Posted Jan 6, 2024
Making New Years Resolutions usually makes me feel bad about myself. I count all the ways I could and should make myself fitter, healthier, smarter, better. I think about all the time I spent in the last year not improving myself and I feel useless. That feeling turns to frustration with myself, which leads to making goals that are more of punishment than aspiration.
And I would have done the same thing this year, and tried to keep it for a while, and failed, and felt bad about myself in a new special way, assuming that I’m an inherently lazy and bad person… until I saw this post. It had truly never occurred to me that you could make a resolution that was just for your enjoyment. Nothing else.
It’s not that I don’t want to grow, and learn, and improve! I strive for those things all the time, and when done in a way that is compassionate toward myself, working toward bettering myself is supremely fulfilling. But what I don’t want is to shape my resolutions into a sledgehammer with which to beat myself over the head, as I usually do. So this year, I’m abandoning the typical “exercise X times a week”, “log food intake”, “read X learning articles a week”, etc in favor of:
Lifted directly from the post, this is exactly the kind of fun and whimsical goal that fills me with joy and excitement. Over the course of this year, I will be eating as many different shapes of pasta as I can. The “rules” are pretty simple; the pasta shapes have to be encountered organically (eg, I can’t order them online), and I have to eat it. That’s it! I’ll try to keep a list of all the shapes I manage to find and consume; check back in a year, I guess 🍝
When sifting through all the activities that bring me joy, one that kept coming up for me was arts-and-crafts-y endeavors. However, I usually have a little bit of a barrier to starting a new project, because I always feel like I have to have an idea or plan, and that it has to come out perfectly. I want to get rid of this artificial blocker, and I think I’ve come up with a way to do it. First, framing it mentally as “shitty art” and knowing that the end goal is only enjoyment, and that as soon as I’m done I can throw it away, or scribble it out, or erase it, or never look at it again, should remove the pressure of feeling like the output has to be perfect. I might document some of it, I might not, but I know that I don’t have to do anything with it at all, except to enjoy the process. Second, I’ve given myself a cheatsheet for ideas, since it can be hard to come up with them and feel like they’re “good enough”. Each week of the year will be assigned a letter (week 1: A, week 2: B, etc) and with that letter, I’ve thought up several categories of thing that I could draw, color, paint, sculpt, photograph, or whatever else it is I feel like doing that day. This will help me keep it interesting and fun, because it doesn’t have to be meaningful and can just be the first thing my brain throws at me. For example, my first “A” art was a little smiling apple dude with tennis shoes holding a π. It’s shitty! And it doesn’t matter! Drawing a goofy lil guy with some markers made me smile, and that was the whole point. Mission accomplished. 🎯
I chatted with a friend about this one and he pointed out that I don’t necessarily need to only do one-off pieces that fit into a category or are based on the letter of the week. That was a helpful thought, because if I do find inspiration for a longer-term project (like cross-stitching), taking time to do that in a day can totally count toward the habit I’m hoping to build, since again, the goal is simply to do artsy-crafty-creative-ish stuff I enjoy!
So those are my resolutions this year. I’m going to have fun, and I’m going to enjoy adding a little more silliness into my life, and I’m not going to waste time feeling bad for not reaching goals that were unreasonable to begin with.
Here’s to 2024, the year of fun galore 🥂
(or, if you’re a fellow MBMBaMbino, Fungalore - he heard your wish ✨)