The new year

I'm not one for new year resolutions. I make them, nevertheless, and I know why, but I struggle to put it into words. It's not habit or custom or peer pressure. But I see other people doing it, and it reminds me that goals are important. I have the standard super-generic goals about love, money, success, happiness, etc., but I struggle with specific long-term goals. I struggle to make them, to complete them, and eventually to even remember them. I was never good at it, and these days I live in the faint haze of an adulthood that I didn't expect, and I have less luxury of time and will to focus on anything too distant. But goals are important, and making a resolution for the new year is easy, and breaking it has minimal consequence (everyone fails them constantly, yay!).

When I resolve to do something, I get a positive feeling that I identified something important that I need to improve, and this by itself creates an illusion of semi-fulfillment. If I take any type of meaningful step towards completing the goal, the illusion intensifies. And then, before I know it, I stop worrying about the goal; either I forget about it or I don't worry about achieving it. I don't know much about the nature of this memory-sieve, partly because I can scarcely remember previous goals at all, and partly because making an active effort to remember is an unpleasant exercise, requiring deep introspection and preparation to deal with pain. Not the defined, expected, and well-known pain from an embarrassing childhood memory, but the pain from rediscovering old, dormant wounds. You know the wounds are there, and you know you'll find some of them when you explore your subconscious, searching for the source of the sieve, but that's all you know. And you won't find any achy old wounds if you don't go looking for answers; no new embarrassing or regretful memories that you'll now have the pleasure of revisiting for years to come. You have to actively introspect. You have to make an effort. You have to gird yourself for that.

And I don't. I don't have the strength of will to devote to that exercise right now. So I still don't remember much about goals and resolutions past.

I make the resolution for the new year knowing it will likely fail, but still allowing myself to feel that feeling of semi-fulfillment. Soon enough I'll probably forget about it anyway.

Anyway: Sorry for that burst of melancholy. The good news is that I made a resolution to be more creative this year. And I just wrote a thoughtful post! Even though I haven't taken any sort of deep dive, I managed to spend just enough effort to scoop out just enough memory to be able to write this, without encountering much dreaded unpleasantness at all. Who knows, this resolution might just take care of itself! Ha.