This is the year I stop hiding.
I write this note as my effort to unmask my struggle, a refusal to delay, a step into public clarity after years of living underground. I am not complaining or planning a heroic parade, but something in between: an effort to discover myself at an age that demands I know myself better than I did a decade ago.
There’s a flawed assumption that age alone grants wisdom. I believe clarity comes not from the passing of years, but from the lessons of failure and the courage to be consistently vulnerable.
This is my effort here.
Progress has always been the word that has defined my search for meaning. I believe everything is born to grow, to become better than it was yesterday.
My challenge was my mind’s relentless pursuit of perfection. Therefore I waited. My sketchbooks stayed a graveyard of half-implemented ideas and projects.
A year ago, a fellow Christian told me she saw a dream where i was surrounded by open, pen, cluttered, and unfinished books. She said whatever you have accumulated is ample; now share it. I have always felt that way. Her words reminded me of the concept of “spiritual obesity, “ a tendency to hoard knowledge or revelation, and failure to live out faith.
My life has been full of big visions, yet they have remained as unpublished drafts and half-launched projects.To understand the hiding, one must understand the journey my soul has taken.
My path has had four chapters. The first was a slow drift in a state of unawareness. I searched for the truth. But its vast darkness exhausted me. I read everything my hand could touch but all surface level. I rarely engaged beyond a fleeting moment.
The second began one fateful afternoon when I understood of becoming a Child of God, and the heavens opened. For the next decade, tears became my companion. A fire grew within me as I curled beneath the dark of church benches. The light grew so bright that the destitute found their path in its glare, and some even built their cabins around it.But I kept the warmth for myself. The world never saw the flares. I never shared what was given to me. A grave sin, in retrospect
The third chapter began when my refusal to remain a Child of God was granted. That night, that precious warmth that grasped me was now ejecting me out into the cold. I remember that evening when I saw people dancing around a different fire, one that consumed but was never warm. Yet, I followed the shadows and entered a world I once disdained. It was glamorous, promising salvation, yet its allure concealed a perilous pit. For seven years, my soul descended into torment and depression. It’s a beautiful dance, I discovered, was just a stumble in the dark. Guilt doused the fire within. Every night, I prayed for an escape from the inferno.
The fourth chapter, these last two years, has been a relentless toil between giving up and finding freedom. I stood with hands full of ashes, finding solace only in the residual warmth of that original fire, slowly inching toward a more luminous existence. A silent struggle.
A fifth chapter still awaits. Those I once loved are gone, and things I admired have turned away. Peace came and left, but I have barely lost sight I discovered a while ago. The light that once breathed life into my desolate flesh now isolates me, prunes me, and pulls me back home.I am willing to step into that realm.
This Ethiopian year, my intention was different. I plan to light the mountain, not hide it, for it has already burnt my home. Because hiding kills momentum. This is a universal law, when you delay action, you break the chain of progress. Each time you start over, you lose the compounding effect of consistent effort, the same principle that grows wealth and wisdom from small steps repeated without interruption.This principle of hiding extends beyond the individual.
Gideon was a man who resonated with this struggle. He was hiding, threshing wheat in a winepress, the wrong work in the wrong place, to keep it from his enemies. When an angel called him a “mighty warrior,” he argued, blinded by a self-perception that did not match his potential. But the day he left his hiding place, everything changed. One decision to act shifted his destiny.
What happens when a person, or a nation, decides to act, even imperfectly? They unlock momentum. They build confidence. They let compounding work in their favor. And so, I declare it: This is the year I stop hiding. For me, this is not an abstract wish but a plan of execution.
It is the year of published essays, of building Huneta, of nurturing my relationships, and restoring my health. This is my declaration.
What is the light you are hiding? What masterpiece is gathering dust in your mind or on your hard drive? The principle is the same for all of us: hiding kills momentum, while acting, imperfectly, consistently, creates it.
This is the year we stop hiding.
