2025 is for breaking habits

I sit in a corner of a San Francisco hotel room typing furtively in the dark as my family sleeps through the new year. I had come off of scrolling mindlessly on Instagram, although I admit it was enjoyable watching all the amazing highlights of people’s past year, and it seemed 2024 was generally a good year for everyone. I thought back to my past year and honestly, I had a great time too. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that despite all my satisfaction and the lack of desire to set new year’s resolutions to compensate for something, I still feel the impulse to write this annual reflection and ruminate upon my goals for next year. I chalk it up to a latest realisation: our 20s is meant to be a decade of our lives spent unlearning the bad habits we picked up in childhood to metamorphosize into more regulated and happy adults. Luckily for me, being born on the cusp of the 21st Century means that the 2020s are also neatly lined up for me to find myself in this stage of life. I suspect this is fully the effects of developing my prefrontal cortex. So, as I sit here waiting for 2025 — the middle of this decade! — to slowly roll upon me as the earth makes this last axle around the sun, I decided to think seriously about what habits I want to break and how to form new ones for the remaining 20s ahead.

1. Translate ONE third language song (Hebrew or Japanese) every week. Funnily enough this whole list started with this idea. I was listening to some anime opening songs from my childhood and realised I could partially understand them, but not for long, especially if I do not have habits that delay the language muscle atrophy after I stop learning them formally in university. Why do this? Because I want to karaoke better, because I want an even more eclectic “Favourites” spotify playlist that my brother shits on, because importantly, I don’t want to fall into the habit of taking communication for granted as I did with Chinese.
2. Ask people for help, before I actually need it. I think this is me trying to unlearn the hyper-independence that was thrust upon me in childhood and I never learnt to see its flaws because it served me so well. It never stopped serving me well — maybe I will always suffer from chronic eldest daughter syndrome — but this year, I think I want to try trusting my community a little more.
3. Start making fashion and outfit blog posts, again. I was reflecting about how 2024 was a year where people started talking to me about my blog posts to me in person, thus breaching the illusion of me just screaming or word-vomiting into the void, and it was a lot less embarrassing than 15 year old me had imagined. 15 year old me, however, started this blog as a fashion thing, inspired by the epoch of fashion bloggers and pre-content creator internet. I want to go back to those roots because I don’t want fashion and these other more feminine ways of presenting myself to the world seem more trivial compared to reflections, social critics, and poetry. I want to unlearn some discomfort I have around expressing feminine interests that had been wedged in me from a lifetime of people calling me masculine.
4. Come up with a system to write better birthday messages for everyone I have ever cared about. I caveat this by defining “everyone” as people I had put birthdays into my calendar for, because younger me was filled with hubris regarding the reliability of my memory. I thought of this when I realised that I turned 23 and it felt insignificant to me. I am seriously aging. What happened to the childhood wonders of blowing out birthday candles? And if this infection is affecting me, surely it must also be affecting people around me, right? Even if I become careless with myself, I don’t want people to feel like their lives aren’t worth celebrating. I also don’t want to come off as insincere and only popping my head in annually to say hi. So, 2025 calls for a system to make this work. Apologies for any Jan babies if this system doesn’t stand up in time. Still, I want to relearn my attitude towards celebrating birthdays, especially since I was brought up in an environment that didn’t care about celebrating milestones.

Four “new year’s resolution”, so to speak, and it is pushing the limits of the precious Rule of Threes and my ability to follow-through on them. That, and the fact that the clock is ticking past midnight and it is 2025 (finally!) in my slice of the timezone, and the Cinderella magic is about to wear off any moment now. These are the commitments I am making to myself in 2025. I hope I make it through this year happier, and a better person and friend. I wish everyone the best in fulfilling what they dream to do as well.