Goodbye to 2022: Slaying My Phobia of New Year’s Eve

My whole life I’ve been afraid of New Year’s Eve.

I used to spend the last weeks of every year texting every friend possible about who else was free and wanted to spend time with me when I don’t even follow the Gregorian calendar—staying up for nothing in particular except to avoid the fear of missing out, knowing that everyone else was kissing someone or watching some ball drop, or having the “time of their lives.” 

This year, I don’t have solid plans for the night of December 31st. I haven’t hypervigilantly texted all my contacts to find someone, literally anyone, to just make me feel less alone. I’ve barely checked my texts in days. This is progress. 

My fear of New Year’s Eve was not because there’s anything ominous about the actual day or celebration or observance. I’ve been afraid of New Year’s Eve because I have been scared of being alone in moments where it wasn’t my choice to be alone, periods of time in which I am on my own and isolated because it was the only choice. This has especially shaken me up over the last three years of the pandemic, which un-nested all of my many selves terrified of slowness, of too much quiet, of being on my own, inside of the Matryoshka doll of myself.

I can’t remember how I spent New Year’s Eves as a child, one of the greatest gaps in my memory. I don’t remember how I spent them in high school. I only have precise recollection of my New Year’s Eves from the last decade, starting when I left my abusive parents and moved back to New York at 18. The first was spent in the city, when my high school best friend Bet-Zua came to visit from where she was studying in the Midwest. I let her borrow my old ratty burgundy Gap sweater—that I still have after all these decades in my closet even now—because she still hadn’t adjusted to true winter weather after we’d both left Los Angeles for places much more unforgiving. I wore a grey crop top that said “KILLIN IT” from Brandy Melville that I’d been wearing for years since I’d been convinced that maybe if I started dressing like the popular kids who bullied me in high school they would see I was human just like them, and a black velvet skirt.

We stayed in and read Anis Mojgani poems, and wore sparkly headbands with the year on them. This was the year I launched my tradition of wearing something velvet each New Year’s Eve for good luck. Has it brought me luck? Who’s to say? Each year has had its own dose of terrible and terrific and in-between. But I keep doing it because it’s the first ritual I built a home in when I began living life truly on my own and creating my own blueprints for who I wanted to be from scratch, no help from adults, no models of healthy relationships or survival on one’s own to look to except what I had from favorite childhood movies.

I was a kid who had been forced to play the role of an adult, and I didn’t feel like my feet filled out the shoes or that my body filled out the untailored costume of someone who knew what they were doing.

As I re-learned how to navigate a New York that felt so different from how I once saw it as a wide-eyed child unaware of how confusing the world can be—and how often people won’t help each other understand it—I walked up and down Fifth Avenue, wandered around the Bryant Park Holiday Market in too-thin-tights and heels, clinging to the warmth of Los Angeles that I’d become accustomed to while transplanted there. I took different subways and Long Island Rail Road lines without reading the maps or checking my phone to see if I was going to the “right” place. I was determined to know what it meant to know where I was going without having to ask anyone. Somehow, I ended up where I needed to go nine times out of ten. 

In many ways, I still feel like that 18-year-old. In most ways, I will never return to her skin, though. I have two decades of therapy under my belt, and a decade of actually helpful therapy that led me to healing as if a stubborn dog on a leash who has a different idea about who should be in charge. I still feel scared of life and people in the ways I did then. But I’ve had a dozen more heartbreaks. Have listened to a thousand more songs. Have read thousands more books. I have been hurt so many times in so many varied ways since I was a child and survived them all, carrying myself through and grabbing onto the hands of those who have loved me to help. 

My therapist of nearly four years asked me a question in our last session this year that unlocked something inside of me: “Now that you’re making really difficult decisions that will change your whole life, are you not scared anymore?” I was a little shocked at the inquiry until I realized that she was trying to subtly pull something out of me, half-way through answering. 

“Oh my god no, it’s not that I’m not scared anymore. I’m still terrified. But what is the worst that could happen? I’ve already survived it all. When I really look at my life, I have experience some of the very worst things that could ever happen to or be done to someone and I’m still here. Do I want to experience them again? Of course not,” I said as I took a deep breath trying to come up for air before continuing. “But if I’ve already lived through them and carried myself through them and dried my tears through it all, why not take the risks? I’m so scared. But I have plans. I have dreams. And I think it’s not that I’m not afraid… it’s that I’m ready to change my life and believe in myself that I can do it more than I’m scared to.” 

“FINALLY!” she shouted elatedly. “It’s about goddamn time.”

This is just about the same reaction that every person close to me in my life has had since I started coming out of my years-long brain-fog from some particularly challenging trauma to heal from. I’d been small. I’d been made small by others who found it easier to keep me down that way. And I’d been made small by myself, convinced that ten-times-shrunken like Alice in Wonderland was my proper size. Now, I talk about the good treatment and healthy relationships I deserve, assert how I deserve to be spoken to and loved. I am done accepting the bare minimum. I will walk away from anything and anyone intent on keeping me small.

Now, it’s nearly 2023 and to be perfectly honest, I have no idea what day it is. 

Maybe it’s Sunday, maybe it’s Friday. I am untethered but not unmoored. I am comfortable with who I am and with my solitude in all its forms—for perhaps the first time since I was eleven years old and the only kid who wanted to show up to the journalism classroom at 7 am to put together the school newspaper. It was easy to bask in solitude instead of being terrified of being alone back then. I was accustomed to it. Now, I have lived enough life to know how to thrive in that solitude, too.

I’ve spent the last two weeks mostly curled up in one chair or another in my library at home, wearing various versions of track suits and sweatpants sweatshirt combos. I’m allowing myself to be burnt out and exhausted from 2022, during which I dedicated most of my time to hours of therapy per week to heal from abuse, during which I worked 60 hour weeks most times, during which I moved for the thirtieth time in my life and finally started putting a place together for myself that actually feels like home for the first time, during which I then graduated from intensive trauma therapy with both a renewed and completely new understanding of who I am and who I can be. I’ve been listening to a lot of Hozier and Hilary Duff, particularly the songs “Nobody” and “Metamorphosis,” both of which feel fitting for the places in life I’m headed towards—a place where I’ve never experienced a love so true as the love I can give to myself, a place where I am ready to come out of the cocoon and fly.

I am spending my last few days of the year reminding myself that I’m not small. I don’t deserve to be small. Knowing that not everyone—most people, in fact—are not going to like me when I choose not to be small. I am an acquired taste. I am not for everyone. But I am for me. 

Once upon a time I spent all of my energy and my promise on trying to convince people who didn’t see me and didn’t want to that I am worthy of respect and care. I have spent most of my life absolutely, stubborn-headedly convinced that if I just kept peeling back layers, un-nesting myself, that the people who didn’t want me or refused to treat me well would suddenly be struck by some humility, some humanity that would give them the taste for me. I thought being continuously vulnerable with people who had already shown me time and time again that they didn’t want me was somehow valiant. It was just hurtful to myself, and begrudgingly annoying to deal with for them.

In reality, I spent most of my life up to this point using up all of my effort spinning myself in circles and draining myself to give a level of care and benefit of the doubt to people whose problem was never me, but themselves. I wasted my own magic trying to connect with others whose puzzle pieces don’t fit me, because I didn’t want to be alone.

But I refuse to do myself the disservice of wasting my magic for another minute. I am no longer convinced that it’s my responsibility to make people see me. That in itself is a form of being controlling and manipulative, however well-intentioned, that is not only not worth it but an entirely miserable way to live. 

I am no longer convinced that being alone, on New Year’s Eve or at any other time for that matter, is the worst thing that could happen to me. I understand now that the worst thing I could do to myself is wait around to be seen by people or spend time with people who don’t want me, chasing the high of when I’ll finally prove myself and win their approval.

I don’t know exactly where it’s from, but there’s a quote printed in the beginning of Jenny Slate’s book Little Weirds: “As the image of myself in my brain becomes sharper and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.” I really, really understand that now.

The greatest lesson I am walking out of 2022 with is this: 

People are going to treat me how they’re going to treat me because of how they experience the world, not because of what I deserve. Some people see me as a shining light, a flickering flame to illuminate their path. Some people see my as the same flickering flame, but one that is going to burn right through them. And neither one has anything to do with me.

If someone leaves me, it’s not because I deserve to be left. It’s because someone needed to leave. If someone stays, it’s not because I proved myself worthy of being stayed with. It’s because someone saw me, even briefly, and wanted to stick around to see the puzzle picture from more angles. 

Here in the comfortable home I am building for myself, both inside my body and the physical fortress, it’s okay to disappear for a while. It’s okay to be alone. It’s okay, in fact, for no one except for myself to see me at all.

I’m not going to fall through the cracks in the universe if I’m alone for a bit by choice. I’m building an existence in which I love myself so well that I will be okay no matter how alone I feel. I will be okay no matter who chooses not to see me.

This year I’ve picked out a crushed blue velvet jumpsuit with celestial patterns on it to wear for New Year’s Eve. I don’t have plans with anyone. I’m going to make myself my favorite white wine pasta with mussels, and the stuffed clams I loved as a kid. I’ll drink non-alcoholic red wine, and listen to songs that make me feel alive. And I’ll probably go to sleep before midnight, because there’s nothing to witness I haven’t before. I know I’m not missing out on anything or anyone.

I’m creating rituals that work for me, and I am all I need to do so.