January is a bold little month. It shows up wearing the new year like a new coat and says, enthusiastically: here we go. And you, still wearing December's tired eyes and operating on approximately 60% of normal capacity, look at it and say: yes, absolutely, let's do this. It is the kind of commitment you make before your first morning breath, which is the kind of commitment that either turns into something real or dissolves by Wednesday. January and I have been negotiating this arrangement for a lifetime.
I have never been a New Year's resolution person. I'm more of a New Year's honest-assessment person, which is less inspiring but substantially more accurate. On January 1st, 2023, I sat with a notebook and a reasonable level of candor and wrote down what I actually wanted the year to look like. Not a list of accomplishments. A list of feelings I wanted to have more of. An honesty, and a list of things I wanted to stop carrying that were not mine to carry. That second list was longer than I'd expected. I realized that the weight of self impossed obligations outweigh the joy in my life.
The crown of thorns is an image I return to often — not specifically as a religious symbol, though it is that too — but as a human one. We all wear a version of it. Everyone you meet is bearing something you cannot see. The person in line ahead of you at the grocery store, the one whose expression doesn't quite reach their eyes. The old friend who laughs too quickly. The quietly exhausted parent in the pickup line who is doing everything and being thanked for nothing. We are, every one of us, wearing our particular, invisible, self-constructed version of a crown we didn't ask for.
January 2023, I made myself one specific promise: I was going to put down what wasn't working and pick up what was. That is a simple sentence that took me most of the month to actually act on in any meaningful way. After the most stormy of seasons, this was progress. Some of what I put down that month I will not describe here. The scars it left are my own, forever embeded into my being. I have made peace with them — they are constant reminders of the things we overcome in this lifetime, and overcoming, it turns out, is worth commemorating even when you'd prefer to forget it.
Crown of Thorns
In sorrow's hues, a visage worn, Eyes deep as night, gaze forlorn. Bearing not gold, but a crown of nails, A silent tale where strength prevails.
Read the full poem →I also laughed a great deal that January. I called the people I love. I wrote bad first drafts of poems that became better second drafts and sometimes became something I was genuinely proud of. Which is very diffuclt for me to admit. I ate soup. I watched the bare trees. I let the cold do its usual clarifying work on my thinking, which always produces interesting results because cold thinking and warm thinking produce entirely different poems.
Happiness in January is a choice that often feels absurd, which is exactly when it matters most. The sun shows up low and late and the days are short and everything takes more energy than it did in October, and you're supposed to have a new year and feel reinvented. I skipped reinvention and went straight to showing up: present, functional, not pretending things were different than they were. That's the actual work. That's the real January crown. Being true to what is.
The year is always new for about forty-eight hours before it becomes another year. What you do with the newness — before it gets worn down by the usual weight of ordinary days — is the entire question. In January 2023, I was learning to do something different with it. To stop waiting to feel better before acting like it. That, as it turned out, was a very good place to begin. The brightness of a new way shined its way.