The Dazzle #6

You don't have to have achieved anything to have had a successful 2023

In times gone by, I would look back on a year and measure its success by my achievements. Had I been praised by my boss, hit some arbitrary work metric, had a baby, been proposed to, got sober, run a marathon? Being a child of the 80s, I have always confused success with ‘hitting traditional milestones’ and ‘being perfect’. It’s only in the last couple of years that I have realised this definition is an absolute crock of shit that will leave your self esteem in shreds because eventually you will stop being able to measure up to all the ridiculous yardsticks you keep setting for yourself.

This edition of the Dazzle will not be a list of all the things I have achieved this year. I am done with having to use ‘achievements’ to validate my existence. This year the biggest thing I have accomplished is the realisation that I am just as lovely if I achieve fuck all as I am if I win an Oscar or the Nobel Peace Prize. I do not need to change the world to earn the right to exist in it peacefully.

I think it is important to have goals. I was going to write ‘I think it is important to want to be the best versions of ourselves’. But then I remembered: we are always doing our best, even if on the outside the opposite seems to be true. Very few people wake up and consciously think “I’m going to be the shittiest version of me today”. Even when I was in active alcoholism, even when I am in a terrible OCD episode, I am still doing my best with what I have at the time. I think this current culture of self-improvement can be admirable, but it can also be exhausting, especially in the dying days of a year when the pressure is on to post a highlight reel of it. What if you can’t think of any highs? What if it all feels like lows? Or just a flatline of meh?

I went round to my cousin’s the other day and she had a post-it on her fridge that read: “remember when all of this seemed impossible?” It stopped me in my tracks because actually, I had forgotten. I had forgotten about the times when I couldn’t get out of bed, when I wanted to die, when life felt bleak as fuck and I could only have dreamed about being able to sit sober on a Saturday afternoon in December, writing a vaguely coherent Substack piece. So I will finish this little rant by saying: we’re here guys, we’re here. We are alive and we got through every day of 2023 and that, my friends, is worth celebrating.