Belated. We are already almost a month into 2025, and only now have I begun to process that it’s a new year. On the other hand, we are only a month into 2025, and I already feel a decade behind.
I’ve never really been one to celebrate the new year. Perhaps it is because I come from a culture that has its own New Year in September, and the two are just about close together enough that it doesn’t feel special. Perhaps it’s because working on yourself is difficult, and this preoccupation with resolutions and self-improvement terrifies me. I make the classic joke that you can’t improve upon perfection, but realistically I’m just a bit lazy. If I’m too lazy to make a new year’s resolution, what are my hopes of sticking to one?
So I do what everyone else does. I get very, very drunk on the last night of the year, have an inevitably disappointing new year’s kiss at some random new year’s party that I was just about able to muster the energy for, and then I wake up the next day with a lot of regrets and quickly diminishing hopes about the future. I vow never to drink again, or I vow to start working harder, or I vow to start being a better person (whatever that means), and within a week, I’ve forgotten about it. I go back to being the exact same person I’ve always been, and realise that at only nineteen years old, I’ve become stuck in my old ways, never to change.
But something feels different this year. Maybe it’s that, after a year of writing a column focused on seeing the good in things, I’ve finally become a natural optimist. Maybe it’s that 2024 was so terrible that something had to change – I simply couldn’t face another year like that. But something’s changed.
This year feels hopeful. Like something wonderful is just over the horizon. A few days into 2025, and I finally felt ready to heal from my old wounds. Two weeks in, I was back in Oxford and moved my desk to a new place in my room. It is incredible what such a tiny change can do. I injured my foot, but I also went from completely hating the layout of my room to suddenly feeling like it was My Room again. I stopped missing my first-year room quite so much and finally settled into this new building and new space in college. I even stopped hating the kitchen quite so much (although it’s still a biohazard).
It’s funny how symbolic a tiny change can be. A slightly different pen has me feeling like an entirely new person. A shift in music taste very very slightly from one female pop artist to another feels like leaping over a chasm. I treat the paper I took last term as a write-off (sorry to my old tutor) and focus everything I have on a new paper for a new term and a new year. I allow myself to believe, at least during the first few weeks of term, that this time I’ll stay on top of everything.
Do I know what 2025 holds? Of course not. Of course I am terrified about what’s going on both globally and locally, of course I recognise the tell-tale patterns of empires falling. I’m a history student – of course I understand that humanity is probably on the brink of a huge turning point that will be blindingly obvious once it happens. But I leave the doomsday predictions and the analysis to better people. Instead, I do what I’ve been teaching myself to do best: I look for the good in things. I make my room pretty and I find a million new little projects to start and I write my essays on time and I discover new favourite books.
I have never been a big believer in new year’s resolutions. I never stick to them and I never know what is best for me. But I do believe in starting the year a little happier than I started the year before, starting the year with a slightly brighter outlook on life. With scepticism and fears pushed firmly to the back of my mind, I embrace 2025 (belatedly – some changes will never be made) with open arms, an open mind and an open heart. It might trample me to death, but equally, it might lift me higher than I was before. I have little to lose and everything to gain. So, welcome 2025.