New Year, New You Doesn’t Work (And Here’s Why)

Every January, we’re sold the same idea.

New year.
New you.
New habits. New goals. New energy.

And while I love a fresh start as much as the next guy, I’ve learned something the hard way:

You don’t become new by layering change on top of what you’ve never healed.

Because we are not blank slates on January 1st.
We walk into the new year carrying old rooms.

Rooms where we learned who we had to be to be loved.
Rooms where we learned what was safe.
Rooms where we learned what made us valuable.
Rooms where we learned what to hide.

Our behaviors don’t come out of nowhere.
Our reactions don’t either.

They usually come from beliefs we formed about ourselves, or from how we thought other people saw us.

And those beliefs came from somewhere.

For decades, I carried a belief I didn’t even know I had:
I am only worthy of love if I am useful.

So I was useful.

I volunteered for everything.
I overextended.
I fixed things that were never mine to fix.
I stayed longer than I should have.
I took on more than was healthy.
I made myself indispensable.

You may have seen my life and thought, “She’s so involved. She’s so driven. She’s everywhere.”

And I was.

But underneath that “extra” was fear.

Fear that if I wasn’t helpful, needed, or producing something… I would be rejected.

Over the last year or so, I finally slowed down enough to look at that behavior and ask a braver question:

Where did this come from?

And the answer lived in a room I had avoided.

As a child, I lived with a lot of different family members when my mother, for reasons that were not in my control, couldn’t care for my brother and me.

We would stay for weeks. Sometimes months.
Then my mom would be able to take us back.
And we would move again.

There was no stable foundation.

So my nervous system built one.

Be good.
Be helpful.
Don’t be a burden.
Make people want to keep you.

That belief didn’t stay in childhood.

It followed me into relationships, where I tried to save what wasn’t mine to heal.

It followed me into work, where I took on too much so I would be valued.

It followed me into adulthood, where usefulness quietly became my worth.

Nothing changed until I went back.

Until I returned to the rooms where my mother had left.

And this time, I didn’t go back as the child.

I went back as the adult.

I sat with her.
I comforted her.
I told her the truth she never got to hear:

This wasn’t about you.
You were never unworthy.
You never had to earn being kept.

And that is how the belief started to loosen.

Not through resolutions.
Not through productivity.
Not through becoming “new.”

But through returning.

Through witnessing.
Through grieving.
Through offering the support that was missing.

That is how rooms release us.

So when I hear “new year, new you,” I gently push back.

Because the work is rarely about becoming someone else.

It’s about meeting the parts of us that were never given a choice.

The parts that were groomed by circumstance to believe something about themselves before they were old enough to question it.

So I’ll ask you what I now ask myself:

What belief system have you been carrying for too many years?

What behavior are you exhausted from repeating?

What belief and behavior never really belonged to you anyway…
but were handed to you in a room you didn’t get to choose?

Because that room might not be behind you.

It might be waiting for you.

And going back doesn’t make you weak.

It makes you free.

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