Why do we all have a mystical bell tolling in our heads at the end of every year? This bell seems to be designed to tell us that everything we’ve done in the last year hasn’t quite been, well, ENOUGH. 

Have you been thin enough? Good enough to people? To the world? Have you contributed enough to culture? Learnt a language? Bought a sodding campervan and taken your children on an idyllic and completely fictionally-perfect homeschool year around the world? Nor me. 

"So how about we all cut ourselves a little slack?"

If you’re in the throes of early parenting, you have quite understandably spent the last few months or longer living from day to day - NO, from hour to hour. 

Perhaps you’ve spent approximately 16 hours in the last week sitting in the pitch black next to a cot whispering sshhhhhhh like a sleep-deprived demented Witch from Macbeth. Perhaps you’ve lost your sh*t because the one thing you were excited about for the next day was meeting a friend with the babies for coffee, but the coffee is ALL WRONG and your boobs have exploded through your top in front of a hot waiter. 

Why do we do this to ourselves? It’s right up there with self-flagellation and hair shirts. This year, we tell ourselves every 1st January, I’ll be different. I’ll be better. I’ll be - OK I’ll be the same, but this is giving me a reason to thoroughly beat myself up about being myself. 

So how about we all cut ourselves a little slack? Have a drink in January if you’re able to. Have a biscuit. And anyone who makes you feel like you aren’t achieving much? Ask them if they grew an actual person in their body then squeezed out something the size of a watermelon. That’ll shut them up. Then you can enjoy the schadenfreude when they spent £100 a month on a David Lloyd membership they never use and due to the dark arts of contractual issues, can practically never get themselves out of. 

Happy New Year from Sarka London!