Yearning and Failing in 2015

Originally I said ‘kiss a stranger at midnight’ and ‘don’t have an orgy’, and we managed to only mess up the first part, so overall it was a reasonably successful New Years Eve. I was pretending to be comfortable in a short red dress that clung to my fat, and was thinking about all the ways I could be better.

I hate this about New Years. You spend each day leading up to it berating yourself and then, afterwards, you once again make grandiose plans you will not achieve. It didn’t help that this year I need to reorient my career trajectory lest I “waste” my degree –  something that is rather hard to do when you have no real idea of what would make you feel truly great and pays bills.

When I was younger I had a lot of plans for life that I was completely confident I would achieve (knowing it would be with hard work on my part). Now I’m an adult I end up thinking about health and roofs and the ability to get outside the house at least once a week.

So I get stuck on 1) be fitter, 2) have money to do fun things, 3) do something incredibly wonderful with my life. These are are not helpful goals in any way. These are goals I want to achieve merely to inspire fantastic amounts of jealousy because on some level I gage my success on how much other people go ‘ooooo’.

Which brings me to writing essays (because journalism in my lazed mind requires too much research), and making podcasts (about what I do not know) which I have toyed with for a very long while. Yet New Years resolutions are not truly about the small things I can do to help myself, but are centred about the inevitable success I think I will find from them. When I say essays and podcasts what I really mean are adoring fans and money and talks and prizes.

Yes, I will write essays, I say, and people will fix quotes on black and white portraits of me and share them on social media to show how wise they are. And then I don’t write because I feel I have nothing to really say, and I don’t write because I write in a terrible rolling style which needs actual practice to improve. You tend to reach a point where you want to be the focus of a painful event just so you can create something that plunges the depths of human experience. That’s what essays are – a powerful way to write humanity. I can’t claim that. My life has been far too good that even the bad things sound like the whining of Veruca Salt.

I want to be legitimate and fully-formed from the first moment. The fear of work, of proving that expectations of others are inflated, is so deep in me. Like most people with impossible desires, I decide instead to remember a single moment of genius from my high school days and hold it up as the sole example of potential – a great proof of possibility. New Years becomes worrying about how any move I make might transform my future historical record of serious, intellectual, literary work into something less than perfect. It’s what I do, I yearn for greatness. I want to make something that will last longer in your mind than the time it takes to read.

I could pretend I am having a great epiphany but I’m not. The difference between 2014 and 2015 is not really there. I’m still me. I’ll still think I can do better than I can. I’ll try a little more though. That should count for something.