Every January, the internet collectively decides that we should become entirely new people. New routines. New goals. New bodies. New careers. New storage containers with matching labels, actually, that last one does sound appealing. Work conversations revolve around, so ‘what’s your new years resolution, and you have to pick.
You know, it feels like the moment the clock reaches midnight on New Year’s Eve, I am supposed to transform into somebody who wakes up at 5am, drinks something green and completes a full morning routine before the rest of the country has located its slippers. If you can do that, I applaud you, but I will never wake up with glee at 5am, or locate my slippers for that matter.
I like the idea of January, I enjoy a new planner, a blank page and the temporary belief that this might finally be the year I stop leaving important pieces of paper in places that are apparently too safe for me to ever find again. But January itself rarely feels like a beginning.
It feels cold, it gets dark before I have mentally accepted that the afternoon has started. I am tired from Christmas, slightly frightened of my bank balance and still finding glitter in places where glitter has no reasonable explanation for being.
Autumn, though? Autumn feels different.
One leaf turns orange and suddenly I want to reorganise my entire life, and get my storage containers labelled. Do I get a label maker, that’s a different ramble, never mind.
September has always felt like the real beginning
I think part of it comes from school, that place I don’t feel like I can mentally escape, even at 30. For years, September meant a new timetable, a different classroom and a pencil case containing pens I genuinely believed I would look after this time. If I was lucky, and we had the money, my pencil case would also feature one of those pens that had like 6 colours, and you pushed down which colour you wanted.
Everything felt possible because everything was starting again, this followed me through life, and even now, long after anyone has asked me to cover an exercise book in sticky-backed plastic, autumn still carries that same feeling. The air changes, the evenings become darker, the shops fill with notebooks, warm jumpers and increasingly ambitious suggestions about what can be made using a pumpkin.
There is a sense of movement, but it feels quieter than January. January announces itself with fireworks, resolutions and a fairly aggressive amount of messaging about becoming your best self. Autumn simply turns up in a coat with a fluffy hood.
It does not demand a complete transformation, instead, I feel like it gently suggests that I might want to come back inside, make a hot water bottle and think about what I actually need.
January asks me to become somebody new
A lot of traditional New Year advice seems to begin with the assumption that the person I was last year was the problem. I need to be more productive, more confident, more organised, more, more, more, more, more. At the same time, it also suggests that I need to be less anxious, less sensitive, and better at mornings, and better at replying to messages without drafting the response in my head for three working days.
There have been periods of my life when I genuinely believed personal growth meant becoming less like myself, and more like what the world said success looks like. I thought I needed to be louder, easier and more socially effortless. And making all these changes made me believe that confidence would arrive when I finally learned how to perform the correct version of adulthood convincingly enough.
It did not.
I am slowly learning that growth does not have to mean replacing myself. Sometimes it means paying attention to the person who was already there. I wrote about that in 365 Days to Become More Me, because this year is not really about manufacturing a shinier personality. It is about noticing the parts of me that have been pushed aside, ignored or treated as inconvenient. Autumn fits that kind of growth, it feels less like becoming a new person and more like returning to yourself.
The change is happening around me too
There is something reassuring about beginning again while the world is visibly changing. The trees do not quietly panic because their leaves are falling off. They do not create a five-year performance plan or compare themselves with the tree across the road, which appears to be changing colour in a much more aesthetically pleasing way. They just change.
Admittedly, trees do not have Instagram, workplace appraisals or a drawer containing six abandoned craft projects. They have an advantage, completely unfair if you ask me.
Still, autumn reminds me that change can be ordinary. It can happen gradually, it can look messy, like thousands of leaves on the floor. It can involve letting something go without immediately knowing what will replace it.
When I am anxious, I want certainty before I begin. I want to know that the new habit will work, the opportunity will be worth it and the message I am about to send will be received exactly as I intended it. Unfortunately, life has repeatedly refused to provide me with a preview button.
Autumn makes uncertainty feel slightly less like failure to me. The season is changing because that is what seasons do, so, perhaps I am allowed to change without having every part of it planned first.
My very unglamorous autumn reset
My autumn goals tend to be smaller. I just want to write consistently for this little corner of the internet, or take my camera out and notice ordinary things again. I want to return to hobbies without immediately deciding they must become a side business, a new identity or evidence that I have finally discovered my one true purpose. I want to spend time with friends in ways that do not leave me needing to lie silently under a weighted blanket for the following weekend.
I actually want to, kinda, deal with the pieces of life admin that have been following me around like mildly threatening background characters. None of these things will create a completely new life by Christmas. That is probably why they feel possible.
It feels like I don’t have to create a complicated seasonal morning routine. I know myself too well. Instead, I am asking four questions:
1. What currently feels louder than it needs to?
This might be an unfinished task, a cluttered room, an uncomfortable conversation or something I keep agreeing to because saying no feels more difficult. I do not have to solve everything. I can choose one source of unnecessary noise and make it slightly quieter.
2. What have I missed?
Not what should I be doing. What have I genuinely missed?
Taking photographs, making something with my hands, reading without checking how many pages are left, seeing a friend one-to-one, going somewhere local simply because I am curious. The things I miss usually tell me more than the things I think I should improve.
3. What would make an ordinary weekday five per cent easier?
Not perfect, not completely transformed, just 5% easier, or close to that, as percentages aren’t my thing.
For example, I mean, preparing lunch the night before, putting an appointment straight into my calendar. Choosing clothes before the morning panic begins. Keeping one evening free so I can actually decompress and recharge.
Small changes are not very exciting to announce, but they are often the ones that make life feel more manageable. Maybe I should start sharing them more.
4. What can wait?
I am very good at turning every idea into an immediate obligation. A new hobby becomes supplies I need to buy, fully, with a list and big prospects. A blog idea becomes a post I should have written yesterday, and a life goal becomes evidence that I am behind.
Some things can remain ideas for a while, and not every possibility needs to become a project. You hear that future me!
Beginning quietly still counts
A fresh start does not need a new year, a Monday or a perfectly clean house. And, no matter how satisfying it is, a new life does not need to start on a Monday, when it’s the 1st of that month. (I love when that happens though)
It does not require a new planner, although I will never speak against buying stationery because I am not a hypocrite who loves stationary (side ramble, my extra goal in life is to have enough disposable income to buy stationary from small, independent shops, because they seem to make the best stationary)
It can begin on an ordinary afternoon when you admit that something is not working, or returning to a hobby you abandoned for whatever reason. It can be cancelling one plan, making one appointment, transferring a small amount into savings or finally writing the first paragraph of something you have been thinking about for months. It can even be deciding that you do not need a fresh start at all, perhaps you only need some rest.
Autumn is not magic, and no matter how much I wish it could, candle shaped like a ghost cannot answer my emails, regulate my nervous system or complete my life admin. But, lighting that candle during the season can give me a natural moment to pause.
Those moments remind me that starting again does not have to mean rejecting everything that came before. Those parts are just as important as the version of me I want to be. Instead, it can mean carrying the useful parts forward, putting down what no longer fits and making a little more room for myself. I have spent enough time believing that a better life required a completely different version of me. I wrote more about that feeling in I forgot my life was about me blog post.
This autumn, I am not trying to reinvent myself. I am still insanely anxious, still totally introverted, and unfortunately for my bank account, still capable of buying supplies for a new hobby while three existing hobbies watch from the corner of the room.
I am still me, but maybe that’s the point, maybe a fresh start is not about becoming somebody new, maybe it’s simply another chance to become a little more yourself.
Does autumn feel like a fresh start to you? Choose one small thing you would like to begin again, not your whole life, just one thing.
