Resolve It

It’s true, we all have resolution fever right now. New Years is my favorite holiday. I’ve always been attracted to new beginnings and opportunities to foster new identities, not to mention the scratch New Years resolutions offer for my compulsion to list make. But because I’ve indulged in resolution fever with total abandon, my resolutions end up looking like impossible overhauls, requiring not adjustments and dedications but an entirely new person that is not me to carry them out. They are also so vague as to be rendered meaningless. Every year is the year I will:

Get in shape.
Stop smoking.
Quit drinking… so much.
Exercise.
Write more.

The list goes on and on. But without specific strategies to attach to these desires (I think they’re far too broad and vague to truly call goals), each year becomes yet another steeped in almost immediate failure.

Or at least I perceive it that way.

This year, I want to try something a little different. Rather than the sweeping changes made in the ecstatic rush and exuberance that accompanies the beginning of anything, I made only one resolution this year. One for self-care. Yes, this is even more ambiguous than “get in shape,” but it’s also all encompassing in a way that “get in shape” is not.

Yes, it’s probably because I’m now thirty, finishing graduate school, and noticing that the differences between my activities and what the kids are doing is now immense.  But it’s also that I no longer want to be doing what the kids are doing. I mean, how many all-night 80s dance parties can you go to before you anticipate that you’ll want to die the next day?

Last year, a friend and I were gabbing on the phone together talking about the things in life that we want. Many of our immediate wants were simple and material: more income (on a graduate stipend, more income is like chump change to regular working folk), more energy for her to spend time with her kids, more hours in our day. But what we wanted most we’d spotted in other women and intuited we lacked. Call it whatever: self-love, confidence, inner peace. You know it when you see a woman who has it. She walks tall, speaks easily, and usually she glows in some manner or another without being airbrushed or pregnant. We wanted that. We wanted it desperately. And although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I understood then that we were not in a place to get it.

Without ever acknowledging that we thought so, both of us believed that we didn’t know how to achieve this intangible quality, but, even more importantly, we believed we never could. These kinds of largely unconscious beliefs are what can keep all of us from changing, achieving, and even dreaming. Some little, shriveled, crapped-on version of ourselves stands up and yells out, “Oh, no! Not for you!” It’s the kind of voice that prompts, “People like me don’t _____.” Take a yoga class, get a pedicure, go back to college, start your own business. It’s how we defeat ourselves. It’s how we don’t care for ourselves.

It’s also how I managed to spend a large portion of my life drinking too much, smoking too much, partying too much, eating too much. I didn’t practice self-care. I never listened to my body. At one incredibly dysfunctional year in my twenties, I actually enjoyed debilitating insomnia. I pushed and pushed, never asking myself what I wanted. I couldn’t have answered then anyway.

So, even while I read the top ten resolutions to make now! and the eight ways to lose ten pounds in three days now! (because I love me some glossies) my single resolution for 2011 is care for the self. To listen. To make the choices I would make for anyone I loved.

2011 will the be the year of self-loving, in all of its manifold forms. You know what I’m talking about.

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