A reinvigoration, criticism, and ode to the classic New Year's Resolution:
By Kellyanne Fitzgerald
January 1st has come and gone, and by then, I will doubtless have decided which facets of my personality to overhaul this year. My birthday is New Year’s Eve, and as a to-do list, bullet journal kind of person, the sheer limitlessness of New Year’s Resolutions, is in itself a kind of yearly “happy birthday: you have permission to dream.”
You can put the most ridiculous things on your New Year’s Resolutions. You can decide to stop eating shrimp. To start eating shrimp. To make shrimp twenty one different ways in 2021. To have shrimp themed outfits, or write twelve pieces on shrimp, or learn how to say shrimp in ten different languages. You are limited only by your own imaginings of what is possible to plan around shrimp, and by what shrimplike-constraints you don’t realize you have added to your list.
In years past, I have planned to study more Irish, take a pole dancing class, finish embroidery pieces started in childhood, learn to make 30 different dinners, write a novel in a month, and a myriad of other excellent while ridiculous goals. Among them I have dotted the usual suspects: eat less, move more, make more art, sleep more, scroll less, be happier. At the end of year, like a council of ancient senators, I meet with myself to determine the state of things.
Every year, like a magpie, I find myself falling in love with different periods of history, trends in jewelry, kinds of data to collect about myself. The problem is, unlike the magpie, I am not limited to what fits into a nest. I keep the old goals, and add new ones. My resolutions list is hundreds long and growing every year. And the effect on my life is hard to quantify. I can manufacture all the conditional joy I want by cultivating habits, and committing to community and venues for goals. But my job will still pay me the same amount. My brain will still have trouble keeping me on the straight and narrow path of happiness. The world appears to have gotten a lot bigger and darker, or my brain is worse at telling me “you can worry about that when you are older” - particularly as birthdays appear with more regularity now than ever before. And the countless goals that demand 36 hours in a day even were I to manage progress on half of them with regularity, beat at the temples of my brain like birds trapped in the airport, dashing for the automatic doors.
How to be happy with yourself, as you are, without developing a complacency that prevents you from taking initiative to work toward where you want to be? How to give up on good things you want, in the interest of better things you want? How to look ahead at where you want to be, only enough to sight and plan, and not enough to hate the life you live now? It’s a quiet crisis. It’s rooms that don’t have enough light. Realizing how long you’ve had your jeans, and an unexpected breakdown at the thought that you will probably never be able to afford the lifestyle you have always expected would fall into place. Kitchens with fridge doors that won’t open all the way.
Putting myself against a grindstone of goals, productivity, and self-overhaul in the interest of becoming my ideal self, has a cost. The weight of the class I haven’t taken yet is heavier than the achievement in the rear view mirror. Dreams of an ideal self sometimes scrape painfully against the body I live in now. But I accept the scratches for what they are: proof of movement, evidence of growth to present to myself at the end of every year. I call myself a river, and know that stopping is the same as dying.
series of admonitions directed at myself in the season of New Year
Against the pressure for reinvention, against the good goals and serious dreams and longing for the future - be kind to yourself.
Against sloth disguised as sorrow, against sorrow disguised as sloth, and the pandemic sweatpants that blur the lines between - be kind to yourself.
Against the productivity that turns into a hamster wheel while the real work goes on outside your apartment walls, against the idea that work done with hands and blisters is the only “real” work - be kind to yourself.
Against obsessively tracking how old everyone you admire was when they first wrote something amazing - be kind to yourself.
Against arriving at the evening with the feeling that nothing you did that day mattered - be kind to yourself.
Happy New Year: you have permission to dream.
Kellyanne Fitzgerald is a writer and artist based in Madison, Wisconsin. In her free time she enjoys language learning, fiber arts, and folk art illustration.
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