Who do you want to be this year?
February 1st is not too late to start.
I’m quite superstitious about New Year’s Eve. The way you begin the year is definitely tied to how it plays out. I fully blame 2024 and everything that happened in it (for everyone) on N, a college friend of Aishu’s who decided to get married on January 1st 2024. My best friend and I had resolved to fix the misery of the past few NYEs by being together this time around, course-correcting destiny to manifest a fabulous year ahead. N then announced his grand wedding on that weekend in a small town Kottayam hotel—the kind of venue that comes pre-stocked with aunties who glare at sleeveless saree blouses. We were still optimistic. Aishu said we could still make our plan happen in a paid-for hotel room with room service and mid vacation vibes. She told N that she was bringing me as her plus one, and he said ummm.. no—technically I wasn’t her family.
Our mothers gasp in horror every time we tell this story.
So for NYE, I was sulking in bed in Trivandrum, the only one awake in the house, feeling abundant despair for my life choices. Aishu exiled herself resentfully to Kottayam, and also cried on the 1st about being forced to play a part in celebrating an institution she detested. The year unfolded as it began—a lot of mental distress, conflict, and disappointments.
Okay, to be completely fair, it wasn’t all bad. I thought I would lose my apartment, but instead found great people to live with and a fellow cat-parent. Inji got a sibling to play with. I thought I would lose my job and I didn’t. I had a bad breakup, but after a lot of suffering and confusion, we reconciled and became better together. A toxic and resentful friendship took itself out of my life, and I ended up spending time with and cherishing other precious friends, old and new. I didn’t have much creative output in the second half of the year (and I blame most of this on AI, will explain later), but I’m trying to remedy that now.
But all the bad that happened was definitely N’s fault.
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In the last week of December 2024, I was consumed with the idea of setting everything up exactly right for the next year. Cheesy intentionality was the way out of the stagnation I was feeling, and the answer to all the annoyances of life. A dear friend gifted me a beautiful purple journal for my birthday, along with some green-violet ink. I spent hours on Pinterest looking at ADHD bullet journal sketches and ideas, quickly got overwhelmed, and bookmarked a Reddit post about how it's more important to have a functional journal than an aesthetic one.
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A friend ranted that January is the worst time to start afresh. It’s still the middle of winter in North India, there is barely any sun, and seasonal depression is in the air. The body wants to sleep and eat carbs; it doesn’t know what the Gregorian calendar dictates. A lot of Indian cultures celebrate the harvest season beginning as the new year equivalent in March. Spring does make more sense. But if you are one of those life procrastinators who waits for 5:30 to begin work, drifts away till 5:33, and resets plans to now begin at 6pm, then the sooner you find a deadline for renewal, the better. (I literally just did this by spending 10 minutes on the Wikipedia page of January and then reading about its birthstone garnet and why it stands for constancy, instead of writing). January is 5:35. It’ll do.
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There were two important NYE parties—one with a dearest group of friends, the other with my boyfriend and another set of friends. Where did I belong? Who put me in charge of making all these decisions that determined how my entire year was going to play out? At 8:30 p.m. on the most trafficky night of the year, I was half-dressed and crying about the impossibility of joy in the face of time turning a year older, and how I had nothing to wear for it. I was going to be late, my friends would be impossible to find in the party roulette we were all playing across Delhi, and we’ll all be stuck in traffic in a cab somewhere over the Chirag Delhi flyover at midnight. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and got me dressed and out of the house, into party number 1, and then party number 2.
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In Korean culture, the New Year is also celebrated as everyone’s collective birthday. If you have ever suffered from too much birthday on your actual birthday, the New Year might make you feel the same.
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As midnight rolled around, I was sulking again in a corner of party number 2, feeling the weight of the futility of life and mortality. I was grieving everything that happened and didn’t happen. I also realized that circumstances or assholes like N weren’t the problem, it was my overthinking and inability to give in. Thankfully while I was moping, the boys were being productive and meeting with a guy who knew a guy. It went well and Sid returned with a nice baggie of ecstasy.
Here was the dilemma—I’ve been grieving the passing of time every NYE, but could I allow myself to chemically induce the joy I couldn’t find? You can’t manufacture unreal happiness when misery is the righteous emotion for the moment, could you? We debated on this for a while, and then I decided. Fuck it. I’m beginning this year with joy—the artificiality is just a detail.
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In 20 minutes, we were flying in a cab from Vasant Kunj to Alaknanda, windows down in 5 degrees. I couldn’t stop smiling. I was filled with wonder and generosity towards the world. I played the Hindu song from Sadko on my phone’s tinny speaker, and felt the soaring symphony inside me. I crouched next to the heater on the floor in the apartment with my teeth chattering, confessing my fears and anxieties giddily to Sid’s flatmate and his girlfriend (who were having a quiet romantic night in till the druggies showed up). “I want you to know everything about me,” I told Sid while making him listen to 80s K.J. Yesudas, the secret star of my Spotify Wrapped. I danced and flailed my limbs around, marvelling at how light the air is when I’m not watching myself critically.
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I woke up happy on January 1st.
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A friend had posted on her Instagram story asking if anyone made resolutions this year. She told me that the common response was “lol no”, I was the only enthusiastic exception. Last year, my company’s meeting about work resolutions had me cringing into a wrinkle. What a lame attempt at trying to wrestle will into our destiny, huh? This year however, I’ve fully bought into it—tricking myself into activity through cheesy intentionality.
At the end of one month of this practice, I’m delighted to note that it’s kind of working.
My journal setup is quite simple for the year—I write down my to-do list daily with checkboxes, along with colour-coded notes on books read, movies watched, dishes cooked, and spending. I set a bunch of small goals to achieve at the beginning of each week (cook one nostalgia dish, crochet two more rows of that scarf, take Inji to the vet). It’s all strictly realistic, as you could very easily plan too close to the sun. I used to jot down my notes and to-dos in a WhatsApp chat with myself called Trial&Error, but it didn’t help at all for tracking. Most tech solutions are extremely to do with the present, and rarely encourages revisiting the past or learning from it. The scroll is always about the present and the near-present future; archives are tucked away. Analog meanwhile rewinds better. Pages are exciting to flip back and forth through.
If you fall within the ADHD-neurospicy spectrum like me, it’s also common to just have days when you have no idea what you’re doing. I’ve spent weeks living in a constant state of brain fog, in which things are happening but I don’t register most of it. I vaguely remember buying coffee once, but when the credit card statement rolls around it’s four times a week, with a panini treat always on the side.
Consistency is my biggest challenge (readers of this Substack can attest to it) but the journal practice seems to be going strong Inshallah. In 31 days, I’ve learned that:
Most of my goals are about creative fulfillment, with work and career just being present within terse to-dos. I aspire to write more, make art and consume art. I’m pleasantly surprised to realize that I do have clarity for what I’d like to grow towards. I credit a lot of this to the wonderful Dilli Billi creatives in my life, balancing day jobs that pay the bills with a truly disciplined commitment to their artistic practices. It’s very inspiring.
The city’s apathy towards healthy air and water is going to have long-term effects on our health in ways we don’t even know yet. Whenever I fall sick these days, I stay sick an alarmingly longer time. The body takes longer to heal, and this is the case for my healthy jock friends too. We are all coughing phlegm up like 80-year-olds for weeks. It’s not going to end well.
I need to cut down on revenge spending. Often I get moody about money and my family’s financial instability, and I lash out with revenge spending on something just to prove I can. This is not just me, India is overall seeing a rise in luxury spending from our generation as we don’t have much less. Let’s balance out the lack of public infrastructure or liveable climate by splurging on Zomato and concerts. But most of it rarely has a lasting effect, I’m working on cutting down.
Bedrot days are essential. I will have 3 days of being a good girl who wakes up on time, socializes and finishes her work. Then rot day arrives. Nothing happens on rot day. I’m still training myself to be fine with it. I always get back to things with vigor the next day (or the day after).
At the risk of being that really obnoxious person who discovers something everyone has been doing and then acts as if it’s their own personal hot take, journals really help! Cheesy intentionality and cringe resolutions do help you feel like you have a modicum of control in your life, even if most things that you do don’t matter! It helps!
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January is still a month of sluggish momentum. It’s a lot of time to dream up who you want to be, if without the will to put things into action. February is hopeful. I might finally start working out, spend less time on Instagram, and sit at my desk more. If you’re like me and looking for a round number moment to start doing something, February is good. If you’re not fooled by the follies of self-improvement and the inevitability of dissatisfaction, you’re smarter than me! Just do more of eating oranges in the winter sun. It’s all that really matters.
Thought strands
Another year, another reading challenge. I’ve started the year with a reading slump despite my formidable goal of 50 books to read. I blame Instagram scroll and dark winter mornings. I’m still persevering, and slowly enjoying Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Every sentence is a poetic delight. It’s a great book to sit with first thing in the morning, a sublime reminder of the scale at which our lives exist.
I have also been dutifully knocking off movies on my watchlist. Letterboxd era has however ushered in a PR-unleashing of highbrow hype for new indie releases, and I’m always disappointed when I get to actually watch the film. I experienced this with Anora and Nosferatu recently. I’ve also been watching some excellent television, which has heightened my expectations of what a feature film ought to achieve (greater depth than a bottle episode). I also watched all of Mad Men for the first time. It made me think a lot about happiness, identity, the cycles of political propaganda and the birth of the monster that’s the consumerism we know today. It was all falling apart from the very start, even before Americans were spending billions to murder children, enable massacres and genocides and lie to their public about it. Oh wait, that was Vietnam too.
AI makes you worse at your job. I write content for an AI startup, and all my work for the past 6 months has been to do with churning out articles with LLMs, clogging up the internet. I did give the damn thing a fair shot, but I can unequivocally say that automating the annoying micro-tasks of writing makes you a worse writer. It’s like how smartphone calculators have eroded most of our mental arithmetic skills. Writing without a tool becomes such a drag, and before you know it you’re unable to draft an Instagram caption yourself. Don’t believe the trash they say about how it’s going to help creatives. It’s not.