The Year of Me

I started off my 2022 the same way I always start off a new year, which very honestly, is hungover. I had gone out the night before with a group of friends to celebrate the New Year’s festivities by watching the local fireworks, and then going to a drag show afterwards. It was a great night, but I woke up feeling empty. As if I was lacking, like something was missing. I pondered what that could be. Was it purpose? Was it love? Perhaps both. Either way, I knew something in me needed to change.

For years, I have always had the same New Year’s resolutions, and failed miserably every single time. Like many people, my resolutions often involved losing weight, going to the gym more, or even trying out meditation. Usually I don’t make it past the first week of January.

As someone who is half-Chinese, I would always joke that for me, the New Year doesn’t officially start until the end of January or first week of February, as the Lunar New Year starts around this time. I’d always say that the first few weeks of January were my ‘test-run’ until my real new year started. But usually, the start of the Lunar New Year didn’t prompt much change in me either.

“Oh, it’s the year of the cow this year, that means it’s going to be a bad one for me regardless”, I remember telling my friend at the start of 2021, almost to make up for the lack of resolve I knew the rest of the year would present.

Was it an excuse? Probably. Maybe I needed it to justify my sense of laziness and inability to evolve. However, waking up on January 1st of this year, with a slight headache from the night before, I realised that something needed to change. Something big. So when Monday came, I walked into work and handed my boss a resignation letter.

I work as an English teacher at a cram school, where I have been employed for over a year now. Being an educator in the middle of a pandemic has been more than difficult, and getting climatized to the unpredictable changes this pandemic has created has been almost impossible. I believe that I am a great teacher, who prioritises and takes care of my students, and encourages them to learn and believe in themselves. But despite all the care I give to my students, I realised that I wasn’t giving myself any in return.

One thing that I have learnt as I have gotten older is that is it simultaneously the easiest and most difficult thing in the world to be selfish. It’s a double-edged sword. You care about yourself and you sound self-centred; you prioritise others too much and you end up neglecting yourself. Finding this balance is something I consider a gift, one which I’d like to take this year to learn.

And so with this in mind, I handed in my resignation letter, believing it would be the catalyst for the change that I dearly needed. Very honestly, it felt like a weight was being lifted off my shoulders, and I walked out of my boss’ office feeling more relieved than ever. Don’t get me wrong, I will miss my students, but waking up on January 1st made me realise that I had adjusted my habits to purely take care of everyone but myself, sacrificing both my physical and mental health until breaking point. That in turn allowed me to come up with a different New Year’s resolution: me.

I have always admired those with endless confidence in the same way a young child admires their parents. I would look at them with disbelief and think “wow, I wish I could be like that”, constantly feeling like I couldn’t. But why? Why do I feel like that? Is it my anxiety, or is it the way society tells us constantly that we have to fit in? I’m not sure. But, one thing I did realise is that true confidence stems from knowing who you are, something I had lost in my duties of being an educator. By prioritising my work, my students, along with their demanding parents and my boss, I had neglected myself to such extent that my reflection in the mirror had become unfamiliar.

And so, the day after I handed in my resignation letter, I decided to make a list. I’m not a very organised person, so list-making is usually not my thing. But recently, a friend had told me that sometimes to implement changes in your life, it is good to have a physical indicator, and so I started writing down a few things that I wanted to do. I decided to scrap the traditional common resolutions, and focus on what would make me truly happy and content. That meant: no focusing on weight loss, no stressing over money, purely just fun and carefree activities.

For my list, I broke it into two categories, splitting the page halfway down the middle. One side contained things I enjoy, and the other, what I could do with these things. The list went as such:

Things I enjoy:

- Going to galleries

- Watching movies

- Listening and making music

- Hanging out with friends

- Eating

- Travelling

- Sleep

What to do:

- Go to museums and write exhibition reviews

- Write movie analysis essays

- Discover new artists and write more songs

- Make new friends

- Find more places to eat

- Go on a trip

- Actually sleep

It sounds like a very simple list, but these are activities I haven’t been able to carry out for the past year or so, due to my responsibilities at work. As I previously mentioned, being a teacher, despite being a fulfilling job, caused a stark decline in my mental and physical health. A lot of that stemmed from not being able to sleep as much as I would like, and not being able to eat proper meals throughout the day.

Handing in my resignation letter made me realise that one thing I really need to prioritise is rest. Working constantly has been terrible for my health, to the extent that I find it hard to recognise the positive impact I have made on my students. It is time to look at the way I view my relationship with my environment and be a little bit more selfish. At least, I think I deserve to be a little bit more selfish.

My last day of work is on Wednesday, and I’ve already booked a four-day-trip for a good friend and I. This is the first trip I have been able to take in over a year, and to say I am excited is an understatement. I am ready to soak up the culture of a new location, enjoy the atmosphere and eat the most delicious food. I am hoping that this trip will be the start of a series of wonderful changes for me, all of which stem from not just focusing on others in my life, but myself too.

This is the first New Year that I have been excited about in a long time, because my resolution is not based on an unrealistic, dramatic transformation, but rather, discovering who I really am. They say life is short, but I have always believed that life is sometimes truly very long. From this, we need to take a deep breath and listen to what we really need, besides the materialistic aspects that we are forced into believing are necessary. For me, that it fun, meaningful connections, and importantly, rest. What is it for you?