A Countdown I Couldn’t Join

My apologies. I did not celebrate the New Year.

People keep asking me the same question:“So, how did you celebrate New Year’s Eve?”

I smile, change the subject, postpone the answer. But maybe it is time to tell the truth.

I went to bed at 9:30 pm.

I tried not to hear people shouting, toasting, celebrating, or the fireworks exploding over Sydney Harbour. I know—hopeless. Not exactly postcard material or Instagram stories. I am not saying they should have done the same.

But I simply could not celebrate.

I struggle to celebrate at the end of a year that felt like a slaughter. A year marked by violence carried out in full view of the world, under the eyes of global leaders who showed very little courage, and even less responsibility.

The statistics alone are shocking.

The numbers coming from conflicts like Ukraine and Gaza are enough to make anyone stop and breathe—if breathing is still possible. Numbers so large they become abstract, almost unreal. And that, perhaps, is the real tragedy: numbers replacing faces, names, stories, dreams.

But what has depressed me most is something deeper than numbers.

This year felt like a renewed massacre of the innocents.

Children.

Young lives cut short before they had time to begin. Lives that never chose a side, never voted, never fired a weapon, never signed a decree. And yet they paid the highest price.

Matilda, the Australian girl tragically killed on 14 December during the Bondi Beach shooting, is the last victim of the year—the final name in a long and shocking list.

I find it hard—almost impossible—to raise a glass and say “Happy New Year” when so many parents are learning how to breathe again after burying their children. When so many families are living with an absence that will never be filled. When the world seems capable of explaining everything except how this keeps happening.

Hope does not mean denial.

Joy does not mean amnesia.

And peace cannot be built on collective distraction.

So no, I did not celebrate.

I rested. I withdrew. I listened to the silence instead of the fireworks. And in that silence, I carried names, faces, and stories that do not belong to a countdown.

This is not pessimism.

It is honesty.

Perhaps the most truthful way to enter a new year is not with noise, but with awareness. Not with fireworks, but with responsibility. Not with denial, but with a renewed commitment to protect what is most fragile.

If there is something worth carrying into the new year, it is this:

The refusal to forget the innocent, and the courage to ask whether our celebrations are still worthy of the world we are living in.

Photo By Rahul: https://www.pexels.com/photo/lighted-candle-695644/