YES, you’ve stumbled upon yet another New Year article again. It is yet one of many transitional periods of our lives, when we often reflect on the past year. While New Year’s Day was on Wednesday, we’re all still fresh off the boat into the year 2020. It takes about a month or two until you stop correcting your 19 to 20 in date slots and your mind keeps wandering off on having a ‘fresh start.’ The beginning of a new year can be very nerve-wracking, because we are faced with the past, whether we like it or not and whether we’ve had a good year or not. If you take a look at your social media, I am sure it is filled with many reflective posts from your friends and family. How does that make you feel?

That question asked before can also lead to another question: “Has the year 2019 healed or hurt you?”. If I am to personally answer that, I must say that the past year hurt me to heal me. To further explain that; I have been hurt and has faced many challenges, many of which have hurt me tremendously. Nonetheless, I am healed by the fact that I have learned from those challenges. You can never run away from or get rid of the challenges and issues that come along with your life. Yes, we did not bargain for most of it, but at the end of it all, I am a strong believer that there is strength in pain. Suppressing the negatives only leads to more negatives.

If your answer suggests that you were hurt, I urge you to learn from your challenges and find strength from them. There is a reason why people set ‘resolutions’ for themselves. It is a means of self-betterment and self-development; and while many of us will probably give up on our resolutions by March, the very concept behind a resolution is important. A ‘fresh start’ at the beginning of the year is great, but we can always have ‘fresh-starts’ from challenging situations, no matter what time of year it is, with resolutions that’ll help heal us. If 2019 aided in healing you as an individual, then I am delighted to hear that. Nonetheless, do not allow that fact to deter you from further self-development and setting goals for yourself.

Now that an entire year has passed and we’ve also realised that it’ll be another year of us getting a bit older, it’s another chapter to tell our grandchildren and it is also a blank book with 365 pages to be filled; how will you begin to write your story? Whether or not we have been hurt or healed, or even both, many of us will always find a way to focus on the negatives and that will ultimately lead to us repeating our past mistakes. Instead, I’d urge each of you reading this to grasp every new opportunity, each day and live for the present as you learn from the past, that will eventually better your future. Ellen Goodman perfectly said that, “We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through our lives– not by looking for flaws, but for potential.” I most certainly agree with her and yet again, I urge you all to ask yourselves, “Has the year 2019 hurt or healed me?”, If I was hurt, how can I change that? And if I am healed, then how do I continue down that very path?