Queenie’s New Year’s resolutions

Queenie’s New Year’s resolutions are a personal rulebook for entering another year: a set of concrete intentions about conduct, work, relationships, family, and seeking help, written alongside an expectation of failure. The list’s significance lies in that tension. Queenie tries to make change manageable by specifying what she will do, while admitting that even the act of setting goals may leave her disappointed.

Writing the list

After eating pizza and watching Jools Holland’s New Year’s Hootenanny, Queenie takes a pink leather Moleskine from her dressing table and begins to write. The setting is domestic and unceremonious: this is not a public declaration or a confident account of transformation, but a private list made at the turn of the year. Her first resolutions concern how she treats other people. She wants to be kinder and more patient, including toward commuters who board the Tube before passengers can get off, colleagues whose financial complaints seem at odds with their family wealth, and housemates whose elaborate cooking occupies the shared kitchen and prevents her from making a simple meal.

The examples make the first promise unusually specific. Queenie’s wish to be kinder does not erase her irritation; instead, she identifies the ordinary situations in which she wants to respond differently. A second resolution broadens the aim into a general desire for better feelings across her life and day. Together, these opening commitments move between small, recognizable frictions and an aspiration that is much harder to define or measure.

Work and self-management

The list carries its personal reform into Queenie’s working life. She means to be actively kind to an intern despite recognizing his considerable privilege and anticipating that he may soon outrank her. The resolution acknowledges the imbalance she sees while still making her own conduct the object of change. Her planned boundaries around work are equally practical: no personal email, no Tumblr browsing during work, and keeping her phone in her desk drawer while working.

These are not simply ambitions to become more productive. They identify the distractions Queenie wants to limit and turn an abstract wish for better habits into repeated, everyday rules. The list’s mixture of moral intentions and small controls gives it a particular scale: Queenie is trying to alter how she behaves toward other people while also changing the routines that shape her own day.

Relationships and family

Queenie places her unresolved relationship with Tom among the year’s central concerns. She wants to try to repair things, with the hope of getting back together when he is ready, and frames giving him space as part of that effort. The resolution is therefore not a declaration that the relationship has been restored. It sets out a desired outcome while recognizing that the timing depends on Tom as well as on her.

Her rules about dating and sex are more restrictive. She decides to avoid men generally, limiting conversation to men who are already attached and therefore unavailable; if she speaks with a single man, she resolves not to have sex with him. Adi’s recent place in her experience is invoked as a warning. She also makes protection an unconditional rule, even when she expects herself to become carried away, and adds that she should try to understand why that happens. Dating apps are another target: she intends to stop using them, particularly on Sundays, which she associates with loneliness, hangovers, and longing for a partner and the activities that seem to accompany one.

Guy receives a separate prohibition. Queenie resolves to have no further involvement with him because he has physically hurt her; she also notes that what she has recently overheard suggests he may have a girlfriend, though she leaves open another explanation. The wording of the resolution registers both a firm boundary and unresolved uncertainty about his circumstances. In contrast, the commitment to spend more time with family reaches toward repair and routine: she will try to mend her relationship with her mother, while allowing that she can step back if it becomes too much, and plans to visit her grandmother weekly, preferably on Sundays when a roast chicken will be ready.

Limits, failure, and the year ahead

The list also includes an intention to be less prone to expecting the worst, to try for optimism, and not to judge herself too harshly when pessimism returns. Rather than treating a setback as impossible, Queenie anticipates it within the resolution itself. She proposes giving half her belongings to charity after sorting her room, dismissing the effort of reselling inexpensive possessions as less worthwhile than donating the money to cancer research. The final item turns toward therapy, but remains tentative: Queenie writes it as a question and settles on thinking about therapy at least.

That hesitation frames the list’s conclusion. Queenie decides that the resolutions are enough to occupy her, yet immediately reasons that challenging herself to do anything has already set her up to fail; keeping the list limited, she thinks, may make failure less disappointing. The ending does not cancel the intentions, but places them inside a deliberately cautious expectation of what she can manage. After finishing the list and eating the pizza, she takes the grease-soaked box to the overflowing recycling bin. Cheers and church bells tell her the countdown has passed. She has missed the transition she meant to mark; her response is to acknowledge another year beginning, with the resolutions still on the page.