There is no grand reinvention here—only the patient work of showing up, again and again, nudging myself millimeter by millimeter toward the person I’m becoming.

Eventually, I stopped making resolutions altogether. Not because I stopped wanting change—but because I stopped trying to become someone else. The desire to work on myself never went away. It simply lost its appetite for spectacle. And so, in place of resolutions, I turned toward ritual.

Rituals are gentler than resolutions. Where resolutions chase... See more

The other day, I asked a friend what she wanted to let go of from this year. “Everything,” she said. “Complete self-erasure.” We laughed—at the absurdity of it, and at the thin, uncomfortable filament of truth running through the joke. How often we look back on a year with a prosecutorial eye, tallying what we didn’t finish, the habits we couldn’t... See more