Every new year arrives with a familiar pressure: be quieter, be smaller, be easier to digest. Tone it down. Smooth the edges. Make yourself more comfortable for others.

I’ve done that before. I’ve folded myself into neat, palatable versions of who I am, versions that felt safer in rooms that weren’t built for me. And every time, I lost something vital in the process.

This year, I’m choosing purpose over permission.

There’s a difference between growth and self-erasure, and too often we’re told the latter is maturity.

That being less is somehow more. That our joy, ambition, queerness, creativity, grief, softness, fire, whatever makes us us, needs to be muted so others don’t feel unsettled.

But here’s the truth: if my light makes someone uncomfortable, it’s not because it’s too bright. It’s because they’ve grown accustomed to darkness, or control.

Purpose doesn’t ask you to shrink. It asks you to show up fully. It demands honesty, even when that honesty disrupts expectations. Especially then.

I’ve spent years learning how to advocate for others, such as students, writers, queer voices, stories that deserve space.

Somewhere along the way, I realized the hardest advocacy is often for yourself. Saying no. Drawing boundaries. Walking away from places that only value you when you’re quiet, agreeable, or convenient.

The new year doesn’t need a “new you.” It needs the truest you, the one who doesn’t apologize for taking up space, for wanting more, for loving deeply, for refusing to disappear.

I’m not interested in resolutions rooted in guilt or fear. I’m interested in alignment. In waking up and choosing what feeds my spirit, not what drains it. In saying yes to what feels expansive and no to what requires me to betray myself.

This year, I’m not dimming my life for anyone else’s comfort.

I’m choosing joy without justification. Rest without shame. Ambition without apology. Love without conditions. And purpose without compromise.

If that makes me “too much,” then maybe the world needs more of that.

Here’s to a year of standing taller, speaking clearer, and living brighter, not in defiance, but in truth.