New Year, Same Old Pressure
Ugh, you know it’s the New Year, when you see all these people on social media sharing plans “to eat no white foods,” or “drink only kale juice,” or whatever other inspiring depressing resolutions they’re punishing themselves with, and all you can think of is,”…no booze? There but for the grace of God go I.” If you’re reading this blog, and you seriously want to judge me for my love of pickle martinis, dirty martinis, gin martinis, and martinis in general, you must have confused me with someone who wasn’t a malicious teenage girl at one time. Don’t go there; don’t wake the beast.
I just dislike the “thought”-process that because the earth has completed another successful passage around the sun, we should all radically change our lives and stop eating gluten. (At the very least, I dislike the fact that you’re sharing with the world your plan to no longer consume gluten, i.e. be better than the rest of us. The world doesn’t care! Save that tedious information for your tedious boyfriend/girlfriend. They have to care. The rest of us, thank heavens, can do better.) I mean, when you really think about it, changing your life because the earth went around the sun again is incredibly pagan, n’est pas? Should we also be reading tea leaves and ritually sacrificing virgins?
A much better plan is to deconstruct your problems: you want to lose weight, or write that book of short stories? Great. What small step can you do today, right now, to further your goals? You could take a brisk walk and, on the way home, buy the ingredients for a healthy, low-fat lunch. No, that’s not two hours on the tread-mill, but were you really going to do a damn Ironman at the gym anyway? Better to do something, ANYTHING, positive, than sit around waiting for perfection. Want to write a book? Excellent: sit down and write. You can read 1000 books/articles/blogs about writing, you can take a thousand writing workshops, you can ask everyone and their mom for advice…but nothing is as powerful as deciding that your human experience matters and writing today. Write one paragraph today. Write another one tomorrow. Write a third paragraph the day after. Wake up one day and realize, “Hey, I just wrote a complete chapter!”
I’m just saying, that making changes in the New Year takes time. It took time to accumulate your bad habits, you ain’t gonna shed them all in one day. Therefore, deciding that, overnight, you’re no longer going to enjoy sugar or booze or you’re going to hit the gym every day without exception, is, invariably, setting yourself up to fail. Don’t do it. Don’t feed your demons, the demons inside of you that enjoy seeing you fail. Your demons are wrong: you deserve your best.