The Best Worst Year

New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday. With the exception of the “it’s just another day/I’m going to bed at 9” killjoys, very few people have hot New Year’s Eve takes. You can spend the evening with your family or not, with friends or not; it’s very Choose Your Own Adventure as far as company is concerned.

The only real New Year’s Eve tradition, which while not mandatory is highly encouraged, is to party all night with strangers. This is the platonic ideal of a holiday as far as I’m concerned. Everyone’s happy. The streets are full of drunk people telling other drunk people they hope things go well for them next year. Everyone’s calendar changes over tomorrow. This holiday is for everyone.

New Year’s Day is a fresh start, even if it isn’t. Every day is just another day. The day you were born, the day you die, the day your heart shatters and the day you fall in love. We decide some days mean more than others, and that rules actually. When December 31st becomes January 1st, we have an opportunity to curate a whole new arbitrary block of time and I personally cannot wait to start.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever been so ready for the calendar to change. Two years ago today I declared 2020 the best worst year of my life. I am tempted to make the same proclamation about 2022. Let’s be serious, though: my best worst years are probably ahead of me.

This year I split my time fairly evenly between spectacular career success and more therapy than any human being should ever do. Started in the actual psych ward and ended with a New Republic cover story (available online January 3rd). The highest highs and the lowest lows. I love a roller coaster, but not the kind that makes you projectile vomit half the time.

Have you ever seen The Prestige? It’s one of those movies I’m not sure I like, but that I think about often. Here’s some spoilers: two rival magicians in the early 1900s attempt to figure out how to do a teleportation trick. Both achieve their goal. Both sacrifice horribly to do it.

The magician played by Hugh Jackman pays Nicola Tesla to invent a machine that can actually teleport him from one side of the stage to the other. Tesla fails in this. What he accidentally invents is a duplication machine. A clone appears at the teleportation location, but the original remains standing.

Close enough.

Every night, a sold-out theater watches as Jackman pulls the switch on the machine. A puff of smoke. The clone steps onto the stage from the other side. And the original falls through a trap door into a tank of water hidden beneath the stage, which seals.

During the big reveal at the end of the movie, Jackman explains the horror of never being sure whether he’s going to open his eyes to find he’s the man on the other side of the stage or the man who drowns. But the Jackman who says this is the one who always opened his eyes on the correct side of the stage. He’s the man who won the coin flip every time.

I’ve made dangerous decisions, this year and every year of my life. Lower-stakes than a tank of water, mostly, but risks nonetheless. If those risks had not paid off I’d have nothing: no home, no career, possibly no life at all. But the risks did pay off. They keep paying off. I’ll live my life this way until they don’t.

I’ve learned two things this year. The first is that taking risks isn’t a guaranteed way to win. But if you don’t take the risks, you can’t win. You’ll never find yourself drowning beneath a stage while an audience cheers, but you’ll never have an audience either.

The second — which might seem to contradict the first — is that sometimes you have to take a year off from your life to fix yourself.

Sometimes, you hit a dead end with the way you’re living. You reach a point where it’s no longer worth it to continue. And so you have a choice: die, or change.

This year I changed.

If you’re reading this and you’re struggling with mental health stuff — and who isn’t, these days — I want you to know that it’s possible to get better. I don’t mean cured, brains don’t work that way, but better. You should also know that it sucks. It’s awful. It’s as hard as you think it’s going to be, in those moments when you’re so far down the hole you can barely see the light and you can’t bear the thought of clawing your way back up again. But you can do it. Day by day. And it’s worth it in the end.

One thing people don’t talk about enough, I think, is the fear of loneliness that keeps some people down in that hole. Getting healthy can feel like leaving everything behind. You’re ditching every coping mechanism that ever kept you safe. In a very real way you will lose everything you have and everyone you know: every relationship you have will either crumble or change forever. It’s the price you pay for climbing out.

And when you finally reach ground level, you will have nothing. You’ll have to rebuild from scratch. But you’ll be able to. You’ll have the tools to build something real.

2023 is the year. I feel it. It won’t be a good year for America, I suspect — we’re fresh out of those as a country — but it will be a spectacular year for sickos like me. I have four strong contenders for projects going into January; at least one of them will surely pan out. So many conservative events to attend, so many people to talk to, so many stories to hear and tell. I can’t wait.

I am cleaning my room. I am putting on makeup. Soon I will leave and walk through the rain to get something to eat, maybe oysters, and then I’ll go to the [REDACTED] and greet the new year as God intended: dancing in thrifted Vivienne Westwood (RIP), blasted, swilling champagne with strangers cocooned in a maelstrom of modern disco. Let’s get this year started right.

Party hard, get famous. That’s my 2023 New Year’s resolution. I think my odds are good.

Whatever your goals are for this year, I hope you achieve them. Whatever you hope to change, I hope you look back at yourself in a year and marvel at just how far you’ve come. Wherever you find yourself today, may you travel somewhere even better as we move forward into yet another season of the weirdest sitcom ever written.

Here’s to 2023. May it be everything you want it to be and more.

Thumbnail by Okan Caliskan from Pixabay