Congratulations, you made it halfway through January!

This fucking month, amirite?

My gentle fucklings, I had something different planned for today, but then I woke up and decided to tell you how much I hate January.

I grew up in Maine, where the first month of the year was Peak Winter, and I always resented its freezing temps and snow and sleet and general refusal to play nice. But even though I moved to the tropics eight years ago and have largely escaped any and all interaction with “winter” as I once knew it, I can confirm that my opinion of January remains low.

I think this is due to a couple of factors:

1. The thirty-five years I spent freezing my tatas off in the Northeastern US cannot be discounted. The body keeps the score.

2. As a self-help author, I’m part of an industry that has designated January as a time for fresh starts and getting shit done (New Year, New You…OR ELSE!!!), but as a cranky contrarian nonconformist—and much like my poor, woebegone nipples in the dead of winter—I chafe against this notion.

Regardless of where you live and whether January brings ice storms or heat waves, I simply do not accept the idea that anyone should feel pressured to set goals or “improve” themselves or make Big Life Changes just because the calendar page flipped into a new year. (If you’ve read my book You Do You, you know how I feel about the entire concept of “just because.”)

That culturally-coded mindset can turn months like January—or even ostensibly exciting milestones like “graduation” or “marriage”—into a real kick in the teeth. If you feel like the whole world thinks you should be ready to do a certain thing (Join the gym! Find a job! Get pregnant!) just because “it’s that time of year/life,” and YOU DO NOT FEEL READY, it can mess with your head.

It certainly messes with mine.

I’m staring down the barrel of a couple of Big Life Changes myself this year, and during the holidays I allowed myself not to think about any of it (well, much), believing that I would “get started on all that in January.” And then the minute January showed itself I was like Fuck fuck fuck. I’m not ready for this.

Self-help gurus, ladies and gentlemen—they’re just like us!

This is precisely why I try, in all of my books and in this here newsletter, to remind you that a) maybe there’s nothing you need to change at all and b) January is not the only time you can make some changes, should you wish to do so. In fact, January may be better spent resting and regrouping, as proposed by Kate Welshofer Was Here in this most excellent post.

So anyway, I just wanted to pop in and urge you to focus on your own needs and desires—not on the “New Year, New You” magazine spreads or the social media-fueled frenzy of peer pressure, or even on those potentially misguided plans you had over Christmas to “get started on all that in January.”

<cough>

Instead, do yourself a true solid and follow your own manageable, feel-good path through the back half of this godforsaken month in whatever way works best for you. If and when it comes time to shake things up, there’s always February.

Or as I like to call it, “January 2.0.”

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A bit about me: I spent 15 years as a book editor in NYC before quitting that career to pursue a freelance life (a decision that involved a lot of red wine and a lot of tears). In 2015 I had the idea for my first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck. And people loved it, so I kept writing! Today my sweary self-help series includes Get Your Shit Together, Calm the Fuck Down, Grow the Fuck Up, and more, with 3 million copies in print all over the world.

You can also find me on Instagram, where my content skews tropical (in addition to quitting my job, I quit New York entirely and moved to a small fishing village in the Dominican Republic), plus food, cocktails, travel, and cats. So many cats.