Craving the New-ness

We did it. We made it. It’s 2020.

[insert air horn noises]

I was walking my dog the other day listening to an episode of Thick and Thin, as I usually do… and I don’t really remember what triggered this thought but now we’re here getting a whole blog post about it. 

That new-ness feeling.

You know what I’m talking about. Best described as that feeling when you would start a new grade in school. It was a little scary, but exciting. You’d be anticipating it for a while and then it would just be there and you were in it. I LIVE on the feeling of new. I love it. But I realized we really don’t have many opportunities to really feel it as often in our 20s. 

Last year around this time I got dumped (have I talked about that enough in the last few blog posts? V single, got dumped v hard last year) and I wanted to feel excited about something, something new. So I started a full time job…Then I moved out of my parents house… and then that wasn’t enough so a week later I adopted a dog (hi riley). And I kept waiting to feel that elated, can’t sleep, slightly giddy feeling that I was so used to experience as a kid. But it never came. Looking back it was probably because there wasn’t much anticipation built around those new things. It all just kind of happened. But that’s how life works most of the time.

But as kids we are spoiled with that new-ness feeling. We start at new schools in new grades, we make new friends, we meet new people, we visit new places, we discover new hobbies. We find likes and dislikes. But slowly as we become adults we stop seeking the new-ness and it stops magically finding us. We leave school, find a few good friends and settle into a routine with little-to-no newness. At least that’s what happened to me.

So we wait and we wait and we wait hoping that something will come along like the change of a decade that will bring us something new. I think now-a-days it’s frowned upon to wait for the new year because we should wait for nothing – we should just do. But that’s hard, we don’t have summer vacations to mark endings and beginnings, we just have this one large new year marker. A chance to start fresh or start over.

Is this all making sense? In my head I was like “this. is. genius”. The new-ness feeling is relatable, right? I think we all want it whether we know it or not. We so desperately want those butterflies of excitement which is why some people wait around their whole life for that kind of romantic lifestyle. Or they start craving newness again and suddenly relationships that are old fade off and away. 

So where does that leave us? How do we find that new-new, that good-good? I’m not sure we really ever find it again. We have new markers in our lives – maybe a new job, a new house, a new boyfriend but waiting around for the new distracts from the now. 

Maybe I’m the only one who falls asleep at night pondering the inner workings of my mind and why I start feeling a certain way but I think its therapeutic to make peace that you can’t get some things back. We’ll never feel the excitement we did when we would meet someone for the first time or naiveness of the first time we read our favorite book. But we can look forward to new things – they’re just different things, they are “now” things.