The truth about change

New Year, new me. Except I'm still me.

[Photo: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash]

The granular measurement of time is a human invention, so it’s hardly surprising that we assign so much importance to the units we count it by. We have the same 24 hours in a day as Beyoncé, we get seven days’ worth of antibiotics, and on 31 December, we box away everything that happens to us over a twelve-month period in a virtual archive and start again. The sun still rises, the rain still falls, and everything looks much the same, but we are different somehow. The calendar’s greatest power is not only making sure we don’t forget to have our teeth checked regularly, but that it makes us believe we are in control, that we can leave a part of ourselves behind in a year with a different number and be somebody else.

It’s a time for reflection, renewal, and reinvigoration and no doubt many other alliterative adjectives that would have my English teachers tutting with disapproval. It’s a time for change. We often go into a New Year aiming to be a better version of ourselves. It’s reassuring, really – there I go, more R-based alliteration; sorry Mr Tennant – that we never quite consider ourselves done, that we recognise there’s more to learn. The only downside is that the road to self-improvement is littered with potential failures, which is why I embrace change but disagree with setting resolutions.

They can be a great way to cope with the bleak inevitability of 1 January and the frightening blank canvas of the year ahead, but I prefer not to be tied to a specific time of year to make a change; I want to be open to suggestion at any point in the year. Circadian rhythms and central heating thermostat aside, there’s no difference between January and July, other than we believe there is. Actually, the telly’s better in January – I forgot that one.

Maybe the biggest change I made around this time of year was five years ago when, on New Year’s Eve, I stopped drinking alcohol. I was adamant it wasn’t a resolution, I wasn’t setting myself any particular target other than I didn't want to drink booze anymore and December 31st seemed a good time to stop. I had wanted to stop for a while – in fact, it wasn’t my first time; I gave up for a year or so starting the day Hillary Clinton lost the US election – and I figured there was nothing like one last festive round of overindulgence to convince me I was making the right decision.

My last drink was one of the crémants from M&S, and I saw in the bells, and the forthcoming hell year of 2020, with a flute of tap water. I may have had a very different pandemic had I kept on drinking, but there was something so powerful to me about living through such a terrifying age completely unanaesthetised. I was so sure of my feelings throughout, good and bad. I will never know, really, whether being sober during the height of the covid years saved me or set me on a different path to destruction, but I came through it and now here we are. Still sober.

‘Sober’ can be a controversial word. My mother doesn’t like me using it, because it suggests I was an alcoholic before giving up. It’s an assumption often made of people who stop drinking, because nobody can quite imagine why on earth you would go teetotal unless you were ravaged by booze. Alcoholism is a condition and there should be no shame in it, but it’s accompanied, usually, by some harrowing, ostracising, unforgivable behaviour and debilitating physical illnesses. It’s understandable, I guess, that anyone who has experienced it or been close to someone who has, wants to distance themselves from it, and in my hometown, dependency is rife.

My best friend’s mum, who worked as an addiction counsellor, explained there is a difference between an alcoholic, who cannot function without it, and someone who has a problematic relationship with alcohol – binge drinking, for example. Neither one is more or less honourable than the other, there are no rosettes available, but understanding the difference is the key to fixing it for yourself and managing the sympathies and expectations of those around you.

Sometimes, when people I don’t know very well find out I don’t drink – a confession usually waterboarded out of me that elicits looks of fascination, admiration, and terror – they will say to me, ‘Wow, so… how bad did things get?’ It’s almost disappointing to them that I have no rock-bottom fables of rummaging in bins for dregs from empty bottles or killing someone under the influence of absinthe (although sometimes I pretend I did to see the reaction and it’s always priceless).

The punchline to my abstinence is mundane. I’d had enough, I didn't like it, I felt I was frittering my money away on literal poison and my life on hangovers and sitting in shit pubs. I wanted to see if I could live without it, is the true answer, plus I looked and felt terrible and I decided I was too young to just let go and become another casualty of alcohol. I was also grieving the death of the aforementioned best friend – if we must ascribe personalities to years, 2019 was a bastard – and it would’ve been so easy to numb the feelings with booze for ever, but that was the point: I needed to feel it.

Turns out, I could live without booze, and I do. ‘Sober’ is in fact the best way to describe it. Feeling everything in its intended intensity is not always easy, and giving up in your forties means almost all obvious health and fitness benefits are cancelled out by other aches, pains, and ailments, but it was worth it.

Changes you make to yourself should be beneficial. Health regimes should be fun, and enriching, an exciting discovery, not a punishment – unless you’re into that, no judgement here. The smallest changes can be indulgent, or practical, and you’ll feel all the happier for them. Just a couple of throwaway examples: a year or so ago, after being on horrible skin medication and banned from using any product that wasn’t a miserable, pharmaceutical, unperfumed ‘application; I resolved to use only Molton Brown shower gel for as long as I could. I save gift cards, I usually receive a bottle for Christmas (it lasts ages), and I feel a little bit special and, yes, amiably snooty every time I use it.

Another one, and while I never give advice, this is a good (if obvious) tip: whenever you’re staying overnight somewhere that isn’t home, if there’s the facility to do so, unpack. So simple. Empty the suitcase, put clothes into drawers or hang them in wardrobes, arrange products on shelves, line up your shoes, and stow the suitcase wherever you can, preferably out of your eye-line.

I learned this a couple of Christmases ago, bouncing off the walls in my childhood bedroom, feeling ungrounded. I carefully unpacked, made room in a couple of drawers, made everything easily accessible. I felt more sophisticated, civilised, and chic.

Sadly I was then immediately stricken with covid and couldn’t wear anything I’d brought with me, recovering enough only on my last day to repack everything and get the train home, but for those few moments, I was in heaven. It’s about taking control of your life in any small way you can, I think. (I might write about this again one day.)

Often, change is bigger than you; we are still at the mercy of the wills and ideals of others. Sometimes they are harmful. The big change I want to see in 2025 is for the LGBTQ+ community to come together to push back against the wave of bigotry that has, for some time now, felt like it’s choking us. The demonisation of trans people, the erosion of their rights and attempts to silence them or weaponise their desire to live their lives as they wish is one of the most shameful developments of the last few years and is bad news for every single one of us, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or social class.

I am perhaps a cynic and never believed the grim old homophobia and bigotry of the 80s ever truly went away – it merely became less socially acceptable to spout it so venomously – but to see it rebranded and wielded so freely in national newspapers and social media is beyond alarming. The legitimisation of the culture wars by the government and other political parties sickens me.

I can’t possibly know how it feels to be a trans person, but the fear and confusion of being a gay child is etched deep in my mind and on my heart. The world telling me – over and over, from even the supposedly safest corners – that I shouldn’t be allowed to exist, that I would never have any power, that being myself was disgusting to a wider public, even people who never knew me, or met me. You shouldn’t have to identify with someone to uphold their rights, but it stuns me that anyone who’s ever known that feeling of powerlessness and fear can support the wave of homophobia and transphobia blighting this country. It can’t continue. Trans people deserve to live full, free lives. We must claw our way back, before everything is lost for ever. The ladder stays on the ground until every one of us has climbed it.

Change is a positive thing, it is essential to human survival. You don’t have to wait for the numbers to change to make it happen. Every morning is 1 January in its own way.

[Don’t worry, these emails will go back to their usual slot next week.]

[Btw, I’ll delete any comments that get weird. Thanks in advance for not!]

ONE-LINER

The paperback of my fourth novel LEADING MAN is out in April, and to mark the occasion I shall be posting ONE line from the book here every week until publication and beyond, to give you a flavour of what’s in there. It is called promotion. I’ll be picking them at random, every 25 pages or so, which means this week’s is from the first page and there’s no guarantee it will be funny, or wise, or indeed anything, but here is #1:

Soaked, I look like I’ve just heaved myself out of the Union Canal, after fighting a dog.

Buy the hardback, or preorder the paperback. Thank you.