I love lists. I’m a little OCD, I love making plans, and I am one of those people who every year make grandiose plans for change on New Year’s Eve. I write a beautiful list (handwritten, every time) put it in an envelope, and do my best to make my own wishes for myself come true. In fact, I don’t even just make them on NYE, I plan them out about a month ahead of time. I take a full day, I sit down, and I list everything that needs to be changed in my life.

Then I pick the top ten-ish things, and those are formulated into my new year’s resolutions. Even though every year I get made fun of by my friends and told that I will never accomplish all of the woefully ambitious things on my list, I love this process. It helps me come to grips with how my last year went, and what things I want to improve about myself in the upcoming 365 days.

In order to understand this concept, I think it’s important to answer the question, Why do new year’s resolutions even exist?!

To answer that question, let’s go back to the beginning. Common belief holds that the very first people to celebrate New Year’s were the Babylonians, some 4,000 years ago. Part of their celebration was them making promises to their gods that they would return borrowed objects and repay their debts. They made these promises knowing that the gods would condemn them if they failed to follow through by the end of the next year. Throughout history this tradition was carried on by the Romans, medieval knights, Jews, Christians, and today has become a way for individuals to take time to better themselves.

I have had my fair share of extravagant and completely forgotten about ideas, ranging from learning a musical instrument or becoming fluent in Spanish to saving money, going to cosmetology school, losing weight, and traveling the world. Some years I thought I was outsmarting myself by putting purposefully vague ideas into the paper (yes, I save them all) so that I would be able to convince myself that I had actually accomplished what I had outlined for myself, which is totally cheating, by the way. Other years confirmed my expertise in the subject of resolutions. Let’s take my 14th year for instance, forever known as the year I kept a new year’s resolution.

I was a sassy and increasingly unique 14-year-old when I had the fabulous idea of giving up chocolate as a new year’s resolution. Why? Who knows. No one understands teenagers, and I’m not about to attempt to analyze my own puberty-infested brain. 52 weeks later, and BAM, I had conquered my year without the wonder of chocolate gracing my lips. I don’t know that it really had much of an impact on my life at all, except that I felt like the most accomplished human in the history of mankind. In my (now) 15-year-old head: I had persevered through what I perceived would be the hardest thing I would ever have to in my life. At midnight on December 31st I ate a bite out of a brownie. It felt wrong. Now I eat brownies all the time. As you can tell, this chocolate-free year made an outstanding impact on my health habits. But that’s not the important idea that I took away from it, but rather the idea that I could put my mind to something and accomplish it.

For the most part, new year’s resolutions involve doing good for yourself, for your family and friends and the world around you. It’s about taking that self-reflective moment in your life to step outside your body and really evaluate where you are at in life, and where you want to be. The purpose of a new year’s resolution, I think, is not to actually keep the resolution, but to be aware of the things that you want for yourself. Even if it may be highly commercialized, and many people disregard their promises after a couple months (or a couple weeks), resolutions aren’t about making big changes every January, but taking the big realizations you come to and finding small tweaks to make to your life within those. The purpose of a new year’s resolution is not to drop everything cold turkey, but to find the things that you truly want to change about yourself and discover the small steps to take to begin making progress.

And yes, everyone’s years hold different things for them. Maybe your 2016 was the best year of your life. For (most) others, 2016 was the worst year they have ever experienced. The act of having new year’s resolutions allows individuals to put the past in the past and try and shift focus on the good that can come out of a new year and different things to come.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that everyone should make a resolution on the 31st of December, but I am saying that we should treat it like a special moment when the clock strikes midnight. It’s a moment of contemplation, motivation, and hope for the future. Well, that, and lots of fireworks and champagne bottles popping.