SZA - The voice of the new year resolution?
Is SZA the ghost of Year's Past?
Most of the holiday season, for me, has been spent listening to SZA on repeat. Her new release has been on loop, creating intrusive-like thoughts during all the holiday festivities. Her lyrics pop up in my head at many unexpected times, like those good songs that just stick. Though I’ve done a lot of vibing, I’ve also been wondering why she decided to release so close to Christmas. I think most of the reasoning comes through in the lyrics. One thing SZA does well is making all her songs sound like streams of consciousness, balancing silly lyrics with moments that feel like she’s referencing Elizabethan English—have we forgotten Good Days and the lyric, "All the while, I'll await my armored fate with a smile"? So many of the topics and themes on the album feel like they’re about revisitation and actualizing self-growth. Many of the lyrics pop up in my head, echoing conversations I’ve been having with friends as the year closes and we look toward 2025.
“Vacationing in rock bottom, back again”—every New Year, for me, feels like revisiting an old self. Everyone on social media is reviewing, creating year-end lists, or sharing their “ins and outs” as if concepts or trends can’t cross the year’s threshold. It’s a societal cycle of introspection and self-realization that comes with the end of the calendar year. With my tendency to look back over the year through a veil of nostalgia and self-contempt—like viewing a snow-covered landscape that feels dead, unalive—the year behind always feels sad to me. Not because of anything specific, but because ephemeral markers of time make me believe that things still in development don’t count. Regrets seem to leap off the page, and missed opportunities just stare you down. For me, looking back is always fueled by nostalgia, simmering in self-sorrow.
Rather than feeling comfortable and complacent in the familiar feelings, I’ve been thinking about the concept of time. I am not one to set intentions or new year resolutions. They feel abusive and often hurdles that even that French pole vaulter couldn’t jump. If anything, I believe that setting the expectation of your January self understanding the needs and feelings of your December self to be oddly flattening. A year feels too big. It feels too small, creating constraints - a time pressure to grow, to be one’s self, to evolve beyond who you were and yet to balance the modicum of self worth you’ve accrued over the decades of living. If I stopped blaming the world for my faults, I could evolve. The representation of a year makes us feel an amplitude of possibility, but every year is different. Depending on where we are in our lives, it can feel so short or, if we remember as teenagers it can feel like an eternity for the year to allow us to enter the threshold of adulthood.
I am trying to explore how I can create a framework of time that allows a more elastic understanding of me, my achievements and feel supportive of the journey I am on, rather than pulling me away from dreaming into a sharp reality. With social media, and pop culture feeding up as arbitrary timeline, I often feel so pulled in all directions. What if we set our own time. This previous year, I toyed with the framing of my year in quarters. Looking back every 3 months to understand what I achieved and who filled my life during those 12 weeks. It felt more approachable, prescient without feeling overwhelming. It’s not perfect, but it’s one that I want to keep exploring and perfecting.
The tension between self-pity when looking back at a year and striving for self-improvement feels futile. Am I being pessimistic? Don’t get me wrong—I think checking in with yourself is essential. A quick tap into where you are emotionally and mentally is a must. “I don’t wanna be (be) just a shell of me (me),” as SZA puts it—where dissatisfaction creates a lens of fear. But often, when we check in, we carve a single mark in the sand and forget that the entire beach is part of the picture. It’s a success simply to be hopeful. There’s beauty in acknowledging that being filled with feelings, rather than empty, is a purpose in itself. And as she says in Drive, “And I know that if love is my purpose, I can't waste energy looking for enemies”. As Jia Tolentino states, we are in a surveillance economy, distraction feels like the enemy of our capacity to have our own control and therefore renders new year resolutions silly. New Year’s resolutions feel silly against this backdrop. We’re like manta rays, floating and being pushed by the tides, trying to ride the waves with as much control as we can muster.
It feels so easy to look at a new year, a fresh slate and believe that the patterns are breaking and that none of the previous year matters. We are new selves, but I don’t think that we should be aiming to float away, as she states, but rather sit within the floating. “Wonder if I die, will I be forgiven for everything?" It’s easy to think of new resolutions when the past doesn’t exist. I find that the liminal space between growing up and adulthood are so common for me. Meaning time doesn’t feel like it structures my life. Like SZA states in “No More Hiding - Gotta break it if you want it to grow.” I guess my end of year for me often looks at not the best moments, not the accomplishments, but rather the moments that broke me. Moments that are catalysts for the next era.
Thinking about how goals, missions across the year, to me often feels greedy and a poisoned apple. The arbitrary marker of years feels stifling and I would suggest we look at check ins to aim for development. As I am humming the lyric from in Another Life - “And I can't lose my focus, I know if hope is the goal.” The goals that are worth pursuing are long-spanning and go simply beyond achievements. Imagine if the goal for the year was simply to keep hope alive amid global chaos and challenges. Not overachieving, but rather creating a sustain stronghold of a mindset aimed to push through adversity. I spoke to a friend recently and rather than setting goals, he developed a concept where he wants to boil his year down to a simple word. One that can have many permutations, reflections, but retain a core and a focus. I think that allows a year to be looked through a moment of transition, and allow growth and metastasized evolution rather than a failed linear one. This year, I look towards consistency.
Our understanding of growth—especially from a Global North perspective—feels trapped in a linear mindset, where age is a tool to measure development and status. I was listening to a conversation with Nick Knight discussing how our generation often foregoes the traditional transitions of growing up, oscillating instead between adolescence and adulthood. Meaning we often vacillate between adulthood and adolescence. New year, and new slates feel to me like they allow you to simply move on from difficult struggles or patterns. I don’t think it’s productive. Moments of growing up force us to confront who we are, understand our environment, and move beyond it. Moments of discomfort, moments of having to understand structures and conventions where we are left helpless. Those are moments that break up and then build us up. As SZA sings on Saturn - “I’ll be better on Saturn, None of this matters, Dreaming of Saturn”. Saturn represents detachment, a Valhalla if you will, one where any of the physical won’t matter. It is escapism at best, and one that I think feels familiar with each passing new year. A new year allows us to picture that the year ahead is the next Saturn - one where we will be new, and won’t be encumbered with the difficulties and patterns of the previous year, but it shouldn’t discredit the year before.
Maybe none of this matters, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe expecting everyone to hold it all at all times isn’t sustainable. Maybe SZA is the voice of our end of year, because of her capacity to use songwriting as meditative check in. My cousin asked me if perhaps SZA was the Virginia Woolf of our times - I see the resemblance between two women trying to reckon with their humanity facing a world that doesn’t seem to welcome their idiosyncrasies. So perhaps, for 2025, instead of setting expectations, we hum along to the lyrics that resonate and see how they make us feel. Maybe that’s all the end of the year is—a perfect opportunity to check in, rather than a line marking the start of something new.