Here it is again, another year gone, another post made ten months after the previous entry, just to justify to myself why I keep paying $200 to keep this website up and running. Another year of losses and disasters, of discovery and joy, and even as times continue to be unprecedented, here I still am, another holiday kerfuffle settled and dealt with, another year older at the very least.
I am self-absorbed and navel-gazey. I think every writer is, to some extent; a writer who isn’t self-aware on some level is either successful enough for it not to matter much to themselves anymore or an idiot, often both. We make our mirrors through which we view the world, each mirror unique, each mirror flawed and warped. We fancy ourselves the Lady of Shalott, perhaps, or a participant in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Either way, there is always a sense that our perceptions are unreal, but honest: it’s all we know, and yet we know that what we view and how we view it isn’t always quite true to facts. Sorry, did I say writers? I meant all creators in general. Or maybe I meant people with anxiety. Or maybe I meant everyone, all of us, have to know on some level that our experiences are disconnected from reality. The car makes a funny noise. I have a panic attack. The noise turns out to be a small, fixable error, and the terrors I imagined that drove me to panic aren’t true, the reaction I had that was perfectly proportional to the horrors I was imagining is suddenly disproportionate to the tame reality and therefore is now an overreaction.
All this to say, when this time of year rolls around, out with the old and in with the new, I get more introspective than usual, which is saying something. We’re conditioned to. New Year’s Resolutions are the ultimate tool of self-flagellation, and like true masochists, we walk into it every time.
So, here’s something: I reject New Year’s Resolutions this year.
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