Reflecting on New Year’s Resolutions from Prison
To be in prison is to be socially dead, removed from society. How does one aspire to a higher state of being when they are social dead? What’s the point of making New Year’s resolutions when the people we love the most can never fully trust that the change is real? When they can’t see us in the world living out our values and showing up for them in their moments of need?
The longer I stay in prison, the deeper I need to dig into reserves of resilience I never knew existed. I need to look for new sources and tools to stave off the temptation to cut myself off from the people who love me enough to stick around after 17 years inside. Settling into a state of mental and emotional stagnancy is so prevalent in carceral existence that there’s a term for it: prisoner’s lethargy. My latest resilience tool to resist this lethargy is the New Year’s resolution.
As 2026 arrives, it’s a time to look ahead and ask ourselves: Who do I want to be at this time next year? What do I want to accomplish between now and then?
Setting a New Year’s resolution is a departure for me, as I gave up on them as a teenager. I kept seeing people resolve to quit smoking, cut back on drinking, be nicer to strangers, give money to those in need, go to the gym, lose weight, eat healthier, etc. To this day, I have yet to hear of a single New Year’s resolution that lasted through the following December.
I didn’t realize how cynical I’d become about the practice until I asked my beloved partner Deborah how she felt about resolutions. As we talked, she pointed out the harsh judgments I held, seeing New Year’s resolutions as not just pointless, but as a practice that cultivates and perpetuates feelings of failure and inadequacy every time we fall short of attaining our intended result. I also railed against the capitalist underbelly of it all: businesses like gyms feed off our failures, pumping out commercials and media blitzes to increase our aspirational spending, then continue to rake in membership fees until we finally admit defeat.
Deborah met my strong opinions with lovingly strong pushback and invited me to see value in a practice I long dismissed as worthless. As is often the case, she was right. I was completely overlooking the benefits of setting New Year’s resolutions.
Most resonant for me is their aspirational nature. Whether we are caged in a physical prison or trapped in a mental or financial prison of need and circumstance, we are offered an annual invitation to take a real look at ourselves and our circumstances and ask one of my favorite questions: What can I do, from where I am, with what I have, to make a positive change in my life, home, community and/or world?
New Year’s resolutions also provide a catalyst to try something new. This can be a time of trial and error, of experimentation. New Year’s is one of the only times in adulthood when it’s socially acceptable to openly have conversations about wanting to live life differently or try new things that might not work. Since so many resolutions fall by the wayside, the fear of failure can be lifted for us. We can be free to reimagine ourselves and our lives, to aspire to something better or to a higher or different ideal.
My resolution to start 2026 is to stay engaged in the balancing process of simultaneously aspiring to be a more positively impactful human in the world and resisting the constant pull to give in to my social death and make it complete by closing myself off from those who still love me.
May you greet the New Year with resolutions that pull you toward new or old ideals, that care for you and the world around you, and that you hold lightly enough to be gentle with yourself if or when and they don’t quite make it to March.
Leo Hylton is a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated at Maine State Prison. His education and work are focused on Social Justice Advocacy and Activism, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. You can reach him at: Leo Hylton #70199, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or leoshininglightonhumanity@gmail.com.
