I found a poem I wrote when I was fourteen.
It was tucked away in an old notebook. The kind with uneven handwriting, dramatic underlines, and no sense of irony yet. I don’t even remember writing it, but I remember the person who must have.
The poem was about giving.
Not money.
Not charity.
Just… being a person who gives.
I wrote about wanting to offer what I had without hesitation.
About wanting to be the kind of person whose first instinct was yes.
Reading it now made my chest ache.
Because when we’re children, we give without calculation.
We don’t ask if someone deserves it.
We don’t weigh outcomes or demand proof.
We don’t wonder if we’re being manipulated.
We just see need and we move towards it.
Somewhere along the way, that softness gets trained out of us.
We learn to be careful.
We learn to be skeptical.
We learn to ask, Is this real? Is this the right cause? Is this person lying? Is my help even enough to matter?
We become guarded. Not because we’re cruel, but because the world teaches us to protect ourselves.
But standing there, holding that poem, I realized something quietly devastating:
I miss the person I was before giving became complicated.
Last year has asked so much of our hearts.
We’ve watched suffering stretch on, unanswered.
We’ve felt helpless more times than we can count.
And in response, many of us have learned to close ourselves just enough to survive.
I don’t blame us for that.
But as the new year begins, I feel a pull back toward that fourteen-year-old version of me.
The one who believed that giving was not a transaction, but a way of being.
The one who didn’t need guarantees before showing up.
This year, I want to be her again.
Not naïve.
Not careless.
Just… open.
I want to give with less fear.
With fewer conditions.
With a lighter heart.
And I don’t want to do it alone.
If you’ve stayed with me this far. Through the grief, the anger, the long nights of wondering whether any of this makes a difference. I want to ask you to stay with me a little longer.
Stay with me as I try to become a more giving person.
Less guarded.
More human.
Stay with me as we choose generosity not because it’s easy or perfectly efficient but because it’s who we want to be.
Maybe that’s how we reclaim something we lost.
Not by fixing the whole world.
But by refusing to let it harden us completely.
With hope that still feels fragile but real,
Hafsa