Self-serving goals

I’ve always been terrible at New Year’s resolutions.

From childhood, I would think long and hard about composing the perfect list of improvements I could make for myself.

It seemed that these resolutions were not only to better my year, but to prove to others I was making great efforts to be better at whatever I was doing.

Some part of me, and perhaps some part of you, always feels like New Year’s has an unspoken capability to destroy a “former you.”

Somehow, when we’re writing down these little numbered lists, we feel self-condemning yet empowered. This is the opportunity with which we can reinvent ourselves.

The reality is, resolutions are less of a way we can improve ourselves and more of a way to say, “Na-na, look at what I’m doing as a better human being.” If you make a resolution, everyone needs to know about it.

Furthermore, if you don’t make a resolution, you’re looked at as a kind of defier of societal norms.

Rather than a personal set of goals, New Year’s resolutions became a competition amongst everyone, and your bullet list would become something expected of you and something to show off.

Resolutions for 2012 are already trying to surpass each other, like “Oh, I’ve given up meat,” and subsequently,  “Oh, I’ve given up gluten, dairy, poultry and all animal products in general.”

It’s all about upping the ante. Everyone’s lists are self-declarations of personal superiority in ambitions we have yet to fulfill, and let’s be honest: We probably won’t.

I think that this overarching pressure in yearly goals had me so confused by the time I was older that my resolutions would start to cancel each other out, as I went through different versions of myself year by year.

As it turned out, I was just trying to up my own ante, and in the process my resolutions became counterproductive and filled me with a displaced identity crisis.

One year I wanted more video games, and the next I wanted to play less. Another year I would resolve to dress more stylishly, and the next year I would tell myself to never stress out about an outfit. I’ve been know to write down “be more rational,” then “be less rational.”

This year, I wrote a small list in a notebook that I will reveal to no one. If these goals are supposed to be for myself, then they’re for my eyes only. But I am hoping you’ll get to see the benefit of my resolutions right here on this page.

­— ftirado@indiana.edu