January 1 is often treated as a symbolic reset, a cultural insistence that renewal can be declared on demand. Yet for many of us, particularly those shaped by long periods of precarity, caregiving, and professional vigilance, beginnings do not arrive cleanly.
Image: The Orange Suitcase
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
They arrive through the body.
On the morning of January 1, I pack an orange suitcase. The act is deliberate, slow, and unexpectedly revealing. Packing, I come to realize, is not merely logistical. It is an embodied practice of identity negotiation. What I choose to carry, what I leave behind, and how I tolerate the uncertainty created by that space becomes a form of inquiry into who I am becoming.
Identity as Process, Not Declaration
Identity is often narrated as stable or cumulative, something we have rather than something we continuously do. Sociological and narrative scholars have long challenged this assumption, arguing that identity is formed through ongoing meaning-making, particularly at moments of transition (Giddens, 1991; Bruner, 2004). January 1, framed as a beginning, intensifies this process.
As I pack, I notice what is absent. I do not pack teaching materials. I do not pack contingency plans. I do not pack symbols of productivity. This absence is intentional. For decades, my professional identity as an educator within precarious academic labour has required constant preparedness and an outward orientation shaped by what Butler (2004) describes as the demand to render oneself intelligible and viable within institutional norms. Packing without these artifacts is a quiet refusal of that script.
This is not an abandonment of identity, but a suspension. A temporary loosening that creates space for becoming.
Anxiety, Uncertainty, and the Body
Transitions often activate anxiety, particularly when identity has been tethered to performance and responsibility. Rather than conceptualizing anxiety here as pathology, I approach it as a learned response to prolonged uncertainty. As Ahmed (2010) reminds us, emotions do not reside solely within individuals; they circulate through social and institutional arrangements.
Packing on January 1, anxiety appears not as panic but as an impulse. The urge to overpack. The desire to anticipate every scenario. The need to force clarity before it is available. These impulses are familiar. They once functioned as strategies of safety.
What shifts in this moment is my response. Instead of obeying the impulse to force certainty, I practice restraint. I leave space in the suitcase. I allow questions to remain unanswered. In doing so, I engage what Brown (2021) describes as vulnerability not as exposure for its own sake, but as a willingness to remain present without guarantees.
This is not fearlessness. It is tolerance.
Relearning Safety Through Ordinary Acts
Much of the literature on trauma-informed and somatic inquiry emphasizes that safety is not established cognitively, but experientially (van der Kolk, 2015; Carello & Butler, 2015). Packing becomes one such ordinary site of relearning safety.
Folding clothes slowly. Choosing comfort over appearance. Closing a suitcase that does not strain at the seams. These small acts register in the body as signals: there is no emergency here. Nothing needs to be forced.
This reframing matters. In neoliberal academic cultures that reward speed, output, and endurance, rest and restraint are often misread as failure (Hersey, 2022). Yet what unfolds here is not disengagement, but recalibration. A shift from vigilance to attentiveness.
Leaving Without Idealizing Arrival
A common narrative trap in stories of departure is idealization. The assumption that leaving automatically produces healing, clarity, or transformation. I resist this framing intentionally.
As I pack, I refuse to script who I will be on the other side of this journey. I do not require the destination to justify the leaving. This aligns with Nash and Bradley’s (2011) description of Scholarly Personal Narrative as one that resists premature closure, allowing meaning to emerge rather than be imposed.
What I carry forward instead is presence. Attention. A commitment to noticing without narrating every experience into productivity or insight.
January 1 as Ethical Beginning
What emerges through this act of packing is not resolution, but integrity. January 1 becomes less about reinvention and more about consent. Consent to begin again without erasing the past. Consent to carry less. Consent to meet uncertainty without escalation.
In this way, packing becomes both method and metaphor. A lived demonstration of identity as process, anxiety as information rather than command, and beginning again as a practice grounded in care rather than force.
The orange suitcase closes easily. That, too, appears to be data.
Figure: The Orange Suitcase
Created by NoteBook LM, 2026
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.
Bruner, J. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research, 71(3), 691–710.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge.
Carello, J., & Butler, L. D. (2015). Practicing what we teach: Trauma-informed educational practice. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 35(3), 262–278.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford University Press.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
