• Opinion

I will tell you something about me. I do not like resolutions and intentions for the new year. The reason is that I have stopped seeing myself as something that needs to be fixed and corrected. I’m not against goals. I am against this belief that resolutions helps us change. New year, new me. Right? A promise, a decision or maybe an intention are all we need to change. But these are all just different words for wishful thinking. And as we know, desires run out of steam quite fast.

No matter how creative we become in order to change, something within us resists and does not allow us to deliver on what we have promised ourselves. Ambivalence is a very interesting part of the human soul: “I want and I do not want”, “I want but I do not believe I can”, “I want but I would feel guilty if I did”. We always play this game with ourselves, and it gets more intense each New Year. We are between what we are and what we imagine and want to become. There is a force that urges us to remain as we are and a force that pushes us to change now. We stuck in the middle, feeling weak between two contradictory forces neutralizing each other. In the middle there is a balance of inaction and ambivalent emotions.

What could give us the impetus to go one step closer to what we so desperately want?

Change is a much more complex and gradual process than we like to believe. What I noticed this year is that between the two forces, staying the same and changing there is a third force: the power to unhook from whatever holds me back, hurts me, does not serve me, destroys me, burdens me.

This year I am ready to leave behind the person I no longer want to be!

What stories are disguised as promises and take you back into your life? Do you say, “I am not successful because I have not studied in a college”, “I will never find a partner because I am not worthy of love”, “I will fail because others have tried and failed”?

New Year is a great time to look back and prepare to unhook ourselves from whatever holds us back: promises, opinions, anything that does not align with our values, narratives justifying mistakes and failures, versions of ourselves that are no longer us.

If we cannot improve our lives, we should at least not burden it.