All that a new year brings
I returned on Wednesday from five beautiful days in the Marlborough Sounds, walking the Queen Charlotte Track and just relaxing with my partner, Jacob. We saw in the new year in our dreams, having turned out the light much earlier in preparation for an early rise. It was quite liberating, actually – the first time since I can remember that I’ve chosen to head to sleep ahead of the midnight celebration. There is a lot of hype and expectation around New Year’s Eve, undoubtedly as a result of the messages we’ve received through our culture that something suddenly exciting and life-changing is going to happen as the clock strikes midnight – we’ll lock eyes with ‘the one’, we’ll transform into a new person, etc. etc. With the fireworks celebration off due to COVID-19, I quickly shrugged off any ‘shoulds’ about staying up, donned my earplugs and set my alarm for 6:45.
Escaping the tyranny of the ‘shoulds’ at New Year’s Eve doesn’t, I discovered, spare you from the struggle of the new year transition. While we often think of transitions as things like moving house, starting a new job, becoming an adult, transitions are any move from one thing to another, big or small – seasons, day to night to day, birthdays, the new year. Sheryl Paul, in her book The Wisdom of Anxiety, talks about transitions as being periods that can induce feelings of:
grief
confusion
fear
numbness
Of course, many of these feelings will be masked by a sense of generalised anxiety. Rather than focusing on the single event of New Year’s Eve, it can be helped we drop into those feelings and explore what is going on for us as we move into this new year. As a society, we are undoubtedly impacted by the messages we’ve recevied that emphasise ‘new year, new me’. It’s a time in which there is immense pressure to immediately shed the things about ourselves we no longer want, even if those things are not things we need to ‘get rid of’ at all – there can be a lot of guilt associated with not immediately being different on January 1st. But changes take time, self-compassion and patience. Sheryl Paul says:
Culturally, we focus on the externals of a transition – planning a wedding, buying the car seat, packing the boxes [in this case, the NYE celebration/gym membership/bullet journal] – to the exclusion of the inner realm. While the externals are important, when we bypass working consciously with the emotions activated during transition, we decrease our chances of adjusting to the new life as cleanly and gracefully as possible. This can have long-term negative consequences not only during the transition at hand but for our lives in general.
I love this reminder. No matter how aware I am of the unnecessary hype and impossible expectations around the new year, it still gets to me. A part of me still thinks that I’ll wake up on January 1st and be different and have achieved the goals I want to achieve – yes, my 2022 will bring change, but it won’t happen overnight. It’s so important to sink into how I’m feeling, to explore it, and not shy away from it. It’s also important to recognise that many of the shifts we wish to see in ourselves and our lives take years – taking a long-term view and being patient is a must.