I love New Year’s Day like I love the feel of a house thoroughly cleaned. I’m willingly deceived into treating the day as laundered time. I suspend my disbelief at midnight New Year’s Eve and hold it til midnight the first.

Like most things, I blame my Christian upbringing. A Regenerational Baptism believer, at that– wherein there is magic in the water of baptism: it is mystically unified with time, space, and a little of the hard stuff (a god’s blood) to create salvation. They won’t call it magic, though– too Hollywood. Colloquially, it was once described to me in a Western PA preacher’s office, where I was once again relegated after asking too many questions in Sunday school, that if Christ’s blood was the cement, the baptism was the water, and together they made concrete salvation. That is a solid metaphor, void of magic.

That is, of course, unless you really messed up. The details aren’t totally clear, but at some point, there is a knowing that your salvation sort of slipped out the back, likely due to personal lack of diligence. Sometimes others can pick up on it before you do, and will likely take precious time to let you know you’re in dangerous territory of wringing out the magic waters from your soul and drying out in Hell. Once that happens, the process has to start all over again. My sister, the one who hasn’t spoken a kind word to me in a couple of decades, had to be baptized twice. Once in our swimming pool with a gaggle of other girls, and another time on a mission trip in Mexico. This makes sense to me. If anyone needs a couple of takes, it’d be this lady. Though I’m still wondering if there was some sort of chemical imbalance or parasite in her particular baptismals.

After my sister got her booster baptism, I became obsessed with the idea. Especially after my own baptism proved a little underwhelming. While it is, in addition to magic, also an outward sign of an inward agreement with God, I thought that it’d be… more. I thought I’d be more. I had impostor’s syndrome, and a distinct fear that everyone could see my tiny 12 year old breasts as I came up from the water in my wet white robe. Once I changed into more modest attire and retreated to the church basement, watching my parents be congratulated and all of the dyed perms mill around doling out cake (in hindsight there was cake– it was my spiritual birthday, after all), I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted to try again. Maybe it wasn’t complete. Maybe there was a little spot behind my ears that was missed, and now I was destined to be only partially baptized in a full-immersion-only society. Again, again, again, I rotated through my skull. Every screw up, every impure thought (mind that I was twelve and that was just the beginning of those endless failures), every misstep had me running back to the anticlimactic day of my baptism. Maybe it was time for a refresh. A second dose. I needed another hit of purity.

When I broached the subject with my parents a couple of years later, they brushed me off. I asserted myself, pointing to my sister’s redo as evidence of our genetic disposition to faulty first baptisms. That in the time it took me to get one, she already got two, and doesn’t she always get everything? I was met only with their assurances, a kindness I couldn’t recognize at the time. I spent years emotionally self flagellating to compensate for my inability to receive the quick magic cleanliness my baptism clearly hadn’t delivered. I looked elsewhere, tampered with off limits theologies, and eventually left the faith. Or, left any remnant of it that is certified with a collar or a board of elders.

The impulse to start over still remains.

Christianity isn’t the only religion that offers a clean slate buy-in. This service, while a little morally pricey, is in supply because there is demand. Humans want this– the chance to start over. We get a new job, we move to a different town, we go on vacation, we even procreate extra humans for a chance to start new now. This time around. We’ll be better than we were, better than our parents ever could be. Eat, pray, love. Diet, repent, withhold. There are a thousand different ways to enact what we crave. Baptism is just a direct shot.

And so is New Year’s Day.

What is built into these rituals, falsely, is that we can step outside of our old skin and into a new body and spirit of good intentions and bright future. That this arbitrary day or pool of water or new town will fortify our will to that of a glowing orb spirit that isn’t messy with jealousy or skin or a full bladder. We will mind over matter the shit out of ourselves this time. And if we mess up– well, first is the self hatred. Then comes a new year. Or if your parents let you, a second baptism. But you gotta be damn lucky for the latter.

I’ve recently tried to stymie up the impulse. In my untangling of the more emotionally and mentally problematic parts of my religious upbringing, I veered the way of self sabotage, spending New Year’s Eves drinking too much of whatever was being served up, and spending the first day of the year grieving and repenting with a bowl of black eyed peas and greens and Ibuprofen. I would drink less. I would exercise more. I would be smarter, somehow, and iron my will until I was unstoppable and simultaneously the most lovable person anyone has ever encountered. Plus a three page list of goals for the year: how I would eat, what I would make, the money I would save, the dreams I would definitely accomplish, and how I would probably memorize all of the countries and be able to locate them on a map. Just for starters. The pull and push of mess-up-big then double-down-on-plans-to-be-better wasn’t all that different than the sin-and-repent cycle I knew all of my life.

My path isn’t for everyone. Sometimes I wonder if it’s even for me. But my need to start new, to be a better version of myself, it had me caught in an endless cycle of feeling my failures. Failure, it turns out, is not a great motivator. Especially when I was the one defining what constituted failure. If left up to me, I’m always failing. I’m never enough. I can’t even get my sins washed away right. In the last couple of years, I quit drinking. I exercise regularly. I write more. I take breathing more seriously. I take time less seriously. This isn’t a list of accomplishments, or a how-to. It has been a natural progression of getting to the bottom of the chronic problem of restarting. It’s not that I am messing up less; it’s that I stop categorizing time in terms of good or bad. It’s a long shot, but I’m trying. The extra walks help. So does the Tao.

But New Year’s Day is still irresistible to me. And why not? Fresh starts aren’t inherently bad. Using fresh starts to justify my mistakes or to set myself up for more self hatred– that is a problem. I’m trying to cultivate a healthier hangover. Instead of fogging over the source of my restart impulse, it’s more like a light of clarity searing over the truth of time as it is, not time as I wish it to be. The year behind me fresh in mind with mistakes, the year in front fresh with possibility. January 1st is a lovely cliff of intention I can feign to look over for miles forward and backward.

And so this year, for the second year, I invited my friends over for The Burning of Regrets. It’s a mid afternoon gathering, to account for the nonjudgmental potential of real hangovers and lack of sleep. And it gives me the morning to brood and wander through the suspension of time while I tidy my home and add more salt to the black-eyed peas. The smell of brown rice fills the kitchen, mixing with the cinnamon and vanilla sweet of the Golden Milk I began simmering before noon. Expectations for the 1st are much lower than the Eve before, so my perfectionist host self takes a nap while I take a few minutes to sit and write a little speech. It feels silly, but necessary, on account of the resistance that will inevitably arise.

Our friends arrive in the stagger that suits them best, some with cheeks still red from their New Year’s Day hikes, others a little sleepy eyed from a late night or a long end of year. We fill our bowls with Hoppin’ Johns and our glasses with bubbly or fake beers or sparkling water to our taste. The room breaks into two while spoons scrape, half breaking into bursts of conversation and the other half working fastidiously on a local puzzle my Someone and I left on the table, hardly started in hopes for a little help. When the time feels right, I pick up some scraps of paper and pens and begin to pass them out. This is where it begins.

“I’ve never done this before…”

“I don’t believe in regrets…”

“What if I don’t know what to write?”

“Will anyone read this?”

The questions come in overlapping waves, and I do my best to assure, talking my way around what I mean, this thing I am still working out for myself. The point, I try and explain, is not to dwell on what we’ve done wrong, but to acknowledge what we don’t want to keep carrying with us. Because really, I don’t think I believe in regrets, either. Or maybe we’ve villainized the word regret too much– that to have regret is to have not lived our best, to have not learned, to be living too much in the past, to have a barrier between ourselves and… ourselves. But regret is also the only word that comes to mind. And by burning it– well, it’s a real statement piece. We send it away. So, I tell my friends that, no– no one else will read it. Yes, we all have something to write. No, you don’t have to believe in regrets to think of something. Yes, it’s okay to be new at this.

With that, we were off. The room got a little quiet, the air a little strange. Then we filed to the kitchen, pulling on jackets and boots and walking out to our cold, snowless yard where my Someone worried himself over wet firewood. We stood in a circle, meditative, trying to take the event serious, but maybe not too serious. That is to say, we were ourselves as we could be teetering between before and after.

“We need to hurry,” my Someone pressed, “this fire isn’t going to stay long.”

I pulled out my pieces of paper, wrinkled in my back pocket, and read what I’d written that morning:

In a new year, we are working– not to become new, better versions of ourselves, but to uncover who we already are. We acknowledge our regrets as a sign that we are learning, that we are consciously taking part in our own lives, that we are aware of our shortcomings. In letting go of these regrets, we are making space within ourselves, but also between ourselves and the people around us so that we may, a little every year, with every small decision, unblock our hearts. We acknowledge, we learn, we let go so that we can know ourselves better, and love ourselves and the people who surround us better.

Into the fire go our regrets, burning up everything until only love is left.

And then, one by one, we burned pieces of paper that for the last few minutes, we had held closely to our bodies, nervously keeping them folded away from anyone else’s eyes. The fire flicked and flipped some, getting gasps from a few, and then sighs of relief as the regrets quickly turned to ash before they could be read. We laughed at our own shyness, at our own secrets, at our own shortcomings. Of course, we have nothing to hide. Of course, we all have something to hide.

Maybe it goes like this: that the baptism, the redemption, the starting new– while it acknowledges how human we are, it insinuates that we will try much harder in the future to be less human. That we will be flawless. That we will be better. That we will be like God. The variation on the theme, and perhaps the love I hold for this new tradition, is that I am not only saying that I am human, but I am also showing myself that being human isn’t a character flaw. It isn’t something I am trying to work out of my system. It isn’t something I need a break or a restart from. It is wonderfully chaotic, oppressively sustaining, joyfully morbid. And, in fact, in carrying this regret into my first and only day of the year to be perfect and new, I am rededicating my commitment to be even more human.

Thomas had prepared a song written for the day. It was heartbreaking and funny and full of the mishaps of 2023. Then we walked quickly back inside. I ladled up hot cups of Golden Milk for everyone while my Someone topped them with shots of espresso for anyone who asked. The kitchen got even smaller as we sipped the fatty, spicy coconut drink, making jokes as we spilled the turmeric liquid or bumped into one another– “There’s my regret for next year!” Yes, yes, yes. Let’s keep building up more regrets. Let’s keep being chancy by running into each other because we are so large and our spaces are so small and we have no choice but to touch each other with the immensity of our humanness.

When the bottom of everyone’s mug showed, hats and scarves were redistributed, and arms flung around necks. Sweeps of cold flew through the door with goodbyes. Two friends remained to finish the puzzle. Then, it was just my Someone and I again. The house was bigger again. I looked for it then– the again again again that rattles in my skull when I have not fulfilled my penitence; when the holy water did not cover every hair on my head.

Regretfully, it declined.

My Someone and I heated up a frozen pizza and sat on the couch to watch a sitcom.

“What was your regret?” I asked him.

“Wet firewood,” he declared.

“Wasn’t that your regret last year, too?”

“It was,” he said. “It was,” he repeated.