Let’s be honest: January is typically not an exciting month. The weather is dull. Everyone’s recovering from Christmas, which seems forever ago now, knowing that it’s almost a full year till we get to celebrate it again.
If you’re staying in all the time, prioritising cosiness over fun, then really, you’re just getting an insight into what my life is like all year round.
Let me be very clear about this: I am absolutely here for being boring.
Call me boring – I don’t mind at all. There is great joy in being as boring as possible; I’m proud of it, frankly. I’ve almost always been boring, except perhaps for about a year when I was 18 and discovered the effects of alcohol. I went out on weeknights, I turned up to university lectures without having slept. It didn’t last long, but for a time, I was into parties.
Beyond that, I haven’t dabbled with drugs in my life (my dad was too convincing in his campaign against them as I was growing up). I haven’t smoked a cigarette. I’m a two drink maximum kind of person who extremely rarely earns a hangover.
If I go to a party, I arrive on time and leave well before midnight – in my experience, parties are hard work, even when it’s a room full of people you adore.The music is too loud and a sustained period of enforced socialising can be difficult.
I once accepted an invitation to a very glitzy industry awards night, only to do one lap of the place, pick up the goodie bag and put myself promptly back in a cab home.
I suspect more people are like this than are willing to admit, although thunderous applause to those who do just that. When asked in an interview what she does for fun, Labour leadership front-runner Rebecca Long-Bailey said she’s never done anything crazy in her life.
Her favourite thing in the world, she confessed, is to stay at home on a Friday night, order a Chinese and watch Netflix with her husband. Swap out husband for boyfriend, and Chinese for Thai, and she had just about described my ideal evening.
It’s probably appropriate, to be honest, that our political leaders are this boring – surely we want them to be clear-headed and able to concentrate on the act of leading.
Being boring is a guilty pleasure. In 2019, more than 158 million people in the world were subscribed to Netflix. In 2017, 20 per cent of the UK population said they didn’t drink at all, alcohol consumption was down 16 per cent from the year 2004 and we have all read the trend pieces declaring that millennials and Gen Z kids are drinking less and embracing sobriety.
This isn’t to suggest that being blind drunk or high are the only determines of a good time. Most of my favourite people in the world aren’t big partiers and they still find ways to be great fun.
Getting out of your comfort zone and maybe going out somewhere fancy is great from time to time.
But there should be no shame in activities that are a little more… sedate. The world is on fire, the news is horrifying, work is stressful – personally, I like to spend my private life recovering from all of that, looking after myself and staying calm.
Being boring is, to me, a welcome sign that I’m more aware of what I like and who I am. I love seeing my friends, I love being with people, but I’m also deeply introverted and immediately need solid recovery time afterwards.
I know what I’m capable of socially, and I don’t get FOMO because I don’t feel any sort of peer pressure to do anything at all, really.
Since passing 30, being more aware of myself means I am better able to work out my preferences and then stand by them. I stay in my lane – the boring lane.
It’s more than OK to be boring, like me. Just quietly, it’s fantastic. You may only live like this at the dark beginning of the year, but I highly recommend continuing, even through the more exciting seasons, like summer and spring.
Even as the weather gets better, I like to celebrate the best way I know how: with Netflix and a takeaway.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/19/i-am-very-proud-to-call-myself-boring-12070597/
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