2022 words to Young Women: this is the year of Dreaming, Healing and Transformation
As a teenager, I used to write memos, notes and encouraging words to myself. I still do it. I still do write memos, notes and encouraging words. This process allows me to reflect, think, appreciate what was, and let go of things that no longer require presence in the moment. It allows me to hope for what can be. I published my first book last year, Unbound: Twitter Thoughts for the Heart and Mind , which resonated with so many people worldwide, based exactly on this process.
I am transparent about my process of becoming. We owe it to ourselves and to others to be true to our experiences and to be each other’s keepers. We owe it to our past to heal the wounds, and to our collective future to lift as we climb to reach higher heights (goodness the climb can be rough! So, if you want to go far, go together). We owe it to our present and to those who move in it, to make space, to learn and to listen, but most importantly to hold each other’s hands so that we can walk together on pathways that are challenging, or *appearing inaccessible.
We experience unique paths from childhood to womanhood. I love Simone de Beauvoir’s quote from The Second Sex (1949) which fully captures this journey: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
In the process of becoming a woman, I realized that we can get lost along the way. Why? External voices, internal doubts. External influences, internal fears. External repressions, internal confusion and vice versa…I also realized that the same way we get lost, may be the same way we get found — “no mud, no lotus…” So, it is possible. It is possible for challenges to turn into possibilities, possibilities into dreams, and for your dreams to flower into reality... Trust and believe in the possibilities.
Trust and believe in yourself and others.
The pandemic we have been experiencing as a collective for the past 2+ years has had a significant impact on our wellbeing, mental health, social and economic fabrics. We still mourn millions of lives, close and far, while hoping for our lives. We hope for the lives of the people we cherish, the neighbors we appreciate, the families we love, the stranger on the street, who just like you and me, still hopes too.
As the saying goes, moments of intense challenges are also moments of great opportunities: the opportunity to rethink how we operate individually and collectively. The opportunity to change and turn the page on the negative things that simply do not work. The opportunity to dream again, higher, stronger of the many things we can still create forward.
My 2022 hope for young women within the Zahara’s Dream community and beyond, is that we find the courage to re-focus our energies to heal better, to dream bigger, and to transform ourselves to become more compassionate and understanding human beings — to continue building this community with love at the center by being each others’ Sisterskeepers. This is how we survived, and this is how we continue.
Now, is the time to find the courage to readjust the external and internal elements that surround us: let go of what needs to go. Nurture what needs to grow.
Now, is the time to become active vessels of positive change forward…and for us to be able to reach this level, we need to become more conscious, and therefore more responsible for ourselves and others. Our world needs more people, particularly young women, who are healed, soft, strong, however you feel comfortable in your skin, to sow seeds to build a brighter today and tomorrow.
Our world needs young women who have come alive, and who take charge of their dreams, of their healing and transformation as the basis to build strong lives within and around themselves. You got this, this is your year to rise and thrive.
Love and Light always,
V.
