NEW YEAR, SAME ME (Lower Your Expectations)

As you know, 97.3% of people who make resolutions at New Year’s abandon them by the end of the year (the rest are, of course, cheating). When I heard that, I was shocked. Shocked. I asked myself, “Self?”

“Yeah.”

“How can this be?”

“How can what be?”

“The—thing I just said.”

“What thing?”

“Weren’t you listening just now?”

“Yeah, no.”

Dropping my head to my chest, I said, “Fine, I’ll start over. So, 97.3% of people who make resolutions abandon them—”

“By the end of the year. Everyone knows that. So what?”

“Well, I was just wondering why.”

“What do you mean why?”

“I mean why can’t we keep resolutions?”

Without a moment to think, Self replied, “Because improving ourselves sucks. It’s the worst. We like to be all like, Get it, girl! You got this! but in truth, most of us don’t got this, girl, because we would prefer to wish rather than work ourselves better. I’m not saying that’s wrong. Work is dumb. It’s hard. And we do enough of it in other areas of our lives that once we get to the hard work of improving ourselves, it becomes easier and easier to decide that those changes can wait.

“Want to know why the countdown felt so anticlimactic to you this year? It’s because you spent all last year working toward goals that take much longer than a year to achieve, and now you’re facing another year of work and doubt and frustration as you slog toward those exact same goals—which you might not achieve this year, either. Sure, you made progress, but you didn’t get the shiny gold star that comes with fulfilling a resolution. And you’re tired. I get it. It’s hard to keep going in the face of something that takes so long. But that’s life. You can’t squeeze your goals down to fit into a single year. You can’t expect to achieve anything truly meaningful in the course of a couple hundred days.

“Maybe we set ourselves up for failure with resolutions. Maybe we should reserve resolutions for silly things, like I resolve to quit accidentally ‘waving’ at people on Facebook like a dummy, or I resolve to go to the eye doctor and pick up milk, or I resolve to grow three inches by September—which is impossible at my age, but what is life without a little unfounded optimism? Actually, probably the best change you could make this year would be to quit social media entirely. You don’t enjoy it, you’re bad at it, you keep accidentally ‘waving’ at people in spite of your best intentions, and it makes you feel bad about yourself. Why do you want to be on there?

“I dunno. Maybe none of this matters. Maybe it’s enough to remind yourself once a year that you are capable of better and you can try to improve. Maybe if, at the end of the year, you can say you did your best, then that’s all that matters. Who knows. Anyway. Happy New Year, buddy. Good luck.”

After that I sat quietly, slumped on the floor, for a long time. The little punk was right. I am tired. I don’t want to keep working at things that feel completely insurmountable—or at least unbearably slow. And so I went for a walk. I thought of a lot of funny resolutions to put into a New Year’s post, and I came home and wrote them down. Then I deleted them. I wrote this instead. When I was finished I gave a great, thunderous sigh, as if I’d been holding my breath for months. Progress doesn’t have a fixed deadline. Improvement doesn’t have to fit neatly within a year. Knowing that, I feel better than I have in a long time. And now I’m going to get back to the long, slow, difficult work that makes us better—mentally, physically, spiritually.

It’s gonna suck. But let’s get on with it anyway.

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