It’s humblebragging season. Around this time of year newspapers are stuffed to the brim with articles about what so-and-so achieved in 2022 and what they hope to achieve in 2023. They read a book a day! They gave up alcohol! They gave up social media! They took up wild swimming!
Me? I did none of those things. Especially not wild swimming, which is a peculiarly British obsession. There’s nothing Brits love more than turning something objectively miserable into a hobby. Long muddy walks, beans on toast, swimming in freezing cold lakes: if it’s damp and vaguely masochistic, Brits are all over it.
So what healthy habits did I take up in 2022? Good question. I’ve been racking my brain, searching for scraps of self-improvement I can tell everyone about, but I’ve been having a hard time finding any.
This wasn’t on purpose, mind you. I had good intentions at the beginning of the year, like we all do. I was planning on doing lots of yoga and pilates. I thought I’d read important books on important things like monetary policy and physics. Somehow, though, I seemed to spend the bulk of my free time watching Netflix. That’s OK, though: one good thing about the modern world is that you can always rebrand laziness as self-care, which sounds a lot more respectable.
And, in my defence, I wasn’t completely lazy. I went to a few yoga classes, but they were the sort of yoga classes where people go “Ohmmmm” and breathe out really hard and I managed to get sick after every one of those classes.
When the yogis and their heavy breathing weren’t making me sick, my toddler was. My child has officially reached disease-vector age: she goes to daycare, where she mixes with other snot-drenched children, and is constantly doing the most unhygienic things her weird little toddler mind can come up with. The other day she licked the playground. We were just at the playground, hanging out, and she decided to lick the slide and then – while I was still in shock – the swing. This did not turn out well for anyone.
As well as getting sick more times than I ever have in my life, I ticked off a couple of other dubious life achievements this year. I bought a house at what was probably the very top of the housing market, for example. Well done, me! That house, by the way, came with a lot of stairs, which was quite a novelty after years of apartment living. If you combine stairs with absentmindedness then you end up getting a ton of exercise just racing up and down trying to find your keys or your phone or your toddler. Who needs yoga when you’ve got stairs, eh?
The one problem with stairs is that they can be pretty lethal. I’ve always thought that if I die an untimely death it would most likely be from tripping over my rat-sized dog (who refuses to walk in a straight line and zig-zags frenetically) or from eating too many gummy vitamins. Now that I’ve managed to slip down my stairs twice already, however, I’m convinced I’m going to end up like Ivana Trump and be found dead at the bottom of my staircase one day. Just, you know, in a Philadelphia row house, not a Manhattan mansion. And hopefully my spouse won’t bury me on a golf course.
Anyway, I’m not trying to dampen the mood here. This column wasn’t supposed to be about my untimely death at the bottom of a staircase, it was meant to be about how there is a lot of satisfaction to be had in small things. I may not have learned a new language or read 500 books in 2022, but you know what I did do? You know what I’m actually incredibly proud of? I fixed my kitchen cupboard. I watched a DIY YouTube video, bought some wood glue, felt a little lightheaded after inadvertently sniffing glue fumes, got out a drill and managed to fix my wobbly cupboard.
I then spent the next few months pitching my editors at the Guardian on a column about how I bravely overcame my fear of DIY. They all politely declined. Nevertheless, I persisted.
So there you go. There’s my little inspirational message for everyone to carry into 2023: never give up on your dreams. Even if your dreams are just trying to convince someone at the Guardian to let you tell the world how you fixed your kitchen cupboard.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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