New year, same story: an incapacitating hangover and wonder that I don’t feel older. I start every January with the expectation that I will rise wiser or mature or something. I wake up on my college roommate’s couch in an Upper East Side apartment and I’m disappointed.

Change, change, change, we say every year, we will become greater versions of ourselves. As if in forming resolutions, they somehow become part of you, rather than a sentence or two we write on a calendar that gets buried on a shelf. Change the way you think about change. It does not happen automatically; it happens one conscious decision at a time, slowly, painfully, and thanklessly, until the change becomes the self. We can sink into the couch, that old friend, or we can choose to rise from the ashes of another lost year.

In 2014, I commit to the following:

I resolve to stop finding ways to break the rules I set for myself, that bad habit of talking my way into doing things I know I shouldn’t.

I resolve to embrace the philosophy: “It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.”

Change: we say it every year, and every year it is not enough. We can continue to make the same decisions we have been making the past 12 months and remain as we are now, or we can embrace the challenge of finding strength in striving to improve ourselves.

Fuck change. The word of the year is evolve.

…oh, and I resolve to post something new each of the next two days.