You’ve been warned. If you’re feeling really warm and fuzzy about the newness of the year and have resolutions you’re excited about, please stop reading now. I don’t want to put a damper on your plans. Please keep your optimism intact. 

If the impending New Year’s celebrations make you feel something closer to hopelessness, we’re kind of in the same boat. So if you’ve been reading my garbage for a while, you know that last year was bad. We didn’t do anything to cause the year to be bad. Cancer happened to us without warning, and now life is different. I have no trust that next year is going to be any better. Probably cancer won’t happen to us again – that would be honestly just so cruel – but who even knows? Nothing is in our control. 

Here’s what I want for next year: normalcy. Time to myself. 5 minutes of uninterrupted time during the day to think without anyone asking me for a snack or milk or where their toy/sock/glove is. Clearly I also want to lose weight because I gained a lot of stress weight last year. What I really want is to not feel resentment toward everyone I know for having normal lives.

So it’s not even an issue of not wanting the pressure of making new year’s resolutions. It’s more like a certainty that if this year isn’t better, I’m going to freaking lose it. Here are the highlights of recent years: 

2017: Big miscarriage but also a move to a new house

2018: Small miscarriage but also continued growth at a job I liked

2019: New baby! Yay! Also stress about maternity leave that I probably just shouldn’t have taken because of the fallout upon coming back when no one had followed the plans I left

2020: Worldwide pandemic plus I left a job without a backup

2021: Worldwide pandemic continued but started a new job

2022: Cancer 

It’s been 5 years of really big, horrible things. There have been good things mixed in, or we’d have gone completely insane, but what the hell. The superstitious part of me wonders what I did to cause it all. Then I chastise myself and remind myself that the universe is chaos, and things just happen. It’s bad luck, either way. We need a break. I need a break. I can’t keep going and just putting on a happy face because the world requires it. Things are too hard, and I’m tired. 

I’m not angling for pity. In a way, it’s satisfying that it’s a round 5 years of garbage, so if things improve, we’ll be able to look back and say, remember those horrible 5 years we had way back when, and then things got better? Maybe we got all of our bad luck and crappy occurrences for life out of the way all at once and now we’re in the clear. My cynicism doesn’t want to accept this, but there’s an optimist who won’t quit optimist-ing in there, up in my brain. So instead of making resolutions, I’m just going to try not to think too hard about what’s coming, and I’ll let my little inner-optimist keep me afloat. 

Happy 2023.