Calling In A New Year
2025 didn’t exactly go down how I originally thought it would. This time last year, despite the growing anxiety of knowing that something was up with my body, I was high off the most beautiful Christmas with my then partner, nourished and loved up. I didn’t seriously entertain the thought that I could have cancer.
I had a couple of scans in January. First, a thermogram which seemed to suggest that there wasn’t anything to be too alarmed about, and then an ultrasound which seemed to suggest that things needed looking into further. The anxiety grew, the GP referred me onto the cancer pathway at the hospital, and biopsies were booked in, although I didn’t have these until I came back from a short trip to Bosnia in early March.
The rest of the story you may already know if you’ve been reading my other posts - in short, a diagnosis of female hormone positive bilateral breast cancer on 1st April, followed by a further diagnosis of stage 4 with metastases to the bones on 29th April 2025.
This news turned my whole life upside down. Very swiftly, I closed my practice and stopped working clinically as a psychotherapist. I realised that I had to change everything, but I didn’t know where to start. I spent the first few months researching, reading and obsessing about what to do, trying desperately to fend off fear and regain some semblance of control in a world that was in free-fall. My friends and community rallied around me. My partner left to go travelling and then for reasons only known to The One, never returned.
I broke and healed, and broke and healed, again and again. Things got worse and worse, and then in the last couple of months my mobility has been getting better and pain has improved.
I’ve made peace with the fact that 2025 was the year in which I was forced to offer up all the unhealed parts of myself to the sacrificial altar. I had started out thinking that it was the year that I could finally begin to live - to complete commitments that tethered me to London and the UK, so I could travel and experience the world in a way that I’d never had the opportunity to do so before. Instead, my body and circumstances meant that suddenly my life became very, very small. I think that this is so that I could do the internal growth work necessary for true healing.
I’m aware that in numerology, 2025 has been a ‘9’ year, a year of completion. And that this has been amplified by the fact that in Chinese astrology, it’s also been the Year of the Wood Snake, a year of shedding. I’ve had to let go of so much: limiting beliefs, old patterns of behaviour, my vocation, my identity as a mother, my relationship, my mobility… And I know that this has been necessary, so that I can heal and make space for something entirely new. Something better than I can ever imagine.
2026 in contrast will be a ‘1’ year in numerology, the beginning of a new cycle, and also the Year of the Fire Horse, a year of forward movement and momentum. I am excited about this.
I reach the end of this year both hopeful and tired. I want to live a full life again, to be able to go for walks in nature, dance, go out with my friends rather than have them always dutifully visiting me, travel, and follow my heart and my dreams.
So this is my prayer for 2026. I call on Ya Rahman and Ya Rahim and pray for mercy and compassion. I pray that the results of my scans in January will show positive improvements. I pray that I’ll continue to feel stronger and regain more mobility and independence. I pray that the tumours in my breasts realise that their message has been heeded, loud and clear, and don’t feel the need to hang around any more. I pray that I will be healed, that this time next year, I will be looking forward to celebrating the most joyous New Year of my life.
