When it comes to making — and keeping — New Year’s resolutions, we all fall into one of two camps based on where we find ourselves when the clock strikes midnight on the 365th day of our self-betterment adventure. By then, we’ve either succeeded or failed; those 25 pounds are lost or they’re not, we either know conversational Portuguese or we don’t, and that garage has or has not been decluttered. End of year, end of story.
What is a story — and sometimes a good one at that (I write this as a perennial underachiever on the resolution front: I’m somewhere around zero for 35) — are tales of fantastically failed New Year’s resolutions, heroic efforts gone humorously awry and stumbles accomplished with lightning speed.
Maybe it’s the time you decided to hop on the dry January bandwagon and made it all the way to the middle of … brunch on New Year’s Day. Or the year you resolved to spend less money only to crash and burn by maxing out your credit cards on get-out-of-debt self-help books. Or the totally sincere pledge you made to eat vegan for a whole year that was derailed on the Fourth of July by a barbecue pitmaster with smoldering good looks and a rack of ribs that wouldn’t quit.
That’s why I’m asking you to share — completely anonymously — some of your biggest New Year’s resolution regrets, your laughable lapses in self-betterment and your epic failures on follow-through. I won’t divulge identities, and I won’t judge. What I will do, though, is compile the best of the bungled resolutions and share them with readers as we get ready to kick off 2023.
To ensure your story of good intentions gone bad is considered for publication, be sure to get it off your chest and into my inbox (either by clicking through the above form or emailing me directly at adam.tschorn@latimes.com) by Dec. 5 at 5 p.m. PDT.
And who knows? Maybe a little anonymous confession is just what you need to start the new year with a clean slate. It certainly couldn’t hurt.
