resolved
DO YOU MAKE NEW YEAR’s resolutions?
Every December, around this time, I find myself drawn to the idea of reflecting and resetting while also wanting to apologise (to the gods of cool?) for adopting a custom so arbitrary and redolent with all the dubious charm of a Brené Brown book.
Unremarkably, Instagram is already awash with posts either celebrating or scorning resolutions: I’ve seen lists of others people’s life lessons and goals, unique prompts for contemplating the year that’s ending, funny memes about stumbling aimlessly into the fog-filled depths of 2026. Perhaps I should resolve to be less online next year, but I do find Instagram (the only social media platform I use anymore) an interesting case study in what a collective consciousness can cough up.
Turns out we love a list.
I know I do.
‘Live by the list, die by the list,’ I often say – and I’m not kidding. I’m a pathological planner. I write stuff down because it’s the only way I can keep tabs on what’s coming up – or what’s already passed. I write to-do lists; I follow a strict budget, which my husband finds inexplicably hilarious. I keep inventories of book and film recommendations, writing projects, gift ideas. For all my careful note-taking, though, I rarely capture real ambitions beyond CALL DOCTOR, SUBMIT COURSE PROFILE, GET OLIVE OIL!!
I think a part of me is scared. To plan is to hope. And to hope feels dangerous.
YESTERDAY, I FIRED UP THE Wayback Machine and went trawling through cyberspace to find a relic of my past: a ‘30 before 30’ list I’d published on my blog when I was 29 years old identifying a series of goals I wanted to achieve before turning 30. Eleven years later, I’ve ticked off roughly half those things, though it broke my heart all over again to read the 30th on the list: Get over my broken heart.
I’m still not sure I have. And my heart has broken many times since.
But I’ve been thinking about resolutions, the latent power of just writing things down, turning thoughts into something more solid, of observing thresholds and drawing a line in the sand – somewhere – to mark the passage of time, of a life.
What I assume is this: the human brain, or mind, probably needs to carve up time into manageable segments and use those segments to generate meaning. I’m neither a philosopher nor a metaphycisist, so I’m not sure whether to think about time as a phenomenon or merely as a construct. But, either way, the practice of dividing time, in all its incomprehensible vastness, into less overwhelming constituents must surely be critical to our feeble engagement with the universe – a way to make the BIG much smaller, a way to observe the cyclical nature of life and to scaffold spiritually resonant and useful rituals.
THE COMING YEAR FEELS QUIETLY momentous because, for the first time in almost a decade, I’ll be doing only one job in one place – a decision that was difficult to make as a perennial slashie and hopeless people pleaser but one that I felt was non-negotiable for preserving my physical and mental health. ‘I think I finally have to accept,’ I admitted to my academic mentor some months ago, before making the call, ‘that I can’t do what I used to do, and I can’t do all the things I want to do right now if I want to do them well.’
So, what is it that I can do and want to do?
Today, I remain in recovery mode after several rounds of fraught family celebrations. My manicure has chipped; I’m sitting in bed writing this post while one cat sleeps nearby and another is curled up on the floor, sighing intermittently. The most I’ve accomplished so far this morning is putting on a load of washing and making a smoothie. The garbage truck has just roared and clunked its way up our little street and back. The day is already too hot. It all feels decidedly unromantic and anticlimactic, not the right moment in which to dream about, and plan for, the future.
Still. I’m trying.
IS IT WORRYING THAT I’VE started out by saving a handful of books to buy online?
New Year’s resolutions shouldn’t start with shopping. But here we are.
I want to read more in 2026, and among the titles on my list to procure are Katherine May’s Wintering, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and The Thin Red Line by James Jones. The latter two are some of my favourite film adaptations (ones I’ve re-watched dozens of times), yet I’ve somehow never read the books. I’m going to try alternating my reading so that I work my way through a novel then a non-fiction title each month, instead of returning primarily to grief memoirs and bleak, depressing non-fiction. Perhaps I also need to give audiobooks a second chance. (In the past, I’ve found that I start thinking about the text as it’s being read aloud, and I think so much that my mind wanders and I miss important progressions in the narrative. I’ve been told the key is to listen to something lighter and sillier, something that demands less sustained attention.)
To that end, another big-ticket item on my list is to get back into the groove of daily walking – I can combine goals and listen to an audiobook as I amble! I used to walk in the mornings and afternoons as a matter of some urgency. It was a habit, a ritual. And when it died off, it died off completely. I have plenty of excuses, and I draw on them often: migraine, arthritic pain, impenetrable fatigue, work to catch up on, the unabating Queensland heat that lingers for six months out of every year. However, my sedentary state has become a renewed matter of urgency. My joints feel gritty; my muscles have dissolved. None of my clothes fit. Something has to change.
Lastly – skipping over the personal and unpublishable – is my main goal for the year: to complete a first draft of my non-fiction manuscript. Funnily enough, this goal also appeared on my 30 before 30 list, but I cannot for the life of me remember what project I had in mind back then. It certainly wasn’t the book I’m hacking away at now, which is a hybrid memoir that pivots around my father’s family and experiences of loss and grief.
My target is around 70,000 words, around 1,000 a week left to go, although I’m tempted to put everything I’ve written so far in the bin and start again. Even so, I’ve downloaded Scrivener and have started shoving bits and pieces in there, hoping the throughlines will appear, that something cohesive will gradually take shape.
Some miscellanea:
I’d like to travel somewhere I’ve never been before. I may attend a conference in London! Even thinking about the flights almost breaks me out in a rash, but they didn’t invent benzos for nothing.
Poor segue, but I want to stop taking venlafaxine. It doesn’t do what it was meant to do (prevent migraines), and I get incredibly sick if I accidentally miss a dose.
My grandma is 93 years old now, and I want to spend more time with her.
I plan to disengage – not completely, just a little – from relationships in which I just don’t feel my best.
I’d love to learn about riso printing!
I hope I can do something fun with this online space.
I might bite the bullet and get a dog. :)
This year, I wish mostly for a greater sense of calm and peace. It seems a selfish goal when the rest of the world is blighted by so much violence, but I like to believe that what we cultivate in our immediate lives has the capacity to effect greater change beyond the boundaries we imagine around ourselves.
This past year has been one of the most difficult I’ve encountered in my short-ish life so far, one that’s left me feeling so often like a failure – wretched, silly, and very, very alone. I hope that, in 2026, I will make someone’s life easier, softer in some small way. I hope I’ll be able to rest without guilt, write without shame, and accept whatever happens with grace and curiosity.
A x
