Resolving, always

It's September and I'm rethinking my entire life

Parents understand that the real New Year begins in September, and my mindset has shifted accordingly over the past week. My kids are back in school! The sun is setting earlier each day! What am I doing with my life?!

The answer is A LOT and yet, this season always finds me restless and unsatisfied, ever-critical of anything I’ve dared to think, feel or accomplish. My dreams become frantic, making up for any quiet moments in the day with a frenzy of activity behind closed eyes. I wake up with a deep sense of unrest, feeling almost guilty that I’ve just been lying in bed. I am rotting, I determine, a stone fruit left on the vine, even in a clear deficit of sleep. I may be raising two kids while working full-time and (slowly) writing a second book, but look at all of the things I’m not doing! The list is endless.

One of my children recently told me that they were having an existential crisis “but without the crisis part.” As in, “I just think about existence a lot, and being alive, and what it all means.” Mentally, I am sort of there, I guess. Not in crisis, but dwelling. Navigating. Wanting to make things, but struggling to find the time and energy. Wishing money grew on trees so I could start each day turning thoughts into prose instead of checking my email. Dreaming about taking pottery classes but never signing up for them. Wanting the words I string together to feel creative and invigorating rather than merely transactional. (Ad copy: it pays the bills!) Wondering what I will do with my one wild and precious life, then remembering that Oliver was advocating for deliberate idleness and the pursuit of simple pleasures, not productivity. I should be lying on the grass, feeding grasshoppers sugar from my hands! And yet.

Instead, I’m making fall resolutions, and planning a big one for the (actual) New Year: to buy fewer books. For context, I have over 200 books in my TBR pile—maybe closer to 250, if I were to count them today—because I buy faster than I read. Not that I read slowly—I’m currently on my 41st book of the year, which means I average more than one book per week. It’s not a contest, but this math is important because my increasingly large TBR proves that I buy more than one book per week, generally speaking. Sure, there are weeks when I buy zero books, but today I bought five (!!) because I had a gift card. That isn’t uncommon, hence the stacks upon stacks upon stacks in my bedroom.

In any case, the TBR is steadily growing and soon I will perish under its literal and figurative weight. So, a goal: in 2025, I will only buy books under the following circumstances:

• I’m at a book launch

• I’m visiting an indie bookstore I’ve never been to before

• I have a gift card, so it doesn’t count

Can you guess what I’ll be asking for this holiday season? Yeah, that.

I could start applying these rules to my life right now but I’m putting them off until January to make time for one last hurrah. There is no better or more reasonable explanation than that. The next 16 weeks are my literary rumspringa! I will squeeze in the new Sally Rooney and Jenny Slate, grab a copy of Liars and make my way through my favourite secondhand bookshop one last time (for now). And then, as a New Year dawns and my TBR swells, I’ll introduce restraint.

(Restraint is relative, of course, because these rules still allow me to buy plenty of books—just not every book I’m drawn to. It’s not a true book buying ban because obviously, I’ve loaded this plan with loopholes. But it’s a start.)

Plans and goals help me feel in control of my life, as falsely comforting as they may be. They are threads pulling me forward, always; my own trail to follow. This week I’m existing, but next week I’ll be somewhere else entirely. Fall is my favourite season, believe it or not, so this shameful ennui will soon dissipate, leaving only sweaters and pumpkin bread in its wake. I’ll be cozy and inspired, sleeping dreamlessly, waking up with clarity and ambition. At worst, I’ll be done with this stupid PMS. (Or is it perimenopause? I should keep track.)

But first, a few resolutions that don’t have to wait: I’m going to write more, organize the piles of paperwork in my home office, start sleeping better and reduce my daily caffeine intake in an attempt to improve my quality of life. I can do that, right? Right. And I will.

…or maybe I’ll just increase my caffeine intake until my body starts to vibrate through the suburbs, shooting overhead like The More You Know star taking flight in the night sky. We’ll see which direction the next few weeks take me. Goals are helpful, but one can never be sure where the path leads.