New Year’s Resolutions Are Still Cool. For some, They Can Be A Means of Survival
Reflections on Trauma, Growth, and the Power of a Fresh Start
Trigger Warning: Discusses sexual assault, trauma, and other sensitive experiences.
Soooooooo… this past year was rough. I think we can all agree. The snake absolutely shed its skin, and it’s not done.
2025 forced me to confront my mental health, accountability, and what I actually want from life. As someone diagnosed with CPTSD, I’ve been living in survival mode my entire life. As a survivor of countless traumas, things so complex even therapists have apologized for not being fully equipped to help me—I never thought I’d make it this far. Ten years ago, at 15, I never thought I’d see 25, let alone having the blessing and salvation that is my son and the namesake of this very magazine. I have decided this year is the year that I finally have New Year’s Resolutions and begin to healthily establish and maintain goals.
As a Pisces rising, I’ve always daydreamed, but I never let myself truly dream. Complex trauma rewires your brain. A nervous system that’s never felt its baseline makes it nearly impossible to create stable goals and even harder to achieve them. Surviving to adulthood was already a feat, imagining elderhood or even “what comes next” still feels impossible in so many ways. I’ve spent my life just trying to survive, mainly for my siblings.
2025 was the year I had to confront the truth of my upbringing and the truth of me. Shadow work, full stop. I examined how I allow others to treat me, how I react, and how I let things affect me. Along with CPTSD, I have ADHD and OCD and an underlying chronic illness we have yet to figure out that has left me hospitalized more than I can count. Surviving has meant severe and chronic masking, coupled with self sabotaging tendencies.
I have people in my life, some who have been long time staples who do not actually know me. They don’t know my favorite color or that I grew up in an abusive household where I was once tied to a bed and forced to urinate in a pitcher because I mixed languages at school, or that I slept in the same bed as my father while he cheated on my mother in another country. They don’t know I was bullied for not looking like my family, or that I used to check every night to see if my mom had passed away from her heart condition because I was told I’d have to take care of my siblings if she did, while I was still a child. They don’t know I was sexually assaulted by two peers, or that last year I had to cut myself off entirely from my family, leading to harassment and public humiliation as attacks were spread on Facebook to peers, ex-professors, and more.
I’ve also known people who did know all of that, and more, because of my compulsive need to confess everything I hold in due to over-compelling guilt and shame. 2025 had me living in near constant paranoia. People I grew up with scoffed at me publicly because of what they read from my family’s smear campaign. ‘Friends’ used my trauma against me. In my silence, I had to hear the lies they told to save face, on top of my family chaos, while trying to be a good wife, mother, and friend, all in silence.
I turned inward. I critiqued myself harshly. I hated myself. I spiraled, ruminating in shame and humiliation. It was hard to believe this wasn’t my Saturn return, it carried lessons that I genuinely thought would break me. I feared the little girl in me, the one who always believed she had potential, would never fully actualize it. I thought my upbringing, my brain, and my circumstances had ruined my life, despite my pure intentions.
A reiki session long ago told me my throat chakra was blocked. Communication in my household was nonexistent, as was emotional intelligence. Combine that with language barriers, I have long felt unable to fully express myself, constantly misunderstood and occasionally being gas lit about it.. Writing has been my safe place; I can spill words and fix them later, but even that felt unsafe, fearing my processing, truth, and self discovery would be weaponized against me.
I have always been the youngest in every room, and arrested development certainly did NOT help. I was never afforded patience and understanding, maybe because I was silent about why I am the way I am.
Recently, I remembered Amber Scholl and her vision boards–things I tried as a teenager but never followed through on– because I didn’t know if I’d even be alive next year. Content creator Meg Lucero puts it perfectly:
“The practice of concept creation for many people living through childhood trauma as adults is over their heads. It’s so hard to tap into… We get stuck on what we want to do… what’s next… what we’re passionate about… so many of us don’t understand how to utilize our greatest skills… we struggle to turn our deepest desires into reality.”
I spent the early part of my twenties obsessively chasing success and stability, feeling like I owed it to myself and my family. I carried the burden of our poverty, of their immigration hardships and the paranoia of protecting my son from similar experiences. My goals were not healthy because I did not know how to healthily set or pursue them.
It is very easy to see someone like me, paralyzed with fear as lazy or incompetent when you’ve never survived what I have survived. Trauma can mask genius. It can overwhelm potential. The world and those much more fortunate rarely have the patience for that.
“New year, same me” is valid, of course, and true in many cases, but there’s something powerful in a fresh start.
Recently I deactivated all my social media and I am on the brink of completely deleting it–one of my new goals. I am focusing inward, on myself and my child. It is never too late. If a new year gives you that little push to begin again, then by all means, embrace it. As the energy of the fire horse rushes in, run like the wind.