Nothing is New
On New Year expectations
When did we decide that a New Year means resolutions, making changes, having a fresh start, all the New You shenanigans? One of the things I come back to a lot - in this whole ‘what is normal? who is normal? who needs normal anyway?’ process of discovering neurodivergence - is the gargantuan gap between expectations and reality for many people. Because New Years resolutions are notoriously hard to keep. This time of year is just often, super depressing.
And what is ‘new’? We have a new year, but who decided that it should be now? What is different now, than on the 31st December?
Nothing is new.
We, and the world, are a collection of repetitions. We might package them as shiny, but we, and our behaviours, and our ways of relating, and the world around us - it’s all pretty ancient.
We can feel that we are wiping the slate clean, or turning a new page. We can promise ourselves ‘this time will be different’. But we carry ourselves wherever we go, and our habits are old, and powerful, and we often look to the wrong places for guidance. I’m not saying change isn’t possible. Just it’s not very sexy. And it can be painful, boring, and arduous, and frustrating, and generally non-linear.
So why do we chase the new? Why this wish to start all over? Why, at this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere when everything in us is telling us to rest, to go slow, to sleep in the darkness and move slowly through rainy days, why do we crave something new and exciting?
I come back all the time to the attractiveness of pathways to follow. The appeal of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I wrote about that a lot in Parenting For Humans, in the context of the pathways we go down as parents, with the promise of the pot of gold of an easier family life, that often leave us feeling completely lost.
I realise now I tend to always think in terms of pathways and models, and how things fit together. And I also realise that most people don’t do that. The older I’ve got, the more complicated the pathways became, the more I had to add on additional routes - and the more I realised many of those pathways weren’t built for me. Unmasking and rebuilding for me is about building my own brand new pathway from the ground up. On solid foundations that will support that pathway.
No wonder the pathways always crumbled before. Trying to walk a pathway of difference when on a foundation of normality - I guess it’s like magnets repelling each other. Sometimes they align and it can all appear quite sturdy, but one little move and it all crashes down. At the moment, I feel like I’m walking in the dark but slowly I hope that the ground will feel more solid.
It’s so appealing, isn’t it. Having a trajectory. Walking a pathway lit by somebody else. The promise is - ‘If I do this, then this will happen, and then I’ll have this outcome’. Often the outcome is not a tangible one, not a solid object but something that we hope we’ll feel. If we are ‘successful’ (whatever that means) then we hope out loud that we’ll feel proud of ourselves. But there will be other hoped-for outcomes too that we’re less open about. Maybe deep down, we hope others will envy us, or that we’ll finally fill that hole of inadequacy that we carry with us, or that we’ll feel adored, or that we’ll find peace.
Turning to the Old
The difficult thing about looking for new solutions, or new ideas, or new 'Me’s is that we tend to look for them to fulfil something very very old. Let’s take the example above. Maybe we hope that this year, we’ll finally… I don’t know, let’s choose something fairly benign… learn to speak Spanish. We think about the outcome/pot of gold - to speak Spanish - we may even think about the pathway to get there (learning steps) and any help we need to walk that pathway (a language learning app, a tutor, a Spanish friend, for example).
But if we want to make the change meaningful, likely to stick, something deep rooted instead of surface level, we also have to figure out why we want to do it, and that’s where the old stuff comes in. So we could ask…
What does the outcome represent to me?
Maybe I want to learn Spanish because I want to go to Spain and be able to order a meal in Spanish because I think that would be cool, and that’s all there is to it.
But if I’m honest with myself, is that all there is to it? Or am I often the one who couldn’t learn languages, just never really had that skill, and ordering a meal in Spanish will make me feel worldly, and I hope that will stop me from feeling so stupid. And actually I feel stupid because I used to get laughed at all the time and I never really knew why, and there are some things (like Spanish) that just feel beyond my comprehension. So maybe instead of learning Spanish I actually need to figure out how to feel less stupid. Or how to let go of those memories of being laughed at. How to love myself more.
Maybe I want to learn Spanish because I never got the opportunity at school, because I had to drop out to take care of someone, and the person I cared for has died and now I want to do something that feels purposeful and fulfils something important to me that I had to let go of. And as I learn, I will also grieve and my achievements will be accompanied by sadness that I have this time to learn. And learning Spanish will represent a new phase in my life, and maybe it’ll be the start of something hopeful but I’m just going to take it one step at a time and honour my sore heart.
Maybe I want to learn Spanish because my in laws are Spanish and there’s something that I just always feel a bit uncomfortable about with them. I often feel that they’re talking about me and I don’t understand what they’re saying, so I’d like to learn Spanish in secret and find out what they really think of me. And maybe as I’m realising that this is my motivation I might feel a bit uncomfortable about that as a solution and maybe I’ll decide to talk to my husband openly about how I feel, or maybe I’ll just live with it being not the healthiest of solutions and do it anyway because I’d rather the dramatic satisfaction of catching them out than the conversation with my husband. But maybe then I might wonder why I often feel a bit persecuted by other people, and that might take me to thinking about why I don’t want to talk to my husband, and other times I’ve felt sidelined like that, and maybe I won’t learn Spanish at all, or talk to my husband maybe I’ll find a way to gently confront my in laws and maybe I’ll find that actually they’re just talking about the plans for the day and that they actually think quite well of me and maybe that’ll open up a more honest conversation about who made me feel ashamed. Maybe. Or maybe they will tell me that they are talking about me, but because I’m hard to read, because I’m waiting to feel persecuted, and maybe that will help me think about my own role in these scenarios. Maybe.
And so on.
So, nothing is new. Our new hopes, dreams, aspirations are often solutions to old problems. And we turn to new solutions so that we don’t have to face the old problem (because it’s painful, or messy, or incomprehensible, or boring, and it makes us feel a bit crap).
But, here’s what can be new. When we allow ourselves the level of self reflection and awareness that enables us to see what we’re doing - the old problem we’re trying to fix - then we can make new choices. Ones that put us on a more solid pathway, that is lined with bricks of understanding and compassion and forgiveness. And then we don’t need New Years Resolutions. Because change just happens, as it is meant to, as we live more in line with what feels good to us and those around us. And when we tend to those old problems, rather than find them impossibly painful, often they actually bring us fertile ground for new growth. Solid bricks, for new pathways.
If you’ve made any resolutions, you could ask yourself…
Not just ‘what I want’ but ‘why I want it?’
What meaning does this bring to me?
What do I imagine will change about me or my relationships or my world?
How do I feel about these fantasies now - do I want to aspire to that or something else?
I love all of this Emma. And one of my favourite phrases/concepts is to “shine the light on the normalising gaze” which you just did so eloquently. Forging new pathways, be it in our work, our beliefs, our relationships or our neural pathways (to name a few) is invigorating and fresh air.
I’m also just super bored with the repetitive and predictable patterns - looking for new ones 😉
I like the idea of tracking back and thinking about the *why* I want to change a particular thing. I’ve never been able to set resolutions tbh as they’ve always felt inherently dishonest to me - perhaps an unconscious recognition that change doesn’t happen in moments, it’s continually evolving - but also the idea of deciding on one fixed thing makes my head spin... I also wonder whether our fixation on New Years Resolutions comes from a place where we’re starved for ritual in western capitalist democracies. I started thinking about this when R and I got married last year - I couldn’t figure out why I wanted to do it after twenty years, and settled on the idea that at least partly I wanted the ritual - to mark and celebrate what has been, and a chance to commit to our future together. So many rituals that mark what it means to be human have been squeezed out of modern, western life and replaced by consumerism and materialism. Maybe this fixation on the turn of the year comes from a place where we crave the opportunity to collectively reflect and perhaps even connect over those reflections.