All The New Years' Resolutions I've Ever Made

PLUS: How to re-use silica packets

A Note For You If You’re Having A Bad Day

Hi Friend,

How do you feel as the calendar year closes out? I’m enjoying days at home with Luke and T, being present and letting time turn to mush. But in a few days, I’m going to sit on my pink chair to engage in what is now a 30-plus-year long tradition of setting goals for myself for the “new year.” Here are some statistics on new years’ resolutions, including one that shows that older adults are less likely to set them than younger adults.

Famously, I dislike New Years’ resolutions because I feel like winter is too hard a time to try to reform a life. But it is also a good time-based marker, so while I get online and yell that January is a bad month to expect more from yourself (true!), I secretly take to my diary and set goals for the new year. For the last half-decade or so, I’ve returned to the goal-setting document multiple times throughout the year to remind myself about what I’d hoped to achieve.

My husband Luke always has cute, quirky resolutions. One year he wanted to drink more white tea. Another year he hoped to buy shiitake mushrooms every time he went to the market. He is good at remembering his resolutions all year long — it’s like he has an invisible lantern always hanging above him to gaze at when he’s lost his way.

I am more openly ambitious, and every year I try to think about every possible thing I could possibly want to do and I journal to death about it. I love this journal session; it usually takes three hours.

I thought it would be fun to look back at some of my intentions from years past. I pulled 12 that I thought were particularly interesting. Going back through old journals from my 20s trips me out. I’ve looked back at childhood journals so much that I’ve been able to otherize the character Young Sophie (I wrote a whole book about this); but Sophie from 2008 to 2018 also feels like a totally separate person, so much closer to here. You don’t notice when a new Russian Doll is forming around your former selves until you can look back at it.

CONTENT WARNING: There is a lot of disordered thinking about eating and bodies. It comes out strong in the 1995 entry (I was NINE), and reverberates all the way to last year. I continue to be heartbroken about this. Fatphobia is an ugly cultural mindset that continues to thrive and, sadly, doesn’t seem to be slowing. I’ve crossed out some of the more recent language that perpetuates those ideas, but I’m leaving the first entry untouched, because I think it’s important to show that this thinking starts when we are BASICALLY BABIES.

1995

This was written in mid-December, but it was the closest thing I could find to a written resolution in this diary, and I think it’s typical. The desire to be a person who could simply not eat and feel so proud about it makes me wonder what it takes to help my own daughter not follow this same path.

That said, I love that wavy hair was central to this resolution. If you’re wondering about the magnetic earring: it was a huge disappointment. It kept falling off. A boy at school accused me of having “fat lobes.” He would be so lucky to truly know the girth of my lobes! (Which is average.)

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I mostly didn’t use my diary to document my New Years’ resolutions in the 1990s and early aughts, because I always had the same one: write more letters. And do you know what? I became a very good penpal.

*

2008

Bottom line: I wanted to stop lying. But I didn’t fully commit to doing that until 2019. Lying is useful. I mostly used it explain my emotions, which felt too big to be correct. Unconvinced that anyone could love me as I was, I would kill off a family dog now and again so that my sadness would be validated.

I went cold-turkey with lying in 2019. It was difficult to do this, and for a while, I sent a lot of text messages that said things like, “I know I told you I only slept three hours last night. Really I slept six, but it felt like three. I’m sorry I lied.” People generally did not care.

2012

I wrote “prostate” and I believe I meant “prostrate,” but even that doesn’t seem true.

In 2011, I wrote in TWO DIFFERENT JOURNALS on January 1, but mostly I just wanted to write about how I made out with a guy named Dan (not his real name) after flirting with him at a coffee shop, and then I wrote about all the people I’d recently made out with, and I compared their kissing styles.

In 2012, I was back on track. New Years’ resolutions begin at the bottom of page 1. Here they are:

• Be kind behind people’s backs.

• Help kids in a more serious and profound way.

• Continue to be an awesome penpal.

• Learn to use a rotary cutter.

• Drink more coffee and eat more kale.

• Find love… in some small way… somehow.

I am pretty sure that I did an acceptable job with those things. I often try to be kind behind people’s backs, and it can be hard, because I am rewarded (we are ALL rewarded; I reward people too) for being candidly mean. The rule I try to set for myself is not to say something behind someone’s back you wouldn’t want to say to their face.

Maybe we should all invent a guy named Stanley who we collectively hate and say funny-mean things about, so we can get it out of our systems. OK, I’m pitching that.

2013

In summary:

• Be here for myself.

• Read a book.

• Put all my things downstairs, get stuff ready to mail, and go to a coffee shop to keep working.

I still dream about being an editor at a magazine. I am not sure if there remains a path for me in that direction. It happened briefly in grad school, and it was dreamy.

2014

Two lines from this stick out: “Sometimes goals lose their grip, but that’s normal”; and “I’m infatuated, but I know that changes.” At this time, I was dating Luke and another boy, who I was about to break up with. With Luke, the infatuation never went away. I was so sure it would go away, but it just didn’t.

2017

This is a good list because I did NOTHING on it. Really: nothing. I think maybe I did yoga? Sometimes? In the living room? But mostly I did none of this. I continue to not properly use my access to the Art Institute, but I’ve also had trouble being as in love with it as I was as a 20-year-old, because I have grown suspicious of the artists, and how they are so disproportionately white and male. And now that I teach art history, I know that they are not only white and male, but often were misogynists and / or racists, and their work continues to be celebrated and placed behind glass as though it matters more than other peoples’ art.

2018

In 2018 I was very busy, and had just gotten married, but I wanted to ask Kat to be my girlfriend. And I DID.

2019

I wanted to get enough protein. This is impossible for vegans. I’m sorry. It really is impossible. I mean, IT IS TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE. But is it?

2020

I omitted some pages here, that discussed how I wanted to write a graphic memoir (DONE!), read more books (yawn), manage my credit card debt (IDK I’m very bad with money), and then some body stuff I feel like you don’t need to see.

There is also a final page where I wrote that I wanted to mill my own flour (done), apply for a residency (I applied! I got into zero out of four!), and grow a garden (HARD check).

I was very into PRIZES. These literally never work for me. I just buy things when I’m sad like everyone else. This was 2020, and somehow, Everything That Happened made it a good year for all these quiet little goals.

2021

I posted all of the pages from this year, because This Person Had Reached An Apex. What beautiful things I wrote — TO MYSELF! — about my body and about pleasure and about boundaries, relationships, and self and community care. Days after I wrote these pages, two hard-to-predict things immediately happened.

First, my appendix burst. Despite all this loving-of-self I was doing, I didn’t trust that my body was sick until it was almost too late. Even a fever felt like an invention that I’d put on to get attention. A strange thing about the burst appendix was that it came right after I had spent a full night lying in bed trying to metabolize My Feelings about a friend I thought was mad at me. I tried to move through the feelings, but it was sticky, and I couldn’t do it on my own. I cried and cried and cried and cried and tried and failed to logic myself forward. In the morning, I made a smoothie and attempted a yoga class, but the bad feeling in my body had taken over, and I threw the smoothie up. I know, the way that only one’s own body can know, that the emotional pain and the physical pain were linked.

As soon as I was out of the hospital, I got pregnant. I remember being on my period the last day I visited the doctor (convenient, really, because they’re always asking about your last period), and then I didn’t get it again for the rest of the year. Luke and I had been trying to get pregnant for a long time. In this journal entry, you can see that I’d come to a kind of peace around our not being able to conceive. Maybe it was the peace, and maybe it was the appendicitis, and maybe it was something less mystical than any of that — but I spent the year so sick and exhausted and trying to get my feet back on the ground that was so solid when I wrote my 2021 goals.

Being pregnant had been the only thing I’d wanted in 2020, so hating being pregnant confused me; made me angry; filled me with low-level grief.

Anyway, this particular entry is a clear line. I’d reached a level of contentment; a Russian doll layer completed itself, right at the beginning of the year. And nothing has been like that again, not yet. Any life is full of little deaths.

2022

“Goal setting feels kind of hilarious given having a baby, & it feeling hilarious makes me want to cry or smoke cigarettes.”

2023

I can’t believe it was only a year ago that I wasn’t sure if I would get into a Ph.D. program or not. This is where I decided that if I got into one, I wanted to go. I applied to four and was rejected from all of them, without even advancing to the interview stage. On paper, applying to graduate school programs (which is An Ordeal) seemed like a thing without major consequences. I’d learn new information about myself, no matter what! I hadn’t really considered that so much rejection all at once would be somewhat debilitating. For many reasons, 2023 was the hardest year of my adult life. This beautiful life plan lasted through January and then crumpled itself up, hurled itself out the window, and laughed maliciously at me, like a mean horror-movie-puppet.

But I did design a calendar, eat more mushrooms, and do one cold water plunge with Kat. Also, regarding hip pain: I felt sure I’d always have it, but early in January I asked Luke if he thought I could do yoga every day and he said “no” so quickly that it made me furious, so I did yoga every day and within three months of this practice, my hip pain was totally gone. Like — gone. It’s definitely the consistent practice that has done this for me, and I am evangelized.

It’s been a long year, and that’s a good thing. Another good thing: I spend almost all of my free time with my daughter, whose Russian Dolls (I’m married to this metaphor) keep finishing themselves and budding up. Every few weeks she is a new self. It’s pretty cool.

*

I never mean for these letters to you to become such navel-gazing journeys, but they often do. Nevertheless, here you are, and how grateful I am for this. Please send me pages from your diary. I am always interested. Please tell me your plans for this year. I’ve got two resolutions this year: expose T to better music (we stagnated after an early rush of Beyonce and Rubblebucket); and get into the WNBA. Not like, make the team — I mean, learn about it, get invested, follow a team. I could tell you my reasons for this, but I’ve already prattled on a lot. Tell me about you.

I’m excited to see more of you in 2024. Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Lo

How To: Use Packets of Silica That Come In Seaweed And Other Stuff Like That

I never gave these much thought, until Luke started hoarding them. Truly, I did not understand their purpose. I think if I had to think about it, I would have assumed they were in the same general family as mattress tags. In fact, as I’m sure you already know, they’re there to keep crisp things crisp by sucking out the water. Luke was collecting them because our basement floods and there were certain spots he wanted to keep dry; he caked the downstairs windowsills with the packets, and tossed them in cardboard boxes that were off the ground but still prone to dampness. THIS WORKS. I was shocked.

Then, I read a recipe that CALLED FOR THE SILICA PACKETS. Not to eat (you should not eat them; the packaging is very clear), but to prolong the shelf life of kale chips! I didn’t know this could be done! I thought you had to eat kale chips Right Now, or goodbye kale chips. THIS IS NOT TRUE! They are even better the next day when you put them in a Zip-Loc bag with some silica packets.

This got me interested in other uses for silica packets, and I’ve come across a bunch of them.

• Put them inside whatever folder you keep your important documents (birth certificate, passport, etc.) to fend off inevitable sitting-in-a-drawer-for—too-long dampness damage.

• Put them in your toolbox to keep tools from rusting.

• Speed up the process of drying flowers!

• Put them in your car, along your windshield. This will keep you from having to turn on the air machine that de-fogs windows.

• I’ve never tried this, but someone suggests taking the silica beads out and saturating them with essential oils to make potpourri.

Housekeeping

• Bird-painting classes are starting soon! And I have gotten the feedback that signing up for them is confusing. If you think you’ve signed up, but have received no confirmation — you haven’t signed up! Luckily, I’m streamlining this process with this link. You can sign up for the Tuesday night classes, Wednesday afternoon classes, or Saturday workshop all in one place. I also have seven (7) scholarships up for grabs! CLICK ON THE SAME LINK if you want to take the class (scroll to the bottom), but can’t pay for it and would like a scholarship. I’ll be able to offer more if you opt for a partial scholarship, but there are full scholarships available! Take me up on this! It’s fun!

• I think there should be a sale on paid subscriptions this week, because I just had some pie. Paid subscribers get access to Monday emails (very fun, very cool), a community of very smart people, a quarterly book club, special meet-up events, coupons for the shop, early access to all products, and seven extra things on my Friday 10 Things emails. And they also know that they are helping me profoundly. 24 percent off if you use this link!

Loose Thoughts:

• What is the best salad? I used to hate salads, and now I can’t get enough of them, but I’m also torn. I like a good kale salad. But I’m at a restaurant right now and I’ve ordered a salad they are calling “Autumn Salad,” which means it heavily features apples and pecans, and I am thinking THIS is a pretty good salad. I guess it’s fine that there are so many worthy salads.

• Do you have matching plates and knives and spoons and things? We do NOT. I am wondering if this is generational, socio-economic, aesthetic, or, like, hip? What decisions do people make about their spoons?

• I’ve been taking some in-person yoga classes and today the teacher obviously hated me (I feel like this happens to me a lot in yoga classes because I’m “bad at” yoga, and it seems like it pains the instructors), and I had forgotten a mat so I used a borrowed mat, and I was going HARD, and so the mat started to DISINTEGRATE under me. When I rolled it up there was a soft layer of mat-carcass underneath me. I was more mortified than if I had gotten my period all over myself in front of everyone. There was no way to clean it up, and the instructor side-eyed me and looked like she wished I would disintegrate.

• I’m working at a coffee shop and WOW do people ever wear CUTE CLOTHES in this world. Specifically, I’m looking at a child’s bedazzled snow suit and a mother’s hot pink corduroys.