New Year, Same Me
All over the world people wait with excitement to ring in the new year. Three… Two… One… The clock strikes twelve … and absolutely nothing happens.
New Year’s Eve is an extremely anticlimactic holiday. There is all this hype to go into the New Year with a bang and leave the past in previous year. However, I always feel like when I look back on my year I overdramatize my problems and think of it in a more negative light than necessary.
New Year’s Eve is stressful because it makes you examine everything in your life, the mistakes you made last year, the friends you were with last year, the friends you want to be with this year, and the things you want to change in the new year. But this past year I’ve learned the lesson that things change, people change, and a lot can happen in 365 days.
The people I was with on New Year’s’ Eve 2015 weren’t necessarily with me throughout the following months. And quite honestly, that’s no big deal. The pressure to over-analyze your relationships with people and decide who you want to go into the new year with is an unnecessary stress.
The idea that you have to make the night a legendary one is overwhelming. As much as I know how ridiculous the idea is, I still find myself caught up in the quest to make it so. We’re all looking for that “movie moment” when the clock strikes midnight but in reality, almost everyone ends up disappointed with how it turns out. That’s because our expectations are so high that they’re impossible to meet.
Having a holiday based on fresh starts is a great idea. Who doesn’t want to set goals and try to get better in the upcoming year? However in practice, setting goals causes people to reflect on their shortcomings and mistakes of the past year, and all the goals they failed to achieve. We should be reflecting on the year and the good that came from it, not our messups and our cringeworthy moments.
Nothing changes just because the calendar resets. The problems we had last year still find a way to follow us into the new year and those bad habits we can’t seem to shake tag along too. I’m not saying we shouldn’t give it our best shot to fix our problems and break those bad habits, but what I mean is that we should do that because we want to, not because it’s a new year.
I don’t want to become a “new me” in the new year; I want to be the same old me who hates running and loves procrastinating. I’m not going to let a clock and calendar tell me when to change. I hate change. Why would I let inanimate objects have that power over me?
New years is pressure filled and basically blows. We should change because we want to become better, not because it’s “that time of year again.” Right now, I’m going to live in the moment and instead of worrying about what friends are going to survive the year with me, I’m going to be thankful for the ones who have my back now.
