2023 isn’t even here yet, and it has me in its crosshairs. A violent metaphor, but it’s the first one that springs to mind. 2023 is the call coming from inside the house, the noise in the basement I definitely shouldn’t go and investigate. Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water, 2023 is the swiftly-approaching fin. I am riding in a 1961 Lincoln Continental, and 2023 is lurking in the Book Depository Building.
Okay, maybe that’s too much. Sorry.
For the last 40 minutes I have been trying to start this piece, and instead, having discovered my niece’s hungry and dying Tamagotchi (yes, the nineties really have returned) in the bag she left behind at my parents’ last night, I have been on YouTube with my daughter trying to find out how to revive it because I don’t want her cousin to freak out, and because dropping everything to spend time with my nearly-teenage kid whenever she is feeling friendly is top of my to-do list right now, and because I felt personally triggered by the pixellated death’s head bouncing gaily on the sofa behind the helpless and frightened digital creature on the Tamagotchi’s screen.
That skull sort of reminded me of 2023.
My daughter and I had to work out how to best feed or entertain or otherwise nourish this Tamagotchi so that the skeleton head would disappear. Given the desperate feelings I’m having as I try to set my New Year’s intentions or at least chart some kind of course for the year to come, I think this must be akin to what I’m trying to do for myself.
At least things are better than they were a few weeks ago, when I was panic-Googling things like ‘psilocybin clinics Amsterdam’ and ‘cheap plane tickets to anywhere today’ and ‘how to disappear.’
I’m ambivalent about New Year’s resolutions, just as I am ambivalent about goals in general. Too often they create prisons of our own making, set us up for disappointment, provide the rods to beat ourselves with, or are simply insufficiently aligned with our values. Many of the to-do and must-do lists my psychotherapy clients compile - at any time of year - are made without any reference whatsoever to personal values or intrinsic motivators. It’s always a sad moment when such clients realise that they have unthinkingly shaped their lives around the demands of others, that they’ve long been sacrificial lambs led to slaughter on the altar of society’s expectations.
So if I do make a list for myself, I start from a values place, sometimes returning to a favourite tool to refresh my connection with what matters most to me. (At the end of the post, I’ll explain how to use it.) The tricky bit comes when the values at the top of the heap - or at least my particular way of actualising them - conflict with one another. Because of the number of competing items on my personal menu of deepest meanings and most-cherished purposes, resolutions are complicated. A values-driven life is always advisable, but rarely simple and never painless. Health sometimes has to trump Achievement. Creativity goes head to head with Stability. Passion has a knock-down drag-out with Responsibility. Worshipping at the shrines of Change and Creativity and Passion all come at the expense of Wealth, or anything like Wealth.
My anxiety at this moment is partly because 2022 featured every one of those struggles, leaving me utterly drained of energy and funds at the close of the year. My damaged knee was repaired and rehabbed, and my manuscript went from nonexistent to submitted, but the price was working only five months out of 12. I cannot have another year like that in 2023 - refilling the coffers is a matter of necessity.
But in what seems like an entirely healthy spirit of if not now, when?, choosing to believe in myself, desperate to see if I can make a more creative life work for me on both psychological and practical levels, I am reluctant to return to the predictable wage-earning schedule as I knew it before. If I revert to that, when will I edit my novel? Publicise my non-fiction book? Create the linked podcast? Pitch more short pieces to proper publications? Apply for writers’ grants and flash-fiction prizes?
At the coffee shop yesterday, doing everything short of wagging his finger at me (which he would never do), my best friend quite sensibly asked how it was possible for me - in the same paragraph, sentence, breath - to sweat bullets over my bank balance and to contemplate the purchases of an Ernest Hemingway Freewrite Signature Edition, a fully restored and reconditioned burgundy 1950s Olympia SM3 (‘the Mercedes-Benz of typewriters’) with a new platen, and a LEGO Ideas Typewriter (21327). The combined cost of these indulgences would be…actually, I don’t want to say).
On one hand, this seems like madness, the preoccupations of a vulnerable mind weakened by a difficult year. But the obsession is meaningful. I don’t know if I’ll ever buy any of them, but I think about them constantly, even the LEGO one, which has no function - other than a purely talismanic one, which perhaps all of them contain, and that’s the thing.
Apparently the word is derived from the Greek - telesma, meaning ‘completion, religious rite’, or from telein ‘complete, perform a rite’, or from telos ‘result, end.’ The implements of writing have always held magic for me - the papers; the pens and pencils; the soft-cover and hard-cover, plain and patterned, ruled and unruled notebooks; the complex mechanical beasts that produce the words, both analog and digital. I’ve always had too many of these things, spent too much on them, been vulnerable to them. I approach them with reverence, hoard them on my shelves, mourn them when they are lost.
When I look at the meanings of the words from which talisman is derived, I wonder what’s meant by completion, wonder what magic I need my talismans to do for me. Do I believe they will help me complete things, or do I believe they will complete me?
I am frightened of 2023 because I am scared that, once again, I will drive myself to the brink of insanity and exhaustion by trying to have it all and to do everything. In the same moment, I fear that I will not be able to strike a healthy compromise, and I have no intention of striking a healthy compromise. But I’ve always known this about myself. Ultimately, passion and creativity, risk and challenge will win out every time over stability and wealth.
So I’m going back in the water. I’m picking up the phone. I’m going into the basement. Maybe I don’t need to make a list at all. Maybe I’ll write down just do it even if it kills you which it probably won’t. I don’t need to specify beyond that. I know what I mean.
Happy New Year, y’all.
Here are the directions I give my clients for the values card sort.
First, print and cut out all the cards. Make sure you don’t have your printer set to print double-sided! Trust me, doing this in paper form is much more generative than using a spreadsheet or some other method.
1. Use the "Very important to me", "Important to me" and "Not important to me" cards as headers.
2. Sort the other cards under each heading.
3. After the initial sort, limit yourself to 10 cards in the "very important to me" column.
4. Turning your attention to the "very important" column, attempt to rank order them from most to least important to you.
5. Make a record of what you have placed in the very important column and how you ranked the values - you might also want to pay attention to what you placed in the "not important to me" column.
A few things to remember!
First, "Important to me" values are ones that you would like to be living in accordance with as much as possible, but if there were ever a time that you weren't living that value, it would not be the end of the world. For example, "growth" or "change" might be important to you, but if there are times in your life that growth or change isn't happening and that feels okay to you, they would probably belong in the "important to me" column. "Very important to me" values, on the other hand, are marked out by the fact that if there is any point where they are not in your life, where you are not living them (in some form, to some degree, in some realm of your life), you just don't feel "right".
Second, we get our values from all sorts of places, and we sometimes prioritise certain values or act in accordance with certain values because we feel like we "should", not because this would genuinely make us feel like we are living richer and more fulfilled lives. For example, someone might have had "achievement" drummed into them as being an important value, but if achievement does not make that person feel genuinely better about their life, then it does not belong in the "very important to me" column. In other words, try to cut out as much of the "should" stuff as possible when sorting the cards.
Thirdly, the cards should be sorted under "Very important", "Important" and "Not important" columns regardless of whether you are living according to these values at the moment. In other words, don't use your current behaviour/choices/situation to try to work out whether something is important to you or not. Many people are in therapy precisely because the values that are important to them are not being "lived", as it were.
Happy to hear about your experience in the comments!
Oh that lego typewriter! Tempting...