Year starter

For the past 10 years I’ve been writing year-enders, from Live Journal to Facebook to my blog and back to LJ.  I’d chronicle all my achievements for the year, the famous people I met, the places I traveled to, the fun nights and emotional blows, the significant events of each year: a new band, a friendship strengthened, a fight, a loss. But I’ve never really written a year starter.

Yes, there was the occasional resolutions list. In 2006, I said I was going to go out less and work harder, while in 2012, I said I was going to not work so hard and actually have a life. There is the yearly “lose weight” resolution. I also said I’d no longer date whores the year I got cheated on, and that I would stop being blinded by a guy’s cute hair and nice clothes and start dating nice guys. (Still haven’t found any.) 

This year my year ender was about how discontent I was about all that I have achieved and done this year, a year that oddly enough is possibly the most prolific year of my life. I listed everything I achieved, from my first London Fashion Week, my brand expansion, my holiday in Cannes, meeting so-and-so famous person, and yet, I don’t feel like the year really felt like anything.

The next day I woke up and, half asleep, went on Instagram, as always.  Like some cliché, I saw a friend’s post that said: “I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of.” (There were other words, but my attention span couldn’t handle the rest of it.)

I realized that what I needed to do this year was to just be.  Just to be content with everything and stop setting expectations and wants.

I realized that I was so discontent because I had wanted so many things and to be so many things. While I had overcome my need to shop for things to wear through my non-consumer pact this year, I still wanted more paintings for my house, more furniture, nicer sheets.  While I had six new stockists for my hats, in four continents, I thought about how I didn’t get one in Paris, or how I needed a department store in America to stock me. While I was flying everywhere and living in London and Paris and Manila, I wanted to go to Tokyo and GStaad and Cambodia.

I had too many goals, too many needs, and greed was overriding the success I should have been enjoying. 

I just have to learn to be content. I have to learn to sit still.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been welcoming in the New Year with my friends by waiting for the first sunrise of the year. Each year, I would describe the air.  Two years ago, I said there was an air of promise, and that turned out to be really crap. Last year, Quark said we got played by the year of promise, and we should just have a year of no expectations. Even as he said this, I still was secretly giddy and felt like the New Year would bring me amazing things.  (It delivered, in theory.)

This year, I waited for the sunrise at Marie Jamora’s house and when it finally came up, it had no “air” of anything.  It was just a sunrise, like any other day.

I’m going to take this as a good sign.  Yes, it may be a new year now, but no pressure. If things go wrong then we can actually restart the next day, the next sunrise.