I've never made new years' resolutions. Don't see the point. I'm not someone who revels in their bad habits for a short time with the intention of giving them up at a set date; I'll come to it when I'm good and ready, and when I do decide, I typically don't go back on it.
It took me a long time to overcome the shame and dysphoria of going to the gym, but I did it when I wanted to and I haven't stopped. Drinking alcohol petered out over the course of two years or so, and when I decided, "okay, that was the last time," I never drank again. I take up new hobbies with care and research, and I often don't announce plans or start projects until I know I can carry them through.
Lent was a big thing when I was a kid. I'm sure it has more complexity, but the way it was essentially taught to us was that Jesus gave up food and water in the desert for forty days and forty nights, so we should give up things we loved but that were bad for us for the forty days before Easter. I never really got it, because Jesus didn't give up wine or Pepsi or kebabs, and we weren't encouraged to give up all food and water while traveling the desert. I always felt like people were confusing it with Ramadhan.
Teachers would encourage us to give up chocolate or crisps, parents would lament their inability to give up fizzy drinks, my peers would brag about how it had been three whole days since they had eaten cake.
If we were supposed to give up those things because they were bad for us, why did we take them back up as soon as the Adult-Mandated Time of Abstinence was over? It never made sense to me.
So, what I started doing instead, when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, was start doing good things for that period. Things that I thought Jesus would be proud of. If it didn't stick, then I had made the world better for forty days; if it did, I had made myself better in the long run.
One year for Lent, I gave one compliment every day. Another year, I said every nice thing that came into my head. Another, I did one helpful thing for someone every day.
I was ahead of my time, honestly; it's the kind of thing that would be shared on Facebook and get a billion likes on Instagram by people who fall into multi-level marketing schemes now, but at the time, those same people just made fun of me for being too weird. Such is life.
It petered out in my late teens, when no-one did Lent anymore and I was too stuck in my own head to give compliments or be helpful every day. I like to think that nowadays, I try to incorporate those values into every day, regardless of whether it's just before Easter or not - hopefully those Lent years were good practice. And speaking of incorporating them into every day - that's really my whole approach to the idea of new years' resolutions.
Why wait for the Socially Acceptable Cue to make changes? Big or small, there's things you can do every day to make that day better.
For the last few years, my goals overall have been bare and simple. Survive. Get through. Recover. Find a way forward. Escape. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I have a solid ground beneath my feet. A job I can settle into and stick with, a stable happy living situation, sustainable finances... I can plan. I can create. I can think about short-term luxuries and long-term goals.
So, when I was tasked in my LGBT+ church a few weeks ago with coming up with a new years' resolution... I tried not to be sardonic.
So, what's not sardonic? Sincerity, I guess.
What do I want out of this year? To save money for something. To finish writing something. To get better at something. To have a procedure. Maybe my hesitance to finalise these things, to write them down and hand it in to someone who promises to keep it safe for a year and give it back to me in twelve months' time, is a kind of fear as well as a value.
So, I went with something simpler, but... sincere.
Flourish.
Let's revisit next January, I guess.
