Little Possibilities of Reinvention

I want to know your New Year's Resolution !! For real!

I don’t care what the haters say, I love January.

Okay, yeah, she doesn’t have the abundance of cookies and peppermint lattes like December does, nor does she have the feast meals of November or the romance of February. In the face of celebrations, January can have a certain aux de Walk of Shame after the conclusion of the Holiday Season. January is so often us looking in the mirror at ourselves and thinking of all the things that we need to change in order to be “new” in the year ahead, as though improvement is a linear line that we need to be resolute in keeping steady year after year. It can be a real Sisophys pushing a boulder moment if you let it, and there’s not even a little treat based holiday to ease the blow.

But, January’s biggest flaw is also her greatest strength. I mean, isn’t it kind of amazing that as a society we have a built-in moment in time to say “I am allowed to change myself”? It’s easy to become stuck in habits that are, at the very least, ones that don't cultivate joy. When you’re already in a routine of scrolling on social media for hours at night, drinking heavily with friends on a weekday, committing to a work softball league that you hate, or any other thing that makes you feel a clinical case of the blahs, then it can be really difficult to find a way to organically shed the habit.

This is where January has your back. You can try something totally different this month, and it’s a lot harder for someone to wrinkle their eyebrows and question your motives when you throw a “new year, new me” right in their face.

The people that make me roll my eyes into the back of my head so far that I see my brain are the people that have to make a big deal of “New Year, Same Me”. You know the ones. You tell them about your goals for the year and they give you a little smirk and brag about how they don’t do New Year's Resolutions. Like for real? Like there’s nothing at all you want to reflect on and add to your life to create a more positive 2025? Nothing at all? You are simply the embodiment of human perfection? So, you’ve gotta let all the Normies with their little goals know that their resolutions are stupid and don’t work? Okay, sick.

In an effort to be kinder in 2025, I’ll give some of these Negative New Year Nellies the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they don’t see the benefit of a New Year’s Resolution because they cling to the belief that a resolution needs to be a massive overhaul of a life change, or that a resolution must be tied to weight or diet.

Announcement: it is no longer 2005. You do not need to make going to the gym 7 days a week and losing 50 pounds your New Year’s Resolution. If that’s a realistic goal of yours that you want to achieve, listen, I am not the morality police and I don’t know you and your body, therefore it’s none of my business. But, did you know that you can have a New Year’s Goal like, “put gas in my car before the gas light goes on” or “try that new Mexican restaurant that I keep saying I’m going to try”?

I love small, measurable goals. Last year, my friend Maddie told me that she was creating a bingo board for 2024 that was full of manageable, small resolutions that she wanted to commit to for the coming year. Immediately interested, I made a board of my own and a corresponding notes app to keep track of all of the specifics.

Yes, I do own an actual bingo daubber.

Okay, I did learn a new recipe in 2024, it was some kind of chicken thing that I totally forgot to write down. I also learned how to cook crab legs, which is easier to do than I thought.

The concept of the bingo board is that you fill your board with achievable, measurable goals. Then, once you get bingo, you get yourself a little treat. If you blackout the board, you get yourself a BIG treat. I’ll admit though, I usually didn’t follow through with getting myself a bingo treat, because there really wasn’t a material object or activity that was motivating enough to drive me to fill out the board. The motivation for me came from filling out the board itself. I am a bitch who loves a checklist, so the thrill of punching my board with a bingo dauber was enough motivation for me to keep going all year long. This year, I think my “small treat” for getting bingo will be a new outfit (workout or otherwise) because I have a goal to otherwise not buy clothing this year.

This year, I wanted to focus my goals on things that I love to do, but don’t always make time for. In addition, I wanted a lot of goals to focus on nurturing my community and the people that I care about. I made sure that every goal was achievable and measurable. I know I keep saying that, but having achievable and measurable goals is key to sticking to New Year’s Resolutions, or any kind of goal making. Making big changes is really hard, and it can be extremely discouraging to not meet a lofty goal. It leads to an open invitation of negative thoughts flooding your cute little brain, the worst of which being “I give up, it’s not worth it”.

In addition, an important part of creating my goals was building in the possibilities of a second chance. For example, if I made my letter writing goal, “write one letter every month”, and then I skipped a month, that goal would never be achieved because, even if I wrote two letters the following month, I still would not have written a letter every month. Therefore, I worded it as “write 12 letters”. That way, I’m not held to finishing those 12 letters within specific timeframes. This concept came up when discussing my husband’s bingo board for the year, because he put “PR in the marathon” as one of his items. I mentioned that he runs one marathon a year, what if he’s sick that day? Or it’s super hot? Or what if there are other external or internal factors that lead him to not PRing? Then he would never be able to fill his bingo board because of one day. That kind of pressure is not the energy we Bring to the Board.

But, no matter what your goal is -- whether you want to hike K2 or eat a new flavor of ice cream-- I hope that you realize that January has your back. As you're slipping and sliding on the ice on the sidewalk, there are infinite little possibilities for reinvention as the days of the month tick by, a beautiful reminder that we have the freedom to change in any way that we want to. For what it’s worth, I hope that you find a goal for yourself, even a little sprout of one, that will improve your life for the better. The year is going to change us regardless, so you might as well hold on to the things that you have control of changing for the better.

2025 is here, ready or not, who will you be come December? I hope I’ll be a bingo blackout winner.