complexity? What if we were able to hold both the past and the future, the good with the bad, the things we want as well as the systems that influence how we want them?
What I’m saying is not: Don’t exercise more in 2021. What I’m saying is: hold your desire to Exercise More within the context of the past year being mostly-at-home global pandemic days, the current cultural zeitgeist around fitness, and the holistic context of what more exercise would really get you and why you want it. Instead of Exercise More, maybe it’s: Feel More at Home in My Body, or maybe it’s: Enjoy My Time More or Divert Energy from Work into Life. You get to decide the part that matters.
What I’m talking about is a shift from firm, quantitative, capital-R Resolutions that move us closer to a specific (often heteronormative, patriarchal, white supremacist, ableist, American) vision of “success,” toward new ideas of living that move us in the direction of more connection and authenticity. I’m talking about moving toward whatever it is we truly yearn for, deep down.
It could be more laughter, more support, more vulnerability. It could be less guilt, less loneliness, less fear.
I encourage you to find new New Year’s Resolutions for yourself in this transition from 2020 to 2021. Instead of asking yourself how you want to be different or better going forward, here are some more expansive questions to help you stand in the doorway of the present moment, holding both the past and the future:
questions to guide your “new” new year’s resolutions
Retrospective queries about the last year
What about the last year surprised you?
What did you learn about yourself?
What did you survive?
What did you realize you could live without?
What did you realize you need to live?
How did you grow? How did you change?
What did you feel too afraid to try?
What do you need to feel safe? What about to be yourself?
What do you wish you had known sooner?
Things to think about looking forward
That thing you wish you’d known— What do you want to do with that moving forward?
What do you want your life to look like?
What is important to you? What isn’t?
What would make you feel more authentic? More connected?
What privileges do you have and how could you use them to support others?
What makes you feel alive?
What helps you be present?
What can you do to feel more at home in your body?
What do you want to learn? How do you want to grow?
What are you ready to try now?
Anna Kim is an Associate Clinical Social Worker, a writer, and an adventurer. Anna works with individuals, intimate relationships, families, and groups to support growth and change. She is especially interested in grief & loss, identity & authenticity, and attachment, but appreciates all the infinite, complicated parts of being alive.
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