7 Steps to a New You This New Year!

OMG, Happy New Year, gush, gush, gush! Kiss, kiss, kiss! Clink of the figurative champagne glasses and tip of the sequin-crusted party hat...IT'S A NEW YEAR, GURL! A new ass me! I'm going to damned near effortlessly be better, faster, smarter, wiser, slimmer...all those glossy magazine cover buzzwords that will practically guarantee a transformation in me that starts with me merely deciding to be all those things. Maybe I'll even be younger and bionic while I'm at it. I JUST HAVE TO DECIDE. I will make...drum roll, please...New Year's resolutions, and so it shall be! I shall be rendered brand spankin' new!

Big fucking deal. We went to sleep in 2022 and woke up in 2023. But, but, it's time, I can claim it! I am a changed woman, damnit! The simple tick-tock stroke of the clock from 11:59 pm to 12:00 am seamlessly ushered me into a brand new, bolder, braver, more determined, more disciplined, and more elegant human being. You have seen the scrawls across the headers of the bullshit rags, touting "Seven steps to a new you this new year!" and "Take charge of you this new year! Our secret to total transformation inside." Bitch, I just came off a carb and booze bender during the last two weeks of December that would put Willy Wonka and Jack Daniels to shame. I found a way to turn Christmas dinner into breakfast and last night's sparkling wine into this morning's ten o'clock spritzer. I am about as prepared to turn over an instantaneous, nay, MIRACULOUS new leaf as a coke addict snorting a bump off a public bathroom toilet seat is. No. Nyet. Nein. I am barely ready to face the morning much less the total mental and physical metamorphosis Women's Day magazine is loftily promising me on page six. 

I admit it. I honestly used to aspire to this and think that if I just wrote a well-penned list on a fresh sheet of lined paper that the magic would well, magically ensue. I felt it in my childlike heart that I could rely on the paper and the ink to inspire and direct me. I was so gullible then. I keep wanting to say I was "young and hopeful" as if that is a bad thing, but it isn't. I was young and ignorant. I was raised sheltered and kept sheltered by well meaning, strict, religious parents who blithely (and, often miserably) lived their lives inside of unyielding, gender-punishing roles that were taught to them in times of greater misery, ignorance and stringency. We were taught to think securely and dutifully inside the "box" (a-suffocating-straight-jacket-of-a-box) and to rest well-as well as we could in our learned paranoia of the unknown. These were two people that were just children during World War II in Italy. They earned their paranoia. We dutifully and unquestioningly dwelt in our teeny, stifling but mostly safe and mostly predictable unenlightened Monopoly rectangle of a house. We did not entertain other truths, systems of belief or deign to think we were intelligent or worldly enough to disagree with some hack of a women's magazine writer. Don't even dare think to question the authority of anyone on "60 Minutes." As my dad would say when I questioned him about anything, "I'm the Dad. I know best." Well, cool. All and any authority figures here is my undying respect, adoration and obedience. Why? Well, because I fucking said so, Domenica, that's fucking why.

For years, I would peruse the long, deliciously freshly cut paper-scented aisles of stationery stores and painstakingly thumb through spiral notebooks, crisp, pressed pads and, stiffly bound empty journals practically willing the one that held my potential in it to reveal itself to me. Which one of these yet pristine and unmolested tomes would receive my ardent ink -inscribed wish list of self-proclaimed personal newness hence offering them unto the resolution-granting gods and goddesses and rendering this old, sloppy, lazy broad new again? 

Well, shit. I wrote the gorgeous lists, and all I got were the blues as I realized not a fucking thing gets done by just saying you will do it. You have to do the work. No. Not just "the work" of the resolutions, the work of repairing you, and understanding you, and deciding to make changes that take far longer than writing a list of wishes ever will. 

That requires something we never actually openly define or talk about...resolve. You can look up that word in the dictionary (nowadays more easily than ever by swiping open a new tab) and see that this word is the root of the word resolution. (Am I boring you yet?) I see it in two of its meanings. The first to me is this: Settle or find a solution to (a problem, dispute or contentious matter). Easy enough, right? I am fat. I should be skinny. I am broke. I should stop spending money. I can't walk up four stairs without losing my breath. I need to exercise. Identify the problem, find the solution. Resolve the damned thing. Got it. Second, decide firmly on a course of action. Verb out, yo! I am fat, I should be skinny, I go on a diet. I am broke, I need to save money, I have to stop adding Amazon's "suggested for you" bullshit products to my cart and say bye bye to my daily morning Starbucks. Oh, yes and our favorite, I am out of shape, I need to get into better shape, I have to join the gym right now and give Curves all my money so that I will fool myself in to believing that I will never be derailed from going to the gym 5 days a week, EVER, because (here it is) I said so. (Which really hammers home the final definition of resolve: the firm determination to do the thing!) See there? We have claimed our course of action. We are the embodiment of determination! OMG-problems solved! Except for one sad and true fact. Resolve isn't found at the bottom of your purse along with your travel sized hand lotion and your 500-count bottle of Ibuprofen, and you can't replenish it as quickly as your exhausted lotion tube or your anti-inflammatory stash when you run out either. Resolve is a finicky bitch that requires way more than a single, stolid, courageous choice. It requires making choices over and over and over again and really getting to know and love yourself which is a resolution I wish we could all truly make and keep. The proclamation of the intention is merely a baby step towards living as much as is ever, at any given time possible inside that intention, in that sacred promise to oneself to commit to being better than you were and trying to keep that pure resolve and hope soaked momentum isn't easy and has no place (in my expert opinion) in the turning of a new calendar year.

Why? Why am I so jaded and over the concept of New Year's resolutions? Simply put? They don't work. Furthermore, they rely on our cumulative failure and are now more than ever just buzzwords and marketing tools for snake oil vendors and social media moguls. We are more than cogs in the constantly cranking capital machine. We are the living embodiment of every ancestor that came before us and each and every one of their experiences, genetics and trauma expressed in our one combined complex body, mind, spirit and soul. We can't create a single feasible or achievable resolution until we have confronted all that we are, all we have living inside of us and incite our own personal revolution. I honestly don't believe you can resolve to do or be better until you understand why you are the way you are, face yourself with courage and compassion, and evaluate who you truly want to and can be. That's where resolve resides--inside your understanding of yourself and who you can realistically and self-lovingly be. It's not a new year exclusive. It's all you, and it starts with finding and accepting your authentic self.

Oh, and in all transparency, I've had my revolution. It was ugly, painful, and waged for years. I've come to terms with who I am and who I am becoming. That's why I want it so badly for you as well. In doing so, I have freed myself for growth and self love in ways I still cannot sufficiently convey in words. I also found out that I don't just desire notebooks and journals to capture illusive new year resolutions, I just have an insatiable- and, yes BOUNDLESS- raging hard-on for paper products. (Lord have mercy, when I go to TJ Maxx and peruse the stationery section, I will Meg-Ryan-"When-Harry-Met-Sally"-level caterwaul with unabated arousal. To be honest, I'm biting my lip right now just thinking about it. Now that's something I can enthusiastically tip my sequin-crusted party hat to!

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