All of my favorite New Years Eve memories have been the quiet ones. They are the moments like the time when I flew out to Oklahoma and played games with my giggling, sober friends or sitting around the fireplace in our PJs as a family in 2020 reflecting on the good that came out of the year. Besides those few simple memories, I've never had great feelings about the holiday.
I’ve never been able to properly explain it, but I generally don’t like celebrating New Years. I'm just not a fan of loud parties, and I’ve always thought the idea of starting over and creating new goals on what seems like such an arbitrary day was silly. If you’re going to make changes, why wait until the New Year? You can wake up and change tomorrow if you want to!
The version of me that thought this way had a lot of growing up to do. She’d never experienced a year of adult life where you have the same structured routine every day, go to an office and work from 9-5pm, and come home too tired to work on yourself. It’s so easy to pour every bit of my energy into my work and relationships that taking care of myself actually requires devoted effort and thought. The version of myself that thought that a clean slate in the New Year was pointless had never experienced 2023.
I don’t know what kind of journey you have been on in the last year, but the title of 2023 could have been, “The Year of Really Hard Conversations.” Every moment I turned around someone I loved was going through a crisis, or someone was angry and leaving my church. I work in ministry, and I don’t want to spoil this for anyone, but it is NOT easy. People get mad when you don’t say anything. People get mad when you do say something. People get mad when you say something but not in the way they wanted. At times, it can be absolutely maddening. That can really weigh heavy when you feel things deeply like I do, and that was all on top of the difficult conversations happening in my personal life and outside of work.
There were so many moments this year when I didn’t know how to respond best. I try so hard to love people, in my case as much like Jesus as possible. I’ve been told that loving people is something that I’m good at, but I was at such a loss so many times. There have been countless times in the last year where I initially wanted to respond one way, typically with lots of ranting and telling people how it really is, only to realize that loving people in the best way that I possibly can looks nothing like that. Turns out it looks more like listening, not speaking, and just being a safe space. Doing that well and consistently is hard, and at times exhausting, work.
Because of these seemingly never ending difficult moments, I was giving every ounce of myself away to other people, and because of the monotony of adult work life, it quickly became a habit for me to not care for myself. It was easier to eat out and not eat well. It was easier to come home and just lay in bed instead of doing something productive or mood boosting. It was easier to hide under the covers and not exercise. It was easier to justify staying up late because I clearly didn’t have enough time for myself and what I wanted to do during the day.
So for me, for the first time probably ever, the New Year seems like a really natural reset button. I love reflecting on the past year over the holiday, but I rarely use it as a time to set goals and better myself because I tell myself I am doing that year round. Well, this year was different, and bettering myself was really back burnered. That’s no one’s fault but my own, which means that making changes is also only my own responsibility. At the start of 2024, I’m hopeful. I know more difficult moments will happen this year. That’s just how life works. But I am honestly working at being a better, healthier version of myself so that I am able to handle those moments with more kindness, love, gentleness, and peace when they inevitably arrive.
Here’s to a brighter 2024, to working on ourselves, and to being on the journey of New Year’s resolutions that I used to find pointless but completely understand now. I guess that’s at least a decent representation of doing some of the growing up that I needed to do. Here’s to growing up a little more every year! May we all continue growing and learning for the rest of our lives.
You are truly and deeply loved.
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