I greeted this year with my whole chest open.
The Year of the Fire Horse is a rare convergence that arrives only once every sixty years and promises transformation, momentum, and courage. After the cautious, coiled energy of 2025, the Fire Horse was supposed to gallop us into something better. However, we are barely a quarter into the year and I am exhausted.
As an Australian Lebanese woman, I carry two worlds in my body.
Psychologist Dr Reem El Baba who l follow on Instagram shared a post recently that stopped me mid-scroll. “In the Arab world,” she wrote, “we don’t experience war as ‘news.’ We experience it in our bodies — no matter where we are. Our bodies recognise it before our minds do.” I read those words and felt something in me unlock. That is it. That is exactly it.
Because while I sit here in comfort genuinely privileged, with a roof and food and safety, my body has been holding a war. I send whatsapp messages asking family in Lebanon if they are okay, then feel the absurdity of those three words in full force. I constantly scroll social media and watch the news. I think about the little girls seeing their dreams of education, career and freedom disappear before them. I think about pregnant women forced to give birth in tents, on roadsides, in rubble, trying to keep something sacred alive in conditions no human should endure. I cannot stop thinking about them.
This is what solidarity does to the body. It accumulates. And it is heavy to carry in a world that has never felt less harmonious.
Paradoxically, Australia is right now marking Harmony Week. This year’s theme, Everyone Belongs feels suffocatingly ironic. Institutional racism is not retreating, it is recruiting. Hate directed at people of different cultures, religions, and races has not merely persisted it has been handed a megaphone by politicians and influencers who have built entire platforms on division. Racism, it turns out, is very comfortable in the age of the algorithm.
And then there is what is happening to women. The anti-rights movement is not a fringe concern, it is a river gaining force.
Reproductive rights are being wound back. The manosphere is swallowing impressionable young men whole. Research from Monash University found that Australian teachers have observed a disturbing shift in boys’ behaviour since around 2022: misogyny more explicit, more emboldened, more normalised in our classrooms. In Australia, one woman is killed by an intimate partner every nine days. In 2023, the sexual violence crime rate reached a 31-year high.
We are watching the world shrink for girls and expand its cruelty toward women, and we are being asked to celebrate harmony.
I am not without hope, but I am bone tired. There is a particular exhaustion that belongs to women who hold too much, feel too much, and are asked to absorb too much and still show up every day.
However, history has never been changed by people who were comfortable. The suffragettes were tired. The women of the anti-apartheid movement were tired. The mothers who built organisations against domestic violence were tired, furious, and unwilling to accept that this was simply how things had to be. That is where we are now.
So, we rest. We refuel through community, through the radical act of sitting with other women and saying me too, I feel it too. We tend to our bodies carrying wars they didn’t start. And then we get back up. We write. We march. We vote. We call out hatred. We show up for the young women watching all of this wondering if the world has anything left to offer them. We tell them, yes. We are still here.
Exhaustion, when it is shared, becomes solidarity. And solidarity, when it is sustained, becomes change.
Tired is not finished. And I am not finished yet.