Did you have a Year of the Snake too?

Reflections on 2025, shedding old skin, and the nature of personal growth.

At the start of this year, I got some posts on my Instagram feed, as one tends to, about 2025 being the Year of the Snake according to Chinese astrology. I then read an article about it and thought, “hmm.”

Nearly a year later now, I am impressed. That there is a language for this kind of personal growth, that this year, a “number 9” year (2+0+2+5), was meant to mark it, and that the Chinese knew this all along and also spread the lore—all of it is wonderful, because I now have the vocabulary to describe the transformations that I (and the others I’ve talked to about their 2025) underwent this year.

Funnily enough, it began with the ghastliest start I’ve ever had to any new year. Fresh off a romantic rejection, after weeks of travel, I was generally nervous and dysregulated. I won’t get into exactly what happened after; what’s relevant now is that during a 4-day hostage situation, from January 3 to January 7, 2025, I dreamt about snakes slithering down a hill I was climbing up with an unknown man. (Before you get too worried, this is also the window in which I received word about Shashi Tharoor’s review of my book, which was published later in April—life has an uncanny way of giving you the maddest things to process simultaneously.)

Anyway, I interpreted the unpleasant episode and the concurrent dream as a lesson about learning to spot and deal with snakes. An engineering + B-school friend group of mine always used “snake” to describe sneaky, untrustworthy, extractive characters.

But the word also took on its meaning from Chinese astrology soon after. In learning how to deal with snakes, I had to shed my old skins, like a snake.

Some of you—those of you who’ve read the book, perhaps—know that I come from an extremely dysfunctional and patriarchal family. When you’ve undergone a childhood that required you to morph into a version of yourself that pleased and regulated the elders, you develop a brain and nervous system that’s wired to work against itself. It is ingrained in you to suppress your own needs and instincts, however legitimate and intelligent, because they were once dangerous to your survival within the family system.

In adulthood, red flags appear transparent; you make excuses for bad behaviour, completely miss when someone is operating against your interests, because there’s a program inside you, still unconscious, that believes that connection will be disrupted by your truth. And for children, connection is paramount.

So your truths—the hurts and violations you endure—know better than to even reach your consciousness, much less get expressed in relationship. Only later, through repeated trauma-reenactment from such faulty programming, do you learn the hard way that no such relationship is worth preserving, unless there’s redressal and repair after you express the truth, which you somehow have to summon the courage to. It feels like death.

This is why I’ve meditated so much over the past few years—I’ve done 3 Vipassana courses, (I’m late for my fourth), and, like bathing or going to the gym daily, meditation has become part of my essential hygiene—to not only decondition the self that was never me, but also continually access a centre of authenticity, insight, guidance, and goodwill that is truly mine. This practice gives me the courage to take the risks I do, the tools to emotionally regulate, the gumption to be myself even when it means debauching conventional wisdom, which I don’t think I was ever a fan of, to be fair.

So, I am confident (which involves a tonne of doubt, by the way) because I am doing my best to be conscious, sentient, aware of the forces that propel me, which sometimes seem to come from a strange source of Self other than ego. I don’t think I could have written the book that I did, in all its ‘brave’, ‘brutally honest’ glory, without such work.

Each unravelling or ego death that happened over these years came unpredictably—they would not be effective, or in service of growth, otherwise—but through the succession of them, there emerged a pattern, which led me to study Jung and what he calls individuation. The pattern seemed to be that the impossible things the ego wanted would seem fantastically within reach, until it suddenly slipped away; or that the fantastic things I did get required the ego that wanted them, in a certain time or in a certain way, to die anyway.

In 2025, even this pattern seemed to reverse, so growth and life stayed unpredictable. Imagine if it didn’t, and I became the one to just Figure Life Out, lol.

This year, the ego deaths involved me getting what I wanted—!!—which is something I never thought could happen. Not without extreme effort, anyway. Now I had to learn to stay comfortable in joy, abundance, stability, and the pleasure of being myself and getting rewarded for it, too, instead of running away from these states because they’re temporary (just like the opposite, sorrowful states, which are somehow still easier to stay committed to), or sabotaging them because trusting that they will stay, or that I deserved goodness at all, once felt unbearable.

This will go down as the year I learnt to let life rearrange itself around the truth. Instead of contorting myself to produce certain outcomes I’d been conditioned to want, in relationships, friendships, and work, I learnt what it means to honour the self and still have partnership.

I never believed this was possible for me, given how used to self-sacrifice and grinding I have been, in big and small ways, and how much we’ve all been told that success and relationships mean endless compromise. But I had taken that too far, perhaps. I mean we all contort ourselves to stay employable or fit in socially, don’t we?

Do even the richest get to honour and choose themselves over something ‘desirable’, something they’ve been told to want?

I want to say that this was has been my favourite year ever. Even though it wasn’t necessarily the quietest or most peaceful. The more I started to express myself and communicate maturely in relationships, the more I realised that any outcome is Okay. The point is not merely longevity, or nostalgia for who we are in relationships, but the simultaneous preservation of authenticity and connection. When either is sacrificed in favour of the other, some steering or rearrangement may be necessary.

Emma Watson said it best in her interview with Jay Shetty. Contrary to the Disney idea of “falling in love” as this sort of irreversible lightning bolt that strikes us, real love is finding someone who will stay in a dance with us, with whom conflict is generative, with whom we can argue and negotiate a partnership and way of being that is mutually safe, win-win, and aligned.

It is about constantly revealing layers of ourselves to one another, even when such vulnerability and authenticity risks the very connection we seek to preserve. Each new truth or layer may cause another to leave, but the upside is enormous: they see us more clearly, as do we, and, ideally, intimacy deepens all around.

As a consequence of shedding old skins, I have had people exit my life, I have exited others’ lives, and I have made new friendships and relationships from a place of deeper trust and connection with myself. It now feels possible to bereave an ending, not as a signal of regret, but as homage to the beauty of what was. What is grief if not love persisting, etcetera, etcetera?

And now for something completely different.

A quick recap of everything else I loved about this year, because I have New Year’s Eve plans to get to summarily:

• I published my debut book, Famous Last Questions, in April 2025, after 9 months of writing and 9 more months of waiting for editors and publishers and printers to do their part and other years spent planning and getting to the point of writing it. Thank you with all my heart to everyone who’s read it, liked it, reviewed it online, and helped make it a success. My ‘success criteria’ for the book were manifold: one, to write it just how I wanted to; two, to put it out in the world somehow; three, for it to reach the right audience and be appreciated by the right people and in the right circles; four, to make a name for myself as a writer, so that I can write more; five, to sell it, so that I can write more. On all these fronts, I have gotten almost everything I wanted to and then some. Special thanks to my agent, Kanishka Gupta, for making difficult things happen. But I still want more, so I’m going to keep doing things around it. If you haven’t read it yet, or if you have read it but not left your review on Amazon/Goodreads—please do, it helps.

• I completed a year of therapy in October, and it helped me heal from this tetrahedron of narcissistic abuse—family scapegoating—C-PTSD—disorganized attachment style. I have, as a result, developed a more secure attachment style and sense of self overall. Again, I thought this was impossible for me, but here we are. I hope this gives hope to anyone struggling with seemingly impossible relational wounds. I recommend conventional psychotherapy (an integrated set of modalities like IFS, talk therapy, and somatic practices), not just for healing from such targetted issues, but also as a continual source of reflection and support, which most people need but avoid and would benefit from.

• I travelled and visited old friends multiple times this year, and got closer to their dogs (and other dogs too), and also lived with a dear friend for most of the year, which was a catalyst for some of the transformations I describe above. I love all my friends so much, present, former, future, and will never get over the fact that I have been loved, known, and taken care of so deeply, so many times, and vice versa. If you’re reading this and see yourself in it, it’s real, it’s you, my gratitude is endless. J.K. Rowling was on to something with the concept of horcruxes; the most intimate relationships do have that effect: a part of yourself is forever stored in another with life-preserving power and reverence.

• My brother visited me twice this year, and we hung out as two adults, outside of the family, for the first time ever. We get along so well, and we hit many first milestones together (getting his first tattoo together, sharing our first… sandwich!). We watched three seasons of Industry (I’m excitedly awaiting Season 4 in January 2026), but we are yet to go go-karting together.

• I learnt how to play poker in July, and haven’t stopped playing since. It has completed filled the void in my life that not chasing achievement through work all the time left behind. Now, I’m chasing the skill part in skill + luck games, which is life. Especially after having metabolised something as personal as a memoir, I didn’t realise it was fair to be creatively depleted for a bit. I was still trying to push out pieces and big essays when I decided it was okay to poke(r) around my other interests too, considering I am in fact a many-headed-hydra. Poker proved to scratch several itches at once—the part of me that loves learning new things, getting obsessed with them, building new mental models to connect the dots with other things I know, to look at the world completely differently; the part of me that loves math, game theory, doing quick calculations to know what to do and what not to; the part of me that, instincts once again recovered, enjoys reading and profiling people and exploiting their weaknesses—red flags now look red, friends; the part of me that loves bringing that aggression and main character energy to the table to, once again, exploit weakness and win; the part of me that simply loves winning and is never coy about it. Now I also have some vague ideas about how to play with a big stack (i.e. How to Win and Not Feel Bashful); and, most importantly, the part of me that would like to lose more gracefully, to decouple decisions from their outcomes and look clinically at what was a “bad play” or bad decision, without self-hatred, with utmost compassion, with the lessons learnt being immediately applicable to the next hand. Just all the skills you need to have in life in one addictive game. Yes, poker is giving me all of this. I love who I become at the table. See?

I hope you enjoyed this year as much as I did, and that this edition of mad words prompted you to reflect on how 2025 changed you too.

I’ll see you very soon.