I’ll Be Cleaning Up Bottles With You On New Year’s Day
“Like, I feel like every year has a new energy, and I feel like this year is really about, like, the year of just realizing stuff. And everyone around me, we’re all just, like, realizing things. ”
Kylie Jenner said this in 2016. And maybe while she was a little ahead of her time, I believe, and I can’t believe I am saying this, she has a point when we apply her words to 2020. Each year on December 31st, we think about our New Year’s resolutions - goals and other accomplishments that we set for ourselves for the New Year. And even though I don’t really believe in the whole ‘New Year, New Me’ mindset, I do believe we should take an example (yes, this is a first) of Kylie and her friends and ‘realize stuff.’ Most importantly – realize what we’re grateful for.
I’ll start. By living a stripped version of my regular life in 2020, I realized that I love writing. I mean, as a copywriter, I write for a living. But I don’t mean that kind of writing. I mean the kind of writing where you get to connect with people, share your experiences, and by doing so, make people feel better.
I’ve never been a ‘look on the bright side’ time of a person. Quite the very opposite, actually. Most of the time, generalized anxiety disorder has me thinking on the very, very dark side of things. However, what I’ve learned in the last couple of years is that if you’re feeling a certain way, there are always others that feel the same. You’re not overreacting, You’re not crazy, You’re not alone.
This brings me to my second point. Sometimes you can’t realize things entirely on your own. Sometimes, you need a little assistance. My whole life, I’ve been getting that assistance from music. Rewind +- 15 years, and you’ll find me in bed with my iPod listening to bands like Something Corporate and Secondhand Serenade (yes, I was a very dramatic teenager), and to be honest, I still do that, minus the iPod part, of course. However, these days I get to add another sort of assistance to that. Now I’m warning you. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready because I’m going to step out of my comfort zone in the next paragraph, and it’s going to get pretty soppy.
In the past four years my life has changed a lot. I’ve known ups and I’ve known downs but there was one person that was there through all of it. He has let me realize that I’m good at what I do, that anxiety can sometimes make me believe things that aren’t true (for example when I can’t sleep at night because I think the lady behind the register at the supermarket hates me because she looked at me funny) and most importantly, in the words of Taylor Swift - my love should be celebrated instead of tolerated.
So now that I’m sitting here on January 1st, sippin’ on a delicious Bloody Mary. I want to ask you, don’t think about what you’re going to do next year to make your life better. I want to ask you, what do you already have that makes your life awesome already? Because let me tell you, now that we welcome 2021, there’s no other place I’d want to be and no other person that I’d rather be cleaning up bottles with on New Year’s Day.
