So begins the time of year that an indication of change is about to occur. According to clock time, now is the best opportunity we have to start anew, give ourselves the option to change who we are and for a good reason, not just because we want to. Resolutions tend to give a change in routine or personality an idea of stability. Rather than choosing one random Tuesday to change your dietary needs to reflect that of a vegan diet and be targeted as someone who is "really going through it," January 1st is a reassurance of a fresh start, a clean slate, and a welcome change because everyone else is doing it, too.
My decision to make resolutions ended years ago when I realized how wonderful I am at creating and keeping false promises for myself. "I'm really going to do better this year!" I'd say, just as everyone else had. The concept of resolutions is an easy bout of small talk at this time of year, and for that reason, I have an artillery of cookie-cutter answers to get me by. Read more, spend less time on my phone, workout more often, watch what I eat, all things that are truthful, but are very dependent on the season and on my state of mind. Ironically, I went into the year with the desire to become more spiritual. Not necessarily religious-spiritual (although my Grandmother is surely turning in her grave as I share that) but spiritual in terms of abiding by the needs of where I'm soul-ly being pulled. Where my natural instinct to go, think, and learn gravitates. That was simply an interest at this time last year and as lockdown unfolded in March, April, and May, I found myself involuntarily falling in line with my understanding of who I was and who I wanted to be on that basis.
I don't believe I have a pull to do anything this year. I have goals, I have must-do's, but none that are set in stone to begin 1/1/21. This approach imposes a sort of freedom onto someone who doesn't like to be told what to do, especially when she's telling herself what to do. Mainly because I know the girl who makes the decisions and she's full of shit. I've always tried to be so controlling of how things go and I have selfishly relinquished a lot of the hold I had on those things in order to better "go with the flow." This is something I have never in my life admitted to being able to do. In April I started working out every single day. I'd spend time reading or watching documentaries to better stimulate the creative needs I had. This was going with the flow. However the natural structure of the day unfolded, I followed. This is the ideal resolution in my case, if it must be labeled as such.
My days of rest are few and far between but this week I was gifted a few days off in a row to do so. As I sat brainstorming what would come to be yesterday's post, I found myself down a rabbit hole of outlandish interviews by entertainers I hadn't thought of in years. One in particular spoke of a moment in therapy where the actress was asked, on the road to recovery, "are you ready to handle someone your own size?" Silence followed both myself, the interviewer, and the interviewed.
I didn't give myself time to process it at the moment. Truthfully, you're watching the unfolding as you read this. I suppose if anything, I want to find out that answer for myself with the change of the clock. I have spent, and regularly still spend, so much time giving to others and fearing the inclusion of the odd person into what I've already begun to create for myself for that exact reason, that I myself, can't even handle someone my own size, and I don't think it's fair for someone else to have to first. I am aware of the uproar surrounding this thinking but this is what reasons everything for me. I have always wanted to know who I am before I present myself to someone else and this past year has been a significant test with no grading curve.
So how do we break down the logistics of handling someone your own size? How do you handle someone with your trauma, with your personality, your quirks and fears and intents? And are you ever actually ready for it? My interpretation comes from the amount you're willing to dedicate to and for yourself. A question of similar cadence is asked in terms of wanting to break someone or something down in a negative way. PICK ON somebody your own size. Inherently, that's what we do as human beings. Especially in a time of real-time comparison to your best of friends and your worst of enemies, there's always something to dissect about yourself in an attempt to better your ability to do whatever you set out to do. I just spoke about toxic positivity and how in the wrong moment it can be misconstrued as a way to push yourself to get over something you shouldn't have to make yourself overcome until you are good and ready. In this case, I think putting a positive spin on a lot of what plagues us internally is the key to how we HANDLE someone our own size. Change the verbiage. Change the inflection. Throw it out, reject it, and allow the cracks that have been created in you to drain the water and bring in the light.
This year has been trying to the collective human race and in more ways than one. Between the pandemic and all that entailed, the election year, the incessant amounts of unwarranted violence and oppression continuing during a year that everyone is already highly sensitive to begin with, an overflow of biased media information, mass death on a daily basis, this year truly was unprecedented, as much as I hate to continue using that term. Overall we've come to understand how our neighbors suffer or refuse to. We've become more candid, collectively, about the struggles we face on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. I would have hoped that as a nation and as a world we would have become more caring and empathetic towards those that need and deserve empathy, but as a nation, we're still waiting to crack that code.
We've gone through emotional seasons. The inability to decipher between March and June goes as far as the weather or what national tragedy was happening. For me, a lot of it is lesser event-based and significantly more emotional based. My personal indication of the time of year or the desire for memory recollection is whether or not I was working out every single day. Or if I was reading The Power of Now. Or if I had just gone back to work. If I was wearing a mask or not. And as of recently, if I had been in the throes of experiencing one of the worst depressive episodes of my adult life. Some of you have it based on if you were in the office or if you were working from home. If you were going out for happy hour or throwing together a cocktail of what you had in the cabinet and cheers-ing to your group of friends on Facetime. If you were protesting or not. All of these things led to an act of co-existing in such an irreparable way.
I can't bring myself to wish for much of anything in 2021. I can't bring myself to make decisions or plans or hope that concert I bought floor tickets for is going to happen. My energy lies in acceptance and peace between all of us. My energy lies in wanting a different future for us, as 20 and 30 somethings because after this is all over, nothing is going to be the same. There's an unspoken grieving process happening amongst us, realizing that though we never really had a "normal," we will never see that type of flippant existence again. To some, that's reassuring, to others absolutely terrifying. I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm just hoping for existence in and of itself and the acceptance that I can handle the size of what comes my way.
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