Feeling anxious about 2023? Here’s how to cope with ‘New Year fear’

In December’s instalment of her monthly mental health column, writer and author, Beth McColl, looks back on 2022 and explores New Year’s anxiety. Beth is the author of ‘How to Come Alive Again’ which is a relatable and honest practical guide for anyone who has a mental illness. She’s also very, very funny on Twitter.

2022 has been a mixed bag of a year. I’ve searched high and low for a snappier and more appropriate phrase but continually came up short. And so I repeat: a mixed bag. A varied clutch. An assorted fanny pack. Like most extended periods of time, it has contained moments that were good, moments that were bad, moments that were frustrating, moments that were exciting, moments that were upsetting, moments that were fun, moments that were uncomfortable, and moments that just were.

The end of a calendar year feels like the perfect time to take inventory of all that’s gone on in the previous twelve months, skim off only the most important lessons learned, the good memories made and leave the rest rotting in the rearview. But what about if the bad outweighed the good in 2022? What if the difficult things are not wrapped up neatly, like Christmas gifts? What if you’re heading into January with more ghosts than Ebenezer Scrooge in a house of mirrors?

When I imagine time, I picture something stationary that we as sentient beings move towards and then through. Each year appears to me as a shape, a warped oval, a colourful child’s hula hoop that’s been run over several times by a Mini Cooper. At the end of each year, the present moment is threaded onto the next warped oval, and we begin that same course around it, with the days and months lit by different colours depending on their positioning in relation to me, The Observer of The Oval. I’ve been met with enough blank stares, confused looks and suggestions that I read up on something called ‘time-space synaesthesia’ to know now that these visuals are not universal. Some people see time as something fluid, carrying us onwards like so many origami boats on a stream. Others see the months like train tracks or boxes stacked up high. Many people have no associated image whatsoever.

Regardless of what you see or don’t see, I think that the Approaching of the Next Oval (also colloquially known as a ‘new year’) can be a stressful or depressing time for many of us, and I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of. Every December we’re encouraged to look backwards as we look forwards, compressing and assessing the previous twelve months while also wrestling with the harsh reality that time is an immutable and irrepressible force, relentlessly marching ever onwards. It’s exhausting – especially when done against the backdrop of everyone else’s apparently limitless festivity and good cheer. Under those circumstances even a gum drop of sorrow or regret or apprehension can feel like seasonal blasphemy.