I love resolutions and fresh starts and new years. I love the cleanliness of it, that crisp break. How one day you were one person and the next day you could try again. Of course, you can make resolutions and new rituals any time of the year, but I love the feeling of collectively giving it a go all at the same time. I also love lengthy resolutions, assessing every facet of life (personal, financial, emotional, physical, etc.), and examining all the ways in which we could have better lives or be better selves.
Of course, I know so many of these resolutions fail, and fail quickly. Which is why I try and build some resilience into mine, making sure that if I fuck up for a whole month or three whole months, I can pick back up 100 days later and still feel that I’m working toward this commitment I made to myself.
So with that, here are five of the resolutions (among so many others) I’m committing to this year that all intertwine with one another to create one big shift in the way I go about my days:
Read more news/stories from my favorite outlets (High Country News, The Atlantic, Orion Magazine) in full, and do less skimming as various headlines are fed my way through email and social media platforms. I listened to a fascinating podcast in which Maryanne Wolf (a researcher and scholar at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies) talked about the impacts of skimming on our brains, our attention spans, and our ability to think. She says it’s important to carefully choose what we read and read it deeply. In a world so flooded with input, our ability to read deeply (not just skim!) is becoming more and more precarious. And it scared me because I’ve been feeling this to be true for myself, but kept brushing it off and skimming more articles. As an avid reader (and writer) this was so fascinating and troubling and made me re-think how I wanted to approach news, which is essential for my job and work in the climate movement, but has become a rush of one-liners and quick info bites for Instagram that leave me panicky and unsatiated.
Read more books. This resolution is on my list nearly every year, not necessarily because I think I should read more books, but because I think I should do less of other things like watch Instagram Reels and TikTok videos. Reading books seems like the most valuable way to replace those bad habits. And usually, it is. But this year I set a goal to read 40 books (5 more than last year) and came up about 10 books short. I really struggled to read in 2022, not because I didn’t have time (I definitely did), but because I kept picking up books that halfway through felt incredibly disappointing. As soon as the magic was lost, I’d pick up my phone and return once again to Instagram, trying for weeks to finish the book to no avail. I worried that I’d broken my brain with social media (see the first resolution) and completely lost my love for books. But after chatting with a few friends who had similar experiences this year, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not the problem, but my book choices might be. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that my brain is not broken, but nonfiction is. In an age where skimmable content thrives, and quick, relatable quotes drive the social media engines, nonfiction has become a beige formula of subpar writing that looks something like this: Deeply fascinating topic > Insightful prologue full of quotable, moving material leading you to believe you’re about to devour something wonderfully salient > Chapter after chapter after chapter of lackluster case studies and meek personal experiences to prove the point of the book which quickly becomes annoying rather than moving. I realized 60% of the way through yet another terrible nonfiction book last month that my brain wasn’t having trouble diving deeply into the subject matter. The subject matter just wasn’t deep (Sorry Golden, you were ironically just full of noise). So many books I read this year felt like they were written out of obligation to “write a book” rather than because anything interesting or beautiful needed to be said. It felt like “content” and not “art.” It felt skimmable and surface-level and not very challenging. It felt like the same three ideas were said over and over and over again. Finally, in this last month of the year, I switched over to fiction (a genre I am embarrassed to say I’ve read almost none of since receiving my fiction writing minor in college) and quickly inhaled three of the best books I’d read all year. So perhaps “read more fiction” is really the resolution here and “figure out the nonfiction publishing crisis” is a 2024 resolution to work up to.
Gossip/complain about/analyze other people less. For those of you that know me well, I KNOW, I’M WORKING ON IT. There’s an astrological joke that Geminis love drama. In that sense, I am a Gemini through and through. I cannot keep a secret to save my life (please for the love of god do not tell me any secrets, I will break your heart). I get giddy for work emails with subject lines that read “URGENT PLS READ” because I know something juicy is inside. I secretly love chaos that does not directly impact me (a coworker rage quitting, a messy divorce, an aggravatingly petty dispute on Nextdoor) and I know it’s a little fucked up. I could defend myself on some level (drama makes me feel more connected with people authentically, small talk makes me exhausted and chaos feels more deeply human, some systems really do need to burn right to the ground and take terrible people down with them), but I know it’s getting out of hand. I also know that it’s a coping mechanism to focus on others and not focus on myself (ugh, but myself is fickle and moody and so much less exciting than others!). Once, in middle school when I was still very very Christian, I gave up gossip for lent and after a torturous week of keeping my big mouth shut, I fell into a kind of freedom in which conversations were no longer laced with shame and regret. Instead, I found other wonderful things to talk about and was also able to encourage my friends to find other things to talk about. Just as someone who gives up sweets for lent can easily say, “Oh that cake looks DELICIOUS but I’ve given it up, just for lent!” I was able to say, “That thought about Sarah sounds SO INTERESTING but I gave up gossip for lent!” And then we’d move on to something else. I clung to the practice even after lent ended and still come back to it now and again when I feel myself slipping out of control. So here we are, 16 years later, trying once again to tone it down, at least a little.
Be less messy. For a person that so genuinely loves clean, tidy spaces, I am incredibly messy. And have gotten much worse in the last few years. I’m not sure what the change has been but my ability to do dishes, fold clothes, and put away projects has been completely obliterated. I let things pile up until they are overwhelming, and then I’m so overwhelmed that I let them pile up some more. And this absolutely does not fly in a 120 square-foot-camper (let alone an entire house). Truly, I’m frustrated with myself. I don’t know why I’m feeling so resistant to cleaning up my space. I think it has something to do with working too much and taking on too many projects and not feeling like I get any free time to just be. Filling what scraps of free time I have with chores feels cruel. Letting everything pile up feels like a rebellion against the system. And yet, cleaning my space always makes me feel less icky. So maybe part of this resolution is to build more free time into my schedule so it doesn’t feel all-consumed with chores, and maybe to not see chores as chores, but rather a sort of caring for myself and a ritual of sorts (see next resolution).
Create more rituals. Ever since the pandemic hit in 2020 and I no longer had to drive to work and had no need for an alarm clock, or pants, or packing lunches, the little rituals that carried me through my days evaporated into the virus-infested abyss. I would wake up whenever my body wanted to wake up (which became more erratic as my sleep became more erratic), I’d brush my teeth whenever I remembered (which led to my first cavity in 22 years), and I’d wear roughly what I’d worn to bed all day and then back to bed again. Even though nearly THREE YEARS have passed since that era began, I have yet to re-establish any sort of rituals to anchor my life to. Most days I just sort of float around wondering how it is that it’s already 2:00pm and I’m still in my pajamas and haven’t brushed my teeth. Part of the problem is that I tried to go too big in re-establishing said rituals (i.e. “I will wake up at 5:00am and write and meditate and cook a nourishing meal and clean the kitchen and journal and…”) rather than just saying “Alright! New ritual is to put on clothes when you wake up and brush those crusty-ass teeth.” One day I would like to be a person with an extensive morning and evening care ritual (as I have done in the past) but I need to inch back into it gently. Just try throwing on a bra maybe. Take it slow. I’ll share more about what works for me as the year goes on, but would love to hear about your own rituals in the meantime!
I could write about resolutions for pages and pages, but I’ll leave you with that. I hope you have a lovely start to 2023, and I hope maybe you’ll share some resolutions with me (or even failures as Mari Andrew does every year). I’ve got some fresh ideas for The Hag next year and hope you’ll stick with me on this writing journey!
These are great, Anja. And tbh I know what you mean about nonfiction. I feel like a lot of nonfiction books should just be magazine features. I wonder if there's a pressure for authors to write books though because of how pay rates in journalism have declined. Whatever the root of it, though, I too am reading more fiction and loving it. I also read recently that fiction is better for improving your working memory (since you have to remember characters, plot details, etc), which helped me feel less guilty since for a long time I thought reading fiction was not "productive." Anyway sorry to ramble and happy new year!