It turns out everywhere you go you bring yourself
Contemplating the New Year and self-reinvention with James Baldwin and Joan Didion
January arrived, once again, with its thin layer of frost and a liminal space. I’ve always hated January. It’s a whiplash: you wake up and the Christmas lights are gone, if they’re still up they disgust you.
The beginning of a New Year is a promise of reinvention, and a fragile one at that. No matter how we vow to start anew, everywhere we go, we bring ourselves—and the weight of who we’ve been.
Joan Didion’s words stand out to me in this season of desperation for changing:
“…we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem
We watch the date change, buy planners we won’t use, and imagine our new version of ourselves, yet there we are, beneath it all our same old selves we can’t shake off.
Self-deception & Growing Pains
There is no shame in vowing to self-improvement. There is no shame in dreaming big. It just has to come from a place of sincerity and clarity with where this longing for change is truly coming from. Being gentle with oneself. Truly examining what changes are necessary—especially those you’re afraid/embarrassed of and might appear as less impressive to others, or may not appear to others whatsoever. In the absence of validation (whether that be online or in person) are your New Year’s resolutions sincere?
New beginnings are fragile because they demand carrying our imperfections forward, not leaving them behind. The trick is not to erase the past but to weave it into something new. Resolutions can fail, but reconciliation with ourselves is always possible. And yet, within this fragility lies beauty and hope. Just as frost melts to nourish the earth, the delicate nature of new beginnings holds the seed of growth. Each small step, each gentle reckoning, is a movement toward a brighter, more assured self. The New Year offers possibility—a chance to bloom, no matter how slowly. And that, perhaps, is all the hope we need.
I’ll leave you with this quote from one of my favourite writers.
Giovanni’s Room ( James Baldwin) :
For I am — or I was — one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all-a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named-but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.
