Whatever it is you want from this world, I wish you’ll have it. We all want different things that are all the same one way or another—we just want to discover ourselves, experience life, and explore our own take on what’s deemed right or wrong.
I hope that you’ll be able to do whatever it is you think life won’t let you do. I truly hope you’ll be whomever you want to be. Ultimately, and ideally, I wish you’d discover who you are and I wish you’d stay true to that person your entire life.
See, being true to yourself is a life-long commitment many are scared to have. It includes giving up people, opportunities, places, conversations, and everything in-between that no longer align with who you truly are. It involves not forcing yourself to do or try anything you’re not completely comfortable with in an attempt to fit-in or look less weird.
It takes a lot of courage and bravery to believe in what you actually believe in—that is, to take your set of values, morals, ethics, and beliefs or the lack of them, seriously. How I hope you’ll be weird, because weird is unique and unique means unforgettable.
We live in a world that repeatedly tells us to be unique whilst pressuring us to be all the same, simultaneously. My hope for you is to speak differently, dress differently, sound differently, kiss differently, love differently, and leave when necessary—also differently.
We jump from one form of oppression to another, all one and the same. Some people have left their old oppressing beliefs only to fall victim of their oppressive society that dictates everything from how they look to what they eat on the daily. Others have left their oppressive households only to fall victim to themselves—their thoughts, their feelings.
I hope you’d free yourself this year, from all that’s holding you back, whatever or whoever it may be. I hope you’d replace the things and people that are holding you back with ones that help you move forward—but at your own pace, in your own time, and according to your definition of forward.
Mostly, I hope you’ll find love. Find love? No, I hope you’ll create love: the kind that comes from within, the kind no one can strip you of no matter how they try. When you love yourself fully is when you put yourself first, and when you put yourself first is when everything falls in place.
When you focus on yourself, you’ll find your journey—the one you’ve been avoiding all those years. When people get concerned with the journey of others, they only hurt themselves. When they hurt themselves, a cycle of unnecessary pain and negativity will come to be. When the focus is on everyone but themselves, they create but more self-destruction—the kind that destroys others.
Alleviate yourself and others from any negative feelings you might have carried in a moment of frustration. Judgment is for the weak; only the strong can pick others up, even whilst deteriorating. I hope you commit to humanity by committing to yourself first and foremost.
By, Zeinab Hamdar, Journalist, Editor & Writer
English 
العربية