No, you don't need a New Year's Resolution
Hello, Happy New Year!
I know this is hardly a controversial take but I hate New Year. Specifically, I hate ‘New Year, new me’ discourse, an entire societal narrative predicated on the idea that nothing you did last year was good enough. I call bullshit.
Also - you may see where this is going - it’s all quite exclusionary, isn’t it? Not everyone can reinvent themselves, or even have the sort of control over their day to day lives that goal-setting and resolution-making requires. (This I know from personal experience: I used to be someone who liked - no, needed - to have a plan, but then every time my body or my care situation or ableism knocked me off course I’d panic even more. Resigning myself to just seeing what happens has allowed me to stop trying to control what cannot be controlled. Of course I still have goals and dreams, but I no longer think putting a timescale on achieving them is reasonable or helpful.) Society’s obsession with New Years Resolutions or ‘starting afresh’ feels starkly at odds with the realities of most disabled people’s lives.
I always love chatting about my book, The View From Down Here: Life as a young disabled woman.
It's a pleasure to talk to people about my experiences - from friendships to body image to dating to work - and how they've been shaped by the tricky interplay of ableism and sexism. I love seeing the lightbulb moment when people grasp the social model of disability and I love sending them away empowered to be allies to the disabled people in their lives.
So join me next Thursday evening for an exciting Q&A with Aphra Book Club at The Gilded Acorn bookshop in Holborn. It promises to be a fascinating chat and I'll be signing books too!
There’s also the basic biological fact that the middle of winter is an objectively terrible time to start anything, especially for disabled people. Lots of us don’t do well in the cold, many are highly susceptible to winter bugs - neither of which lend themselves to going out and doing lots of things. My powerchair and I are simply not made for the rain. The season necessitates slowing down and cosying up, conserving energy and staying warm. If we must have New Year’s Resolutions, can we at least do them in March?
And let’s talk about energy. All these resolutions and goals seem to require expending vast amounts of it. Go to the gym three times a week. Read two books a month. Learn to sew. Blah blah blah. Some of us are tired, ok? Some of us have already portioned all our energy out on all the things we’re already doing. Some of us don’t even have enough energy for that. The assumption that you can just magic up some more is, to use an internet-ism, extremely non-disabled coded. The difference between how non-disabled people talk about energy and how we do fascinates me. Where are you getting it from? How can you be so unaware of how much you are using? What’s it like to live without doing constant energy budget calculations in your head? What a genuinely flabbergasting way to live. I’m not really jealous of the ability to walk or feed yourself or whatever, but I would do anything to go from one thing to the next without wondering when the crash will come. Maybe in such circumstances publicly committing to doing something within a certain timeframe makes sense, but for the rest of us it is pure folly.
Maybe the answer here is to make commitments that are less about doing and more about being. Being kinder, to others and ourselves. Being gentler. Being angrier about injustice. Being prouder, being rooted in community. Being open. Being trustworthy. Being a friendly face. Being happier.
Now they’re some 2025 goals I can get on board with.
Much love,
Lucy