Self-Reinvention
the myth of New Year, New Me
A decade ago, a man told me a Holocaust joke.
When I expressed disgust and reminded him that I was Jewish—not that it should have mattered—he replied, “I’m not six and don’t appreciate being lectured.”
Though he lived in the United States, he hailed from a European nation that questioned its neutrality only once the Nazis bombed and occupied it; a country that, in the last two months, has seen an 800% rise in antisemitism. He was six and a half feet tall with thick blond hair and crystal-blue eyes. Coming from anyone, a Holocaust joke is unnerving, but this was my first time hearing one from the Platonic Ideal of an Aryan.
Years later, the man emailed me an apology: He’d been immature, he admitted, and kind of a dick.
I forgave him right away. I was touched, not to mention surprised; I generally assume that those who have wronged me feel pretty good about having wronged me.
Whenever I make New Year’s resolutions, I forget about them before I can implement them. They’re always the same: Work at your desk, not on your couch. Grow the hell up and return your phone calls. Lift weights, even though insomnia zaps your life force. Honestly, I resolve to do those things all year, and then I don’t do them, so an arbitrary calendar date changes nothing.
In low moments, or perhaps pragmatic moments, I wonder if the best we can hope for is to give the appearance of change, fooling others if not ourselves. That Holocaust-joke apology arrived around the time politicians were circulating old yearbook photos of their opponents smiling in blackface, so (forgive my cynicism, ye of the Master Race) it’s possible the dude was less changed than scared. I’m not vindictive, but how would he know that? No one can predict who will or won’t be vindictive. It was 2019, a vindictive year.
I remember a grand total of one time in my life when I resolved to change internally and then…changed internally. I was 24. I’d grown up in Massachusetts, gone to college in Colorado, and then immediately moved to Montana for graduate school. After that, I lived for six months in Texas and six months in Wyoming, and then moved to California for a creative writing fellowship at San Jose State University. In San Jose, I knew no one. I felt as though I’d known no one in years. The people I loved dotted the country like thumb tacks on a wall map. I was writing a book. Writing a book is a lonely endeavor.
From my loneliness bloomed a specific anxiety: a terror of greeting people. Would I hug? Shake hands? Kiss the person’s cheek? Stand at a distance and perform an exaggerated wave like a mime? How did anyone make these decisions? What factors determined which route to take? I spent an obscene amount of time agonizing over hugs and handshakes. It was as if I’d just arrived from a foreign land and had to learn the strange customs of Americans. I most dreaded a scenario in which we’d make different decisions—I’d go for a hug, she for a handshake, and we’d engage in an awkward mating dance.
I think the fear started one day when I was talking with a couple I’d just met and the woman said, “Gotta go, let me give you a hug and a kiss,” so I moved in for my hug and kiss and she said, “Not you, I was talking to my husband.”
Oh, my god.
Anyway, one night in San Jose, my then-boyfriend and I were driving to a party. The host was someone I’d met through the fellowship, but we weren’t going to know the guests. I was spinning out: “What should I do to the person who opens the door? Hug? Shake hands?”
“I don’t know. Maybe just see how you feel in the moment?”
I was exhausted and wanted to cry. “When will I ever live in my comfort zone?”
“Possibly never,” he said.
He was right. We weren’t comfort-zone types. He was the first travel writer I ever met. I spent the bulk of my 20s traversing the country with him. He was older than I was and he taught me how to be a writer—not how to write, but how to live outside the lines.
I thought then, in that car, on the way to that party, I can be uncomfortable all the time or I can make the whole world my comfort zone.
I chose the latter. Forever after, I was comfortable—at ease with people I didn’t know, excited by newness and strangeness.
That story amazes me. I’m amazed by my 24-year-old brain. A 24-year-old brain is silly putty. These days, I feel my brain’s rigidity, its refusals. It’s an old dog who won’t get up for a walk, no matter how many times I clap at it.
I know people who, when traveling, assume fake identities. They like the freedom, they say, of being someone else. To strangers they meet, they offer made-up names, invent professions, pretend to live in cities they don’t live in. They wear a hat, though they’re not a hat person. They slip their wedding ring into their pocket.
Once in a bar, to a man who wouldn’t leave us alone, my friends (one of whom is reading this…hi Kelly!) and I pretended to be world-renowned Scrabble champions, in town for a tournament. Mystifyingly, he believed us.
It was Cicero, in First-Century Rome, who coined the term alter ego—“a second self, a trusted friend.” In the 1800s, a crackpot German doctor, Franz Anton Mesmer, from whose name comes the word “mesmerized,” would sit knee-to-knee with his patients, staring into their eyes, moving his hands up and down their arms, touching their diaphragms, playing music on glass bowls. (I feel like I dated this guy in college.) He reported that, under hypnosis, a patient would express a different personality, an alter ego separate from the conscious personality, inaccessible upon waking.
The alter ego—Jekyll/Hyde, Clark Kent/Superman, Dorian Gray the portrait subject/Dorian Gray the person—is such a cliché, it’s lost meaning. But isn’t it the heart of the New Year’s resolution, a wish to drag from our depths a second self? Wasn’t that the idea behind the old Weight Watchers ads—finding the thin woman hidden inside the fat woman like the tiniest Russian nesting doll?
To make a resolution is to summon the ideal alter ego—the woman turning heads in a slinky red dress, the woman with the conspicuous clavicles and the waist a man can encircle with his hands. We find her inaccessible. We resolve to access her. We fail to access her and then attack ourselves, making her even more inaccessible.
What a sad tradition it is to start the year trying to be who we’re not. Maybe the only resolutions should be: Merge your alter ego with yourself. Shake hands with yourself. Kiss yourself. Open the door for yourself and give yourself the longest, most inappropriate hug.
Thank you, dear readers. This platform has been among the greatest gifts of my 2023. I love hearing from you. I love writing to you. I love imagining you reading my essays.
Love,
Diana
P.S. A prompt: Write about the weirdest New Year’s Eve of your life.
P.P.S. Will you make resolutions this year? Let me know in the comments!
Soooo much I love about this one!
I agree it’s silly to need one designated day to make resolutions - I resolve to be better every day. Like I resolve to read your posts (that’s an easy one to keep!) and respond to get me back in touch with my own free-style writing.
I wonder If I too should be writing from my desk and not the couch but then think how lucky I am to be able to work from the couch. And I love that you imagine us reading your writing.