Stuff it. 2021 is the first year I’m not making any resolutions.
I made some last year and met them all. I’m a published writer now, I bought myself a very sweet little car and proudly crammed the glovebox full of snack bars and “car makeup” that I’d set aside some six months before even passing my test, and I learned some Spanish. I may not have remembered much (any) of it but that wasn’t stipulated, your Honour. So it’s time for a year off. I’ve had a look at the most popular resolutions just to see what I’m rejecting. Don’t bother looking them up, they’re terrifically predictable. There’s the perennially popular “spend more time with family and friends.” Impossible for me. As a typical millennial boomerang child, I live at home and generally get under everyone’s feet anyway. There’s the vague “get more organised” which I’ve attempted in various guises. Trying to alphabetise the 347 books in my bedroom will inevitably get derailed by stumbling across an old favourite, wavy-edged from where I’ve dropped it in the bath, that I just have to sit down and read right there and then. Or, I get distracted and count them instead, as evidenced. I often start the year by trying to “streamline” my beauty routine, too. I will generally throw products at my face with a decent regard for the cleanse-tone-moisturise sequence but allow myself some creative flexibility outside of that. So come January I usually decide to revamp the whole thing and “actually stick to it this time, Isabel, honestly.” I’ve forked out for LED at-home treatments that are basically just red torches, some pink gel allegedly with dragon’s blood in it (nope, no idea on that one), and was so seduced by makeup artist Alan Pan inspecting my skin and telling me I’d age well that I left my appointment with two foaming cleansers and four kinds of serum. And then after a few frantic weeks of swapping between products, I can be found in the kitchen making some disgusting mask out of oats and spirulina powder, nodding wisely and confidently saying to myself “natural is best, you know”. Ho hum. And as for losing weight, well. Hard pass. It’s the most popular resolution and, yes, I get it. After those post-Christmas days where you only leave the house to take wine bottles to the bin in your onesie and a pair of clogs (this is not poetic licence, this was my Sunday), you do feel the need for a bit of a kick up the somewhere. I think the way to this, though, is not pounding freezing cold January streets with the Couch to 5K app and eating quinoa, but simply getting over yourself. Don’t get me wrong, live and let live. If that suits you, then smashing, enjoy. You can have my share of quinoa. But I refuse to spend any month of the year, let alone the coldest and darkest, in miserable self-denial, looking wistfully at my smart new macaron baking tray and an eight-strong stack of chocolate boxes. Exercise, inner glow, endorphins, yeah, okay. I’ve personally found that nothing beats the self-satisfied endorphin-charged glow of having seen off a full wheel of camembert rather than the hungry mongrel look I know I get after a mere hour or two of “dieting”. If the events of 2020 have shown me anything, it’s that there’s not much point planning rigorously for the future. Losing weight (ugh in itself) for a holiday that will probably get cancelled anyway; trying to solve imaginary problems ten years down the line and then having Covid shake up the very thing that might have caused you those problems; fretting about optimising your commute and then having to WFH for the foreseeable future, pffft. No, I shall spend 2021 pottering around in all my gluttonous, haphazard, homemaking, joie de vivre glory. Why improve on perfection?
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The official website of Yorkshire-made, Oxford-based writer Isabel Parkinson. Want fewer words and more pics? Follow me on Instagram!
(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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