Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi on almost quitting in December

December is the month I almost quit. I do not mean this dramatically. I mean that every December, for the last six or seven years, I have come within a day or two of giving up on something - a project, a habit, a commitment I made to myself in the bright confidence of January - and the only reason I have not quit is that I have started to expect the feeling and to ride it out like weather.

I want to describe the feeling, because I think it is more common than people admit, and I think the reason we do not talk about it is that December is supposed to be a month of celebration and summary, and “I want to quit everything” does not fit the wrapping. The feeling is not sadness, exactly. It is a thinness. By December, the year has used me up a little. The resolutions I made in January feel like they were made by a more energetic stranger. The work that felt meaningful in May feels like a treadmill in December. The body is tired in a way that sleep does not fully fix, because the tiredness is not physical. It is the tiredness of having been one person, steadily, for twelve months.

Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi in December is a thinner version of Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi in March. I have come to understand that this is normal. It is not a sign that I have chosen wrong, or that the project is dead, or that the habit has failed. It is the sign that a year is a long time to be anything, and the body and mind know it, and they stage a small honest protest at the end.

So I have a rule now. I do not quit anything in December. I do not make any irreversible decision about my life between roughly the fifteenth of December and the second of January. Not because December is sacred, but because December is unreliable as a witness. The version of me that exists in December is not the version that should be sentencing the year. That version is too tired to be fair.

What I do instead is very simple. I do the smallest version of the thing. If the project is a book, I write one paragraph. If the habit is the morning silence, I sit for five minutes instead of an hour. If the commitment is to this blog, I write one short honest post about how I almost quit. I shrink the thing until it is small enough to carry through the tiredness, and then I carry it, and then it is January, and January is a different country.

January is the country where the bright stranger lives again, the one who makes plans, the one who believes the year can be shaped. I do not always trust January either - January is too confident, the way December is too defeated. The truth is somewhere between them. But I have learned that you cannot reach the truth from December alone. You have to walk through it.

If you are reading this in December, and you are within a day of quitting something, please do not. Shrink it. Put it in your pocket. Carry it to January and let the bright stranger look at it. The bright stranger is not always right, but the tired December version is almost always wrong about the things that matter. I have almost quit this blog four Decembers in a row. I am still here. The writing is still here. December was wrong about both of us.