second year priya desai

As is customary during the first month of each new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about personal growth. It’s never linear, and you can’t measure it in the same way you quantify your height or your GPA. You can’t even realistically track your growth—I mean, who among us doesn’t fall back into their old unhealthy patterns from time to time, whether it’s texting the person you promised your friends you’d cut off, or staying up too late and regretting it in the morning?

As a culture, I think we’ve cultivated an unhealthy obsession with starting anew each year. Gyms have never been as crowded as they are in those first few weeks of January, filled with people holding themselves to a strict new goal. Don’t get me wrong: I love a good resolution, but I keep mine vague for a reason.

I’ve finally accepted that 2020, or any upcoming year, won’t be the one where I reinvent my personality from scratch. I’m sure I’ll retain the vast majority of my inconvenient habits, like stress-eating popcorn and crying at every movie I watch. Honestly, I’m sure you will too. If nothing else, we are creatures of habit.

But, that’s okay!

Resolutions don’t have to be so concrete. The beginning of the new year doesn’t have to be a time of strict discipline in the name of starting over. Set gentler goals for yourself: resolve to watch more movies, to meet new people, or maybe to just be nicer to yourself when you (inevitably, as all humans do) fail. Acknowledge the growth that you’ve undergone just by making it through another year, even when you worry you might just be the same person you were in middle school. Spoiler: you definitely are, just an older, wiser, and hopefully more improved version. Gradual change can be the most impactful—like the regrowth of an ecosystem, rather than the fire that destroyed it.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m still the same person I was last year, and the year before, and the year before that. I still listen to the same music my brother and sister played in 2010, I still wait in line for the same jalapeño cheddar bagel at Jittery Joe’s, and I remain embarrassingly, unfailingly sincere. Rather than trying to reinvent myself for the new decade, I’m choosing to accept myself as I am: an accumulation of all my past selves, waiting with open arms for the next addition.

new year, same me