New Year's Eve: ditch the expectations

I'm not sure I'll ever get over my pre-New Year's anxiety, a bad habit of projecting too much meaning on the night.

I'm not sure I'll ever get over my pre-New Year's anxiety, a bad habit of projecting too much meaning on the night.

Published Dec 30, 2015

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Washington - On a New Year's Eve many years ago, I watched an early evening snowstorm from the one window of my tiny Manhattan apartment.

Months earlier, I had broken up with a boyfriend, a man with whom I had enjoyed many quiet New Year's Eve dinners. I assumed that some invitation or other would pop up, but none had.

A friend called me, worried. She was also staying home for New Year's, but with her husband, which to both of us made it a completely different thing.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I'm going to do some work and go to bed. I'll be fine.”

Actually, I was devastated. I was failing New Year's Eve, which felt like failing life. What kind of person has no plans on the biggest party night of the year? The whole point of living in an awful apartment in the city was that your life outside those four walls was full of sparkly conversations and twinkling lights. I should have been slipping champagne in a shimmery dress, trading barbs with other bright-eyed young things. Or at least meeting someone for a beer.

I churned about this for some time. But at a certain point I realised there was nothing to do but relax. Outside the snow drifts grew, and I got cosy with some Indian takeaways and a book, How Stella Got Her Groove Back. I want to say it was something more high-brow like Middlemarch or The Bostonians, but it was Stella.

“All I want is a little companionship,” Terry McMillan writes, telling the story of a 42-year-old single woman taking a last-minute trip to Jamaica. “No ring. No 'I do till death do us part,' because I said that once and we're both still very much alive.”

The older, self-assured narrator was just the tonic I needed that night. I made myself tea, read all 274 pages, and went to sleep. I awoke the next day feeling refreshed, ready for the new year.

Over the next few years, my life opened up. I found a better apartment, made more friends and had the kind of New Year's Eves that at least sound good on paper: “I went to a party with friends” or “A group of us had dinner at (insert name of twee restaurant where the waiters wear arm garters).”

In reality, though, said party was usually hosted by the thinnest of connections - Caitlin's college friend's cousin or Rachel's co-worker's ex-boyfriend. My friends and I would shout in each other's ears as we sipped cheap wine out of paper cups; we'd weave our way through crowds, holding hands so we didn't lose one another. At about 12.03am, we'd rush to the streets with the rest of the city, fighting for a cab in the freezing rain.

The Fixed-Price Dinner with Big Group seemed like a nice respite from that, but I quickly realised I couldn't pay the price. Sure, I could decline the $35 (about R400) lobster add-on and the $40 champagne tasting, but my share of the bill would still equal about two weeks of groceries.

It was always a relief to score an invite to a Decidedly Low-Key Party, lovely to play cards and eat quiche with a group of close friends - or even people I barely knew. Here the guests felt like co-conspirators; we were hunkering down together, as if the drunken crowds were a natural disaster to avoid at all costs.

After I met my husband, I happily joined my couple friends in Opting Out. To my mind, having a partner meant I could finally declare there was no way I was dealing with the traffic and expense of New Year's and not sound like a loser. I could fall asleep in front of the television without questioning my entire existence.

Not that I'm against New Year's soirees. There is one party that actually met my youthful daydreams. Hosted by a good friend who lives near Times Square, it had a perfect mix of familiar and new faces; people could tell entertaining stories and were quick with a droll remark. When it got close to midnight, we piled on to the terrace. We couldn't see the ball drop, but we could hear the crowd cheer. Here I am, I thought. In the life I'm supposed to have.

Across the way, I saw a woman in an adjacent apartment. She was writing on her laptop, deeply absorbed, occasionally sipping from a slender champagne flute.

My mind flew back to the night I spent alone in my tiny studio, when I felt like such an outcast. But that's not how this woman struck me. She seemed to be simply enjoying her own company while disobeying the New Year's Eve's command to “get out there.”

I realised that if a New Year's partygoer had glanced in my window all those years ago, she wouldn't have seen a wretch or a scourge. She would have seen a young woman sipping tea and reading a book. A woman who, once she got over agonising about How It's Supposed to Be, had a very nice evening.

I'm not sure I'll ever get over my pre-New Year's anxiety, a bad habit of projecting too much meaning on the night. But when I look back on all my New Year's Eves, the one I spent with a blizzard and a bestseller stands out.

That night, I gave myself a vacation from my expectations. I took a break from trying to be successful, popular or fulfilled - and instead allowed myself to relax into the evening's wide-open space. It's one of my fondest memories.

Washington Post

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