Happy New Year & Other Crap Expectations
New year, new you — right? That’s what we tell ourselves when we hit this fairly unremarkable day on the calendar. There’s nothing special about it on its face. It’s a day that ends a month that also happens to end a year. Time is only a construct because we made it one.
So, why do we put so much pressure on this one little 24-hour block?
Most of it’s based in hope. Here’s to the end of this old, busted thing and the beginning of a new, shiny thing. New things are good because they’ll be different from old things, right?
Some people throw their hopes, dreams, and goals at the new. They “new year, new me” themselves into a gym membership, an organizational planner they swear they’ll use, and whatever self-care trend is fashionable.
Others take a darker (or perhaps more realistic) route. These are the “same sh*t, different year” people who just want to make it through without choking someone, not gain another X pounds, and find a spark of serotonin along the way.
Bring out the resolutions!
Often we create resolutions because that’s what we’ve been encouraged to do. Keep up with the Joneses. Don’t you know the clock is ticking? Why aren’t you couple/married/pregnant yet? You should buy instead of rent. What do you mean you want to go to trade school instead of college?
And then we put so much pressure on ourselves to achieve certain milestones within certain timeframes because that’s what we feel we’re supposed to do. Failure to do so “on time” tells us that we are failures.
Here’s where we mess this all up.
I’m sure you’ve seen this somewhere in meme-land before, that we should stop comparing ourselves to others’ timelines because it’s not healthy. And while that’s true, it’s not especially helpful because everything around us says we’re failing at life when we’re not hitting some arbitrary benchmark.
Ergo, we mess this up because we’ve got this idea that success looks like certain things at certain points in our lives. When we miss the mark, we become less-than. We fail.
Example: As a high school English teacher, I see one of these benchmarks repeatedly, and it makes me ache. For context, I fell into the “trap” of feeling like the first few years out of high school were the time to get engaged, married, and start planning a family. I was married at 19 and divorced by 21, though, because I wasn’t being authentic. I was doing what I was “supposed to do.”
And now I watch my students graduate, and within months, engagement rings are flying, and they’re committing to doing life with someone at 18 years old. Do those marriages work sometimes? Sure! I’ve got lovely friends who’ve been together for decades now. But they’re the outliers in my experience.
So when my students — I teach all seniors — ask me about stuff like getting married young, I hit ’em with questions. “Do you want to get married soon after high school? or at all? Even better, what would you do if you had all the money in the world and no one to tell you what to do otherwise?”
They almost always want to travel the world or do things that would lead to a greater understanding of what they truly want in life. But they’ve grown up hearing that they need a college degree to be successful and that they should want XYZ for themselves, and so that’s what most of them do instead.
There’s no right or wrong way, but…
Everyone should work on their own timing, without making comparisons to others. Easier said than done, I know. Living a life always wondering when we’re going to reach the next milestone prevents us from living in the present, though. And if we’re not allowing ourselves to be fully present in our moments, free from anxiety about the future, then what kind of life are we living?
The hardest thing for most of us is knowing what (and even who) is authentic to our purpose. And many of us don’t discover that purpose until much later in life. Therefore, following societal expectations on timelines doesn’t work for everyone. And that’s okay. We need to break the stigma around doing things by any particular age.
And that’s hard because there seems to be someone in our lives asking things like, “When’s he gonna propose already?” One that plagued me was a former mother-in-law hounding me about when I was going to make her a grandmother when I was pretty sure I didn’t want kids.
Please realize that these people are projecting their wants and expectations onto you. You are under no obligation to live their dreams out for them. What do you want?
But I don’t want to disappoint anyone…
My polite response to that is to tell them to kindly #$%& off. In my case, I wasn’t a breed mule. You want babies in your life? Adopt some.
Knowing that it’s not your responsibility to please others and being able to establish healthy boundaries to protect your peace is liberating. My wish for everyone’s 2023 is that they start flinging those boundaries out like spike strips on a high-speed pursuit.
And remember, the kicker is that no one is truly aware of what you’re doing because they’re too busy telling you what they think you should be doing.
Sure, maybe your friends are all around you getting engaged and married while you’re hanging out with your cat, and maybe they’re feeling sorry for you and trying to set you up on blind dates or encourage you to “get out there” more. Want to know why none of that matters?
Because it’s not their f’n life. It’s yours.
Here’s to 2023. Go kick all the ass in whatever way brings you authentic joy.
Much love, ~ Jennifer
