Farewell 2025: Battered, But So Rooted

At last, we bid farewell to this crazy year! 

A few months ago, I wrote this blog post titled “Is 2025 trying to break me?” in a failed attempt to understand the horrors I, along with countless, were living among. As an immigrant. As a public health professional. As a woman. 

But in the midst of trying to make sense of all these attacks, one word kept coming back. Belonging.

As a Haitian woman who spent her childhood in constant motion—moving every two to three years, leaving my home country, assimilating into an entirely different one at fifteen, I carry a bone-deep feeling of not belonging. 

But then came executive orders targeting immigrants and the over-politicization of public health, coupled with Haiti’s relentless cycle of violence. The idea of belonging became a more visceral and urgent concern. A feeling many worked toward that was and is being crushed. 

I’m also aware that tomorrow is just another day. 2026 will surely have its own marks—whether good and bad. 

But 2025 actually taught my fifteen-year-old self something she desperately needed to know: belonging isn’t always about a country or a neighborhood. It’s the fact that we matter. It’s the deep roots that grow within—values, morals, a sense of self—that hold steady even when everything external is battering them.

Am I naive to have hope for 2026? Yes. In fact, I am the queen of that delusion. 

I have to be.