With less than two weeks away from the New Year, there will be no goal-making this time — but rather listing off respectable intentions.
I spent much of yesterday, December 16th, crying, a slow-moving track of tears wetting most of my motions. It was a specific type of lacrimal release — by no means a wailing of any kind, more akin to a gradual release of fluid pressure. The difference between opening a dropped can of Dr. Pepper immediately after picking it up versus waiting a minute or so before pulling the aluminum tab. Like spring rain’s first trickle through barren creeks in West Texas.
I slept four hours that night; I went on a 10.6 mile run at 3:14 a.m.; I bit my pillow before throwing my iPhone at it. My unshowered head eventually filled in craters left in the sunken fluff.
“Fuck, here we go again,” I contested to myself, the LED lamp at the far side of my small Nob Hill studio glowing in soft orange hues. At 32 years old, the past five years have seen an otherwise healthy understanding of both my body and mind. The claymation of my life is moving in earnest, albeit at a sedate pace.
In my early twenties, dialogues with myself weren’t as straightforward. It was an eternal back-and-forth of questioning: Why was today so off-kilter? Did I have an interaction that unstabilized me? Is it something I ate? Did I even eat? Are my prescriptions mismeasured? These are the queries those with mental health illnesses ask themselves when in a state of compulsion; my bipolarity has made me a rather devoted scientist to my own experience, my own single, wild, true life. The newly prescribed medication I’m now also taking offers a beaker of sorts to hold those and make sense of those observations; they by no means remove those compulsions, mind, rather they mitigate them and allow for space to make sense of them all.
Partaking in self-examination puts thoughts under an uncomfortable amount of magnification. Sometimes it’s warranted. Other times it’s not. No one episode of apparent woe is similar. But the illusion of control is never misplaced, regardless of when where, and why you choose to place those thoughts on top of glass slides.
To find one’s self in moments like these is an exercise in submitting. To walk into the profundities found at the intersection of radical acceptance and universal happenstance.
“And so we go, again,” I wax poetic in an apartment.
The lamp is now off.
This was scheduled to be the day I was to set time to write out 2024’s goals.
This did not happen.
Bipolar disorder runs like maple syrup down my family tree, which is to say a fair chunk of my blood relatives is sticky with its capricious expressions.
For example: My maternal uncle was diagnosed with “manic depression” — what we now understand as either bipolar 1 or bipolar 2; I suffer from the latter, my since-vanished uncle falls somewhere in the former diagnosis — and he would become a published writer later in life, who would also go on to own a string of restaurants. Suffice it to say that his vocational parallel still haunts me in muffled whispers.
I’ve spent my entire life in some level of ebb and flow. I tried in my youth to place myself inside boxes people put around me when semblances of balance washed over. I escaped them when I grew itchy claustrophobic and hypomanic. My lukewarm early twenties were years consumed by fits of shapeshifting. My 30s have offered longer glimpses into my ideas of contentment and what it looks like to have self-organized daily habits and warm relationships, all of which sit in unlocked cages filled with songbirds; they all ring true to who I am, in my gestalt.
Though even in this era — a chapter that, for the first time in seven years, also includes a newfound anit-depressant routine —the bad days still transpire; these chapters, too, have a way of making quick work of new connections incapable of holding ton emotional depths and re-focus the importance on evergreen friendships that can stay down there with you, evening offering a slight push up toward the surface.
But what I profoundly understood during these atypical periods of moral sinking is the inconsistent nature of the human experience and our wants, how we extrapolate very concrete goals onto a timeline played out inside a finite planet. Everything is in entropy; nothing is permanent; everyone is responding and reactivating.
Intentions are kind, the well-meaning stranger stating that you have spinach in your teeth. Resolutions would trade benevolence for a bat in such a scenario. I’d prefer to go through my daily activities, sans black eyes.
I’ve long thought that those conscious of their mental health conditions have a particular gentle vision of the world that’s hard to simply ascribe to someone else — the someone else here being an individual who, by some divine act, managed to evade modern living without falling ill due to a mental health emergency. There’s a reason why the most fucked up among us also appear to be the most interesting and the most empathetic and the most illuminating to experience time collapse while in their company.
It’s an inherent gentleness born out of lived experience; a curiosity about the world, conceived by a quest to find light in dark places.
This is all to say that the humans who suffer from a mental illness see the world for its mercurial nature — which is to admit that resolutions then exist in an ideated vacuum simultaneously. Because they imply certainty; a grade of dominion. And if these past two years have taught us anything, it’s that plans will inevitably be sidetracked by something. (A global pandemic. An insurrection. A new, small, quaint apartment. A final release from toxic love.)
Assigning premeditated change to a world in a state of upending seems foolish. Perilous, maybe.
I’ve found intention setting to be an antidote of sorts to a culture that fetishes becoming anew at the beginning of a fresh calendar year. Living in tandem with my mental health issues — an inescapable contention that’s proven to be the most complex partnership in my life; despite past attempts, I can’t simply cast aside a part of me that’s as tied to myself as being right-handed — has forced me to reframe imposed normalities. The intention setting fits neatly inside this line of thinking.
We can attach our intentions to parts of your character, yes. That’s a healthy, admirable approach to progressing on this mortal coil.
Intentions bring clarity to the detritus of humankind’s perpetual pull toward self-growth. They take certain factors (thoughts, ideations, realities, etc.) into consideration that resolutions, on the other hand, ignore. Intentions aren’t absolutes. They’re applied objectives to attain a certain goal that may or may not happen; life happens. Resolutions, however, sit outside vulnerability, where an answer is expected to achieve the said endpoint — at all costs.
Intentions are kind, the well-meaning stranger stating that you have spinach in your teeth. Resolutions would trade benevolence for a bat in such a scenario. I’d prefer to go through my daily activities, sans black eyes.
2020 was enough to live through, let alone to pontificate an improved future self within. 2021 was more of the same. 2022 should’ve felt like a cautionary tale against placing certainties on a tomorrow that hasn’t yet, in fact, come to fruition. 2023 traded that cautionary tale for into fairy book story of outright ignorance and ambivalence to this “new norm.”
Holding onto the dream of control will only lead to disappointmenting hellscapes and confabulations. Surrendering what is not yours — what is out of your manipulation, what exists outside your realms of influence, what sits on the other sides of rivers too rough to swim through — brings with it levity, light, and livability to your whole life.
We can attach intentions to parts of our character, yes. That’s a healthy, admirable approach to progressing on this mortal coil. But to denounce the idea of fate in the pursuit of self-change is dangerous, dare I say even joyless. God knows all of us should sequester all the pools of contentment we can after what we’ve been through these past three years.
As of publishing, my intentions are now set; I’ve dog-eared them in my Moleskine notebook. My resolutions, though, are nowhere to be found written or bookmarked. Frankly, I don’t know what’s to come of this; neither do you. None of us do. And that’s, in fact, fine.
I haven’t met the new me who’s yet to come.
