Maybe this year I'll feel better.
Maybe this year my brain won't feel under the weather.
I'll have some problems, but I'll find some solutions.
Simply being happy is my New Year's resolution.
So maybe this year I'll get out of bed and feel excited for the
day. And my bones won't be brittle,
my skin not made of clay. But if I don't feel better, I'll
just look in the mirror and say, well, maybe I'll be happy next
year. This was a poem that I wrote
several years ago, just after New Year's had passed.
And I saw everyone around me making resolutions and swearing
to be a better version of themselves.
They set all of these grand goals, and many of them went on
to achieve them. And I was faced with the same
mental health problems that I had been dealing with for years.
And I thought to myself, wow, it's just going to be another
year of feeling bad. It's going to be another year of
struggling while everyone around me seems to succeed and thrive.
It's going to be another year of being me.
And I was so upset. I was so deep in my struggle
with mental illness that I felt like I was broken because I
couldn't just set a resolution. I couldn't find the energy
within me to set a goal to to be better for the next year.
And I felt like a complete failure because I'd given up
before I'd even started. And that is inherently the
problem with how you may be facing healing your mental
health. It wasn't until I broke down the
barrier of needing a place to start and instead just started
not worrying about anything else started ridiculously small.
That is when I began to see real progress with my mental health.
My name is Ethan Jewell and welcome back to Feel Your
Feelings. It's Tuesday, which means I will
be dissecting a poem that I wrote.
I'm still workshopping a name, maybe Poetry Tuesdays, maybe
Together Tuesdays. I'm working on coming up with a
name. But what matters is today we're
going to be talking about the new year and we're going to be
talking about specifically how it pertains to your mental
health. If you're anything like me, this
time of year is really hard. You are dealing with the grief
of another year going by, of perhaps feeling like you wasted
it, or feeling like you didn't hit the goals you wanted to.
Maybe you didn't heal as much as you wanted to.
And at the same time, you're faced with the overwhelming,
crushing, impending feeling of the next year coming far too
fast. I've been dealing with this
feeling every single January for the past six years, and it's a
really hard feeling. You're letting go of what was
and simultaneously trying to set your sights on what is going to
be. And there's this pressure to set
goals. There's this pressure to go into
the new year being the best version of yourself.
But the problem is when you're depressed, when you're
struggling with your mental health, it is very hard to set
realistic goals because of course, you want to be the best
version of yourself. You want to heal.
All of us want to heal, but we want to already be healed.
The process of healing is so difficult it can feel almost
impossible. How can we set a goal for
something that we can't even understand?
How can we set this goal of healing when we don't even know
what healing looks like? So every year we try and we say
this year is going to be different.
This year I'm going to improve. And then by the second or third
week, we're back to square 1 and we think, what is wrong with me?
I can't even commit to healing for a year.
And that's the problem. We're setting our goals far too
high. I remember many times going into
the new year saying this is the year that I heal.
But the problem is I was too zoomed out.
I was focusing on the entire year.
I was focusing on these great grand, big moments of healing.
And in your mental health journey, those moments almost
never exist. There is no one grand moment.
There's no one moment where you're going to be ready to
heal. There's no one moment where
you're going to know exactly what you're supposed to do.
This is a trap and it is a cruel one because you keep setting
expectations and then inevitably being disappointed in yourself
when you shouldn't be because you're trying.
So today we're going to talk about what this looks like, why
we do this to ourselves, how it hurts us, and ultimately how we
can go into this year to truly heal our mental health.
So the new year can feel heavy because we've been taught from a
psychological, from a social standpoint, that January is a
starting point, that if we don't start in January, well, then
that's another year wasted. And that is a totally ridiculous
lie that were sold. You know, this idea of New
Year's resolutions, I think it's great to set goals for yourself,
but at the same time, it puts on this ridiculous pressure at the
start of the year to go into another year being the absolute
best version of yourself. And that's just unfair.
I mean, we're coming off of seasonal depression.
The weather is cold, the days are still short, and you just
expect yourself to jump into the best version of what you can be.
It is unfair. We're sold this belief of if I
don't change now, I never will. We treat January like a doorway
to change, but most of the change happens in the hallway
after that door. It happens when you allow
yourself to walk through that door and keep going no matter
what. The problem with starting fresh,
with having this moment where everything is supposed to
change, where you're supposed to let go of everything, the
problem with that is that you are a person with history.
You can't just magically flip a switch because it's January and
erase all of the pain and the trauma and all of the mental
health issues you've been dealing with for years.
That's just not how it works. There's this immense pressure to
be different when in reality you are the same person.
You are the same person with the same hurt that you have and and
the same mental health struggles that you've been dealing with.
And it's unfair and unrealistic to expect yourself to just leave
that all behind. And that's not how healing
works. We're not supposed to drop
everything or go around it. We're supposed to go through it.
We're supposed to carry all of our baggage with us until we
become strong enough to live with it.
The pain that you feel all year, what you've been struggling
with, it doesn't wait for January.
So why should the care and attentiveness that you give that
pain wait for January as well? It just doesn't make sense.
The mental health issues that we face are there all year round,
yet we are putting all this pressure on ourselves to try to
deal with it starting in the new year.
This whole concept, this whole idea of starting fresh in the
new year of, of really dealing with all the issues you've been
having, especially when it comes to your mental health, it is
ridiculous. So let's talk about what we can
do instead. Now, I'm always getting on this
podcast and I'm preaching about healing not being a linear
journey. And that especially reigns true
when it comes to something like this.
This idea that we start in January and we keep healing
throughout the entire year and everything is totally fine and
by the end of the year we've reached our goal.
It's ridiculous. It's not realistic because
healing is not linear. You will have setbacks.
And if you have this expectation that you're going to start
strong and keep that going throughout the entire year, you
will be disappointed because inevitably there will be days
that feel like day one. That will happen.
I have had more day ones than I can count.
I have had more days where I feel like I'm just starting off.
I mean, literally in the past two weeks I had a day one.
I've been working on healing my mental health for more than six
years, and just two weeks ago I felt like I was back to square
1. And that is the cruel nature of
healing your mental health. It is not some beautiful linear
journey where you start one day and then one day you stop and
you're healed. No, when you struggle with
mental illness, you are always learning and you are always
trying and you're always carrying that weight.
And I still carry that same weight with me to this day.
But what matters is what happened in between.
You slowly and silently became stronger.
You slowly and silently learned the insurance and outs of your
emotions, how you deal with your feelings, how to feel them, and
how to carry them without it ruining your life.
So yes, I can say I keep having day ones, but I know how to deal
with them. The day one didn't ruin my life,
it just threw me off for a day or two.
I was able to shrug that off and keep going because that's what
realistic healing looks like. We need to stop setting these
big unrealistic goals that will inevitably lead us to be
disappointed and instead we need to zoom in.
You know, people always tell you zoom out your perspective, look
at the big picture. But I'm going to tell you, you
should zoom in a little bit. Go day by day, go hour by hour.
Do 1 ridiculously small thing for yourself going into this
year. Don't focus on a full reset.
Don't focus on being the perfect version of yourself going into
2026. Instead, focus on what small
acts help you every single day. Focus on the tiny little actions
that you can take towards healing.
Let today be enough for today. Redefine your progress.
Don't be afraid to show up imperfectly, because what
matters is you're showing up for yourself.
When you're hurt, when you're sad, when you're dealing with
your mental health issues, show up imperfectly.
You don't have to get it right on the first try.
You don't have to get it right on the 100th try, but what
matters is you're there for yourself and you're showing
yourself that you matter because you do.
You are more than your feelings and you deserve to heal one day
at a time. So going into this new year,
don't set yourself up for this grand.
This year, I'll be happy. Instead, focus on today.
Focus on one small step that you can do for yourself today to
slowly work towards healing. I believe in you one day at a
time. Thanks so much for being here.
That's going to wrap it up for today's episode.
If you need help feeling your feelings, you should check out
my music on all platforms under the name of Ethan Jewel.
I almost guarantee it'll make you cry.
Also, if you enjoy this podcast, the best way that you can
support me right now is by getting some merch.
I just dropped some merch last month and I think it's pretty
cool. You can find a link to it in the
description or you can find it at ethanjewel.myshopify.com.
Also, drop me a comment and let me know how you are approaching
your mental health this year and maybe if there's one small thing
that you're doing for yourself every single day.
So thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for understanding that sometimes you just need to zoom
in a little bit and take your mental health one step at a
time. And as always, thank you for
feeling your feelings. I'll see you next time.