This is the party

New Year's Eve and the illusion of change

The other night I was out to dinner with a longtime friend. We’ve known each other since we were eleven and we have matching tattoos—we’re that kind of close.

“When was the last time you went out for New Year’s Eve?” she asked.

I set down my fork because I actually had to think. “I went to dinner at a friend’s house in 2017,” I said. “Does that count?”

We spent more than a few weird December 31sts together. We drank Martinelli’s apple cider out of fancy flutes with hope there was magic in the fizz. One year her ex joined us at a dinner at The Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood where I awkwardly fell into my role as third wheel as they flirted and fought (and I seriously reexamined my theory that any plans were better than no plans).

I don’t remember when I stopped hunting the magic of New Year’s. As a kid, I bought into all of the movies and tv shows that had endowed this particular midnight with the power to transform. It was a night of portent and glamour. People went dancing. They had revelations. They fell in love. If I could just get the right dress and the right invitation to the right party, this would happen to me too.

In 1999, everyone was panicking about Y2K or at least headlines were telling us that people were panicking. I was 25, living in Seattle in a gray box apartment, and working a pointless job for a boss I hated. My then-boyfriend got us an invite to his friend’s New Year’s Eve party. I can’t remember the friend’s name but it turned out he was rich. He came from a family of actual lumber barons and they owned a house on an island. It’s possible they owned the island too.

I don’t remember how we got there. We must have taken a ferry or maybe there was a bridge. I do remember the family home was a big old farmhouse with a wide porch. Fires were lit in every room and the kitchen table was covered in cookies and plates of food all the guests had brought. There had to be thirty or forty people moving through the hallways and parlors and bedrooms of that old house. I remember sliding around in socks on the hardwood floors. I remember talking to a very tanned blonde about the camp she went to every summer and how they had to wear a uniform that included bloomers. At midnight, we all went out to the beach and we lit sparklers and we stood in the dark by the black waters of Puget Sound and counted down to the new millennium. I remember looking around at all of these beautiful, comfortable people in their fleeces and flannels, with their white teeth and good bones and glowing futures. I remember thinking: This is the party. I’m here. So why haven’t I changed?

Five years later, I was living in Los Angeles, working a different terrible job and dating a different guy. He was in finance and he took me to Paris with his friends. On New Year’s Eve we went to a fashionable bar with a fashionable restaurant where we stuck out like pallid American thumbs amid the lean, liquid Parisians. We sat down to a multicourse meal and at midnight Daft Punk’s “One More Time” blasted over the speakers and everyone stood up and danced and kissed and screamed. I thought: This is the party.

A few years later, a good job that I was bad at, a truly rotten man driving me to a house some friends had rented in Palm Springs. Someone left ketamine on the bathroom counter with a handwritten sign that said “take a penny, leave a penny.” We made grilled peanut butter sandwiches and used scented markers to draw up a list of goals for 2010. I made myself write FINISH MY NOVEL in capital letters and we burned the list at midnight. I watched the sparks disappear into the desert sky and thought: Is this the party?

At some point I stopped searching for the perfect midnight, for some moment of glamor or delight that would rewrite me. The magic that overtook my life did not arrive on a single day or at a designated hour. It happened slowly, creeping over the garden I planted, the little house with its painted fireplace, the logs my husband set in the grate, the lanterns in the trees, the sound of rain on our rooftop as our dog snores in his bed.

Yesterday we went to Trader Joe’s and we bought a whole bunch of weird snacks: horseradish potato chips, shrimp on a stick, a chocolate polar bear that you pour hot milk over to release its belly full of marshmallows in an act of sacrifice to the gods of the New Year. On the 31st, I’ll write until it gets dark. Then we’ll walk the dog and watch movies and eat our heaps of snacks. This, at last, is the party.

As writers, we build our narratives around big moments for our characters: catharsis, upheaval, transformation, revelation. Our brains want to structure our own lives around these essential moments too. This is what New Year’s resolutions are built for: the idea that we can look back on a single moment or a crossroads and say, “This is the moment when everything changed.”

It’s fine to set goals, and I do love a grand scheme, but I’ve found that small gestures matter more than big proclamations. The moment that mattered for me did not occur when I wrote FINISH MY NOVEL on that piece of paper or when I set it alight. It happened the next day, in the quiet of a January 1st morning, when despite how sad and lost I felt, I made myself devote fifteen minutes to writing a few more words of the manuscript that would become Shadow and Bone. That fifteen minute “sprint” became the tradition of Begin As You Mean to Go On.

This January 1st I hope you’ll devote just fifteen minutes (more if you like) to something you want to do more of in the new year. Learning a language. Working on a novel. Cleaning the house. Trying a new recipe. Meditating. Connecting to old or new friends. Seeking bloody vengeance. The choice is yours. That fifteen minutes is a promise to invest in the things that matter to you. It’s a reminder that small steps lead to big progress. This year I’ll be staying offline because that is how I mean to go on. But I’ll schedule a post here and on Instagram with a few creativity prompts and I hope you’ll embrace BAYMTGO in any way that serves you. Use the hashtag or ignore it. Share your goals or keep them secret. This, my friends, is the party.