Scrappy Badger

scrappybadger January 5th, 2010

I’m not much of a New Year resolver. I think there are two reasons for that: resolutions in general, but particularly those made at the beginning of the calendar year, seem trite and are infrequently kept. It’s just the way things go. We want to make grandiose, sweeping changes in our lives, so we come up with this great idea that is so big that we couldn’t possibly stick to it. Besides, resolutions have really devolved into more of the moralistic bs that I just can’t stand. They are all about what a person should be doing, what she should look like, or how she should feel. Screw that. Don’t we have quite enough of that throughout the rest of the year?

Luckily, I’m old enough now to see most resolutions for what they are. When I was younger I would secretly resolve to be a better, nicer person. I would squeeze my eyes closed and think about being more pleasant. The problem with that? I was already a terribly compliant child. I lacked anything that would make me interesting, in fact. I was quiet, well-behaved, and always did what I was told. I’m not sure how I was supposed to be nicer. Maybe I was thinking of petty fights with my sisters or being less reluctant to help with housework, or maybe, just maybe, I was buying into societal ideas about what it meant to be a girl. Maybe I was pushing myself to be closer and closer to an unrealistic ideal — a smart, interesting, well-mannered, witty, and precocious in just the right way (ala Shirley Temple) little girl.

If I could talk to my 5, 10, or 15 year old self right now I would grab her round cheeks in my hands, look her square in the eyes, and tell her “Girl, that shit is impossible. Give it up. Be bad; be very bad. Fuck some shit up.” For once she’d be hearing the truth, that you can’t be interesting and well-behaved all of the time. You can’t be good and precocious. That only happens in the movies. You won’t be interesting by going along with everything you’re told to do. What makes you interesting is finding your own way, discovering who you actually are. No one told me that. What adults told me was that I should be good; being good would make people like me, and I understood, without them ever saying so explicitly, that being liked was the most important thing of all. So here I am at 35 wondering how to figure out who I really am, and it isn’t easy to find me because I’m buried under all these sickening layers of good behavior.

That, for me, is what resolutions are all about. They are about trying to mold ourselves into something that, ultimately, isn’t that interesting. Think about what seems to be the #1 New Year’s resolution: a diet: The point with this resolution is to make your body more closely approximate that which we find beautiful, and as much as people will say there are many kinds of beauty, we as a society really only have one model. Thus, everyone is trying to look exactly the same. It’s like those plastic surgery reality shows. People started out with bumpy noses or long chins. They looked interesting and different, and we could recognize them. After the surgery? They all looked the same.

And you know what? Few resolutions make lasting change in the world. We focus on changing things on such an individual level that we often fail to see connections to societal systems. Look at a few lists of the top resolutions, and you’ll see “quit smoking/drinking,” “reduce stress,” “address debt/save money.” Those all address the individual’s so-called problem, but they don’t do anything about the source of the issue. Why are so many people in debt? Why are we all stressed out by our work? Why are so many people addicted to smoking or alcohol? These are systemic problems that require wide reaching solutions. If I am a smoker, and I decide to quit the tobacco companies will never even know. They have, however, felt the sting of anti-smoking legislation and widespread anti-smoking campaigns.

For me, the real failure of New Year’s resolutions is that they are all too often either an attempt to be more like some fantasy of who we think we should be or an attempt to solve a problem on a personal level while remaining blissfully ignorant of the flaws of, say, capitalism (why are so many of us in debt? why do we hate our jobs?) or the prevalence of sexism in our everyday lives (what makes thin so beautiful? why do we so often and so readily dismiss scientific evidence that fat can be healthy?). We see ourselves as the problem rather than seeing the problem as the problem.

So my advice to myself and anyone else who happens to listen will be to fuck some shit up this year. Make some noise, crash some parties, and see what happens.

Check back tomorrow for my attempt to revise New Year’s resolutions for myself.

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