If you’re like me, you got used to the fact early on in adulthood that New Year’s Eve is almost always a let-down.
It was never the case when I was a child, but that’s because my mum was a party animal. For the year 2000, she had all her friends over and at midnight we all walked around my village streets in a procession, banging saucepans and ‘yelling Happy New Year!’ to the houses we passed. It felt wild and spontaneous and silly and sensational. I was ten. It was probably the best New Year I’ve ever had.
Oh, the days when I wanted to stay up until 5am. When it was a fantastical time, and it didn’t hurt so much afterwards.
I think New Year’s Eves went downhill as soon as I was old enough to make my own plans. With plans come expectation. And with expectation, disappointment. And tears. And resolutions to not make plans again.
There was the New Year’s Eve I spent alone in a van. I was moving house and had meant to finish at 6, but I accidentally rented a vehicle that was too small for my stuff and so had to do an extra trip in the evening. I rung in the new year in a traffic jam outside Infernos, watching zombie-like crowds shimmying together in celebration as I listened to the radio alone.
I cried.
Then there was the New Year I spent watching the fireworks from Tower Bridge, where as soon as it struck twelve the guy I was dating cried for an hour about his parents’ divorce. I cried because I felt bad for him, and then he accused me of bringing the mood down.
And then there was the worst NYE I’ve ever had, which I spent at a rave (my first and final) very far away from home, where I was very bored and accidentally took Speed. Or I think it was Speed, because everything moved very fast and my blood felt like soil. The kind of soil that’s full of horse manure. I saw a giant mouse and figured some poor person must have come in fancy dress when that clearly wasn't the vibe. It took me four years to realise that was the DJ Deadmaus.
Needless to say, it was Not. My. Scene.
I did not cry that night. But probably only because I was on Speed.
By the end of my twenties, I had firmly concluded that New Year’s Eve sucks.
If you go big, it can suck for a million reasons: the inordinately long amount of drinking time to carry you through to 12am, which leads to indigestion-inducing excess. Or the hideous public transport journey back from wherever, full of people who didn’t quite get what they wanted from the night and are trying to find it on the bus home. Or the feeling of being surrounded by a thousand people at an ‘event of the century’ and feeling completely alone. And then getting chips.
If you go small, and stay in, it sucks because you get FOMO and wish you’d done something, even though you know deep down that nothing you were going to do anyway would have been particularly fun. (See paragraph regarding Deadmaus).
Each year, I would go out wanting something - to fall in love or find a new best friend. I wanted to have a time so good it would match the expectation of what NYE is supposed to be: significant, memorable, or at least just mildly bloody enjoyable. And each year, I never really did.
New Year’s Eve has gotten so much better since I have expected nothing from it:
The NYE where I played Scrabble with my mum. And realised I vastly prefer playing Scrabble to the limited number of times in my life I have taken hard drugs.
The time we wandered out to see the Amsterdam Fireworks and ended up at some loose connections’ family dinner party, having deep, soulful conversations with people we would never see again.
Last year, when my husband and I watched Rick Astley sing more songs than was probably necessary and I drank apple juice because I had just found out I was pregnant. I went to bed at five past twelve. I had a lovely, love time.
This year, we’ll stay home with two good friends as our baby sleeps upstairs. Maybe one year, when she is old enough, I will take her around the streets to ring in a new decade, banging saucepans and shouting at the neighbours! Or perhaps I will never be able to recreate those magical New Year’s Eves of my childhood, because I will never be quite as much of a party animal as my mother.
(Or as much of a nuisance.)
(Or quite as cool.)
New Year’s Eve also got better for me when I began, again, staying closer to home.
But that's just me! You go drive a van through a large city twice, if that is what your heart desires.
Whatever you do… whether you have a life-changing, average, or painfully dull time, remember that it is absolutely fine. There’ll be another New Year’s Eve along in a year’s time where you can have a do-over. The good ones will remain great and the bad ones will fade with time into amusing anecdotes, or life lessons that you can post on Instagram against a picture of a sunset.
Tonight can be a special night. Or it doesn’t have to be more special than any other. And from what I’ve learned, you don’t find happiness by going out to look for it. You find it by looking at what you already have.
Oh, and look what I have? Just these three incredibly profound sunset memes that I made. Enjoy! And have a a very Happy New Year.
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