Happy new year. It’s the 11th (pipers piping) day of Christmas, and the great fuck-it holiday season is coming to an end. A “fuck it!” mince pie. A “fuck it!” third martini. A “fuck it!” Uber to the depths of Brooklyn at 5 a.m. At the tapered beginning of a new year, we naturally look into the crystal balls of our futures, making resolutions that set us on the path to New Me. New Me is often harder, better, faster, stronger: essentially the old you, with less fuck-its.
What are your resolutions, Raven? I hear you beg. I’m inching slowly towards New Me; this is my first day eating something that isn’t technically a pudding for breakfast, and wearing something not specifically designed for sports. Last year my resolution was more palm trees—something of a lifestyle mantra, rather than a trip to the garden center—but my husband offered to take me to the botanical house at Kew Gardens instead of visiting the Sphinxes. This year, I’m once again trying to phase out sweatpants, a lockdown hangover I’ve not been able to sober up from because sweatpants are so damn snuggly. I have a sense that the Raven I want to be wears slacks, wears more tailoring, might he even be partial to a necktie? But right now I’m still irritated by the cotton-y prison of real trousers. I’m also learning to drive, which will not only grant me access to farther-flung palms, but also feels a bit Kenickie. Double win.
How about you? How much of your life have you upended in pursuit of a newer, shiner self? What are you minimizing to stay more present? How are you trimming your screen time? I say this every year, but it’s easier to try to pick up something new—a hobby, a skill, people often try a language—than to scan your life for general “badness” and try and stamp it out. (I will be practicing parallel parking alongside my commitments to my skincare.) I just think life is so chock-a-block with negative happenings—war, violence, political upheaval, the unstable climate—that the last thing you deserve is punishment. You don’t need a grueling regime while we’re living through one; you needn’t feel guilty every time you pick up your phone, or eat dairy, or forget to call your mom.
All the January self-examination that morphs into self-flagellation can get a bit competitive, and I think we’re all part of that problem; we’re all part of the pursuit of a well-rounded, verging-on-pious existence. I can say, hand on heart, that I want you to be and feel safe and well, that your self-prescribed flaws need no tweaking, that we all have less-good attributes, that being human is essentially (and deliciously) imperfect. I can say in the same breath that I’d like my jackets to look less borrowed from someone smaller and I’d like to read maybe half a decade less tired. But perhaps those are my own flaws talking?
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