Some of my defects are load-bearing

Phase 2,000,023 of the New Me Project

We shofared our way into a New Year this weekend, and I emerged from it feeling less renewed than slightly flattened. Somewhere between judgement, repentance, prayer, promises, introspection, and an impressive amount of food, there was the expectation that I would come out the other side improved. Not unrecognisably different, obviously. I still know my PIN number and answer to Talyah. But spiritually refurbished. A better version. Taly 2.0, except I think we passed 2.0 sometime around 1987, and the upgrades have been increasingly erratic ever since.

There is something about a new year that does this to us. We behave as though the calendar has powers it has never actually claimed to possess. Tomorrow I will exercise. I will sort out the cupboard. I will stop procrastinating. I will make peace with the past, drink more water, answer messages when I receive them, and finally become one of those women who always know exactly where her passport is. The fact that I was incapable of most of this at 11.58pm apparently presents no obstacle to my transformation at midnight.

It turns out there is psychology behind the madness. Researchers Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis call it the “fresh start effect”. They found that temporal landmarks—birthdays, Mondays, the beginning of a month or year—can give us a psychological dividing line between what came before and what comes next. That distance can genuinely help motivate change. (Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, and Jason Riis, “The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior”, Management Science, 2014.)

I understand the appeal completely. Last year’s woman made the poor decision. This year’s woman has learnt from it. Last month’s woman ate the biscuits. Monday’s woman has bought lettuce. It is a remarkably efficient piece of psychological bookkeeping, except that somewhere in all this separating of the old self from the new one, I wonder whether we have begun to confuse renewal with repudiation.

We don’t just want to change what we do. We increasingly seem to want to disown the person who did it.

The urge is hardly new. More than a century ago, French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep noticed that cultures worldwide marked important human transitions with rituals. His model was essentially separation, transition, and incorporation: you leave one state, pass through an in-between place, and emerge into another. Victor Turner later explored that strange middle territory and called it “liminality”, the threshold on which you are no longer quite who you were but aren’t yet whatever you’re becoming. (Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 1909; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969.)

It is difficult to read that as a Jew and not recognise something.

The Yamim Nora’im place us deliberately on a threshold. Rosh Hashanah doesn’t simply mark the arrival of another year. It makes us stand there and account for the one that just left. We hear the shofar, examine ourselves, confess, ask forgiveness, and move towards Yom Kippur, carrying the deeply inconvenient knowledge that G-D knows perfectly well who entered the building, regardless of how respectable we look once we’re inside it.

And this is where our modern obsession with reinvention starts to bother me.

We adore the before-and-after. The transformation photograph. The comeback story. The renovated kitchen. The person who “did the work” and emerged glowing, emotionally regulated, and apparently incapable of ever again sending an ill-advised WhatsApp message after midnight. What we are rather less interested in is the messy middle, where change actually happens, and nobody looks particularly good in the photographs.

Worse, the after only looks impressive if there was something wrong with the before.

That is a dangerous idea to import wholesale into teshuvah.

There are, obviously, things about ourselves that need changing. This is not an argument for announcing that one’s character defects are actually authenticity and everyone else must simply learn to cope. Teshuvah without responsibility is self-esteem with a Hebrew vocabulary. If I have hurt somebody, I don’t get to announce that I am “protecting my peace”, light a scented candle and disappear over the horizon. Judaism has paperwork.

Maimonides is fascinating here because he takes change far beyond comfortable self-improvement. In Hilchot Teshuvah, he describes the penitent changing so profoundly that he can say, in effect, that he is another person and not the person who committed those deeds. (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah — Laws of Repentance, 2:4.)

But he doesn’t offer amnesia as the route there. Teshuvah begins with recognising what happened, regretting it, confessing it, and behaving differently when confronted with the same possibility again. You cannot become someone new by falsifying the old biography.

That distinction has been bothering me because we now live in a culture where the self appears to be in permanent renovation. We must heal it, optimise it, regulate it, manifest things for it, establish boundaries around it, release what no longer serves it, and occasionally take it to Bali. There is always another course, podcast, therapist, diet, retreat, journal, morning routine, or person on Instagram who apparently wakes at 4.30 am voluntarily and has already achieved inner peace while I am trying to remember why I walked into the kitchen.

William James was writing about habit long before any of this became an industry. He understood that repeated behaviours become deeply embedded and begin to organise much of our lives. (William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume I, Chapter IV, “Habit”, 1890.) Of course habits can and should change. Beliefs should be examined. Behaviour should be challenged. We need to make apologies and reconsider relationships. We also have versions of ourselves built for circumstances that no longer exist.

But not everything we dislike about ourselves is necessarily a defect.

That thought has rather complicated my New Me Project.

I had been approaching myself like a property developer who has acquired an old house with excellent potential. Rip this out. Knock that down. Get rid of whatever happened in 1997. Replace several beliefs that clearly haven’t been up to code for years and, while we’re at it, perhaps do something about the plumbing.

The trouble with renovation is that before you swing the hammer, you need to know which walls are holding up the roof.

People have load-bearing walls too.

The sensitivity you have spent years wishing away may be tangled up with the empathy you value. Stubbornness can make a person infuriating, but it can also be the reason she didn’t stay down when life gave her every excuse to. Even scars have a function. They are evidence that something happened, certainly, but also that something closed over afterwards.

This doesn’t mean we turn every failing into a virtue. Some walls genuinely need to come down. Some should probably have been condemned years ago. The harder work is learning the difference between something that needs changing and something we want to change because it doesn’t resemble the imaginary person we decided we should have become by now.

Perhaps that is why the threshold matters. Van Gennep and Turner saw it anthropologically; psychologists see the usefulness of temporal landmarks; Judaism built an entire season around making us stand in one. The threshold gives us a rare view in both directions. We can look back without having to move back in.

So perhaps I have been asking the wrong question this New Year. Not, “Who is the new me going to be?” There is something faintly insulting about that question, as though the woman who made it this far was merely a prototype with several known manufacturing defects.

The more difficult questions are what I am taking with me, what I am responsible for repairing, what I have been carrying long after it became useless, and what I have been trying to remove from myself simply because I once decided it made me unacceptable.

The woman who arrived at this New Year isn’t raw material for her replacement. She is the history, the evidence and, inconveniently, the building itself.

So I will renovate. There is plenty to be getting on with. I may even locate the passport.

But I think I’ll check whether the wall is load-bearing before I demolish it.

Phase 2,000,024 will presumably commence before breakfast.