Oh, look – December 26th arrives, and blammo! – the inevitable television advertisements pop up, attempting to sucker people into buying into the “New Year, New Me” school of thought by banking on the fact that everyone’s feeling like ten pounds of shit in a two-pound bag after seasonal over-indulgence. It’s quite interesting, though rather contemptible, that the way they do this shows exactly what view they have of the sexes and what they best respond to when you want to manipulate them.
Targeting women: “Losing weight is really hard because you can’t have any cake, and we’ve all had enough of being judged, haven’t we, girls? Take our pills.”
Targeting men: “You look like a twat, and people laugh at you. Join our gym.”
But, meh. I guess it’s something to do with the first couple of weeks of your January.
If I’m coming over as a cynical old curmudgeon, then I do beg your ever-so-pardon. But realistically, nearly all New Year’s resolutions mean absolutely butt-fuck nothing, and you know that as well as I do. If they meant anything to the people making them, they wouldn’t need whatever psychological leg-up the first day of January adds to the mix, because they’d already have started making the changes they need to make. It could be that the limbo period preceding that date – slobbed out flatulently on the sofa feeling like a hung-over hippopotamus, mechanically conveying half a tub of Quality Street chocolates into your gob – confronts you with the realisation that something needs to change. But a calendar date is a funny sort of place to hammer in your first piton for your ascent, given that everything will very soon afterwards revert back to the same dismal conditions under which you bumbled into your present intolerable position in the first place.
I’ve long considered New Year’s resolutions kids’ stuff. The meaning of this changes over time, of course. When you’re a child, your resolutions tend to be things your parents think are a good idea (“Have you made any New Year’s resolutions, Hector?”, followed by being given pointed helpful hints whether you have or not.) So you end up with “I will keep my bedroom tidy this year” or “I will work harder at school”. They’re not things you’re personally invested in – they’re just things your parents want you to do, using the fact that it’s January 1st in an attempt to make you feel you ought actually to do them this time – so your efforts in their direction rarely even reach a “half-hearted” level. Then, for those still bothering with the concept as adults with no parents breathing down their necks – and once you’ve weeded out the wafty New Age-y ones you see posted on Facebook with a rainbow in the background, like “2025 is my year for embracing change”, which is more or less code for “2025 is my year for attempting to be at peace with the fact that I have given up” – you tend to get the grown-up equivalent of something an oversugared child with no brakes might come up with: “This year I will dump Useless Simon, go travelling in Bali and find myself, and meet a man who deserves me!!!” (Yeah, of course you will, Dorothy.)
And me? I’ve got weight to lose. I’m not talking about weight in the physical sense here (although you can look at the photographs of me illustrating a couple of posts in this blog and decide for yourself whether or not you agree) but psychological weight; the compacted sludge of feelings of fear, grief and hopelessness that come for me in my sleepless hours, when there are no distractions to drown them out. I can’t pretend, least of all to myself, that I can sling it all aside, turn my back on it and ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay my triumphant way into the New Year just because the calendar resets; if I could do that, I wouldn’t have a problem to start with. I can look at it, explore it, maybe chip away at it with whatever tools and strength I can find; sometimes all I can do is sit with it, and when that’s so, that’s what will have to suffice.
That’s part of what this blog is for. I find it easier to articulate my thoughts in writing than in speech, and it works too with the analytical side of my brain, because to write about what I’m going through I need to dissect it and work out what’s going on with it first. In a way, it’s through the process of writing about my thoughts that I learn for myself what they are.
It’s not a glamorous, Instagram-friendly process, and it comes with no show of a “journey” painstakingly curated to make me look marvellous, or any intention of its winning me praise or “followers”; it’s about going within myself, for myself. But you can watch if you like, though you’ll have to bring your own pop-corn.