Why I'm anti-resolution

Happy 2025, y’all! I started the year leading a free workshop meant to serve as an alternative to making resolutions. For an hour, our group sat with a series of questions, including the one above, in an effort to hone in on how we’re feeling about last year and where our hearts are steering us this year.

Deciding how to spend a year doesn’t have to be a quick process, or a daunting, joyless one! In fact, you don’t have to make any hard decisions on January 1st at all; it can just be the day that the process officially kicks off (if you’re not too partied out).

The day after our workshop, I spent an hour going through the questions myself, and for now, I’m just letting the answers breathe. Some day before the end of the month, I’m going to sit with them and see what jumps out at me.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of my favorite questions from the workshop. If a question inspires you, I encourage you to stop what you’re doing and sit with it for a minute, maybe even write down what it brings up.

The first question is, what are you being hard on yourself about that you’d like to let go of?

I chose this question because, in my own experience, past New Year’s resolutions were almost always things “I just couldn’t get my shit together to do” or do more consistently. Underneath the resolution was an energy of, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just do this?”

On top of that, most of the time the resolution—or the thing I was being ultra hard on myself to do—was fairly arbitrary. Multiple years, I tried sticking to a resolution where I wrote for a certain number of hours every week, or every day. Why? Because that’s what I saw other writers doing. To quote all of our mothers:

More importantly, the resolution didn’t take into consideration what works best for me as a writer. I’ve been writing since I was 8 or 9 years old! I know my rhythms by now. I marinate on a writing project for weeks, months, sometimes years, jotting down scenes and ideas and lines and images here and there, usually when I’m out walking, and only when I know I have enough to work from will I force myself to sit down to put it all together.

I imagine the first half of the question (what are you being hard on yourself about?) brings up a long, itemized list for most of us. Life is too short, and it’s too freaking hard. Just being a person, getting up every day, making a living, taking care of where you live, not to mention any humans or animals that depend on you, can be a lot. You deserve more joy, and you deserve to ease up on yourself.

So: pick one of the items on that long list, especially if it’s one that feels more like a “should” than a “want,” and tell it to go away for a while. It doesn’t have to be forever; there may be a year where you have more space or feel more motivation around it, and you can always let it back in then. But for now, let it go. And if it’s something you’re being hard on yourself about that you genuinely want to be doing, that you know will make your life richer and more joyful, sit with it for a bit. See what about it feels so hard. See if you can find a new shape to it, something a little looser.

To quote my own coach, this is your life. You get to design it.

In the meantime, a friendly reminder that I work with people one on one as a coach, offering up thoughtful questions like these and helping them work through what they want their life to look like, every week, every day, every year. For more info:

https://www.virtualhumanity.net/coaching