#please be constructive with feedback i am not made of glass i just have adhd

[denimshortsdean]

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[aspire-to-the-light]

Assorted New Year’s Rituals

I love hearing about other people’s New Year traditions, but this year I spoke to a few people who thought New Year’s was hollow and unimportant because they didn’t really have any traditions, so I thought I’d share mine. I’ve got a few different things I try to do every New Year, so I’ll run through them in no particular order. (If you already have meaningful New Year rituals you probably won’t get much out of this.)

I believe in New Year, so it makes it true. 

New Year is a really incredibly meaningful holiday for me. It’s my favourite of the entire year. I think it’s one of those things that gets stronger the more you believe in it. You see, a new year is a new you. You can give up your bad habits, forgive yourself for all your sins, change who you are, make new friends, start new projects and allow yourself to give up old ones that hit dead ends. If you’re trapped in a negative feedback loop, it’s a reset point.

In December I struggled to get out of bed, missed important deadlines, got depressed about the fact I’d missed important deadlines, played video games a lot to escape, ignored all my friends, got depressed about having no friends, fucked up my sleep schedule, and got so badly in the habit of doing nothing that it became impossible and scary to just start doing things. Then I spent New Year’s Eve with friends and since then I’ve been bashing down tasks in quick succession. Sure, the person I was last year was a terrible idiot who shouldn’t even try to do anything because it would surely fail and it was easier to lie in bed and/or play video games, but now I’m a new person and I can achieve anything. Even grocery shopping!

Believing in New Year means a lot of vague hazy things, like spending December 31st reminiscing about how the last year went and sort of breathing in the giddy feeling of it being the last time you’ll do certain things in 2018, then counting down with a rising excitement that bubbles in your chest and feeling reborn when the clock chimes.

Some basics

I like to make some kind of fancy dinner on New Year’s Eve. It’s the last meal of the year, so it’s nice if it’s a good one. I also watch a movie, not for any particular reason, I just always do it so it’s become meaningful by sheer virtue of the fact that I always do it.

I hear that in some parts of Britain, steak pie is a New Year’s Day tradition. I would like to try making one next year. 

I watch the countdown on the BBC. I dislike the fact that my computer clock and my phone clock and my physical clock might disagree on exactly when the moment of midnight is; it brings some uncertainty to an otherwise extremely special moment. When I watch it on the television, I’m reasonably certain that at least the moment I’m celebrating is the same moment as millions of other people. Also, the fireworks are often cool.

I fricking love Auld Lang Syne, which apparently isn’t a tradition everywhere but certainly is in Britain.

This year I was also introduced to ABBA’s Happy New Year. I am not a massive fan, but I’m low on New Year songs so I’ll take it. I would love more New Year songs! Please send me them!

A long shower, literally washing the year off you, can be pretty nice.

Declutter. Spring clean. Literally throw last year’s shit out. But do it on New Year’s Eve; some folklore says that on New Year’s Day you should only bring new things in to your house, to bring in prosperity. I’m not superstitious at all, but I like following all these little rituals just to help convince my brain that something important is happening.

Focus on January 1st on doing good things. For me it represents how the whole year is going to go; if I get it off to a great start by having a productive, focused January 1st where I’m kind to others and work hard, then I’m going to have a good year.

Something else which I’m going to incorporate next year is a little ritual to physically represent the thing I always do, of trying to leave bad and unhelpful thoughts in the past year. I might just write them all down and then burn them or shred them.

If you’ve got new habits you want to start, even if it’s something as simple as “drink a glass of water when I get up in the morning” or “go for a walk every day”, it’s important to do them on New Year’s Day, if you’re anything like me. If you’re all “oh I’m hungover from New Year’s Eve, I’ll start them on January 2nd” you will probably not. I find that it gives me a real sense of possibility and fresh-startyness to set things up on New Year’s Eve - glass of water by my bedside, or exercise clothes by my door - and then go through on New Year’s Day and do the things I intend to keep doing.

Looking back

Most years I try to keep some kind of record of what I’m doing as I go - I usually keep a diary or calendar, this year I had a Filofax, a few years ago I even had a Year Jar - and on New Year’s Eve I’ll go through it.

I have a tendency to feel pretty insecure about my achievements, especially when I don’t have other people around me who respect me for them and will remind me that I’m good at things. I often feel on New Year’s Eve like I’ve just had an utterly terrible year in which I did nothing, because the periods in which I was busy having ADHD and playing video games all day become more salient than the things I did well. It’s really nice to go through my diary or other records and have a reminder of all the things I actually did in that year. Something like a Year Jar is especially good for that because I write down all the little meaningful things that are otherwise easy to forget - times I helped out a friend, or made a really delicious meal, or just had a lovely day playing guitar in a park in the sunshine.

It’s also nice to be able to look back at a longer period of time, and see the structure that I couldn’t see at the time. I usually think about my day-to-day tasks, and I don’t have time to sit back and see the overall story of my life. Looking back over my whole year lets me pick out the highlights and lowlights and milestones and progress markers that are meaningful, and construct a sense of what that year meant to me.

In many cases I’ll have a splintered record because I stopped keeping up with my diary at one point, kept switching my calendar app, or was writing in a different notebook when I was in another country. In those cases it’s kind of nice to piece everything together in one place, and maybe colour-code it all up prettily.

I actually really recommend the Year Jar (a jar which you keep all year, and whenever something good or meaningful happens, you write it down and fold up the paper and drop it in the jar). Unlike a diary, you won’t notice or feel bad when you leave ‘gaps’ in it. You don’t have to be committed to it, just remember about it often enough to fill it up. Unlike a calendar, you can also keep an element of secretly-giving-presents-to-yourself about it; get one with a slot lid, so you can easily put paper in but not take it out, and don’t let yourself open it until a certain hour on New Year’s Eve.

Resolutions

I don’t need to say much about these, because everyone does them and you can look at five hundred other blog posts about how to make them well.

I’ll say that the more you believe in New Year, the more they work.

I’ll also say one piece of advice on the basis that I haven’t heard it anywhere else. I actually hear quite a lot of people recommending that you make New Year’s resolutions public and ask people to hold you to them. I prefer the opposite; keep them secret.

I don’t feel nearly as strongly about this as I do about keeping the letter to yourself secret, and I’ll discuss it more in that section, but essentially.... it may well be the case that you want to make incredibly “cheesy” or “cringey” New Year’s Resolutions, like “I will embody the spirit of <insert anime character who is deeply meaningful to you but everyone else will laugh at>”. You might want to make embarrassing resolutions like “I will stop <habit which you’d prefer not to admit you have>” or “I will give up <secret guilty addictive pleasure>”. Your resolution might be something like “I will stop letting certain people push my boundaries”, which certain people might take offence to. You may want to just promise yourself to be good in whatever language means something to you.

Either way, if you tell yourself from the start that they’re going to be secret, I find personally that it’s easier for my brain to suggest resolutions that otherwise I’d shy away from as cringey, cheesy, uncool, embarrassing, cliche, etc.

I usually calligraphy them in a nice notebook or on a sheet of paper, somewhere I’ll keep looking at it but won’t be too public.

Company

New Year’s is one of the few holidays I really don’t mind spending by myself. New Year’s is thoughtful. It’s about contemplating what you’ve done and achieved and failed at throughout the year, what you’d like to change, what you’re determined to do next year, and who you’d like to be when you’re a new-year-new-you.

For me, at least, it’s for quietly reading and writing. I read my diary back over, I write my letter, I make resolutions and carefully note them down.

Parties are fine if that’s what you’re into. New Year the way I do it is okay with parties, too, but the right sort of party - people who are willing to either leave you alone to be contemplative at certain points, or who want to all be contemplative and do the rituals together.

It doesn’t really work as a structured holiday. You can’t get everyone together and say “We’ll have cake at 10pm, all read our letters at 11, drink champagne at midnight, party for a few hours and begin writing resolutions at 3am ready for publication at 5am”. A lot of the New Year’s things, for me, are emotionally intense and I need to take them at my own pace. I’ll open my letter and/or Year Jar when I’m damn well ready to.

It would be a really nice thing to celebrate with other people, if they wanted to do my kind of New Year together, but it’d be less like a party and more like... a meditation retreat with more champagne and cheering than usual.

If you want to celebrate with other people, but don’t have people who want to do contemplative New Year with you, I recommend attending a party but ensuring it has a quiet room that people can retreat to if they want to quietly consider their resolutions.

Letter to myself

A separate post, for length reasons.