Welcome to 2022! Along with celebrations and fireworks, many folks brought in the new year with new commitments, new promises to themselves and new ideas to make this the year when everything shifts and changes for the better.
Sometimes this can be a great way to start a new year – but usually it’s not, since the “new year, new me” mentality can be extraordinarily toxic. So, if you have a huge and unrealistic list of new year’s resolutions, your best option is to throw it in the trash. The start of a new year can be a slippery slope toward self-hatred. This year let’s just not do that. You’ve been through enough.
Don’t get me wrong, feeling inspired toward self-improvement can be a very good thing. The problem is a week or two into the new year we might have set ourselves up for failure. If we have not been perfect with all the things that were going to change, we might begin to unravel. Nothing magical happened at exactly midnight on Jan. 1 to make change any easier than it was before.
When we don’t live up to the unrealistic expectations that we set for ourselves, we begin questioning our worth based on arbitrary ideals, largely emerging from the opinions of other people. This is a new year and with it might come some new realizations. You might form new commitments – but you aren’t a different person than you were in 2021, and that’s a good thing.
You are the culmination of the amazing things, the bad things, and the many mundane things you have done up until now. If your list of resolutions was made from a place of self-hatred, it’s not ever going to fulfill its aim.
Recently I read that the average person makes about 35,000 decisions every day. You are currently reading this, so clearly you make good decisions. But perhaps not every one of your 35,000 decisions is the best decision. Maybe you are kicking off 2022 with that achy feeling of regret from some of the 12,775,00 or so decisions you made in 2021, or the many millions of decisions you made before then.
Everyone has things about themselves that need to change. Whether we want to change our behaviors, our bodies, our jobs, or our relationships, we need inspiration for transformation. We need fuel for better decisions. We need the courage to change ourselves and our situations. These things come from self-worth, not self-deprecation. But all too often, we approach change by berating and criticizing ourselves.
If you need to change something, cruelty toward yourself is not the best way to inspire self-transformation. Instead, you can love yourself into change. Even the things you might hate the most about yourself are part of you. You can change these things by loving yourself enough to know what decisions are best for you.
As a trans person, I know quite a lot about change. When I was rather young, I made the huge decision to transition medically. For me, it never felt like a decision, but more a necessity for my survival. I feel lucky that I learned early on in life that I was better off loving myself toward change instead of making changes fueled by a sense of self-hatred.
I remember thanking my body for getting me to where I was, while I worked to change my body into what I needed it to be. I had to find a way to be comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t become a wholly different person. But I am a person who found a much more authentic embodiment for myself.
A couple of decades have passed since the beginning of my transition. I find that a fringe benefit of having transitioned is that people run out of excuses when they are trying to tell me they can’t change something in their own lives. It can be awkward for people to argue that change is too hard in their own lives when they are talking to someone who was able to make huge life changes.
You don’t have to be a trans person to understand the desire to radically change something about yourself. There are many things that we all seek to change about who we are, how we look and what we do with our lives.
Maybe 2022 really is your year. Maybe it is time for you to make the major changes you need to make in life. If you feel you need to take better care of your body, or get a handle on your sobriety, or go back to school, or transform your life in any of the other myriad ways you feel it needs transforming – then do it! But do it because you are worth it. Don’t do it because this is the beginning of 2022 and certainly don’t do it from a place of shame or self-hatred.
I stand by my suggestion that you choose to throw out that huge and unrealistic list of new year’s resolutions. Of the 35,000 or so choices you will make today, the best choice is to look at yourself with kindness and compassion. Figure out what you can transform in your life. Tell yourself that you are worth the time and energy that it’ll take to get there.
Rev. Jakob Hero-Shaw is the senior pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Tampa, MCCTampa.com. He and his husband are the proud fathers of two wonderful children.
