New Year's resolutions are the perfect opportunity for the media to burrow under our skin and convince us that all our Christmas indulgence has made us too fat/lazy/complacent/terrible to hold any worth as human beings and we must of course change this by immediately buying their gym memberships, diet plans, and weird cardboard food, now with 129% less calories! I confess, I have made resolutions in the past, phrased vaguely enough that I can deem even the most half-hearted effort a 'success' without too much argument. They've been things like 'manage my time better' and 'read more' - goals that lack any kind of metric whatsoever, so I can merrily go about my life without the promise of failure breathing down my neck. After all, how can you fail if you haven't even worked out what you really intend to do? You probably get the picture - I've never considered New Year to be properly worth my time.
New Year felt a bit different this year though. December 31st marked the sixth of my twelve sessions of chemotherapy, which means I'm halfway there, and as much as I despise the thought of another three months getting my blood periodically diluted with poison, there's triumph mixed in with the dread. I'm still scared, because cancer is unpredictable, and chemotherapy is disempowering, and nobody can be completely sure it's even working until it's over anyway, but I'm not just scared. I'm hopeful and thankful and optimistic and a whole host of other things too. This is the home straight; despite my impulse to prepare for the worst, I'm beginning to feel more and more like things might be okay in the end. December 31st also happens to be the anniversary of me meeting my boyfriend. We don't really have a proper anniversary of 'becoming a Thing' because we drifted together in such a way that there was no real point of collision, so the date of our first meeting is the best we've got (at least it's an easy date to remember). The celebration was admittedly a little half-hearted because we'd spent all day at the hospital (the well-intentioned and grossly enthusiastic mixing of mocktails did little to inject any joy into the experience, but you have to commend the staff for trying) and our enthusiasm was somewhat dampened by cytotoxic drugs and tiredness. Nevertheless, New Year's Eve felt a little more capital-S-Significant than it might have done otherwise. I had a couple of real, non-arbitrary reasons to believe 2015 might be different.
I really want 2015 to be different. Last year was rubbish - like really, spectacularly rubbish - and without the stupendous patience of a few people in particular, I probably wouldn't have got to the end of it in one piece. I am so desperate to leave all that negativity in the past where it belongs that I am prepared to send my cynicism on its merry way and treat January 2015 like it actually is a new beginning. If I want this year to be different, I'm going to have to make it so. To that end, I have made myself some vague sort-of aspirations. I'm not sure they quite deserve to be called resolutions, they're just things which I think will make me happier, which I hope is a low enough bar to set myself. I have learned that I cannot trust circumstances to improve (2014 was the year-long equivalent of that scene in a cartoon where the characters are in a tricky situation, one of them says 'at least it's not raining', and then it starts raining), so I'm left with no choice but to improve the way I approach said circumstances instead. Cue efforts to become a Radiant Goddess Creature composed entirely of light and positivity:
- Read. I baffle myself with my reading habits. I'm an English student, I have a to-read list which currently has over eighty books on it, I have more time than I know what to do with, and yet I have been stuck halfway through Brideshead Revisited for about three months. I love reading, the only obstacle seems to be convincing myself to switch off my phone and actually sit down and do it. I have literally no idea why I procrastinate something I like so much, and in the interest of transforming myself into a Radiant Goddess Creature, I will make a conscious effort to spend more time reading. (I know, this is one of those goals that doesn't have any kind of metric, but this time it has some emotional weight behind it, which, according to science or something, makes me much more likely to do it, honest.)
- Resume status as clarinet ninja. I'm tired of feeling defeated, and a sure-fire way to chase away that feeling of defeat is to do something really well. Together with my trusted friends Mozart and Weber, I will once again be mighty and powerful (and also hopefully actually learn to play scales properly).
- Journal. A quote that's stuck in my head ever since I first read it: 'I'm terrible at journalling. But I do it anyway, because I think that maybe one day I’ll write something that I didn't know before, and suddenly it will all make sense.' My journal was used almost exclusively as an emergency vent whenever I hit crisis point last year. While that's all very well and good, I now look at my 2014 journal with a mixture of sadness and anxiety, as that's how I was feeling most of the time when I used it. I don't want to start pretending everything is sunshine and rainbows when it damn well isn't, but I do want to record my thoughts more often so that when I look back on my 2015 journal, I also find things that inspired me and things that I'm grateful for. Life's pretty cool if you make an effort to find the good bits, and journalling is going to be my effort to find the good bits.
- Fruit, veg and water. I don't care about losing weight (more as an act of rebellion against the Western media-patriarchy-machine than because I'm actually satisfied with my squidgy bits) - this one's about health. I've been following doctor's orders to drink three litres of fluid every day during chemo. At times it feels like some crazy variation on Chinese Water Torture, but for all the splooshy stomach sounds, eating and drinking properly always manages to make me feel a bit more alive.While I'm not going to force myself to drink three litres a day once I'm done with chemo (I'm not a masochist), I could probably stand to drink a bit more than I used to.
- Find a form of exercise that I hate less than other forms of exercise. I have all the grace and coordination of a squid, and my lack of depth perception (thanks for the eyesight, Dad) means I cannot catch to save my life, so sports have never been a strong suit of mine. There have been points in my life where I've taken a perverse kind of pride in my lack of physical prowess, but I think it's about time I did something about it, since there is no pride to be found in needing to take a breather halfway up a flight of stairs. Maybe I'll put my squidliness to good use and start swimming?
- Be nicer to my parents. I'm not sure this requires an explanation to be honest. Not that I'm unkind to them exactly, but I could probably go a bit easier on the sarcasm.
- Keep in touch with my friends better. I am very good at convincing myself that, if people want to talk to me, they’ll message me first. Which is a stupid attitude to have, because if everyone thought like that, nobody would ever speak to anybody.
- Live intentionally. The frequency with which I tell people I don't mind when I actually do mind is getting silly. Drifting along like a discarded Wotsits packet in the breeze may be simple enough, but it's a lot easier to be happy when you know you're doing something because you wanted to, not just because that's just how things panned out.
- Have a magical attitude. To consciously approach life with positivity, compassion, gratitude, and Goddess-like radiance.
It'd be foolish to expect to fully achieve all of these, but I hope they'll be a catalyst for some sort of improvement. To be quite honest, I'd settle for comfortable mediocrity. If my year can manage to be any more than pretty much average then I'll consider it to be a glorious success!
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