As I sit here on the first day of 2020, amongst the hubbub of an internet that seems to be overflowing with people announcing their goals for the coming year, I find myself wanting to offer a counter-argument.
Maybe January 1st is not the time to tear down and disavow everything you do not like about yourself. Maybe January 1st is not the time to cast those rejected pieces aside like so much garbage in the hopes that the dump truck will come to haul them away for good.
Maybe that approach was never going to work out the way you wanted it to. Maybe the cast off pieces of yourself were always going to come crawling back just about the time your resolutions started to slip and old habits began to creep back again.
Maybe it’s okay to be a work in progress.
Maybe you are allowed to be just as messy and imperfect today as you were yesterday. Maybe the only thing that’s changed is that today you are just a little bit braver, just a little bit more prepared to admit to your flaws and to love yourself anyways.
Maybe the only intention you need for the new year is to become every day just a bit more of yourself. Just a little bit braver, just a little bit wiser, just a little bit more willing to speak the words you are afraid to say, and to disagree with the people whose opinions of you matter the most.
Maybe these are the only things you have ever really needed. And maybe casting off the parts of yourself that you could not be proud of only ever served to make you feel more dreadful about yourself, maybe it never helped to dislike those parts of you at all.
In 2019 I did a lot of things I’m proud of:
- I finished the first draft of my memoir-in-progress. Finally. After literal years of failing.
- I read 38 books after several years of really not reading much of substance or quality.
- I walked 96 miles from start to finish of the West Highland Way in Scotland with a great friend.
- My sister got married and I managed to pull off being her maid of honor despite being far outside of my comfort zone.
- I nourished connections with old friends and new ones.
- I navigated difficult conversations and found that sometimes relationships come out stronger on the other side.
The thing about 2019 was that I didn’t set out to do any of these things. Indeed, in 2019, as far as I remember I abdicated goals and intentions entirely because they seemed way of torturing myself for not yet being the person I knew that I could be (and therefore thought I should be), rather than being a healthy and productive way of motivating myself to make beneficial changes.
Because the first thing I know is that when it comes to making changes is this: it’s okay to not be ready yet.
There’s a particularly uncomfortable place that we linger in — a liminal space between the moment when we understand that more is possible for us, and some future moment when we are finally brave enough to step through the doorway and to try on that new way of being out in the world where other people might see and hear and judge us.
There is a sacred pause in the process of becoming.
It is a pause that cannot be skipped or avoided. It must be lived fully because only by leaning into the discomfort of becoming will we ever find our way to the other side.
But also: how you navigate this liminal space matters more than anything else.
Learning to love yourself in the space between knowing who you could be and actually having become that person, will always work better than trying to excise the parts of you that you do not like.
In the end there’s nothing special about the beginning of a new year (or a new decade).
Which is why in 2020 I’m not planning to make any big changes. Instead, I’m planning to keep leaning into courage as much as I am able to — and to love myself as much as I can in the moments when my courage fails me and I fall short of being as brave as I hoped to be.
There are of course, more tangible things I would like to do as well: to revise my memoir, to perhaps begin blogging again, to continue to focus on the health of the relationships in my life that matter most to me, and to make sure that life is as rich and fulfilling as possible.
But in the end what I will accomplish in 2020 is less important to me than the choices I will make. Will I choose to act in accordance with my deepest values? Will I be brave enough to use my voice? Will I allow myself to be truly seen by the people who matter to me the most?
What about you — what choices will you make in 2020?