RESOLUTIONS

By Raoul Suarez

We sat there together. On mismatched couches. On plastic chairs. On someone’s floor. Yes, we were there. Full of food. Full of excuses. Full of another year we didn’t quite recognize as progress. Midnight came and went. Fireworks cracked outside. Loud. Dramatic. Celebrating people braver and fitter than us. We raised our glasses anyway. Not to change. Just to survive another year of being ourselves.

We don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore. At least not the loud, inspirational kind you post online with a flexing emoji and a green smoothie. We’ve tried those. They last exactly three days, sometimes four if the internet goes down and we can’t order food. We’ve known each other long enough to stop pretending. We say it to each other the way you say a truth that no longer needs defending.

We are fat. We are couch potatoes. We say that without self-pity and without pretending it’s some radical badge of honor. It’s just a fact, like gravity or the way our knees make a sound when we stand up too fast. Our shirts fit tighter every year. Our joints complain sooner. We all have that one spot on the couch that remembers our shape better than we do. And still, we laugh, because laughter is easier than reckoning. We spend too much time sitting, too much time scrolling, too much time telling ourselves we’ll start on Monday. We say it as if Monday is a spiritual event instead of just another day that shows up uninvited.

Every year, we’ve made the same promises out of habit. Gym memberships we never used. Diets that lasted until payday. Group chats filled with motivation for exactly one week before turning back into memes and food photos. We didn’t fail because we were lazy. We failed because the goals were never ours. They were borrowed from people who don’t live in our bodies.

This time, our New Year’s resolution is smaller. Embarrassingly small. Almost insulting if you’re the kind of person who wakes up at five in the morning to run in the rain. This year, we will get up from the couch on purpose. Not to become new people. Not to chase beach bodies. Just to interrupt the slow and comfortable decay that we’ve been nurturing.

We resolve to walk even when it feels pointless. Ten minutes. Around the block. No fitness tracker. No dramatic playlist. Just us, our breath, and the realization that our bodies aren’t broken, just neglected. We don’t need to love exercise. We only need to tolerate it long enough to prove we’re not trapped.

We resolve to eat like adults at least once a day. Not clean. Not perfect. Just intentional. One meal where we don’t eat standing up, distracted, and shoveling food like we’re afraid someone will take it away. One meal where we stop when we’re full, and not when the plate is empty or when the shame kicks in. Real food. Eaten slowly. At a table. Phones down. Jokes still flowing. We stop pretending hunger is an emergency and fullness is a failure. If someone orders extra rice, nobody comments. If someone stops early, nobody claps. We let each other be human without commentary.

We resolve to stop weaponizing humor against ourselves. No more “I’m hopeless anyway” jokes that sound funny but land like surrender. If one of us starts spiraling, another interrupts with genuine concern. We are not broken. We are just tired. We agree that tired people deserve patience and not punishment.

We resolve to forgive fast and publicly. When we miss a walk. When we overeat. When we choose the couch again. Weight gain isn’t a betrayal. Slipping back into old habits isn’t proof that change is impossible. It’s proof that change is repetitive, boring, and unglamorous. We will not turn one bad choice into a personality trait. We will not let a slip become a reason to quit on ourselves this year. We might stop quitting just because progress doesn’t look impressive.

We resolve to stop lying to ourselves in motivational language. “We deserve this” has been our favorite excuse. Sometimes we do deserve comfort. Sometimes we deserve discipline. We are learning the difference slowly, badly, but honestly.

Most of all, we promise to think about our future selves as a group. Not worship them. Not romanticize them. Just acknowledge that they exist. Not as perfect versions of us, but as older friends who will inherit whatever choices we make now. We imagine them sitting together years from now. Still laughing. Still alive. Still capable of standing up without wincing. We decide we owe them that much. The least we can do is make their lives slightly easier.

We sat there together. On mismatched couches. On plastic chairs. On someone’s floor. Yes, we were there. Full of food. Full of excuses. Full of another year we didn’t quite recognize as progress. Midnight came and went. Fireworks cracked outside. Loud. Dramatic. We know won’t become thin this year. We won’t become disciplined overnight. We won’t suddenly love vegetables or burpees or mirrors. But we might stand up more than we sit. We might move more than we avoid. We might choose progress even if it looks pathetic from the outside because it feels enormous from where we’re standing. No reinvention. No heroic transformation. No “this is our year” nonsense. None of those.