My new year's vow is to give up making daft resolutions

I used to love New Year's Day.

- ZESHA SALEEM

It felt like the only opportunity to press reset, shake off my past self and hit the ground running with my new year's resolutions. It was a time of self-improvement and ceremony, wrapped in a general feeling of intense hopefulness about what the new year would bring in. In the sluggish, aimless days between Christmas and new year, I loved putting together brightly coloured vision boards, restocking my notebooks and creating long lists in the iPhone Notes app of all the things I wanted to change in the year ahead.

I always lost my steam by February. What a graveyard of unkept resolutions that month became. Just weeks after dramatically declaring that 2023 was going to be the year of no social media, I ended up downloading Instagram and using it more than ever – much to the amusement of my friends.

In 2024, I gave up Uber Eats, setting myself the sincere goal of no longer wasting money on it. By December, I was in the top one per cent of Uber Eats users in the UK - thanks for telling me that, Monzo Wrapped. Another year, I felt a strong urge to keep a diary, only to run out of things to write about by March that year. That unfinished notebook is still hidden at the bottom of my drawers.