Is it a Wonderful Life?

The first time I decided to create New Year's resolutions, a pandemic cursed the earth. As a cynical and misanthropic soul that wanders modern civilization, I detested the idea of New Year’s resolutions before 2020. For one, the ritual of promising the air that I will read more or exercise more had curled my fingers into steaming red fists. Seemingly, resolutions are a primordial practice of shouting prayers to an invisible god in the sky about pleasing yourself more. While the word “resolute” hung on every tongue, I bled from my ears. The practice presented itself to me as a futile effort since life is far more complicated than achieving yearly stilted goals.

My friend began her year with the resolute goal of moving to another state to experience more job opportunities, live in new places, and meet new people. One month later, six pregnancy tests presented six plus signs. My sister began her year with the cordial desire to stop drinking alcohol. Following a tragic death, she found herself befriending more bottles of whiskey and vodka than the year before. Three former classmates of mine shared their New Year’s resolutions with me on a chilled afternoon. They wanted to start a business together but while I was congratulating them, money from their shared account was drained by a chauvinist boyfriend. The idea of creating yearly goals haunted my depraved mind as I thought about the cruel world’s resolution for humankind; make it hard for people to want to wake-up in the morning. Unabashedly, I believed that sadness was this era’s zeitgeist.

The Moment I Realized I Was the Antagonist of My Own Story

I recently graduated from college in May of 2019. I had already begun working a full-time job the following month which equipped me with health insurance for the first time, and I even had my own little office. But the desultory routine of life began to bloat my angst. Episodes of anxiety and depression followed me like a lost shadow. I had begun working seven days a week. I had bills to pay and school loans to cry about every night. My opium dreams were hanging in the balance as life swallowed me whole. As a child, my champagne colored dreams chased the idea of being an adult. While sitting in the swampy reality of adulthood, I craved feeling like an optimistic kid who had wild horses for thoughts. Life was dipped in a dull hue that I desperately sought to brighten.

While remaining cynical about politics, ruminating over the best financial decision that would contribute to my eventual retirement, and circulating thoughts about my ten-year plan of trying to avoid financial destitution, I thought about resolutions. As a kid, I wrote letters of goals to my future self. As a teen, I wrote five-year plans in my journal and continued daily affirmations. In college, I found time to write poetry, essays, short-stories, and screenplays in my spare time. What had changed? I thought it was the world becoming harsher. But truthfully, I had changed.

It was Christmas day, and my tired eyes twitched at the thought of a full night’s rest. I wanted to feel like a child again with happy promises hanging from my teeth. While I am a self-professed "miserablist," I found sentimentality peeling through my emotional armor on Christmas morning. I felt obligated to watch Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life again. I don’t consider it a Christmas film, but I wanted to feel warm after months of believing the world is a steaming pile of garbage that is disguised as an opportunity to become the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or a Nobel Prize winner. Upon viewing the final moments of the film where George Bailey lassos the moon, cheers at the sight of movie houses, and kisses the broken pieces of his house, I remembered the lost feeling of hope and imagination. That evening, I finally understood J.M. Berry’s Peter Pan too.

After crying to the last scene of It’s a Wonderful Life, I decided to create my first New Year’s resolutions because life is the hammer that beats you over the head but hope is the medicine that makes you come back for more. And no, Capra’s film did not convince me life is wonderful. It convinced me that people can be wonderful. Despite having seen the film every year for the past twenty years, my decaying mental health, the constant dejection of working in a joyless job that I didn’t love, and trying to remain above the poverty line by working two jobs ultimately contributed to the film hitting me like a wave that forgot how to pull back into the ocean. The capacity of the human spirit displayed in Capra’s film and the longing for living in my own imagination drove me to accept the sentimental desire of creating a list of goals that could be erased by the cyanide reality of life.

Find Art and You’ll Find Yourself

The simple pleasures of life are found in the few activities that contribute to a serotonin boost. Every person living in this veiled existence has an activity that gyres hope in their veins. For me, art was the shot of happiness that I did not mind taking. Because with art, we find that pain is universal and it is not exclusive. The list of resolutions that I made for 2020 began with the exercise of stimulating my emotional wellbeing. I told myself to create something every day. With pencils and erasers, I drew the faces of my bursting emotions. My paintbrush captured the decay of nature. The songs I sang, which were accompanied by my ukulele, released the troubled sadness locked inside of me. While writing poetry and short-stories, I had aged into happiness. After practicing these resolutions in the beginning of 2020, covid-19 broke out in America. Its existence caused the earth to rotate backwards. In addition, there were wildfires cooking the earth’s soil. Social media activism reignited and formed itself into long lines of ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs. Empty hospital gowns stacked high outside hospital doors while political leaders laughed at the impoverished. The world was seemingly at odds with itself again and again. But with my rituals, I grew stronger.

Make Your Pain Beautiful

While pursuing these resolutions, I had engaged more with my soul. I had taunted my hidden emotions to burst out of my chest. I blame art for the contentment rising in my throat. While creating art does not erase financial troubles nor does it pull me out from lifeless jobs, it still caters to the dark side of my moon. Art shined a bright light in my life, and I grabbed its rays to remain above water. Art does not solve problems. It does not make you the next Bill Gates. It certainly does not armor bodies against the unforgiving pandemic and its consequences. But a renowned filmmaker named Andrei Tarkovsky once said, “Art is born out of an ill-designed world.” My goal for 2021 is to continue to make art since the world will never be a utopia. In life, happiness weathers like a storm; it isn’t consistent. But art can take your pain and make it beautiful.