New Beginnings

A note from Editor-In-Chief Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice

January’s for resolutions. More H20. Less sugar. More positivity. Less Twitter rage strokes. Stop something bad. Start something good. A series of gold star stickers on a calendar filled with goals. A new year. A new you.

But what happens when we ignore our old self in search of a better self? Will we eventually slip into the same bad habits, the same dehydrated skin?

Maybe resolutions are a kind of amnesia, an act of forgetting masked as renewal. A resolution by definition is the distilling of complex info into simple info. And resolutions, as packaged by our consumer culture, are not usually moments of true growth. They’re detoxes and green juices. They’re eat less, but buy more. 

This month at Split Lip we’re looking back in order to look forward. With powerful work from Julie C. Day, Davon Loeb, Josh McColough, and Olatunde Osinaike, plus art from Grace Gebhard, we’re thinking about the way our past—personal, historical, emotional—shapes our future. And we’re wondering: If we forget where we’ve been, will we ever get where we’re supposed to go?

Yours, 

KAR