I’m late. January 2026 was the longest January I’ve ever endured. I made it through “dry,” starting late, on January 2 (I mean, come on, New Year’s Day?? That’s for mimosas in front of the Rose Parade) and ending a tiny bit early, 15 minutes before midnight on the 31st, when I got home from a concert.
So, fresh from that dry January desert, having quenched my thirst, I give you the 2026 Obligatory New Year’s Revolution post:
For the last several years, I’ve been choosing a “nudge word” for the year. This year’s word is “less.”
Not less as in “less is more,” or less as in the Broadway show Hamilton (“talk less, smile more,” but that’s part of it), but less in the Jack Lemmon sense — as in substantially reduced presence and lowered volume, and significantly increased self-restraint.
Every person I have ever known has wanted “less” of me. This includes all members of my immediate family (with the notable exception of my late husband Mike, who loved me just the way I am). That seemingly universal need for less me hurt my feelings. But my own mother wanted less of my feelings, too! Predictably, as soon as I became aware of everyone’s need for less me, I immediately became more.
They wanted less of me physically. So I gained weight.
They wanted less of me verbally. So I spoke faster and more often and in longer sentences filled with even more multisyllabic words, and rarely let anyone get a word in edgewise.
They wanted less of me intellectually. So I won nearly every game of Trivial Pursuit I ever played, spent a semester abroad at Oxford “reading” Elizabethan narrative poetry and aesthetics, and went to law school, when what I really wanted to do was sing, act, and improvise.
It’s easier for me now to take a back seat. The echo chamber of social media has heightened my distaste for adding my two cents, which would only reiterate what’s already been said multiple times.
It took me years to realize that “being entertaining” or talking fast was not because I was trying to get people to like me. I stopped caring about being liked years ago. I cared how audiences reacted to me, but I really didn’t give a damn if they liked me personally.
Wanting people to like me wasn’t the problem: the problem was me not liking people. I did all that flashy personality stuff for my own entertainment, because the painful truth, and it’s hard for me to admit this, but I have to if I’m going to succeed in being “less,” is that it is really difficult for me to be interested in people — unless I think they are smarter, quicker, or more talented than I am, like Angelic Daughter.
My boisterousness, and my unattractive and difficult-to-disguise sense of superiority has kept me from giving others enough space and time to reveal how intelligent and talented they are, and to get to know them. I couldn’t appreciate them, because I just wouldn’t shut up. And by the time I did, they were sick of me already. Or I had already made them cry.
I remember a number of times when someone I was talking to (or at), or working with on a show, in a choir, or just at work, dissolved into tears. I was shocked – I never understood what happened or what I did. But I know now that often, it is simply that who I am makes people feel bad.
And that makes me feel bad.
Angelic Daughter, who is the joy of my existence, and the most patient, resilient, forgiving, and loving human I have ever known, gets very anxious whenever I speak to her. Sure, most daughters bristle a bit when their mother is trying to make a point, but this is different. She hears almost anything I say as criticism. Especially if I’m trying to show her how to do something, because, DUH, implicit in my instruction is the message, “you’re doing it wrong. My way is better.”
Mike was the same way.
I finally found the right moment to just ask Angelic Daughter to explain it to me – why does she get so anxious when I speak to her? Is it something about my voice?
And she calmed herself, took a beat, and said, “Too loud. Too harsh.”
Less, Anne. Less.
A few minutes later, she said, “I love you, Mom.”
I’m not crying, you’re crying. OK, I am crying.
Consciously softening my tone and shortening my (spoken, anyway) sentences, I remain,
Your chagrinned, ashamed, speaking lower and slower and trying to less, less, less,
Ridiculouswoman