Dr. Darline Wilkenson

February 7, 1986. People poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince before dawn. Men wept. Women held their children toward the sky. Someone’s grandmother, who had never danced in public, danced. After 29 years of Duvalier terror, after 30,000 souls swallowed by darkness, after the systematic looting of our national dignity, we thought we were finally free.

January does not knock gently. It arrives with questions that penetrate the comfortable narratives we've constructed about ourselves. What will you carry forward? What must you finally release? Who will you choose to become when no one is watching?

The weight of a year settles heaviest in December. Not in the festivities or the forced cheer, but in the quiet moments between when the noise dies and we're left alone with the truth of what we've survived. December doesn't ask us to celebrate what happened. It demands we reckon with who we became in the process.