What if my inner sloth actually liked doing yoga?
Smooth skinned. Fluent in 10 languages. Dexterous at the piano. Badass at self-defence. Deeply knowledgeable of economics, world history, philosophy, mythology, politics. Incredibly zen. Contagiously fun. Gifted at drawing. Skilful at investing. I present to you, the most elusive of beings: my ideal self.
For decades, this time of the year held a special magic. With all the promises of transformation that accompany the beginning of January, it felt like a unique window of opportunity to finally cross over that distance between who I was and who I wanted to become. The only thing necessary to make up for all my inadequacies? The perfect transformation ritual. With self-improvement podcasts and productivity hacks flooding my feeds this week, I thought it’d be a great time to look back on some of the New Year, New Me advice I followed in the past and how much closer it has gotten me to self-actualisation.
Vision boards
Items required: Women’s magazines (for spiritual guidance (read indoctrination) because how else could I possibly know who I should become. The images in the magazines would also serve as materials for my vision board collage); copious amounts of snacks all of which I vow to sacrifice as part of the vision board ritual to achieve radiant skin.
The first New Year’s ritual I remember practising is that of vision boards. Fuelled by Teen Glamour, I was convinced that if I only thought hard enough of smooth skin and a cute boy aided by a poster collage, they would magically appear. Teenage fantasies, decoupage and a self held together by washi tape. Sadly, Henry Cavill never showed no matter how much I contemplated his ad pictures, so I needed to take matters into my own hands.
A Superman boyfriend and effortless French girl chic. I guess you could draw a very straight line between early 2000s advertising and my teenage dreams.
Habit tracking
Items required: Stationary you never knew existed but feels essential to you becoming a complete human being the moment you discover it; books about bullet journaling, hacking your brain, nudging yourself into perfection etc. preferably written by a rich, white San Francisco start-up boy who is also a hobby psychologist; a fancy notebook for journaling that will never feel quite right, so you need to keep buying new ones.
Ring in the habit tracker phase and countless attempts to subject any possibly unproductive urges to the dictate of a 4 by 5 cm grid with enough squares to tick off every day in a month that I did yoga or didn’t eat sugar or practised my French. Naturally, bursts of ticking all boxes each day where followed by long stretches during which my improvement resolve collapsed leaving me vegetating on the couch inhaling Galaxy Counters, too exhausted to question whether the impossibility of upholding my habits was owed to the inappropriateness of the habits themselves rather than my own inadequacy as a woman. I would wallow in my shortcomings until another moment with enough ‘new beginning potential’ arose to recommence my tracking. Preferably Mondays or the beginning of a new month. Because what kind of savage could possibly start re-building a habit on a random Wednesday. My early twenties = a season of stops and starts.
Curiously, my intense focus on pursuing the habits of my ideal self never left enough room for questioning whose ideals I was trying to accomplish.
Evening routine
Items required: Aforementioned notebook, electric piano, Kindle, language learning app, language learning notebook, yoga mat, hula hoop, probably a Fitbit, although I never got one maybe that explains all.
After years of recommencing the perfect habit tracker streak, I realised how silly I had been. In my haste to tick off boxes, I had missed one essential step. Combining all the things I wanted to cross off my list into a sufficiently enticing routine that would lead me to perfection! This time for real. And so when peak habit tracking collided with the pandemic, it resulted into an evening routine on steroids. 30 minutes of yoga, followed by 30 minutes of reading, then 15 minutes of mediation, 45 minutes of language learning, 30 minutes of piano practice, 30 minutes of meal prep, 10 minutes of hula-hoop, dinner, 8 hours of sleep, repeat. Somehow, my okayness with the absurdity of the state of the world wholly depended on how many days in a row I managed to wedge my yoga mat between my wardrobe and radiator to do a downward facing dog. As I stood in our kitchen/living room/guest room/home office (the joys of London housing) one day, hula-hooping while conjugating the irregular French verb ‘avoir’, I did begin to wonder: what did it say about my ideal self when I could only get close to impersonating her during a global lockdown that had life grind to a hold…
Hands in the air, don’t care
Items required: Nothing. Or wait, a stained yoga mat?
With the first kernels of doubt about my ideal aspirations sown, relief from my habit routine prison came one morning during an in-person yoga class (because where else could it have been). Holding the downward dog position, blood rushing to my head, a revolutionary thought dawned on me. Are you ready? What if I was already enough as I was? Let’s just sit with this for a moment. What if instead of always struggling to get to a better version of myself, I had already arrived and could enjoy the view. Gasping (I wish it had been from the magnitude of my realisation but let’s face it, it was from holding downward dog for too long) I looked around wondering whether anyone had noticed the minor revolution taking place on my questionably stained yoga mat (Coincidentally, the stain is from another watershed personal growth moment, namely when I bled on my mat during class while I had my period and was very calm and collected about it. I call it my Yoga Flow incident).
Reborn, I didn’t walk home from class, I skipped. There and then I decided to give myself over to dolce far niente. And all this on a random Saturday halfway through April! Who would’ve thought.
Shocker: I actually like doing stuff
Stowing my habit trackers away, I braced for my sloth self to nap my productivity chimera to death. But as I was spending my third Saturday morning in bed watching series instead of going to my yoga class, I felt a stirring inside of me. Was it? No it couldn’t be. An itch that had to be scratched. An urge, that could only be satisfied through reactivating my shunned vocabulary trainer. I actually wanted to correctly identify the spelling of ‘pouvoir’ in the imperfect subjunctive tense, rather than watching another episode of Emily in Paris. La Folie! After that, my books started calling. And eventually my yoga mat. Turns out that the tale I had absorbed over years that I was barely human unless I whipped myself into disciplined shape aided by journals, trackers and any other fad item currently on sale was untrue. If anything, I did more of the activities I’d forced myself to do before because freed from habit tracking and the sense of obligation that comes with it, I actually loved doing them!
On the outside, my days haven’t really changed that much since my Yoga moment. I still have a weakness for overpriced stationary. What has changed is how I show up for them. Today I learn my French vocab because that’s how I like to spend my time, not because I haven’t yet crossed it off my tracker.
My 2025
After years of free floating, I haven’t fully abandoned the idea of striving for something. But one habit tracking 180 later, I know that it works better for me to hold my intentions gently on the periphery of my mind, rather than box-ticking my way through life.
Admittedly, the new year has lost a bit of its magic that way. I’m already doing what I want to do, so I miss the thrill that comes with the potential of an annual reinvention. However, I have settled on three prompts that I want to use to enjoy the excitement of growth without the dictate of self-improvement. For 2025, I’ve settled on:
- One tangible thing I want to get done in the year: It’s pension related. Sexy.
- One thing I want to learn more: Italiano.
- And one emotion I want to bring to the year: Amore. For myself and others.
Posting a new year’s resolutions article I’m only soso happy with more than a week after the fateful first on a random Saturday feels like the perfect start.