Resolute, resolve

Sunset in Manta, Ecuador. 2013.

I have a confession: most years, I fail at every single New Years resolution I make. I last a few weeks, maybe even a month or two, but then I burn out; the energies required to change some aspect of myself too numerous to stay on top of. I engage in various mental gymnastics in order to defend my inability to change, and then I move on, still dissatisfied with a part of me or my life but resigned to accept it: this is who I am, oh well, I’ll just never get to be like those people who I aspire to be.

I’m tempted to call this performance pathetic, but I know it’s off trend these days to denigrate oneself, but maybe I deserve it; a little denigration that is. I’m not sure it’s actually bad to witness and accurately label our shortcomings—endlessly putting one’s self down, sure, that’s unproductive, and thus not useful, but the excuses I’ve made for being “unable” to change certain bad habits or tendencies? I think actually, yes, some of them are quite pathetic.

This past year, however, I changed something about my resolutions: I made one resolution, rather than a list of resolutions (that most people, even those who do not dilly dally in the land of avoidance and excuses, would find impossible to accomplish).

I resolved, after reading Peter Attia’s book Outlive in 2023, to make working out, and especially strength training, a more regular habit, and not something I started and stopped at unpredictable but convenient intervals. And, I did it. Throughout 2024, I completed a total of 397 workouts, for a total of 167 hours. I also had to move up one size in jeans, thanks to my stronger thighs. I’ll admit, I fell apart a bit in September, as going back to school is always a bigger ordeal than I think it will be, but I held on, putting in one or two workouts a week until I was back into the swing of things.

While I certainly feel accomplished that I managed, actually, to stick to a goal and maintain some degree of self discipline for more than a few weeks, what I feel even better about are all the unexpected side effects of working out more regularly: I’m sleeping better, my levels of anxiety are lower, and I just generally feel better in my body, and in life. I’ve long been prone to dark, depressive thinking modes, and to seemingly permanent states of dissatisfaction with my life, the state of the world—and while I still have experience these modes and states, they’re no longer so all-consuming. I can more easily shrug them off and move on, or suggest to myself a better alternative to sinking into anger or despair about things far beyond my control.

Which forces me to reflect on the other good habits I’ve failed to acquire—mostly because such acquisitions would also require to abandonment of various bad habits I have a mysterious tendency to cling to, despite knowing they cause me distress and harm. I read the book Atomic Habits this past spring, and, per usual, felt excited and impassioned about finally quitting doing some bad things and replacing them with good things. But also, per usual, I failed. I over-filled my plate and burned out. I didn’t even last a month.

Looking back over this past year though, and seeing all of the unintended positive consequences of sticking to one new habit, I think that perhaps overfilling my plate is the first fatal flaw. If I can just change one thing (maybe the hardest thing), then it’s likely several of the other things I wish to change will more easily fall into place. I know what, for me, that hardest thing is, and for someone who is about to turn 41, it’s a little pathetic that I still can’t do this: GO TO BED. At a REASONABLE HOUR. Every weeknight.

In Atomic Habits, author James Clear poses an interesting theory: that the habits we choose, bad or good, we choose because they reflect some aspect of our identity we like or are comfortable with. When we fail to kick a bad habit, it’s likely because it represents some part of our identity we’re not yet able or willing to let go of. I’m paraphrasing pretty badly here, but hopefully you get the gist. It’s this idea that has stuck with me for these past six months, haunting me as I watch the clock sail past midnight when I know I should be in bed, unconscious, or when I wake up the next morning, exhausted and cranky and angry at myself for being stupid enough to stay up late, again. I really should know better shouldn’t I? And if I do, but still can’t act on it, than what does that say about me? How foolish am I?

Clear also asks his readers to imagine the kind of person they want to be, as well as what kind of habits such a person would have, to help guide us toward making choices about new habits that point to creating an identity we want but don’t currently have. So I’ve wondered: what part of my identity is my bedtime misbehavior connected to? And, more importantly: what does the best version of myself look like? Who inspires me? What habits do those people practice that I don’t? How do I become that person?

I can’t tell you how many times these past six months I’ve tried to convince myself that enforcing a better bed-time habit just simply “isn’t me”. While I can be very disciplined, determined, and hard-working, I’m also rebellious, a little disheveled, scrappy, spontaneous, and I enjoy resisting convention, rules, and expectations (often to my own detriment, unfortunately). In earlier fantasy visions of my adult life, I had some magical job with few and odd hours that allowed me to go to bed whenever I pleased. I didn’t have to get up and go to work like everyone else, I’d chosen some more unique, supposedly “better” path. It’s both ludicrous and embarrassing, now, to admit how long I clung to such fantasies (and for how many years I lived in near-poverty trying to escape the confines of reality—all the while creating new confines for myself that kept me even more deeply trapped). When I think about the vast majority of writers and artists I admire, they nearly all have day jobs, or night jobs; they all work full-time or almost full time. I did not grow up in a rich family, both my parents worked full time, my mom always had two jobs, sometimes three. Where the hell did I get these ideas that I could live a comfortable life without having to make some kind of sacrifice?

I’m not sure (movies? TV? The endless messaging our generation received about following our dreams?), but that’s beside the point. Because perhaps there is indeed a future in which I do not have to work a full time job, but I’ll never get there if I’m always exhausted from resisting the constraints of the present in which I actually live. Furthermore, whatever my future does or does not hold, I’ll waste my life in a tired state and arrive at the end full of regret about all the time I lost, too weary to do what I really wanted, simply because I refused to accept my reality. And, I realize now that I can still resist convention in other ways while also taking care of myself, learning to say NO to myself at 10:30 and put myself to bed. I am a night owl, I do often get great ideas and energy at night, but I also have to get up for work at 6:30 am. Is this ideal, or fair? No, it isn’t. But how many lives are fair and ideal in most or all circumstances? None that I know of (and to be abundantly clear, with regards to fairness or the ideal, I realize how tipped in my favor the ‘fairness’ scales have been, for the singular fact that I was born in a wealthy, developed country, and, even more, to parents who cared about me and had enough money to feed and clothe me and let me participate in hobbies that interested me.) While the imagined “prison” of the 9-5 isn’t what I’d dreamed of when I was younger and more naive, it’s no worse than the “prison” of exhaustion and self-remorse I create and recreate for myself every day by refusing to accept it.

And I must also ask: Why has it not occurred to me that by taking away my “freedom” to go to bed whenever I want, I might unleash, as collateral, a litany of other liberties currently unknown to me? Just as working out regularly helped improve my quality of sleep and lowered my anxiety, regularly going to bed earlier is likely to produce other positive outcomes. Why can’t I be excited about what those might be?

Because, there is, at the center of my being, a tiny kernel of rebellion against any and all restricting forces. But it occurs to me now that this rebelliousness can be put to work in other, healthier ways. If I can harness it, instead of allowing it to harness me, I can work my job (that I actually really do enjoy, but it’s still a restriction against the total freedom I crave) AND SLEEP, and also make and write and travel and learn and grow. When I rebel against bed time, against the 9-5 that feeds me and clothes me and pays for housing and healthcare, those conventions do not suffer, they remain stolid, unchanged. What does suffer is my creativity, my energy, my lust for life. I get to feel rebellious, but I also lose.

Who do I want to be? I want to be a creative person who makes and writes things everyday. I want to be more fully awake and alive. I want to feel strong physically and mentally, and in control of my choices, my time, as much as any human can be. I do not want to feel victim to my whims, my impulses, my furtive need to rebel against surface level conventions. Better to accept the easy conventions, like bedtime, like a 9-5 job, in order to have the energy to rebel against the deeper, more insidious ones: so that I can to be truly awake while I’m alive, can both dream and work hard towards my dreams, build a life that is aligned with my values and desires, make stories and paintings where before there was nothing but the glimpse of an idea, a fleeting thought. And because I actually do really like my job, even though it starts way too early: when I’m well rested, I’m a better teacher, and love my students more, and I can put more goodness into the world if I’m not cranky and tired and mad at myself, at life for being so difficult and unfair.

I think it’s supposed to be hard, the world, living. I really do, but I think we’ve forgotten that, myself included. It will be difficult, but I can be both rebellious, and in better control of myself. It’s a myth (a.k.a. mental gymnastics) that I have to choose. I can also still be a little disheveled and spontaneous, and have a regular bedtime. Working out most days this year has not cancelled out other traits of my personality, except a tendency towards slothfulness in the realm of exercise (yes, now I actually like workouts that burn, and I used to hate them).

I’ll come back in a year and update you, on the success of my bedtime mission, but for now, some wise words in a letter from W.E.B. Dubois to his daughter that I plan to print and tape all around my house for a daily reminder of the kind of life I want to live, the kind of person I hope to be.

The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin — the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world. Don’t shrink from new experiences and custom… Enjoy what is and do not pine for what is not. Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself. Make yourself do unpleasant things, so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.

Read the entire letter here.

Happy (almost) New Year!

~KD