2020 Vision – The New Year Zine

“We are people, we are equal, you are wonderful and rare.” 

I Got Love, The King Blues

I’ve gotten to that age in my life, the one where you meet people and they ask me what you do. The usual response I give is that I’m a librarian. They nod, make a comment, usually about reading, and you carry on with the rest of your conversation. They’re talking about something and my brain starts to wander and wonder (I’m annoyingly good at phasing out in conversations…) At what age does the question “What do you do?” become part of the vocabulary of meeting new people? A name card on a TV show “Darren: Former Child”. And then in circles, asking what does librarian mean? What do you want to be when you’re older? You’re old now. 

I’m not going to get into the whole language as a contract of communication and all that mystical mumbo-jumbo; there would be a lot to unpack. How we define ourselves is a huge part of being; pronoun, race, sexuality, eye colour, fan of…, an endless list of self-expression. Librarian as a word comes with bookish and learned, glasses (which I do have to be fair), the smart wear and the endless shushing. The pattern of eat, sleep, work, repeat comes out in full force, and after cycling up-hill and back home for 30 minutes after a long day, the TV becomes something to hold your attention and zone out to. 

I’m not one for self-help books; they tend to say things that are common sense mixed with CBT. I’ve flicked through a few and they all tend to say “You should probably get some sleep.” “Have you thought about eating three meals a day.” “Bad thoughts are natual, but have you thought about burning your house down.” (Okay, maybe not that last one…) And to throw into the mix, as we enter the new year, I’ve never been one for new year’s resolutions either. They tend to be vague, such as eating healthier, doing more exercise, seeing friends and family more often. Before you know it, it’s February and you’re saying that next year will be the one, the one where you get your life together and show everyone, you’ll prove yourself. Sound familiar?

So with all that pre-amble, what I have decided to do is completely contradict myself and set new year’s resolutions, again…but seriously, 2018 is the first year I decided to make myself a New Year’s Zine. This zine, as all underground movements know, was to combat the repetition of paper pushing and life admin. The endless streaming of endless shows into endless grey matter. I started to question how many new skills had I learnt outside of work and off my own back? But a bigger one, if I get home at 5.10 after work, and I don’t get into bed until 10.30, what was I doing with the hours in between?

As a side note, that’s not to say every waking moment has to be filled with cartwheels and handstands galore, only that mine should have more in that it currently does. 

At the end of 2017, I decided to sit down with a piece of A4 paper and write down the things that I wished I could do, and all the things that I used to do and don’t anymore, the days in which my hairline hadn’t receded quite as much. I then turned this into a zine, little bits of dream tucked and folded into a paper form. 

This is where a bit of my corporate life snuck in to push me in the right direction. As part of the everyday 9-5, one thing that a lot of offices like to slip in is the appraisal. Here they ask you uncomfortable questions like “How are you finding your job?” “Do you feel challenged enough?” But the one thing I have taken from this is the SMART acronym: 

Specific 

Measureable 

Achievable 

Relevant 

Time-based 

New year’s resolutions tend to be too vague and don’t fit into this. How do you measure that you’ve done ‘enough’ exercise in a year? I put all of my goals for the year into this framework, all complete with a nice box to tick once I’d done it (I do like the ticking off and crossing out of a list). This way, I could see if I reached my goal or not, and then look back and see how close I got. Don’t get me wrong, I was widely off in some of my predictions; I just about reached my 30 films I’d never seen before, and out of the twenty books I was supposed to read, I ended up on forty-one. Writing this blog was one of the goals I had set myself, to write at least 30 blog posts in 2018, which if you’re reading this, I just about hit! 

This allowed me to prioritise things for me, and made me do things for me. I read those books, wrote this blog, and hit a few other set goals. It also taught me the value of a year’s worth of time and how to use it. Setting yourself a goal to do something so many times gives a timeframe when divided by the number of weeks in a year. Reading twenty books in a year, that’s about a book every two-and-a-half weeks. Want to write a blog post that goes out on every Friday, that’s one a week. By the end of the year, you could try and cram in as much as you can to hit your goals, or you can let it be, and reflect on how the year has gone. I never made it to YouTube like I had planned, but hey, I don’t want that anymore anyway, and I’m not uploading five videos for the sake of it. 

If you were sat, or stood, or drunk on new year’s eve, and somebody was asking you what you did. How did you answer? What will you answer now? Will you say you’re a clerk at the checkouts, or a number pusher in an office, or will you talk about how you play for your local football team at the weekends, or perform at the open mic’s around your town? There’s more to life than the boxes we put ourselves in. Heres to learning how to play the piano and releasing an RPG or two this year. Wish me luck, and let me know what you have planned in the next 365 days!