New Year’s Eve has never been my favorite holiday. Frankly, I absolutely hate it. There’s so much buildup and anticipation. People always ask what your plans are. New Year’s plans tend to be elaborate, blown out of proportions, trying to meet some standard of how we should usher in the new year. You need a place to go. You need people to be with. You need someone to kiss or hold as the ball drops and the new year begins. You need to be happy and joyous and excited about the future beyond the party. I have tried and failed many times to make this holiday memorable. But, I’ve only succeeded in making it memorable for the wrong reasons—memorable in how disappointed I always feel after.
When I think about time, all moments kinda exist at once for me. These moments happen simultaneously and continuously. I look back at myself through the years and remember where I was, whom I was with, and how I felt. I envision myself almost exactly how I was but clarity lessened a bit by age.
I see myself, a youthful 21 year old, at Club Giraffe off Dotonbori in Osaka where I had to pay ¥4000 to enter because I am a man, ringing in the new year with two Canadian women and a paid club dancer who mysteriously disappeared a few minutes prior and returned with a bottle of champagne he sprayed all over us as the clock struck midnight. I see myself on New Year’s Eve 2018 in Queens slowly dancing around in a friend’s living room, stomach full of homemade dumplings, surrounded by loved ones as we laughed and reminisced about our times together in Japan. I see myself and my former partner on my parent’s living room couch next to the Christmas tree at age 23, careful not to get too close together despite our urges to cuddle up and do so, as we watched my father run around the house switching off all the lights and switching them back on at midnight for the new year. I see myself at an indeterminate age standing outside of our house as my mother smashes a pomegranate on the ground and asks me to walk through the mess of seeds to welcome good luck into our home. I see myself on New Year’s Eve 2017 standing outside a packed sports bar in Boston, freezing and waiting hours for entrance, drinking mixed drinks in plastic bottles regretting every decision that led me to that moment. I see myself at age 28 sitting alone in my New York apartment with a homemade charcuterie board wiping alway the tears that rolled down my face as I finished Call Me By Your Name and journaled my reflections on what I thought at the time was the hardest year of my life. I see myself in Philadelphia, months before I decided to leave the city, at a friend’s partner’s home watching every else kiss someone at midnight while I stood around and drank champagne and wondered if I’d always feel this alone on holidays.
I understand why people want to celebrate New Year’s. There’s something so powerful about closing a chapter of your life, especially one that might have been marked by difficulty as I’m sure the last few years have been for all of us. It’s cathartic to move past all that and hope for something better on the horizon. A year is a perfect amount of measured time to pause and reflect and attempt to figure out how life can change in the future. People love to make resolutions of what they want to see for themselves in the next year. The to-do list of life changes makes its yearly appearance as the blank slate of a new year gives us promise that things can be different if we just take that first step and action our resolutions to ourselves. I know in the past I’ve made resolutions—to be happier, to be healthier, to put myself out more, to enjoy time with friends more. But, I’m not sure how long any of those resolutions lasted.
For me, nothing is less motivating than trying to fix my life in the dead of winter. Daylight lasts only a few hours a day. Cold air seeps in through every crevasse. There’s a stillness and a quietness to winter that calls only for sleep, warmth, and coziness. Each day feels like a battle to not let that deep and dark sadness overpower and win.
Every winter I think back to my UConn Poetry & English Literature professor, Professor Hufstader. I spent my spring semester my first year walking 15 minutes in below freezing temperature before 9 am to attend his Poetry class three times a week. I hated poetry. I still mostly do, but I’m growing to like it more. Poetry reminds me of wine. I know when it’s good and I know when it’s bad but I can never tell you why — the tannins of those metered lines hit my literary brain but I can never fully grasp its power. Hufstader was a great professor; he is since retired. He pushed us to re-read poems and feel the emotions in those words. I struggled. I would read these poems over and over again, trying so hard to make sense of how I was supposed to feel. I had no great loves to think back on. I had no deep or powerful truths that I could pull from. But, I kept trying. I don’t think I ever got any better, but I did progressively get more comfortable and knew what to expect more from him and the class. Professor Hufstader was also an eccentric professor — once having us read an incredibly sexual e.e. cummings poem as class, with the men taking the male voice part and the women taking the female voice part as our oohs and aahs crescendoed before 9:50 am.
At times, I felt like I failed Hufstader because I knew inside of me that I could understand the depths of these poems if I just unblocked myself or stopped looking at everything so literally or if I just looked beyond the page. I took another one of his classes my last year at UConn on a whim, Modern English Literature. Maybe I felt like I needed to redeem myself, to prove to him that I can understand these great writers. Unlike Poetry, this was a writing intensive class. We had a four page paper due every four weeks of the semester and every Friday we submitted any single page type of writing we wanted to. He would then pick one that stood out to him the most and read it for all of us. I dreaded these the most. I never knew what to write about. The first two submissions, embarrassingly, were about how I didn’t know what to write about and Hufstader kindly told me to never do that again and write something a bit more substantial. He did this with my draft analysis essays as well, pushing me to stop being so surface level with everything.
Eventually something clicked. I let loose. I stopped trying to control so much — my outward image, my writing, myself. I wrote about space. I wrote about how much the profound unknown beyond our skies both amazed me and horrified me. I wrote about wanting to travel to space one day, to not let my dreams be deterred by realism and to never tell myself that something is impossible to achieve. I wrote about how each of us, to our very core, are made of the same atoms that make up the rest of the universe. I wrote about how magical and awe-inspiring that was, to be part of this grand painting, our lives single brush strokes filling a canvas. Hufstader read my essay that week, much to my surprise. He quietly left feedback about how I finally seemed to get it. I see myself in that class, sitting in a Socratic-style circle, facing Hufstader exactly north of me, and feeling like maybe there is something to letting myself out there more, letting myself be more vulnerable and open.
For our third essay of the semester, I focused on The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. I plan to reread that novel one day as the details allude me. My first draft was atrocious. I don’t even remember what I wrote about. Hufstader asked me to consider the seasons: how they mean more than weather changes, how the seasons cycle much like our lives. Spring is our (re)birth, fresh from the ground flowers begin to grow and blossom. Summer is youth where our joys and our sunshine are seemingly endless. Fall is maturity as we age and shed the colors that once gave us vibrancy. Winter is death and ending. I mapped quotes from the novel to these specific seasons and how the protagonist herself was going through this cyclical death and rebirth of her own heart. Hufstader was proud of what I had written and so was I. I saw, maybe for the first time, the intentionality of a writer painting this beautiful connected moment beyond just words on the page, linking me and her and the protagonist and the other readers to this shared and universal experience forever.
Every spring I feel this rebirth happen within myself. As I shake off the layers and walls I put up for winter for protection, I feel my inner light shining a bit more strongly. I feel this need to start a change, to create the person I’ve always envisioned and longed to become. Change, however, takes time. Change takes a lot of energy. Change requires a lot of determination and self-sacrifice and, most importantly, an honest inner drive to truly be more than you are now. Change comes with failure and setbacks. Change isn’t a clock turning at midnight.
I made the biggest change of my life at the end of March. I finally built up the courage to answer an email that had been sitting in my inbox since January. I didn’t feel ready before. I was so deep in my own feelings of pity and sadness that I couldn’t muster up the willpower to even picture myself as something beyond what I was in those moments. As the days lightened, the snow melted, and the warmth started to come back, I noticed something shift in myself. I could no longer just idly sit back and let life happen to me. I needed the death of my former self. I needed to use the pain and the shame I cultivated for years as fertilizer to help me blossom and grow the flowers of myself. As the weeks and months moved on, those flowers pushed out of the cold muted ground towards a spring vibrancy, feeding on the brilliant rays of the sun, and quietly sleeping underneath the distant stars.
Now, when I look towards New Year’s, I see nothing more than a day. No expectations. No elaborate parties. Just another day. One of many I’ll continue to live. The night will pass quietly, maybe I’ll enjoy a nice dinner with friends. I’ll wake on the new year, much of myself the same as I have been lately, just slowly waiting for the winter to finish its necessary cycle, dreaming of the radiating warmth of the spring.