It’s the first week of 2026. I did not end up inviting the year with bells. I spent the 31st reading a last manga, feet tucked under my legs next to warm light. I texted my favorite colleague, sent good tidings to one friend and fell asleep. I would enjoy raucous music, dressing up, hugging my neighbors as the fireworks filled the sky, but that was another life.
Now, a humming quietness drives my days. 2025 is the year I started synthesizing the world around me. I am starting to understand how to live a bit better based on my needs. ️I spent a lot of my life trying to intellectualize what I felt. No matter how greedy I was, how much I wanted to absorb the world in its entirety, everything felt fragmented. And that fragmentation made it so I understood life lessons, but could not internalize them.
But I have spent the past few years thinking and writing. Too much really. I think these past few weeks has reinforced that writing will probably not serve me as much as it did before️ and I am starting to consider if it is time to archive these files.
I know lessons will be forgotten and I will need to reinforce them. When I struggle, I should address the need instead of hating myself. And most of all, to not be a sponge. I am giving myself the space to think as I absorb the world because only in doing so can I be myself. Living nonstop was killing me inside, but now I lazily map out patterns in my head as new information builds on my worldview. I'm not sure if I feel optimistic, pesismistic, at peace or lonely. I just feel more awake when I don't have to make others happy or satisfied. I think it's just a feeling of finally deciding that I am enough, becasue I don't need to earn myself.
Orquídea didn’t like it because she knew she wasn’t a flower, delicate and pretty and waiting to be plucked. For what? To be smelled? To sit in a glass of water until she withered? She was more than that. She wanted to be rooted so deep into the earth that nothing, no human, no force of nature, save an act of the heavens themselves, could rip her out.
– Zoraida Córdova (The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina)