new year, new me?
on self-discovery, resolutions, and another year of wanting.
I often find it hard to reflect on a personal level, particularly in terms of seeing how I have changed with each passing year. Today, I feel as if I am no different than I did at the start of 2024 — save the acquisition of two pairs of Levi’s jeans and a new hair color — which is why the original title of my first ever newsletter (!!) was “new year, same old me.” But like any girl about to go forth on a semester abroad, I have found hope in the cliche of reinventing myself.
I am so incredibly ready for my gloomy, dark academia spring, studying mythology and nineteenth century literature in London. Doesn’t everyone want to be that girl? So, in the spirit of the new year, as everyone flocks to social media to preach their New Year’s resolutions, I have decided to fully embrace 2025 as my year of reinvention.
Currently, I am stuck in the limbo between adolescence and adulthood — that is to say, I constantly feel like an imposter. It’s hard to feel like an adult when you’re still going to classes every day and doing homework at your desk in the dark hours of night, but I’m hoping this year I will feel a shift. Though I will still be attending classes and completing assignments at late hours, I will be truly on my own for the very first time in my life (and I’m going to romanticize the hell out of it).
As the only child of a single mother, it is easy to feel like I grew up too fast, that the reality of the world pushed me too far before I was well and truly ready for it. I was constantly in the presence of adults. Children are nothing if not sponges, and so I soaked up everything around me and adapted to my environment, conversing like I was one of them. And it felt good, being treated like I was wanted in the room unlike most other kids who seemed to be a nuisance; I reveled in being wanted company.
I have always felt a bit awkward around those my age, even my closest friends. Often, it has been remarked that people feel that I talk down to them, which I believe is a symptom of my early maturity and something I have yet to figure out how to turn off. I have spent a majority of my life waiting to reach the next stage. College was always my end all be all, the place I assumed everything would all finally make sense, where the waiting would stop; and yet, here I am: twenty years old and still feeling like the outlier in a room full of my peers.
“marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.”
-normal people, sally rooney
Even now, deep in my mind, I am still struggling to find my place, my people.
I don’t know if I really want to find my people in London because I would never see them again after my five months in their company, and I am notoriously bad at keeping in touch. I’m not placing all my hopes on England when I’ve been mostly disappointed in my own country. Maybe what I’m searching for is how to be okay being alone. I feel as if I have spent quite a bit of time on my lonesome since starting college, but it wasn’t by choice so much as by my inability to make more than acquaintances.
Articles have been written about how we as a society learned to be lonely during the height of the pandemic, but quarantine really just made me dread being by myself. I struggle going out in public and doing things if I’m alone; my thoughts so much louder. I become my most self-conscious, worried about what others see when they look at me — utterly aware of being perceived.
I want to find comfort in my own company.
I typically hate resolutions — the only goal I set for myself is my Goodreads challenge because it is the only one that I actually ever make an effort to accomplish. There are things that I want to make a priority this year to better myself intellectually and start becoming the adult I yearn to be. Maybe if I don’t call them resolutions or goals, I will actually do them (at least I know myself).
Five Priorities for 2025:
start the morning with an article
I’ve never much been one for reading The New Yorker or the Times, but I feel like it is now my responsibility as an adult to stay updated not only with what is currently happening in our world politically, but also culturally. I often know nothing about what is actually happening in the world that I inhabit and I want to do better. And even just reading up on things that don’t have an impact on my knowledge in that regard are still important; people put time and effort into these pieces, and as someone who wants to be a writer, I should be reading others’ work in all forms — not just novels.
listen to more audiobooks
I own about 9 audiobooks that have gone unlistened to. For me, the struggle comes from an issue with actually listening; so many people listen to audiobooks while they do their day-to-day tasks because they don’t have the time to sit down and read, but I don’t comprehend any of the content when I’m not sitting down and actively listening to the book. The few audiobooks I have listened to took me longer to get through than the books I physically read, but they were really enjoyable experiences. With the amount of traveling I plan to do in the next five months, I will have the opportunity to listen to some of the audiobooks that have been sitting on my phone for years while waiting to arrive at my destination.
write for an hour everyday
Now this is the big one for me because I am horrible at writing goals. The desire to sit down and write comes in random spurts for me; I always want to be writing, but it’s a matter of whether I can actually bring myself to do it. I am aware that if I continue this way I won’t ever finish anything, which is completely incongruous with the whole point of my career aspirations. By forcing myself to write every day I will build the habit that will be crucial in my life when I am writing professionally, and it won’t pressure me with a specific word count per day either — I don’t care how many new words I put down on the page, as long as I’m making an effort to write anything at all.
experience my surroundings
My mom will always scold when we’re in public for looking at my phone or just not paying attention in general, and while I don’t typically care when I’m walking the streets of my home or riding in the car for a couple of hours, I do want to take the time to look up once in a while and take in my surroundings. The whole point of embarking on a semester abroad is to travel and experience the world, and I can’t do that if my nose is always stuck in a book or I’m trapped doom-scrolling social media. I really want to be a more present human being and spend less time escaping.
find joy in small treasures
This one is a bit vague so that’s why I’m here to explain what I mean. While I’m abroad I want to become a collector of small, seemingly pointless things that can be made meaningful through the memories those objects embody. I’ve seen so many collage journals where people take old receipts or movie tickets and other random “trash” items and turn them into something beautiful and joyful; I have never been the sort to save anything, so I want to actively keep anything small that won’t take up priority space in my luggage and can symbolize all of my experiences and adventures.
My time abroad will be the longest my mother and I have ever been apart. Despite my fear of the unknown being on an entirely new continent, I expect this will push me closer to adulthood. I will get to experience a semblance of what it’s really like to live on my own.
I want this year to be the year where I finally start to become the person I yearn to be, but I have to first discover who that really is, who I am now, and how to find balance between the two.