I am crawling into a new year
Spotify Wrapped except it's words not music and it makes you think 'is she ok' x
A year ago yesterday, I launched this newsletter with a post about my 2023. It was a year that I felt like I’d survived, rather than thrived in, for the most part, after a breakup, moving home, and the first term of my masters degree. Going into 2024 I had set no resolutions or goals – I just decided to adopt ‘live deliciously’ as my mantra.
And a lot of my 2024 was delicious. I deepened my relationships with people who I now view as some of my best friends. I finished my degree. I bought a secondhand leopard print coat that has become my entire personality. I watched 99 films and read 31 books and sent more voice notes than ever before. I swam in the sea and dated for sport and bought myself flowers often. I laughed a lot and loved a lot and was loved in return. From the outside looking in, it would appear that I’d done it.
But in amongst the cinema trips and the sand between my toes and the alleyway kisses there was a looming dread, which started to build almost as soon as my degree was done and crescendoed when the clocks went back. A sick feeling, an uneasiness. The sense that nothing I was doing mattered, which at times meant I could make fun decisions and not think about the cons, but at other times felt paralysing. I still feel it. To borrow a line from Frances Ha (which I deliberately didn’t watch in 2024 because it felt too close to the bone): I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person yet.
2024 was characterised by feeling unmoored. I read once that living in London is like existing in a triangle of housing, employment and love, and only being able to have two sides of it at once. I have had zero for all of 2024 – I’m living at home, working two part time jobs while I wait to be employed in the field I want, and I’m not dating anyone. I spent the year in limbo, mostly. I sent my friends cards as one by one they got jobs and wondered to myself ‘when is it my turn’. I watched people get into wonderful new relationships, or stay with partners who are brilliant for them, and tried not to feel bitter. I watched them move into beautiful flats and write for amazing publications and set up savings accounts and tell me they were so happy and I stayed on tenterhooks, all the while declaring my unrealness, my lack of existence.
If I wasn’t a real person yet, nothing I did could have any consequences. I could burn through talking stages and hook ups and situationships no matter how they made me or my partners feel and chalk it all up to experience. Holiday in other people’s lives, collecting memories which would one day make my chest feel funny. A pastel de nata at Bar Bruno. Being taught how to play pool. Comparing death masks at the National Portrait Gallery. Countless night buses. The numerous job rejections couldn’t possibly hurt me because I wasn’t existing in real time. The money I spent didn’t matter. I burned through it all and burned out fast and said I’d never do it again and just ended up finding new mistakes to make, new ways to disappoint myself.
It felt tiring and futile and monotonous, like I was Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill (except if he was constantly describing it as his ‘flop era’ and voice noting the whole experience and the rock was LinkedIn and Hinge). I declared 2024 as the worst year of my life before it was even over, multiple times.
It was only when I sat down with a friend who I haven’t seen in months, and she hit on the same feeling, that I realised it could be reframed. She summed it up in terms of our lives being sitcoms, and this chapter we find ourselves in taking place before the pilot airs. The backstory that will be summed up in a few sentences of exposition in a future episode. In her words, “it’s like we’re Jess in New Girl and we haven’t moved into the apartment yet.” I nodded in full agreement: “we haven’t even met Nick Miller.”
I don’t care if it’s silly to trade in metaphors like this. It’s a relief, to imagine that the cover letters and rejection emails and ghostings and boredom will be a footnote in my life, rather than what I am defined by, one day when I am through it. That I might one day move into the apartment and meet Nick Miller and look back at this time as inconsequential, but not because I wasn’t a real person, or the things I did didn’t count for anything. Instead, because what I’ve been desperate for is yet to come.
I spent New Year’s Eve with new friends from the pub I’ve been working at. We missed the countdown and didn’t do Auld Lang Syne and I didn’t eat 12 grapes under a table, but I still think 2025 will be better than this year. I have no choice but to hope it will, partly because I can’t imagine things will get worse but also because (sorry for being cringe) hope is all I’ve got. Apart from my leopard print coat which WILL be my most worn item of 2025, I’m sure.
I’ve come up with some resolutions this time: to be more earnest, to say yes more often, to say no more often too. To compliment people more. To get a job. To fix my posture. To find a drink I like that isn’t a spirit or soft (hellloooooo Guiness that is at least a third blackcurrant cordial!). I hope I do all of these things – they’re not unachievable, or particularly inspired, but as Iris Murdoch once wrote, “One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher act which one bungles.”
I’m sure I’ll continue to bungle all sorts of acts in 2025, not least learning to drive while in direct opposition to the clutch, but I think I’ll be okay. It’s not embarrassing to not be a real person yet. One day soon I’ll be able to look back on who I was in 2024 and feel proud of what I did – of the boundaries I set, of what I learned about myself, of my determination. I haven’t met the new me yet – the real one, with a job and a flat and a Nick Miller - but I’m sure she’ll live deliciously too.