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Each New Year brings a flurry of activity as people make resolutions, purchase diaries, and press their personal reset buttons. What weird monkeys we are. What makes December 31/January 1 the day for this, and what’s more, what makes January, January? It’s arbitrary. Academic. I get seasons, natural ones. I get that the earth revolves around the sun roughly in the span of what we’ve decided is a year. I get Julius Caesar exporting his personal planner along with his legions to bring his domains into line. I even understand Pope Gregory XIII’s need to add a leap year, so things don’t get out of whack and summer turns to autumn before its due. But honestly, our insistence on breaking down time into nano-seconds or epochs too small or large to personally observe is nothing short of majestic and our insistence on renewing ourselves once a year by making promises we are unlikely to keep is bizarre.
I suspect life is resistant to our timetables. It doesn’t count hours or days or years. It doesn’t ease our existential dread. I’m wondering if this need to race the clock isn’t a means to control the uncontrollable. Imagine someone, let’s call her Fredericka Rose Edwina Amelia Kelly, who keeps to her predetermined schedule year after year after year. She sets her goals on January 1, or December 31, if she’s feeling sassy, and works that plan, crossing off her achievements one after another until by the time she reaches D31 again Fredericka etc, (FREAK) for short, is ready to begin again. She doesn’t need to amend her plan because her grandmother doesn’t get sick, her dog doesn’t die and her boyfriend/soon-to-be husband (via a most carefully planned and perfectly executed wedding) doesn’t dump her for a Instagram influencer. She’s immune to life stuff. FREAK’s also immune to changing her mind. Better opportunities don’t puncture her plans. The chance to up her game in the boyfriend department passes her by, as do the signs that version one is playing away.
I’m not saying we are FREAKs, but I think we must admit to approaching yearly planning with a little of the FREAK about us. Let’s call it a freakish mindset. We slap ourselves in the face with our future joie de vivre and it blossoms in our chest like a rose. We’ll go to the gym once, no three times, a week, reduce our net carbs, and read all the books teetering on our night stands. We’ll paint the house, keep up with the cleaning, mow the grass before it’s a jungle, and make our own clothes. And for a time, we feel like our best selves. That shot of serotonin makes our henceforth dissolving resolve worthwhile.
These last two years, I’ve put my foot down. I have not read any January emails about getting my life in order or reaching for the clouds and becoming my best self because this stuff makes me anxious. Future me may pull her socks up or not, but present me is bloody overwhelmed over the expectation that I do so. Would the world stop if we ceased to measure time? Would time treat us poorly, if we ceased to plan it? Would we be lesser? I suspect not.
Sure, I get that there’s a multitude of things to do, but as someone with executive functioning difficulties I ignore January as a one-stop shop for all things planning and yearn for February, its calmer more discreet younger sister. On December 31, I don’t finish my diary and reach for a new one. I turn the page and carry on. Granted my diaries are of my own devising (heavily influenced by the Bullet Journal method), and not pre-dated. I have tried the January planning method, but I’ve found the promises/goals I’ve made are either soon forgotten as more interesting ideas arise or are superseded by pressing events. Does my anarchy mean I get nothing done? Actually no. Of course, I’m susceptible to procrastination, binge television and excessive dog-walking, but my system allows me to do something badly before doing it well.
My current method, which has stood the test of time for the last two years (so I consider it indelible 🙄), requires me to pass undone tasks, from one day to the next until I can cross them off and each day I reconsider them, so they are always front of mind. When they no longer apply because they are irrelevant or uninspiring, I draw a line through them. That’s it, I’m done with you. Try it. Its empowering.
And before you ask, I’m not left directionless in a goal-less void because what has forced my hand is a better idea to take its place. So, rather than place all the pressure on January, my hopes and dreams continue to evolve day by day. Planning happens as needs be in and around the work. Unlike Freak, I can change my mind at any time, refine and finesse what drives me, and have the flexibility I need in the face of life’s disruptions…at least some of the time.
It’s a calmer, quieter way of being. I’m not reinventing, I’m augmenting. The changes are less drastic, bottom-up rather than top-down, and very gradually the ones which matter permeate where I need them most. If, like me, you are done with Januaries, have ADHD, or know someone who does, I wish you ongoing happiness and fulfilment, and I’ll chat with you next month.
Gabrielle.