The Year of the Snake: A Cycle Finished

December 26, 2025

In 2025, the Year of the Snake in the Chinese calendar began.

The Year of the Snake is often described as the end of a cycle.

A shedding.

A reckoning.

A turn to what is true.

For me, it wasn’t symbolic.

It was lived.

This year didn’t ask me to become someone new.

It forced me to become a defined and refined version of myself—

by ending what I could no longer carry or justify.

In 2017, something fundamental shifted,

setting in motion a long, exacting cycle that would not finish until I fully stopped abandoning myself to stay connected.

When a long relationship ended, I made an intentional decision not to jump into another one. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t reach for a person to regulate my emotions, steady my nervous system, or fill the hollow space left by loss. I stayed single. I was celibate for two years. I learned how to be with myself without using attachment as anesthesia.

Even though I eventually returned to that relationship, the interruption mattered. Once a pattern is broken consciously, it can never fully return unconsciously. That moment marked the beginning of a long cycle.

Between 2017 and 2025, I spent a great deal of time alone.

Some of that aloneness was healing.

Some of it was protective.

All of it was necessary.

I was learning how not to use another person to regulate myself. I was learning how to survive grief, upheaval, and identity loss without immediately replacing them with a relationship. I was learning how to sit with discomfort rather than anesthetize it with connection.

But there is another truth I can name now, clearly and without shame.

When I did choose people during those years, I often chose dynamics that cost me my dignity. The circumstances differed. The stories were different. But the trade was the same: I made myself smaller, waited longer than I should have, accepted inconsistency and neglect, and attached to potential instead of reality. I let hope lead when evidence did not support it.

Over time, the cost of that trade became impossible to ignore.

This year—

the Year of the Snake—

was the end of that cycle.

Not because I finally chose perfectly.

But because I reached the point where self-betrayal was no longer possible.

I stopped trading my dignity for attachment. I stopped attaching to fantasy. I stopped letting hope override behavior. I stopped staying in dynamics that required me to abandon my self-respect in order to belong.

And just as importantly, I stopped believing that strength meant doing everything alone.

For many years, I lived at two extremes: isolating myself while quietly hoping for connection, or accepting connection that diminished me so I wouldn’t be alone. Both were survival strategies. Both are complete now.

What remains is something new for me.

I am no longer willing to use people to regulate myself. I am no longer willing to accept a warm body to avoid loneliness. And I am no longer willing to sit alone, quietly hoping for healthy connection that never arrives.

I am selective about who has access to me. I am discerning about how long I remain in any dynamic. I let behavior—not hope, not chemistry, not potential—determine attachment.

This isn’t guardedness.

It’s integration.

The cycle that began in 2017 is finished.

Not because I learned a lesson.

But because my nervous system, my boundaries, and my self-respect have changed.

I don’t need to repeat this pattern anymore.

I don’t need to test it again.

I don’t need to prove anything.

I know the cost now.

But more importantly, I know what I want and what I deserve.

That knowledge is permanent.

And I still believe in love and happy endings.