Meggie Fairclough - The Messiah, Lady Gaga, and Knitting

I had good intentions, I really did. However, it simply cannot be denied that I am a complete and utter failure when it comes to successfully carrying out my New Year’s resolutions. It’s not even three weeks into January and I have already failed the first and most basic resolution of my list of ten: “complete at least five resolutions this year”.

I didn’t get off to an auspicious start. On New Year’s Day, being in Austria, I was inundated with Schnapps. Alcohol is fine, and I was not stupid enough to attempt to quit that, but I was stupid enough to believe I could go for a month without chocolate. Apparently, as well as coming up with psychoanalysis and Schnitzel, the Austrians have invented chocolate Schnapps (and, incidentally, I was rolling with the idea that knocking down peach Schnapps is essentially having one of your five a day).

Arriving in Cambridge quickly shattered the majority of my remaining list. For example, one resolution was to “get to grips with what I want to do in life”. Now, becoming the Messiah or the next Lady Gaga was never considered an option; I aimed small, and so I thought it would be easy. I simply went to the Careers Service and told them I’m good with people and like a challenge. After all, Psychology is ultimately a degree for people who don’t have any idea what they want to do. Little did I know that the Careers Service was a challenge unto itself, and I left having less of a clue as to what I’m going to do with my life than when first entering. Apparently careers as either a policewoman or a weather presenter are my best bets!

Taking up knitting was a different sort of resolution altogether... yet even here, my dad’s new knitted ‘hat’ ended up being so unfortunately misshapen that it could pass as some sort of woolly willy warmer, for want of a better phrase.

So, is there any hope left for those of us who will probably never be able to merrily tick our way down a list of New Year’s resolutions? Quite honestly, probably not. But really, I don’t think that it matters too much. One of the special things about resolutions is that they make you realise that you’ve somehow survived long enough to reach the point you’re at now, regardless of whether you go for a run every day, or managed to learn to speak fluent Korean. If we’re still here, I guess we must be doing something right.

 

Beth Cloughton - Why fad resolutions are just, well, fads

Oh, hey there. How’s your chai soy latte going? How’s that vegan cream you’ve got going on top of your matcha tea? How is your gym regime? New Year’s resolutions aren’t really resolutions at all. They are more like a commercial injection of positivity that your self can be made better at the stroke of midnight, almost in a reverse style of Cinderella. They are fleeting like a Zante romance, and yet mine this year is still withstanding. My New Year’s resolution is, you know, sort of ‘meta’. It’s sort of ‘modern’. My New Year’s resolution was to not have one (boom). Now, pedants, I know and you know this means in turn I have a New Year’s resolution, and to that I have no answer except that I am greedily munching into a bag of pre-grated cheese. This dynamic has meant I have indulged in a bit of the old penny sale at Holland & Barrett and looked at a gym. Sure, my gluteus maximus is not that of a marble statue, nor is my skin glowing like a freshly polished shoe, but entertaining a two-week fad diet does more bad than good, and my pockets are perhaps too heavy with all the coins I have saved not purchasing a Bootea detox shit-yourself-and-pay-for-it drink.

A *clap* *clap* *clap* for those who have sustained their resolution because it is only the third week and it isn’t impressive yet. I want you to succeed, it’s just that the world did not design the façade of a ‘New Year’s resolution’ for you to become a better person: ‘they’ created it to make you feel inadequate and buy a waist trainer. Why have I never heard of someone’s New Year’s resolution to be something like “I want to remain exactly the same if only to reflect after 365 days and be happy with whatever progress I have made”. Or “I want to be able to do a really cute sticker collage to hide my corporate investment of a mac laptop”?

It is because of ‘the man’, ‘the system’, the lie.

 

Noa Lessof Gendler - “stop biting nails is as far as it goes"

From the age of about fourteen, I set myself resolutions every year. In my idealistic adolescent phase, they were basically preposterous. I’d pick ten on a variety of themes, including ones such as ‘exercise three times a week’, ‘drink eight glasses of water a day’, ‘meditate before bed’ and ‘write a blog post every weekend’. Needless to say, these would last until about 6th January, by which point I wouldn’t have exercised once, and I’d give up on the whole endeavour. In more recent years, I streamlined: in 2015, I committed only to writing one short story a month. That failed by March. The only resolution I’ve set every year is to stop biting my nails, and the ongoing necessity of that demonstrates my success.

This year, I haven’t set myself a single resolution. Here’s why. My life is tough enough as it is. I struggle just to get out of bed in the morning, to remember to take my medication at the same time every day, to motivate myself to read things in time for my supervisions. I find it hard to get laundry done and make myself do the washing up. I have to fight myself in order not to buy cheesy chips in the middle of the nights and obscene amounts of alcohol when I’m already well into my overdraft. These things are enough to be getting along with as it is.

Setting myself pernickety resolutions which I’ll only feel guilty about is not going to improve my life or make me a better person. I know what I need to work on – being awake during daylight hours, spending reasonably, working consistently – and bullet-point lists will only be one more reminder when I’m failing. ‘Resolutions’ just add unnecessary pressure. I don’t need any more pressure – I’m well aware of my flaws, thanks. So this year, I’m just going to try and get my shit together in my own way and in my own good time. I’m not going to feel guilty if I don’t get down to the gym three times a week.

But I’m still definitely going to try and stop biting my nails. Because it’s disgusting.