New year, new you? No thank you. I plan – and perhaps you’ll join me – to embrace the oldest me I can find. Improvements, upgrades, in a cost of living crisis? Are you joking? In a time when simply staying warm and fed is a struggle, we’re expected to add value? We’re expected to tone our bodies and refine our minds when the weather is horrid and the trains are off and the tap water tastes like violence? And God, honestly, who has the time, especially when time itself is unreliable, sometimes a viscous fluid that runs slowly through the days, other times it transforms into a rolling dice, likely to tumble very fast before getting stuck behind a sofa. Change… it’s not for me.
Instead, I will try digging into the very guts of me, the laze and the slime, the most awful honesties and grim-witted shames. I will wallow there for a while, in a bath of my own soups. Isn’t this, in fact, what people want when they employ anti-ageing products? Or invest in plastic surgery and fillers? Aren’t they trying to see themselves again? To journey back in time and reunite with their truest selves, who nine times out of 10, they recall as looking like a 26-year-old trust-fund manager with big naturals? Our true self, our authentic self, is hidden (we’re encouraged to believe) by our jowls or cankles, or the soft belt of flesh that sits over our jeans. It’s compromised by the back passage of time. To this, I object.
Your authentic self, surely, is unphotogenic at best, and at its worst a bird trapped in a kitchen, flailing awfully between murderous and needy. It is chaos, but a chaos in which you and only you know where everything is. Apart from the traumas, of course, which you filed haphazardly away in a hurry and which have the tendency to spill out at the strangest times, like when you sing Happy Birthday or hear the sound of scissors.
While the new you might start to learn such skills as “posture” and “small talk”, the old you can be found covered in a towel typing into the comment box from a foetal position. At parties you are the one standing alone in the frigid garden pretending to vape in order to avoid the worst question in the world: “So, what have you been up to?” Where would you even start? What have you been up to? You worked that poppy seed from your teeth. You mastered the fine art of drinking coffee through a KitKat finger. You amused yourself at the table with candle wax for almost a whole hour. These replies never seem acceptable in the wild, but at home, in the bath of your own soup, it’s blindingly clear that if people want better answers they’ll need to start asking better questions. We call this: liberation.
“Do one thing every day that scares you!” No, that sounds horrible, and the exact opposite of the life I aspire to, which involves – and this is top line stuff – remaining almost exclusively unterrified on a day to day basis. “Push your limits!” Limits exist for a reason, man. “Do the work!” Ever heard of labour shortages? “Step out of your comfort zone!” How about, instead of that, I crawl right back into it and make a nice cosy den there out of fleece and biscuits? How about I dig even deeper into that sweet old zone and build an entire city down there, with cinemas, and wall-to-wall carpet, and little bowls of chocolate buttons scattered around on welcoming surfaces? How would that be? Would all my pain be transformed into graceful and important works of art? Unlikely. Would I win a marathon or sail across the world on an eco dinghy made of milk bottles? Maybe not. Would I enjoy all nine seasons of The Office while gossiping on WhatsApp in my pyjamas? Perhaps! And who’s to say which is more rewarding?
After many decades, when it becomes clear that every January demands a new you, eventually we must question how many we have in us. A baby girl is born with about 1m eggs, a baby boy born with about 300 bones – the numbers fall rapidly as time passes, and it’s the same with yous. At some point the effort of conceiving, producing and birthing yet another new you becomes treacherous. You run the risk of destroying the original you, now simply a host to all the prawnish enhanced versions emerging annually from its ruins with their abs and therapy words. Enough. Enough of all this – enough self-help (let’s help each other), enough self-improvement (find the joys hidden beneath the rocks in our existing if flawed little lives), enough struggling to be better when most of us are almost absolutely fine exactly as we are.
Would you care to join me in a nap? Or a gentle stroll through the arcade, or up the high street? Would you like to sit comfortably for a while here on the sofa and marvel at the telly, and the comfort of our slippers, and the way our bodies instinctively know when to breathe in and out, and the gentle setting of the sun through the curtains, and the fact that both of us have lived to see another January? New year, old me – and I promise, that’s absolutely fine.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
