8. Thinking About 2025 Resolutions?
What if the generic practice of New Year's Resolutions isn't serving you?
I’m not ready for the onslaught of New Years Resolutions themed content that is right around the corner. This newsletter started from a seed earlier this year and my choice to skip setting a reading challenge. Some concerning reflections led me to see that despite being in the habit of setting these goals each year, it was no longer serving me.
I am achievement driven and shame averse. Despite my struggles and commensurate low grades in middle school, and passable grades in high school, I graduated with a 3.9(something) undergrad and 4.0 in grad school. My grades improved through extraordinary effort all the while undiagnosed,, untreated and under-resourced around all things ADHD. Not to mention navigating family, relationship, and work struggles as is likely a relatively universal experience for young adults.
I started to realize that tallying each book mark of progress on the way to my reading challenge goal was more about the achievement than the experience. The number of heart emojis on my book goal post more satisfying than the epic journey through the landscape of a mind that is not my own.
Further, I realized reading had become my go-to socially acceptable form of dissociation. Exiting the realities of the world and immersing myself elsewhere. Then I noticed this shame that is so often the response I hear when discussing books with fellow readers. Book recommendations began feeling like a should, and my TBR pile would already take years to finish.
It brings me right back to the idea I was sifting through in one of my first newsletters, What is a Dream?. The premise is relevant as we’re about to be bombarded with New Years Resolutions content. What is under or driving our goals and dreams, and how authentic are they to ME in this unique experience only I can have in this lifetime? The marketing is going to push for more, better, harder, with an undercurrent message of ‘you aren’t good enough as you are now, you always need to be better.’ If you’ve read any of my other content, you won’t be surprised that I’m not here for that kind of experience.
Below are reflections on my relationships with some of the most common ‘New Year, New Me’ related practices and how my relationship with them have evolved over time.
New Year’s Resolutions:
I quit resolutions years ago. Long enough I can’t remember when. What I do remember is that something didn’t FEEL right about it. Plus, I was never successful. This far out, I know that part of it is how resolutions are tied in with capitalism (buy more, do more, produce more) and heavily focused on aesthetic things like body/weight related goals. While the latter always bothered me personally, I learned more about how insidious anti-fat bias is in our culture through reading Fat Talk. You can also find Virginia Sole-Smith on substack at Burnt Toast). It’s worth checking out, especially if you are raising or have any relationship with children. The cultural influence of anti-fat bias goes beyond advertising, and has become part of school curriculum and influences the medical care we all receive. You may be straight-sized and believe that you are safe from disordered eating and/or thinking, and you will likely unearth some core beliefs born from bias filled misinformation, and it’s never too late to unpack your relationship with body, food and movement. For your own sake, or the sake of the other humans you influence, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Step/miles count:
I had gotten a $30 knock-off watch last year after my 2023 road trip, the one where I went to 24 national parks and hiked over 250 miles cumulatively. I loved the satisfaction of telling people my achievements. Especially as someone who hasn’t set foot in a gym in many years. The inspiration for the watch purchase was to keep me moving in between travels so I could pick hiking up without the painstaking process of building stamina again. What I didn’t readily acknowledge about that purchase was that I had noticed my phone mileage count and the all-trails hike tracking mileage never matched, and I wanted something more accurate to report back to others. The daily walks didn’t last long and I was vaguely aware my demand avoidance would kick in because without a ‘pretty sight*’ to be walking toward, it felt like a fitness related goal. This year, I hiked less and prioritized experiences in nature. I reflected on this in My Most Authentic Outdoorsy Self. The thing is, it’s way less satisfying when people ask about how my 2024 roadtrip has been, to do so without impressive stats to report.
In Calypso, a memoir by David Sedaris, one of the topics that stood out was his Fitbit obsession. In an article in the New Yorker, he says “people who are obsessive to begin with, the Fitbit is a digital trainer, perpetually egging us on.” (use an incognito tab to read the story beyond the paywall).
The good, the bad, and the ugly of step counting devices:
The good: He walked every day and as an older guy, the research suggests walking 6000 steps per day might help with arthritis prevention; the walking turned into neighborhood road trash pick-up adventures (yay for less beer cans on the sides of the roads).
The bad: The device suggests increases in steps once you’ve hit your goal a certain number of times, so much so that he wrote he was averaging 20 miles of walking per day
The ugly: Breaking a step streak became anxiety provoking and interfered with other aspects of life
I’ve seen it in others. Closing those Apple Watch rings can go from urging you to get outside, move your body when you work a desk job, and evolve into something else that doesn’t serve. A friend of mine kindly accompanied me to catch a view of the comet (C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) in October. Helping me find a viewpoint was a generous gesture. Little did I know that our short outing interfered with the time he would otherwise be closing those rings, and the entire next few days were then thrown off.
Reading Challenge:
My relationship with reading has changed over the last few years and can be summed up into the following periods:
Childhood (for pleasure)- sitting in the sun reading the entire day with Jamie, only stopping for meals with Nanny and Pop-pop. Sometimes finishing a novel in a day.
Academic (required)- reading and re-reading in desperate hope that when a quiz happened, my brain had managed to retain the particular kernels that had been chosen as ‘proof of understanding.’
Early adulthood- After high school, reading the classics that didn’t make it into any of my curriculum, relishing in the freedom of exploring the classics without a parallel graded experience. Still, this wasn’t entirely for pleasure as I felt like I was lacking some standard knowledge of books and story lines, and not having read those books made me less smart.
Career +self-help focused content- Sometimes this content was explicitly required and more often, implicitly. As therapists, it’s generally recommended to be actively involved in both personal and professional development.
Fiction and non-fiction by authors with different lived experience from mine- This intentional focus has been a part of a multi-pronged anti-racism/anti-oppression journey I committed to along with many other folks in 2020. I’ve always learned best through story and have always been attracted to memoirs.
Down the Romantasy Rabbit Hole- I finally listened to the recommendations of one of my best friends and read a romantasy series and I’ve been done for ever since. Reading anything with substance has felt like work. I’m in a reading rut.
As I reflected in the introduction, this relationship is shifting and the one action I took in service of preserving my love of reading and knowledge was to skip adding a reading challenge in my book app. Comically, I looked at my stats for the first time recently and without working toward a goal, I’ve read just as much as other years.
SO WHAT?! Do we give up on goals and resolutions and stay stagnant?
If we aren’t striving, grinding, hustling, showing our grit and tenacity, what ARE we doing in this lifetime? Is there a both/and, where we can choose practices that are aligned and less filled with shoulds?
As I was finishing up this newsletter, I noticed a relevant subject line in my email, Do This Before You Vision Board. I highly recommend giving it a read, as Juliet Diaz shares an Indigenous and decolonial perspective as well as some prompts to taking time for introspection BEFORE jumping to intentions.
Personally, I’m constantly reminding myself to lean into that which makes ease and contentment and sprinkles of joy possible. It’s not easy. My body is yet again rebelling the go-go-go and grounded me into solitude (isolation) for the first 5 days of my east coast return trip, recovering from the flu and quite possibly an overlap with a case of strep. The amount of times the phrase ‘waste of space’ popped into my head during my forced days of rest, was quite frankly disturbing. I’ve read Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey and follow her social content. When it comes to everyone else, I am a broken record about rest. Not just for the sake of recovery and returning to the grind. Rest as an inherent need in this lifetime. I know my body was recovering from a few weeks of unexpected chaos and going beyond my capacity before I left PNW, and still my automatic thoughts were those tied to the ‘must produce or feel like failure’ socialization of capitalism.
Taking a bath on the solstice, after a morning ritual led by my friends at Harmony Heartspace, I was filled with anxiety. I should be reading, I should be listening to a cathartic playlist, I should be journaling. What my body truly needed was to be still. The ceremony had revealed that one of my focuses this year will be HEALTH, and still, only hours later, my mind was insistent I wasn’t doing enough. In the bath. I waited out the anxiety, I noticed and allowed the information to be witnessed. Focusing on health will be difficult and require using discernment and saying no and practicing boundaries around my time. I will honor what comes up in the difficulty. Come Spring Equinox, I hope to have a more clear and authentic vision for the intentions I’d like to set for the new year.
READER INVITATION 💌:
What ‘shoulds’ come up for you as we’re approaching to Jan. 1?
If you are already doing your best to show up in your roles and stay connected to yourself throughout the inevitable hustle of the year end, is there space to be like the trees and allow some time before beginning to contemplate what you will produce/accomplish/give/achieve in 2025?
Can you spend the deepest of winter months making space for contemplation about what YOU want to be adding or removing from your life? If we wait until at least February, the marketing will have settled and hopefully have slightly less influence on what would truly serve you in the new year.
Land Acknowledgement: I’m home for a while and that means pressing publish while on the the ancestral territory of the Piscataway and Susquehannock Peoples. Both tribes were displaced, in the case of the Piscataway the land was documented as ceded; while the lands of the Susquehannock were stolen through broken treatise and encroachment of colonial settlers.
Footnote:
“I have stamina to see the pretty sights” was an affirmation I said daily for months leading up to my 2023 roadtrip and continued along the way. Sometimes over and over while hiking long inclines.
Beautiful land acknowledgment. I’m going to Hawaii with my husband who will mostly be at a work conference the whole time, so I’ve been looking up local museums and places to visit to learn more. There’s a really cool art exhibit going on while I’ll be there called Aloha Nō that I’m going to visit. It “invites visitors to (re)consider their notions and preconceptions of aloha. It is a call to know Hawai‘i as a place of rebirth, resistance and resilience.” I think things like this are important.