If you over-think New Year celebrations (like I do most things), they start to feel a bit silly. It’s an entirely arbitrary holiday, based around how we funny little monkeys mark our planet’s orbit around the sun. A New Year isn’t all that different from a clock striking midnight, or any other time of day. It’s just a big party in which a large portion of our species celebrates the fact that we have a system for keeping time. Go us.
But I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. I like New Year’s. I like what it symbolizes. I like the unabashed optimism, even though January 1 is no more of a clean start than any other day. I like that we often choose to spend those transitional hours with people we love, as if to say, “It is awesome to be alive, and it’s awesome to be alive with these particular people.” I like that New Year’s often involves pretty clothes and drinking and things that explode (especially if you are here in Reykjavik, where the stroke of midnight looked like this; one of those rockets was lit by yours truly, who ran gleefully away from it in a foot of snow).
I also enjoy having sanctioned time for reflection, which is something I do a lot of anyway, regardless of the day. Arbitrary as it may be, the New Year gives me a chance to compartmentalize a particular series of events — in this case, 2011 events. I like taking time to look at the things I’ve done, the things I’ve learned, and the things I’d still like to do. I don’t make resolutions, per se, because I don’t think the goals I set on one day are any more valid than they are on others. But I do think hard about those goals, because they are the standard that I measure myself by, and in another twelve arbitrary months, I’ll be seeing how they panned out.
If 2010 was a year of learning how to earn a living by writing, 2011 was a year of learning what I actually like to write — not just fiction-wise, but in terms of earning my bread, too. I tried a lot — a lot — of different things. Some of them worked out. Most did not. But even the things that didn’t work out could usually be built upon, and if not, then I learned something important about my strengths and weaknesses. I’ve (mostly) stopped comparing every detail of my work habits to writers more successful than I, because I’m not them.
2012 also means that in a few months, I will have been out of college longer than I was in college. This is a marker that, to me, means a lot more than a New Year. It is a giant boot to the ass, and one that I heartily welcome. Scrapping my theater career and picking up writing was a good step in the right direction (nay, a totally rad step), but I’ve spent an awful lot of time this past year waiting for people to hand me the chances I was looking for. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking hard about opportunities I can give myself instead. It’s a very freeing line of thinking, but it’s scary as hell, too. As I think all good things should be.
That’s what you’ll be seeing from me over the next few months: experiments. Some will crash and burn, as all experiments are prone to do. But I’m hoping some — at least one in particular — turns out a little bit awesome.
Happy New Year, everybody. I hope it’s good to you and yours.