New Year's Eve brings countless traditions from the ball drop to a kiss at midnight. It celebrates the end of one year and starts the next one off with a bang. New Years Day brings it's own set of traditions, from stating your New Years resolutions to inevitably saying “New Year, New Me" at least once (even if it is ironically). Regardless of whether or not you believe it, you hear it so many times that you begin to wonder if you need to change yourself for the New Year.

Now don't get me wrong, having positive personal goals is something that is good for yourself, but it shouldn't be something that only happens during the change of the year. Positive goals should be something that you set for yourself all year long, ensuring that they are manageable and reinforced. If this is your kind of New Year's resolution, then continue without my judgments.

As much as I hope that people's resolutions are like this, the statement of new year new me usually “inspires" people to make goals to come into the new year as a completely different people. People feel pushed to change major things about themselves, whether it be a new haircut or a crazy diet plan. New me causes people not to set realistic goals, but rather crazy resolutions to change themselves.

At the end of the day, when people try to change themselves drastically with unrealistic goals, they rarely ever achieve them. When they inevitably fail, they chalk it up as something that they can never do. The blame never goes onto their unrealistic expectations and their crazy resolutions. The blame never goes onto the statement “New Year, New Me."

For 2019, I don't want to be a new me. I simply want to continue improving myself using goals I will set in place throughout the year. I want to keep the emphasis on understanding that change isn't quick, and it doesn't happen without hard work. I want to scrap “New Year, New Me" and replace it with “New Year, Better Me."