New Year's Eve: A Progression

January 1st, 2017 (25 years old)

I woke up in complete darkness, as per usual.

The hum of my mini-fan wasn’t loud enough to drown out the sound of someone’s footsteps thundering down the staircase above me. Groggily, I wondered what time it was, and if I was the last one up.

I crawled to the edge of my bed and reached for my phone in the darkness, only to fumble it and drop it. When I found the phone a second time, I pressed the button on the side and turned on the screen: 11:05 am.

I groaned, and then nearly gagged as I noticed the taste in my mouth: utter ass. As I tried not to focus on how nauseous I felt, I remembered brief flashes from the night prior: shots of Jagermeister at midnight (who had brought that?), bourbon, orange juice, and the spliffs.

I sank face-down onto the padding of my bed, the edge of the wooden platform cutting into my check. I didn’t care enough to do anything about it.

I must have passed out before setting my alarm; so much for starting the new year with yoga and a run. Maybe I could make it to the gym later, if at any point that day I started feeling like a human again.

After another minute or two, I swung my legs toward the front of the bed, hardly feeling my knee hitting the wall on the way. Instead of turning on the closet light, I opted to just pat down my legs and torso in the darkness to verify that both halves were indeed clothed, before cracking open the door and stepping out into the hallway.

Bad timing. “Harry Potter is alive!” A passing roommate assailed me (quite loudly) with the old, tired joke about me living in the closet under the stairs. I squinted at him in the bright morning light, my head pounding. No polite smiles from me this morning.

I could smell bacon from the kitchen, where I knew my other roommates and party-goers from the night before were likely all nursing their hangovers. “You want a Bloody Mary? Joe’s making some.”

I considered my plans to work out, my New Year’s resolution to lose weight, to party less, my rock-climbing goals, how I wanted to be more productive this year — for all of four, fuzzy seconds, before replying:

“Yeah. That actually sounds really nice.”

I mean, did it really matter that I didn’t start my resolutions today? I had all year to do it.

______

One year later — December 31st, 2017 (26 years old)

By mid-December of that same year, I had moved out of that big party house and my closet under the stairs into — wait for it — a smaller party house, which had ended up being another equally unhealthy living situation. I was miserable there, and I knew that I needed to move out.

I took a chance on a three-bedroom apartment, split with two other climbers that I hardly knew. We landed the place on December 28th, and planned on moving in around January 3rd.

But the morning of December 31st, a soft, unexpected knowing arose within my heart. Quiet and pleading, it insisted:



I don’t want to start 2018 in a house I’m so unhappy in.

I want to start the new year in my new apartment.



Immediately, I knew this was what I wanted, and that I would do whatever I could to make it happen. Within moments, my phone was out of my pocket and I was texting the landlady, asking if she would let me move in a few days early. She told me that would be fine. 

I practically flew to the ATM to withdraw the cash for the first month’s rent, loaded up my little Toyota Camry with as many boxes as it could hold, and began moving by myself. As I hurried back and forth across town that day, I reflected on the state of my life, after several years of unhealthy habits, unhealthy relationships, and failed resolutions.

I was in a job with a toxic employer, still underpaid. I was in debt, and even thinking about my finances felt overwhelming. I wasn’t smoking weed anymore, but I was still drinking every day. I was terrifically anxious, and it was affecting everything in my life.

And I was tired. I was so, so tired. On a deeper level, I knew that I couldn’t continue living this way. I knew things had to change.

As time ticked on, I felt a growing sense of urgency. Every box I hauled up the stairs felt like a piece of my old life that I was carrying into this brand new year, a year that I promised myself would be a turning point, a year in which I would make some big changes. As I worked feverishly, hour after hour, I knew I wouldn’t stop until it was all done, until every box, every bit of my life, was completely out of that old house — a house that seemed to symbolize all parts of my life that I want so desperate to leave behind: unhealthy relationships, toxic work, toxic living situation, toxic lifestyle habits.

The temperature peaked at ten degrees, and then began to slide back towards zero. The cold wind bit at my fingertips, my nose, my ears, taking my breath with it.

I kept moving.

With 45 minutes until midnight, I finished loading up my Camry with the very last load of boxes. By 11:30, I was hurrying in and out of my new apartment, face and hands numb, in total disbelief that I had done it — that I had actually moved everything out before midnight.

I shut the door to the apartment behind me, locked it, and leaned against it, catching my breath. The apartment, set to 55 degrees, felt so much warmer than the biting chill I had been moving through. I relished the way my footsteps echoed throughout the empty apartment, with all of its unfamiliar creaks and noises. In this new, fresh space, I was about to spend the night completely by myself, for the first time in a very, very long time.

Breaking away from my traditional style of celebrating new years (drinking lots of booze), I found the box with my tea kettle in it and boiled a pot of water. I found my yoga mat and unrolled it onto the floor of my new bedroom, with high ceilings and two large windows.

With five minutes until midnight, I carried the steaming cup of tea to my room and sat on my yoga mat. I didn’t really know how to meditate, so I moved through a series of stretches and silently offered up thoughts like:





Please let this year be different.


Please let this year be better.


I want to be healthier.

I want to be happier.

And so it was — alone, sober, and hopeful — that I moved out of 2017 and into 2018, a year that did indeed become a turning point for me.

______

(Three years and roughly 150 hours of therapy, 250 hours of yoga and 50 hours of energy work later)

December 31st, 2021 (30 years old)

As I journaled that afternoon, I reflected back on 2021, what I had resolved to do, and what had actually happened.

2021 was my first year without any drugs or alcohol since I was a teenager. Since I had stopped partying, New Years Eve had become my favorite holiday of the year. I had become such a shameless knob for new beginnings. For the last two new years, I had chosen to meditate from 11:55 to 12:05 — you know, to really start the year off mindfully. Tea, journaling, cleaning and decluttering had also become New Year’s staples, and I relished it.

I had certainly "achieved" a lot this year: due to a series of unfortunate events, my husband (whom I had met in 2018, several months after that first new years eve spent alone) and I had moved four times in the space of ten months. I started, and closed, my first business, tried opening another one (and closed that, too), inching ever closer to whatever my “yes” was by scratching out a few big “no’s”. I started a new job. Even for all of this chaos, I had never felt more clear, curious, motivated, and driven.

But up through the new spaciousness and clarity crept an old rigidity, complete with near-crippling feelings of time scarcity, as well as the enormous weight of my self-imposed pressure.

I could feel it in my body, in the ache from the TMJ I had developed while opening that first business, the tension in my neck and shoulders, the constant drumbeat in the back of my skull that was needing to know what I was doing next, what it was that I was striving for, what my “purpose” was to be.

I had sought it to near exhaustion all year long, almost as if there was a part of my psyche trying to make up for time I had perceived as “lost” in that long, dark season of life. That pressure, pressure, pressure, handed to me as a child and taken on unconsciously, pressure that I had carried on into adulthood without knowing, the same pressure that I had slowly been unpacking in therapy sessions for the better part of the last three years.

And so when I began to feel into possible New Year’s resolutions for the coming year…my mind churned up several ideas, only to promptly turn them away.

Starting a 5am routine?

Cute idea. And...no way in hell, replied my body. Which was fair, I suppose — I was exhausted.

Put my new Yoga Teacher Training certification to use and finally start teaching yoga?

This didn’t feel good, either — it felt a bit too pushy.

Get really good at setting boundaries?

Cool, but…still, no.

Now, this resistance around committing to a New Year’s resolution was both interesting and new to me. I mean, I could write a book about the words Push, Strive, and Plan, mined entirely from my own life experiences. So what had changed?

The truth didn’t hit me, so much as it bubbled up softly to the surface:

It wasn’t working for me.

I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I had been holding.

What if, in 2022…I didn’t have a plan? What if I just did what felt…enjoyable? Or inspiring? Or kind to my sweet, tired body?

What if I liberated that poor, inner child of mine from the authoritarian presence that I had become, needing her to be different, more productive, more disciplined…just, more?

What if, in 2022, I didn’t need any of it to be different?

This idea is a revolutionary one to those of us who have never felt safe to just be who we are; without condition, without a reason, without a deadline.

And so it was that I spent New Years Eve in bed with my husband, apartment decidedly not sparkling clean, snacking on popcorn sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, watching Queer Eye. I think we were talking about my job as the time slid from the eleventh hour into the new year. I wasn’t watching the clock.

Somewhere in the distance, we heard fireworks.

In the minutes before we turned off the lights that night, that pesky pressure and perfectionism caught up with my mind just as it was starting to unwind:

“Your apartment isn’t clean?! It’s new years eve! You have to get everything tidy, cleansed and ready for the new year! Set your alarm for 6am so you can get up early and have it all done first thing in the morning.”

I picked up my phone and opened the alarm app, pausing with my thumb over the 6 am alarm that I sometimes used. After a moment, I clicked the button on the side of my phone, turning the screen off, and plugged it into its charger without setting any alarm at all.

I slept for ten long, delicious hours that night. And when I woke up, I felt wonderful.

I felt like a human again.

. . . . .