NEW year, same old me and while I’m far from perfect, I’m going into 2025 accepting that I’m good enough as I am.
I don’t know where this never ending pressure to change our shape, our mind-set, our careers and our relationship status came from but at this time of year the ‘makeover’ stuff is everywhere and it comes with more than a whiff of toxicity.
January, with its still short days, its darkness and its cold is not a time to make promises we can’t keep. The natural world is still in slumber waiting for the spring to enliven it once more. Our own deep natures know that rest is necessary for our own transformations to occur and yet we expect ourselves to begin a reboot as soon as a new year begins.
Like the mouse on the wheel, many of us are exhausted with the pressures of life, the constant demands, the energy shrinking to-do lists set against the backdrop of images of humanity plunging into ever deeper darkness. To try to be and do more, for most of us, is simply not possible. We limped across a non-existent finishing line at Christmas to switch off from this broken world for a while.
And yet everywhere we look we are served up a smorgasbord of ways to improve ourselves. All around us, at this time of year especially, are tips and hacks and apps to sign up to or classes to take to help us get the life/body/relationship we want. The unsaid, unwritten subtext here is that you’ve been doing something wrong all along and that’s why your life needs fixing.
Even though we’re not a wet week into the New Year, I’ve lost count of the references to ‘goals’ I’ve seen in the last few days as if life were one big list of things to tick off in order to do things right and have the ‘perfect’ one.
As a woman, we can fall hard down into this rabbit hole of trying to find ways to fix ourselves. We can be fooled into thinking that it’s an outside job, that we’re only one course, class or session away from being our most brilliant selves.
I have bought into this too. I have looked into the eyes of doctors, shamans and priests and all kinds of practitioners of wackery on my own journey for self-improvement. I found only disappointment.
I ran from myself for years. The improved me I was seeking would always be just up ahead and vanish out of sight as soon as I thought I was gaining ground. It was all an illusion – I had bought into the idea that there was something missing in me that I needed to keep trying to reach.
The truth is it’s exhausting and so I stopped trying to be the 2.0 version of myself. My family loved most of the things about the person I was and I suppose I started to accept this good enough version too.
It is painful to say it but if you can’t love this sometimes stranger looking back at yourself in the mirror, then how are you supposed to love others in your life? Being comfortable in our own skin – the only one we have – is the start of this transformation that has nothing to do with a reboot but has everything to do with accepting who we are.
This is not a quick fix solution. It’s an inside job of being gentle on yourself when you make a mistake, of using the same voice to speak to yourself as you use to talk a friend. It’s about patience and promising to drink in the satisfaction of your own life and being able to stand in the full force of the storm when it comes.
According to Dr Marie Murray, Adjunct Professor in the School of Psychology at UCD, emerging from Christmas, people often think about what they would like to be different in the year ahead. “The problem is that it can become a self-critical exercise fed by pressure to change to impossible ideals rather than valuing ourselves for surviving another year and all the challenges it may have brought our way,” she says.