New Year’s Intentions

It’s that time again at the end of the year when we clean our space, create our vision boards, and write our New Year's resolutions. We meditate and ponder the year's memories, promising ourselves that next year will be our year, as if we haven’t done it at the end of every year of our adult lives.

However, when I look back at all my New Year’s resolutions throughout my life, I notice I have either gone into the new year without a resolution or stated resolutions without any intentions or feelings. Almost as if I am rehearsing and roleplaying the collective performance we all do.

Like having a dollar in my pocket will ensure I will not be broke, while I spend money as if I could print it, and quit jobs as if I can afford it.

Yet this year, 2026, there’s something that has awakened within me that rattles my bones and produces the most significant amount of fear. These feelings of anxiety and heart- throbbing feelings sprout from the desire, choice, agency, and autonomy to decide to live. To grow and launch a life where I am aware of my hands on the steering wheel and my feet on the gas pedal, this is the only time when my decisions can be my driver's license—a time when tests don’t reflect how I choose to drive this so-called short-term life or need an overseer in the passenger seat to babysit and judge my calm rides or road rage.

Whether my hands are 9 and 3, searching my bag for some lip gloss, or throwing up birdies, I am in complete control when driving to my destination of self, en route to the version of self where I can thrive, honestly and unapologetically.

On this map, I have planted specific monuments I want to see and experience this year.

These grand monuments of check marks, where I would have evidence that I did, in fact, enjoy the sights and/or experiences of it, or maybe not. However, here is where I would write it all down.

These are the same monuments where others might have taken photos of, climbed, partied on, had broken hearts around, or possibly lost their virginity to someone who doesn’t know what they are doing.

These monuments are the rites of passage into the human experience that I didn’t want to participate in, out of fear of seeing and believing that I actually belong here.

Or from the social stigma of being a girl and how I took ownership of identities that denied me the right to live, while also conditioning me to separate myself from what I deemed was an unjust visual representation of girlhood and its impact on my womanhood, which I am fighting to find a place in due to the indulges and digestion of narratives I fixated on through the lens of a girl raised in a house of all boys.

Each monument visited would be the first time I would see such a wonder. I would reverently take the opportunity to be present in its glory lessons and blessings with.

For a change and a chance has fallen upon me, wherefore I’ve learned myself in a way in which I never knew before.

This upcoming year is unlike the years prior because I will arrive differently, knowing that I am taking life rather than life taking me out.

I am choosing to be a participant instead of a victim. I am actively making a conscious decision to pick myself every time, even when things don't look as I believe they should. But most importantly, I will show up when I am afraid, because I’ve heard that's a magical place to start.

Why not start with the art of being grown? Why not start with discomfort? Why not start with wanting to be excited by the thrill of experimenting? Why not start becoming the version of myself that I need?

Because being grown is complex and hosts fears. It oozes chaos, rebirth, dysfunction, and evolution. It’s something you can be without permission, and it boosts your confidence like no other.

It’s an ever-evolving revolving door that I would rather get dizzy in.

Still, it all comes with a risk: the unknown and letting go of the version of myself that kept me comfortable and cautious.

I am releasing cautiousness to invite vulnerability.

I am shedding fear that will create more fear, yet I will move through it while holding all my worries, as if I am collecting the infinity rings that will grant me all joys and lessons of life.

This year, I would be stepping out on myself, like someone in an unsatisfying relationship without regret, worry, or shame. I will be creeping on myself for the chance to find myself.

All these late nights, solo dates, travel, healing, and finally transforming into the woman my inner child once hoped to become. A person she saw but was afraid to let blossom because of my inner stagnation, which kept me a seed that my inner child held tightly, clenched in her fist behind her back, as if her growth would cause her to break into small specks and drift on the wind like dandelions.

‘Tis this new season, this new year, I am unwrapping like a child on Christmas Day.