New Year, Same You?

At this traditional time of radical self-change, could you take a moment to appreciate at what's already working?

Hello friends, and happy new year. Hurrah! We pressed reset again! Toss that old broken 2023 in the bin, because January has delivered a brand new upgrade.

So we’re into Week Two. Are you changed yet? Metamorphosed into the perfect incarnation of the Higher Self you always longed to be?

I wonder if, like me, you’ve already gorged yourself on articles about how to make your new habits stick in 2024. Or - in a procrastinating attempt to avoid writing your newsletter perhaps - you’ve fallen down an Insta-hole of Intentions Settings for the year.

The new year is a time we promise ourselves we’ll be perfect, this time round. We didn’t get it right last year, or any of the years before that - but that’s ok. This year, 2024, this is the one. The one where everything changes. The one where we finally level up. This is the year when everything that was holding us back - whether that’s the wrong job, the wrong house, the broken heart, the negative friends, or even (say it quietly), ourselves - all of it, finally, is going to be Sorted Out. 

Shed your toxic life accoutrements my friends, because this is the year you finally get it right. Right? 

New Year, Same You

I have hot feelings about this New-Year-New-You rhetoric (the bothered kind, not the sexy ones). Perhaps it’s because I used to be so heavily invested in it myself. Last year, in the first edition of this newsletter, I wrote about exactly that: the resolutions I used to make, the lofty goals I would set - all in service of the New Self I hoped I would finally become. 

In a decade or more of doing it, it never worked, and in many ways it made me feel worse - disenchanted with the life I was currently living, hopelessly far from the one I wanted. I saw myself as a broken model, waiting to be fixed; hoping, with a new calendar and a list of stretch goals and a watertight daily improvement schedule, for an apotheosis. 

Two Face

January is named for Janus - the double-headed Roman god whose two faces point in opposite directions: one towards the past, the other to the future. He looks forward and back: to the places we have been and the ones we hope to go to next.   

I like this two-way imagery. January has always appeared in my head as a literal hinge - the end of one year and the beginning of the next like a door between past and present.  But I think it also represents a toxic idea we’ve come to hold about the start of the year, and the reinvention that it promises (or demands).

On one side of the door is Old Self; on the other is New Self. They are not connected. Everything that was wrong with Old Self is going to be rectified in the new ways and habits of New Self. Old Self didn’t know it then, but they are the villain in this story. So much of our hopes for the future seem hinge on the rejection of what we already are, or have been. 

Close the door behind you on your way out Old Self: there’s a New kid in town (You, only Better), and they’re going to sort this mess out.

2023 - Everything Suddenly Here All At Once 

This time last year, I was celebrating a grant from the Arts Council. I was also recovering from an operation and feeling very bruised and feeble. 

I was impatient to get started on ideas I had been mulling over for years and finally had the resources to explore. I was also feeling shaken from a minor surgery which felt major, both physically and psychologically. I hurt in extraordinary ways I had not reckoned with. I realised how much of my independence I had taken for granted. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and thumbed the ugly scar carved downward from my belly button. I had never been changed like this before - so visibly, irrevocably. This really was a New Self standing in front of me - and I didn’t much like the look of her.  

It was an ambiguous start to the year: full of hope and excitement and a sense of reward now my ‘moment’ had finally come; but also of frustration, impatience and remorse for time not spent better before. 

It was ok though. I had a year to make it right. 

A Glorious Year

I’ll admit, 2023 was one of the best years of my life. It was f***ing hard but it was incredible. 

I took a solo show to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time. I explored clowning and dramaturgy and filled my head full of ideas. I began dancing again and started work on new shows. I read books and took courses and went to history festivals (yes! They are a thing! I nerded out massively and it was great!) and in so many ways was very happy. 

I felt like I was feeding my brain on nutrients I had denied it for years. My adult body felt safe to be seen in the dance studio mirror, and in that safety reclaimed a childish ridiculousness I had been trained out of. I felt like I was re-becoming the person I had always told myself - or been told - I was too fat/old/ugly/incompetent to be.   

Show Your Working

But when I came to write up the report in November for the Arts Council (with great largesse comes great admin, never forget), I didn’t feel like that at all. I didn’t feel like this self-actualised version of myself. I didn’t feel like Sarah 2.0, the new super-bot with lightning powers of artistic efficiency, able to distil ideas at the switch of a button and deliver them in an engaging format with one hand while penning a lucid write-up with another. 

I felt like the version of myself I had been at the start of the year, albeit with a few more battle scars and an ever-growing reading list. I was tired and wrung out from Edinburgh, filled with excitement for all the ideas I had planned for next year, but incapable of acting on them. I was knackered, in short - and disappointed in myself because of it.  

I had had 10 months to learn and explore and dare and create - but how much did I have to show for it? All this money and all this time, I thought: and you’re still not the version you said you would be. 

A New Year, Again

I asked the ACE for an extension. They told me everyone gets 45 days’ grace - so I think this brain freeze is perhaps not unique to me. In the new year, I’m now starting to pick things up - slowly, and deliberately. I am determined not to rush this year, or put my faith in miraculous transformation. 

Beginning last year with a grant made me realise that I still cling to an ideal I thought I had discarded: the fable of the Revolutionised Self. I think I really had a notion that if someone gave me a chunk of money, and a year or so to work on my ideas, I’d be able to sort myself out. Everything would be solved - not absolutely, but almost.  

There is some truth in this but not all. Time does not exist in a pristine lump to be hoarded for future use; money isn’t as curative as it promises to be; and our Higher Selves do not sit in stasis, waiting to be activated once the time is right. 

This has become painfully clear as I try to write up an account of my time and skill development (to prove I am worth the public money, no pressure). The progress was much more nebulous than I predicted; I sowed the seeds for many future projects but it may be years before they come to audience-worthy fruition. I thought new equipment and time to experiment would yield a multitude of works and release at last all the captive ideas from my over-crowded brain: unfortunately it seems there’s a queue and it can only move so fast; and trying to prepare and then perform a show at the Fringe brings it to a complete standstill. 

I think I thought I would come out the other end vomiting operas, with a stack of fully-fledged solo shows in the pipeline. With the right resources in place, New Self would step in and take the reins. But I just kept on being me, with all the inefficiencies and limitations that comprises. 

I learnt a lot about process, but I didn’t produce half of what I planned and I’ve no idea exactly what I’ll do next. It was a year of leaping, in many ways a lightyear turbo charge; but it was also bookended with illness and brain fog, and peppered with many days of sleeping and recuperation. 

Alterations

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror last year, I looked in sad horror at my distended belly, inflated like a balloon, and the vivid cut marking the skin forever. (The surgeon was very nice but he will not be getting his brownie badge for needlework). 

I have always been awful to my body. Ever since I have been aware of it being looked at, I have told it it is not enough. I have counted the things that are wrong with it, even as I have praised the small exceptions that I like. I was always hoping for it to be more (by which, of course, I mean less). 

The metaphor does not quite hold up of course. There were things that needed to be changed internally. It was defective before, now it is a little better. Improvement does come with a drastic before and after transformation. The Old Self did need to be replaced with the New - or at least patched up a bit. 

But standing in front of the mirror, looking at a tummy that had never had a kind word from me, on a body that was only ever assessed in varying degrees of ‘could do better’, I realised what could only be appreciated when it was no longer true: it had always been lovely. Surgery and a scar does not make it un-lovely, of course - but it will never be lovely in the way it was before. I realised in a very abrupt way that the only way I could appreciate this was in being completely removed from the previous version of myself. There was me before the operation and me after. Both are good - only I wish I’d been more forgiving of the one before. 

Conclusion: thoughts for a new year

I thought I was over this Transformation business. I even kicked off this newsletter a year ago with a lofty essay about slow growth and acceptance. What a bloody hypocrite! (The lesson is: don’t trust anything an artist tells you). 

Last year showed me that this idea - of radical self-revolution, of replacing the current version with a new better model - is still deeply embedded. To hope for better is good; to embrace change is essential; but it should not come at the cost of failing to appreciate who we already are.

After all, it was Old Self that did all the work for years before that got me the grant. It was Old Self who advocated for herself to get treatment in the face of so much medical dismissal.

Embrace change, have fun, thank yourself for everything you’ve already done

As we haul ourselves through this month of mandated reinvention and our fierce resolve turns into the daily grind and resolutions fade into the middle distance, I wonder if you can treat yourself more kindly with where you’re at right now. So much of my life, I have been waiting for an upgrade - and it’s only in the last few years, and last year especially, that I realised the extent of how mean this is to the person I already am.

There is so much writing now that champions self-improvement and constant betterment - as if everything we are currently is wrong, or needs to be finessed and perfected. We are so used to considering ourselves in terms of what needs work, we don’t make space to congratulate the work we’ve already done; the obstacles already overcome; the things we like about ourselves, actually.

For this new year, I think that might be a better place to start. Not with a radical need to discard the old, but with space to welcome it along for the ride.

I think the purpose of double-headed Janus as January’s embodiment is not to pit old and new against each other, but to show two sides of the same coin. They are always joined, and the one can’t exist without the other.

last day of Gone to the Dogs at Gilded Balloon in August. I am very proud of my first Edinburgh show. I have also not wanted to think about the dratted thing since.

That’s it for today. i’d love to hear your experiences of new year change and also your hopes for 2024, big and small. Hit reply or drop a comment below. And please do share this newsletter with anyone you think might enjoy it, and tell all your friends. Together we shall conquer the world!

Bye!