Every December 31, I look forward to opening a year-old envelope and comparing my past aspirations to my actual accomplishments. At times it’s satisfying, at other times disappointing, and sometimes it’s just confusing. I seem to keep making the same New Year’s resolutions every year, whether or not they’re achievable or even measurable. Every year I tell myself that they don’t make any sense, but then every year I write them over again.
1. Write more.
For some reason, I never seem to encourage myself to write better or write smarter, just to write more. Besides the obvious problem of emphasizing quantity over quality, it’s not really possible to measure this. I could theoretically go through all the word documents from 2014 and from 2015, tally up the word counts, and compare. I could flip through all of my journals and see how many pages I filled up with diary entries and dreams and terrible poems and midnight rants. If I were really committing to the quest literally, I’d have to track my texts and emails and Facebook messages and Instagram captions as well. But that would be a lot of effort, and it wouldn’t account for letters I gave away or the handwritten assignments I turned in, the fact that a good amount of what I’ve written is floating around somewhere unknown.
2. Read more.
Again, though this is an admirable goal, it’s rather tricky to measure. Have I read more books for my own entertainment than I did last year? I honestly don’t know. Did I have more reading assigned over the past two semesters of college than second semester senior year and first semester of freshman year? Probably. Having moved to the city, I probably read a lot more street signs, flyers, and billboards, too. But I really wasn’t counting.
3. Obtain driver’s license.
This one first emerged when I was 16, or maybe even when I was 15 and was going to turn 16 the next fall. Now I’m 20, live in the city for most of the year, and couldn’t tell you whether or not my learner’s permit is still valid. I just put it there because I feel like I should.
4. Make new friends.
Resolving to make new friends isn’t pointless because I don’t think I should do it, but because it seems like it’s impossible not to. In a span of 365 days, I will inevitably meet many more people, develop quite a few friend-crushes, and probably actually follow through on a couple of them. People coming in and out of your life over the course of the year is inevitable, but I guess it’s still worth aspiring to.
5. Surprise yourself.
I think I just throw this one in to acknowledge the fact that I don’t know what will happen in the next year, to admit that the above resolutions were in fact pointless, and to make the fact that I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing half of the time seem like an accomplishment.
A lot has happened in the last year, but a lot has also happened in the past month or in the past semester. A lot probably happened in a span of 16 days in 2014 and maybe three weeks in 2008 and the months stretching between 2003 and 2004. A lot has happened between September 7, 1995 and December 20, 2015. I don’t necessarily see the point in trying to measure my growth as a person in calendar years, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to let any year become the year that I’m too old to keep writing notes to my future self in ballpoint pen, sealing them with tape in makeshift paper envelopes, marking the year in colored Sharpie and tucking it under my mattress.
