This Year

This Year

This year, I will stand as I am—

unmasked, unwavering, wholly true.

Each step rooted in purpose,

each word a mirror of my heart.

With kindness as my compass

and love as my guide,

I will give freely, live fully,

and honor the beauty of being real.

I hesitated before sharing this image, a frozen moment that feels more raw than real. My face is smeared with the remnants of yesterday’s mascara, lashes clumped like brittle branches in winter. My hair, staticky and defeated, is pulled back into something too tight, too bare. The mirror offers no mercy. And yet, I promised myself this year would be about shedding. The masks. The layers. The small, practiced comforts of concealment.

What I see is not performance. It is evidence.

This feels like the beginning of an excavation, a deliberate unearthing of my own history. These years have been carved by struggle, discord moving through me like weather that never quite clears. There were seasons of collapse, long stretches where survival itself felt like labor. And yet, amid the wreckage, something improbable kept growing. Parts of me, parts of my life, found a way to stay alive even while others quietly came apart.

For a long time, I learned to look at myself with judgment before compassion. I searched for what was wrong instead of what had endured. Now I am trying something different. For once, I am learning to be kind to the woman in the mirror. Not indulgent, not sentimental, but honest.

I will give her credit where it is due. For surviving the chaos. For moving through the sharp edges of illness. For holding together fragile bonds with the people she loves. For waking up again and again when it would have been easier to disappear into numbness.

The image does not show perfection. It shows persistence. It shows a woman mid process, unfinished, unhidden, still here. And maybe that is what this year is really asking of me. Not to become someone else, but to finally stand still long enough to see who I already am