The Promise Of September

And the bloody inconvenient reality of life

Yesterday I found myself hanging up laundry (when are we not) and listening to a podcast with the title How To Get Ahead of 99% of People.

I allowed the host’s frankly aggressively positive tone to wash over me for a few minutes while I grappled with a blizzard of tiny damp socks – that tiny clothes are exponentially more annoying to deal with than ordinary sized clothes is one of the immutable facts of life – then I came to and actually NOTICED what I was listening to. Gah. I don’t even want to get ahead of 99% of people. My main ambition in life isn’t to get AHEAD of anything but merely to finally feel caught up with myself which, based on the last 10 years of adult life, is nigh on impossible.

The refrain of ‘next week it’ll all calm down’ has been the mocking chorus of my every day for a decade now.

When I think the feeble words ‘next week it’ll all calm now’ or, even more stupidly, voice them out loud, I imagine the universe answering me.

Me: Next week it’ll all calm down.

Universe: Ba-ha. Silly bitch. Next week there’s going to be a gas leak meaning you’ll have to feed a family of five for three days without cooking anything.

Or.

Me: Next week it’ll all calm down.

Universe: Two words idiot: Vomiting. Bug.

Or.

Me: Next week it’ll all calm down.

Universe: Oh no, pathetic mortal. School’s closing randomly for two days despite having only just opened back up and you need to start and finish your 2023 taxes during exactly that window of time.

The general gist of the rest of the podcast episode was that studies have consistently shown that while January has been branded as the New Year, New Me month, it’s actually in September with its Back-To-School buzz that we have a better chance of bringing about change in our lives.

Now, I am as partial to a new notebook as the next person and god knows I have to be very vigilant with myself around the various online courses and seminars that promise the alluring concept of The Reset. I swear I have sat with my index finger hovering, VIBRATING over the phone, perched on the verge of purchasing a wellness influencer’s September Life Optimising online course despite not even particularly aspiring to the greige life of relentless betterment that she is peddling.

It’s just the tantalising promise of change.

But, and I am not being a nihilist when I say this, I don’t really believe change is possible.

There I’ve said it. (You don’t subscribe to a newsletter called Death Is Coming for my rosy takes, do you?!).

Okay… maybe it’s not that I completely and utterly disregard change as a possibility. It’s more that I think ‘change’ is sold to us as

a) something that can be done with material things and expenditure.

And

b) something that we do once and don’t have to do again. That change once completed is a box ticked. I’ve done the September Life Optimising online course and I am now this person who is organised/works out every second day/meal preps on a Sunday. And then when change doesn’t stick as it invariably won’t because: Life! We beat ourselves up for being someone who ‘can never finish anything’ or is lazy somehow.

I think the concept of expansion is actually more interesting than the idea of change. Turning over new leaves and making resolutions feels, to me at least, a bit surface level and also like I am setting up my future self to fall short so my brain can, yanno, berate her more.

Deciding on how we’d like to expand ourselves and our lives feels gentler and like it could ultimately lead to more lasting, less fraught transformations.

I have an example of this. So earlier in the year I made a vision board – I’ll pause for you to absorb this and perhaps make a little scoffing noise – and stuck pictures and words to it illustrating the things I wanted to expand my life with this year. It was pretty standard stuff: more time with my family, more time outdoors and more connection with my body.

I then folded the vision board away and didn’t give it another thought until last week when I was moving office and came across it. I was amazed to see how much the last nine months of my life was reflected in the images. Expeditions to the beach with my kids, good food and water sports (I did a lot of stand-up paddle boarding and kayaking this summer). There was even a picture of a little tent lit up at night with a campfire – one of the last things I did before the schools went back was take my sons for their first camping trip.

Sidenote: The camping was a great success though, as with all parenting endeavours, there were some moments spent questioning my life-choices, most notably when, in the morning, I was crouched beneath the arse of a seven-year-old to catch a shite with a plastic bag.

I don’t think the vision board was about manifesting these outcomes because I CANNOT with manifestation even though many of my nearest and dearest are flat out with the manifesting and good for them, it’s just not for me. I think the vision board was about putting the possibilities in my eye line, letting my subconscious absorb it, not putting myself under the pressure of a timeline or needing to actually even do anything then and there. It’s about as passive a way of transforming your life as possible and that’s fucking good because it’s less pressure!

Another thing this talk around the question of change reminds me of is an issue I’ve been talking about in therapy since 2020* and it’s only recently I realised that in that time things have actually changed. My thoughts and entire behaviour around the problem have altered and moved me to a place that I never thought would be possible at the beginning of that journey.

* Quick aside: In therapy not too long ago, I looked up mid-whinge and thought I caught my therapist finishing an eye roll. I can’t be absolutely certain, she may have been moving her eye in a perfectly innocuous fashion and I just happened to catch it at a funny angle but it’s definitely been feeding the old 3am over-thinking machine.

These evolutions go much deeper than the big, back to school, September reset and in a way kind of reminds me of the trajectory of grief. In its early, embryonic stage, grief can be so raw and savage that you experience actual physical symptoms like nausea and pain when you think of the person you’ve lost. Then one day you think of them and it doesn’t hurt, it only twinges and then there comes a day when you realise you can now think of them, might even enjoy the remembering. And all that took was a certain amount of time (years let’s be honest) but it took an infinite amount of expanding to be able to hold all that pain and all that love and no longer be crippled by it.

I think come September, it’s extremely human to fantasise about a new, box-fresh self. I get this literally every time I buy a new pair of jeans. ‘These will be the jeans that fundamentally change me,’ I think, apparently forgetting about the previous 87 pairs of jeans that changed nothing and even a few pairs that had the temerity to not only not change me but also gave me thrush while they were at it. (As a cyclist, I do not do well with an overly tight gusset).

I think we all go through life accumulating selves. One self wasn’t swapped out for another the year we took up meditation or joined the 5am club, the selves just kinda cosy up inside us like a game of Sardines. My theory is that the selves have different seasons just in the same way that life has different seasons. Sometimes we’re gonna be the person who can do the 5am start to meditate and get ahead of the day and some years we’re going to be the self just trying to stay afloat during immensely difficult times. Some years we are going to jump with relish and feet first into the September reset and some years we’re going to have to tell the September reset to get in the fucking bin.

How has the first week of September been for you? And tell me in the comments if you love the September fresh start buzz or does it feel like one more thing on the to-do list, I’d love to know where we’re all landing on this.

Thank you so much for being here and reading.

S xxx