29 | Why New Year's Eve is no big deal for a woman
This time last year I wrote Six good things about bad Christmases and it struck a chord with many people.
So I've flagged it and linked to it again and that's got me thinking about
the whole cult of New Year's Eve which I know can hang over us if we're feeling a bit sub-optimal, like a child knowing a dental appointment is coming up.
The ghosts of New Years past
I was in the habit of dreading New Year after a teenagerhood of mostly being left out left me feeling I had to prove my popularity.
I can even remember one New Year's Eve feigning illness so I would have an excuse why I wasn't going out, when asked what my plans were by someone with much prettier looks, a much wider social circle, and a dashing boyfriend who drove a bright red MG.
She gave a toss of her shining blonde hair, twitched her suede bag over her shoulder, and went off into the frosty night air to her waiting carriage and escort, leaving me behind with a 'gippy tum', probably reading one of my English syllabus texts.
This used to bother me.
Now I'm older and have seen how both our lives have turned out, I realised just how meaningless it is.
Don't believe the hype
Since then I've had many New Years' Eves both the ones which were too low for zero and ones which might count as instagrammable.
The thing about NYE is: it's not a forecast of your future life, it's a signing-off of the past.
I remember going cold all over watching a scene from the drama 'The Golden Pathway Annual' where a midlife woman feeling claustrophobic at home with her husband on New Year's Eve cries out in despair, 'What have we become?'
It chimed in with my 20-year-old worries that not being part of a big social circle might mean something was wrong and I was doomed in life and love.
In retrospect: these are the normal fears and sensitivities of a young adult.
New Year in New York
Since then I've spent a New Year's Eve in New York (or was it Boston? Somewhere in North America anyway.)
I've spent New Years' Eves at home on my own.
I've spent a New Year's Eve as part of a bunch of markedly single singletons at another singleton's house.
And the worst New Year's Eve of all was one where I took something to help me sleep and went to bed early to blot the whole thing out.
Little did I know then that the next day would be the start of the year I met the man I married and spent all my New Years' Eves with ever since.
The only important point about all of them?
NYE is not a forecast of your future life, it's a signing-off of the past.
New Year's Eve is the last dying throes of the past.
All that stuff with fireworks going off and people cheering is the exploding embers of what's gone before.
One New Year's Day morning after a relationship had ended and I'd spent an uneventful New Year's Eve, I wrote in my diary:
In the sum of life, how you spend New Year's Eve is no big deal.
The thing about it is the fresh, new, upcoming year itself and the space it offers.
Your space, and the people coming to meet you.
❄️ ❄️ ❄️
