Hastily applied fake tan, alcohol-fuelled d&ms with your mates, breaking out your worst dance moves to ABBA with reckless abandon, finally weeing after waiting in line for the portaloo: these are the things I love about New Year’s Eve.
Uber surge pricing, losing your friends the minute you get to the event, having to look after the mate that severely over did it while your favourite Jamiroquai song plays, and the unavoidable mini existential crisis you have are easily my least favourite things about New Year’s Eve.
From conversations I’ve had with friends, the general consensus seems to be yes, New Year’s Eve is a bit overrated and doesn’t live up to expectations. This seems to be a widely accepted concept with the odd few NYE proponents who say they always have the time of their life on NYE. Those people happen to regularly go on benders anyway.
Personally, I’m yet to experience a truly great New Year’s Eve. Of course, at 22 years old there’s still plenty of time for me to redeem my past New Year’s Eve experiences, but after doing my fair share of consoling crying friends, rather regretfully throwing up in bushes and wishing I was in bed instead of on a train packed with absolutely wrecked party-goers, I’ve generally accepted that New Year’s Eve just isn’t my thing. Or at least it won’t be until I’m 34, settled down and hosting NYE dinner parties in an Italian villa that concludes as soon as the countdown ends because I only have about five hours of party time in me before its bedtime.
Because, along with the extortionately priced vodka sodas and personal dramas, New Year’s has this rather unwarranted way of shining a stark light on all the things you don’t have or haven’t achieved. If NYE was a person it would be that distant relative you haven’t seen in a while that enjoys their fair share of margaritas and subsequently enjoys dishing out their unsolicited ‘life advice’ to you at family reunions. The distant relative that eyes you as their target, countless cocktails deep, parks up next to you on a plastic chair and conspiratorially leans in to ask you if there are any ‘hot boys on the scene’, followed by the inevitable, ‘maybe you should try going to some bars with your girlfriends, that’s how I met my hubby, or at least my second one!’.
So, rather than reflecting on all the positive things you’ve achieved you’re hit with the realisation that no, you didn’t actually meet the love of your life in a cool underground bar and dive into a whirlwind romance whereafter just three months of dating he proposed during a romantic stroll along the beach. Nor did you launch a successful small business, learn how to speak French, achieve your goal of running a half marathon or move out of home.
Instead you re-watched Gossip Girl for the twelfth time, read more books than attended parties, spent a substantial amount of time in lockdown and took another step closer to totally giving up on straight men. These are the kinds of realisations New Year’s Eve rather rudely points out to you and evidences when people share their personal highlights reel of the past 12 months to social media: new houses, puppies, engagements, babies, shiny new careers.
Maybe New Year’s is simply a time of celebration and fun and togetherness for you, and none of this springs to mind. But if it does, and you find those thoughts creeping in, that ‘everyone is ahead of me in life or happier than I am’, know you’re absolutely not alone and, in fact, nobody has their shit together. And as much as I hate to say the C word, I think it’s also important to consider how much we’ve all collectively gone through over the past two years with COVID. We really should all cut ourselves some slack.
So, however you spend your NYE, remember how far you’ve come. Hold your friends close, if you can. Celebrate your achievements however big or small. Allow yourself to feel hopeful as you look towards a new year. But above all else, make sure you dance your heart out to some ABBA. It’s good for the soul.