Beginning Again

It’s New Year’s Eve and my Christmas tree looks like a weeping willow. Like most of us at the end of December, it’s tired, prickly and dehydrated. In contrast, when I woke up this morning, my driveway was sugar-coated with snow. Opening my front door, it was as if I’d rubbed Vicks Vaporub onto my chest – cleansing and purifying and the antithesis of my long-suffering Christmas tree (it went up on the fifth). The surprise snowfall gave me a momentary jolt of mental energy. I’ve been using Christmas and the build-up to it as a pretext for parking all of the tasks I should have been tackling, from life admin (my NCT is long overdue for the first time ever) to domestic (my bedlinen has been sitting in the tumble dryer for more than a week now), but most importantly, my career.

For the past while, I feel my work life has looked a little like one of the baubles on my pendulous Christmas tree, hanging precariously from a limp branch, about to crash and burn. Or maybe that’s just how all freelancers feel all of the time?

But tomorrow out goes this period of stasis along with the decorations. What’s past is past, and that goes as much for my incapacitation as the season of goodwill. While I’ve always thought the “New Year, New You” mantra was nothing more than another method of shaming women – in particular – into believing they’re not good enough just as they are (invariably, the narrative usually revolves around body image), this year for the first time I’m ready to jump on the bandwagon. It’s not so much that I want to create a “new” me, but I would like to retrieve the old, pre-pandemic me – with a few modifications/improvements of course.

In hindsight, I fumbled my way through 2020, punch-drunk from loss, pain and Covid. When a friend of mine texted recently to ask how I felt about 2020, the only word I could think of was “bruising”. I spent a lot of last year licking my wounds and wishing I could change things that were simply unalterable. I lost faith in the notion that everything happens for a reason, that doors close but windows open, that silver linings exist if you look for them. As a result, everything suffered – my confidence, my ability to connect with people, my health. But I think this week, for the first time in a long time, I no longer feel black and blue. I’m ready to begin again, and I’ll use Brené Brown’s always beautiful words to explain what I’ll take away from 2020: “No matter how much gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy…”

Notwithstanding Brené’s words, I left too much undone in 2020, and so it’s time to start making up ground. I read a wonderful Instagram post today by Anne-Marie Tomchak, the Longford-born, London-based former digital director of Vogue UK and now contributing editor to Glamour UK. She explained, “This was the year I channelled my gratitude for the experiences of the past and used those experiences constructively to move forward with purpose and intent.” That is how I want to feel on December 31, 2021. I wish she’d included a road map, although frustratingly each of the dirt roads we travel is different (they’re never straightforward motorways are they?), but despite being the worst navigator in the world, I’m determined to reach a happier place by December 12 months. While I’ve been reading articles in Forbes and Psychology Today on career progression and success, I already know what I need to make tangible changes in my work life – confidence; the holy grail of a happy existence, people say. Michelle Obama obviously thinks so because she once declared, “Your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.”

I had it back in 2019. I had more of it than I’ve ever had in my life because I was constantly challenging myself professionally. But what do you get if you cross an introvert with a pandemic? A cripplingly shy recluse is the answer. I’m not there yet, but despite all the funny tweets and droll Instagram posts about introverts living their best lives in 2020, I’m not sure I agree. While extroverts will work around the limitations of a pandemic and find ways to connect, an introvert will happily accept the seclusion and add in a little isolation for good measure, and that’s not healthy for anybody. On a bad day, I’m like Bagpuss, the old saggy, sleepy cloth cat from the seventies’ cartoon.

But reading psychotherapist and author Phillipa Perry’s comment in The Guardian that, “Confidence isn’t a fixed component of a person. It may build up and then dip down again at any time” has been a bit of a wake-up call. Don’t they say emotions are like muscles? We have to use them to maintain them.

Confidence may not count as an emotion, but surely a state of mind can be exercised in the same way that compassion or contentment can?

So just as I plan to take up running again next week after a six-month hiatus, I will also begin to exercise my confidence “muscle”. Both will start with short, sharp bursts, followed by rest and retreat. Instead of viewing confidence as some intangible gift that we are born with or without, I’m taking a pragmatic approach and simply adding it to my New Year’s list of things I need to practice more, along with yoga and crochet, Scrabble and sewing.

Tennis champion Serena Williams, I recently discovered, attributes her phenomenal success to this very approach. She told The New York Times, “I feel that I owe my success to my belief in myself and have found that confidence can be learned and developed. In fact, my own self-confidence is something I work on every day, just like going to the gym or training on the court.” She goes on to provide three essential rules for developing and maintaining self-confidence – be honest about your feelings and deal with any doubts you may have while working towards your goal rather than covering them up; create a map of the path you will follow to achieve your goals and start believing you deserve success and happiness; and finally, use failure to your advantage by understanding that it makes you stronger, wiser and better.

Stronger, wiser and better rather than defeated? Perhaps this is the real takeaway from 2020 for each of us. In any case, tomorrow I begin exercising my muscles, both literal and figurative, and if I take my washing out of the tumble dryer...well, that will be a bonus.

Marie Kelly, January 2021