Who Am I Supposed to Be by Next Week?
by Aaliyah Smith
January always arrives too fast. It does not ease you into the transition; you blink and suddenly the year is gone, and a new one has begun. The days between Christmas and the New Year feel suspended and overstimulating at the same time. It's too quiet to feel like real life, too chaotic to feel like rest. Everyone is online, announcing something, preparing to become someone “new.” People are announcing themselves before they’ve even unpacked the year they just survived (and some of us barely made it through). It’s exhausting to watch and exhausting to be part of.
I keep thinking about a tweet that tries to capture the energy of the period between those holidays – liminal and even slightly dissociative. Too much is happening at once. That’s exactly how I would describe this part of the year: that time doesn’t really exist, and you’re simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Urgency presses in, and even though the year hasn’t really started, there’s this quiet insistence that you’re already late. Suddenly, there are timelines for becoming disciplined, healed, hot, successful, enlightened, way before January has even had a chance to arrive to you gently (or even at all).
What’s strange is how quickly possibility starts to feel like pressure. It’s framed as excitement, as renewal, as a clean slate, but underneath it, there’s a quiet panic. It's this annoying hum of feeling behind, behind clarity, growth, and becoming the version of yourself that everyone else seems to have a user manual, schedule, and plan for.
There’s this unspoken expectation that by the first week of the year, you should know who you are now, what you’re committing to, and what you’re leaving behind. You should know what version of yourself you’re stepping into with intention. I keep wondering: why is this urgency so normalized? Why do we act as if missing some invisible deadline for “self-reinvention” is catastrophic? And why does it feel like I'm already behind, even though I haven’t tried to catch up yet?
The truth is, I don’t feel like reinventing myself. I don’t feel inspired; I feel tired. I feel like I’m still metabolizing last year (a lot of us are, I think, especially those who had a messy 2025). In the aftershocks of last year, before trying to extract meaning from the next one. I feel like sitting with the parts of myself that didn’t get closure, that didn’t get celebrated, that quietly survived without being acknowledged. None of that fits as neatly into a January to-do list, and yet we pretend we should be moving forward like we’re already alchemized and fully processed.
And maybe that’s why this pressure is so collective right now. 2026 is being sold as a “success year.” Everyone’s talking about it, the shiny “Year of the Horse”. It’s supposed to be fast, forward, and heavy with abundance. A chance to finally execute everything you’ve been storing inside yourself for years. But if you’re like me, and 2025 beat you up a little—or a lot—there’s no way you can just step into that version of yourself (even if your Instagram tells you otherwise). You haven’t finished integrating the last year, you haven’t cleaned up all the loose edges, and somehow we’re supposed to already have the next version fully formed.
“ Care itself becomes a pressure point; self-care starts to blur into self-discipline, into another metric we have to meet.
Somewhere along the way, tending to yourself becomes another way to exhaust yourself. ”
Even the sky (I am an astrology buff) is pushing this tension. The sun sits in Capricorn, ambitious and structured, leaning forward. Meanwhile, the first full moon of the year hangs in Cancer, soft and reflective, reminding us that this is a time for tending, for noticing what’s emotional, unfinished, neglected. It’s literally in the stars. A push to act and a pull to slow down, simultaneously. And I think that mirrors how we’re feeling internally, collectively. The world is screaming “go,” and the cosmos whispers, “wait.”
Somewhere in all this, the act of slowing down starts to feel radical. Radical and uncomfortable, because it goes against everything society has trained us to do (go, produce, perform, optimize, grind, repeat). Care itself becomes a pressure point; self-care starts to blur into self-discipline, into another metric we have to meet. Somewhere along the way, tending to yourself becomes another way to exhaust yourself.
So I keep circling back to the same question: Who am I supposed to be by next week? And who decided that was a reasonable question in the first place? Why is there a timetable for becoming? And why do we act like arriving somewhere, having it all figured out, equals success?
I think a truth, one we rarely admit, is that the journey never ends. She who thinks the journey is over is truly lost. We are always mid-process of shedding, growing, failing, and trying again. We are always “in-between,” and always somewhere we can’t yet see. The point isn’t to arrive at all, it's to keep moving, noticing, and living through the tension.
For now, I’m letting the year meet me where I am. I’m letting myself exist without having to package it as progress or performance. I’m letting the tension live in my chest without trying to kill it with action. Because whoever I’m becoming doesn’t need to be announced (especially not by next week). The rest can wait.
