Hope as Resolution: Holding each other in 2025
For all its joy, 2024 brought great hardship – both at home and away. As we emerge from the holiday season, we unpack how to prioritise hope in the new year
As we enter 2025, the world feels increasingly fragile. It’s tempting to shut down, numbed by the constant barrage of crises and trauma. But now, more than ever, we must reactivate and hold on to hope. The genocide in Palestine continues. The far-right resurges, threatening already marginalised communities and attempting to erode the rights so many have fought for. Climate disasters wreak havoc while governments delay meaningful action. Trans rights are attacked, anti-migrant policies escalate, and here in Scotland, according to Shelter Scotland, every 16 minutes a household becomes homeless. These interconnected struggles have collectively traumatised us – and, as such, they demand our collective response, a collective hope.
Trauma is persistent. It curls around our cells, dulling our senses, numbing us, convincing us that inaction is inevitable. It whispers that nothing will change, that exhaustion is final. Trauma imprints itself on the body, shaping how we breathe, move, and respond to the world. Studies from the University of Northern Colorado show that trauma affects the nervous system, locking us into patterns of fight, flight, or freeze. But just as trauma reshapes us, energy can be reclaimed and directed toward resistance, creation, and change. We carry hope and survival in our bones.
I’ve written about hope before, how it’s often dismissed as naïve or passive. But hope is neither. Hope is fierce. It is a force. Hope is soup hurled at a painting, hope is chained to the gates of arms manufacturers, it’s Palestinian flags hung defiantly from windows and wrapped around protestors' shoulders. Hope is action. Hope is resistance. Rebecca Solnit, in Hope in the Dark, describes it as "an embrace of the unknown." It’s the act of imagining a future that feels distant but is still worth fighting for. Hope is not sitting idle, waiting for change – it’s creating possibilities where none seem to exist. With hope, rage and tenderness intertwine: igniting protests, organising communities, and daring to believe in something better.
Before charging headfirst into 2025, stop. Feel the weight in your chest, acknowledge the tightness in your jaw. Breathe in slowly. Count to ten. Let yourself feel what has been buried beneath the grind of survival. It’s not about escaping discomfort but inhabiting it, understanding that anger and despair are signs of humanity, not defeat. Let these emotions exist within you. Let them fuel your hope.
We aren’t meant to carry this work alone. The forces we’re up against are too vast, too entrenched, too global. But the antidote to despair is community. The people we stand with – those who listen, organise, show up, and hold space – make resistance possible. This is how movements endure. Many of us have spent the last few weeks surrounded by loved ones – sharing meals, stories, and warmth in a season marked by togetherness. But community isn’t only built during the holidays; it’s something we must attend to every day. Finding community doesn’t mean perfect alignment or constant agreement; rather, community means working alongside others with shared commitments to liberation. Community means showing up – in any way we can – even when it’s uncomfortable, even when you’re tired. It means taking care of each other, not as a side effect of activism, but as its very foundation.
As we step into the new year, many of us set resolutions; intentions to care more deeply, live more fully, or show up with greater purpose. What if we carried those intentions beyond individual goals and into collective action? What if community care became a shared resolution? A shared hope for a better future?
History reminds us that progress is forged through defiance, not comfort. The Suffragettes, who are now honoured with statues in Parliament Square, slashed paintings. Queer liberation erupted from fierce resistance in places such as the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and Stonewall. Palestinian resistance endures, despite every attempt to erase it. Protest has never emerged from politeness; it’s born in anger, grief, and a deep, hopeful love for what could be.
But protest isn’t only in the streets. It’s also in everyday acts of defiance: creating art that challenges dominant narratives, sharing meals with those facing food insecurity, planting gardens in neglected spaces, or offering support for someone in crisis. In systems that seek to isolate and silence us, these acts become radical declarations of life, hope, and resistance. Quiet acts of care – the overlooked moments of support – sustain long-term movements. Meanwhile, the everyday labour of organising and educating continues, even when the world feels too heavy to bear alone.
As we move into the new year, let’s carry our hope forward, not as wishful thinking, but as fire in our bones, as a refusal to accept the world as it is. Trauma may try to numb us, but we can reactivate. We can breathe, hope, resist, and create. In the darkest times, choosing hope is the most radical act of all.