This article was written by Daisy Johnston. Find them on Instagram at @daisies_in_bloom_. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
At exactly midnight every December 31, a giant ball made of 2,688 crystal triangles welcomes everyone into the new year. In the days before the drop, news channels begin counting down, celebrities put on hard hats to take selfies with the ball and an estimated one million people prepare for their trip to Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
When the ball completes its sixty-seconds-long journey down the six-meter-wide pole, it’s a relief to those with filled adult diapers who have been holding down their spot in Times Square for hours and countless more families watching the celebration on TV who were starting to get bored.
In the following weeks, planner companies, fitness instructors and health food stores help begin January with unpassable promotions, and, for a short time, the world is a happy place for people who like to sit out with friends, talking about how their lives are only ever getting better.
On the other side of the obsessive drive to celebrate the passing of another year, there is a large group of people drawn to the opposite reaction. Won over by the idea that each consecutive year of their life should somehow be an improvement, many people become miserable.
Regardless of how someone takes it, most people have something they can learn from each passing year.
Some lessons we learn as a group. For example, millions of people learned this year that even in a place as heartless as a United States Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, two people can find love. Other lessons we learn on our own.
It isn’t easy to look back on the past year. Some things I remember make me proud, but most of what I think about from 2023 leaves me with questions.
During the past year, my life has changed constantly. I spent time alone. I was confused about who I was spending time with. I spent time with someone I hadn’t spoken to in a year. I spent countless time thinking about someone I hadn’t spoken to in several years.
When I think about it too deeply, I actually feel a lot like how I did at the end of 2022: hanging on to the routines that help me for my dear life, dating people who aren’t good for me and clinging to the hope of a fresh start, maybe I’ll walk into the next year feeling different.
This feeling that I’m failing at something has never sat well with me. To live with it, I’ve had to learn how to redirect my mindset, a kinder – and more accurate – way to say what I always called “lying to myself until I start to believe it.”
One redirection of my mindset has been learning that there is no need to pick apart all my mistakes. Instead, I’m letting the wisdom come to me.
The lesson I am taking away from 2023 is that there are no mistakes in love, only the lessons I take from it. Like muscle memory, my experiences stay with me. Every person I met taught me something about myself.
It isn’t to say that the lessons I’ve learned have kept me from making the same mistake twice because I often still feel doomed to repeat myself. During the past year, I reconnected with one person who has always found me when I’m at my worst. The result was relearning the same lesson I had to learn at 16.
I also can’t say for certain that these lessons have made me any smarter, although I would like to think they have. Also, during the past year, I overcorrected past behaviors I wanted to improve on but ended up more unhappy. Although I believed I had been making progress, it’d be more accurate to say I was embarrassing myself by acting detached around people who naturally could care less.
All I can say confidently is that nothing is ever a waste of time. It seems like a small takeaway, and maybe it is, but a little certainty goes a long way when you don’t know anything else. Because I struggle to trust my gut, I obsess over making the right decisions. However, I take comfort in knowing the lessons are there, regardless of how badly life gets messed up.
Falling too deep into the idea that they have been wasting their lives is a terrible habit, worse than people might know. On top of being discouraging, it keeps them from knowing how smart and experienced they are.
Knowing that there is something I learned from all the weird stuff I went through in 2023 helps me put meaning into another year gone by.
I don’t know how to fix the awful feeling that follows a massive ball dropping slowly to the ground miles away from me, but I know that maybe with time, there could be a lesson somewhere in all these New Year’s Eves.
What life love lessons did you learn in 2023? What are you hoping to learn in 2024? Let us know in the comments below!
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