28/08/2026
28 August. One year ago today.
I took this photo while closing a significant chapter of my life.
I was broken. Emotional. Financially struggling more than I am today.
And I was f**king tired.
Tired from everything I’d carried. Tired from everything my body had been through. My hormones were all over the place, my life was changing, and somewhere amongst all of it, I’d started questioning myself too.
I genuinely had no idea what the next year of my life was going to look like.
Yet I wrote these words:
“As one version of you dies a new one is created… who knew you before may not know you today.”
Looking at them exactly one year later hits very differently.
Because despite how tired I was, I kept f**king going.
I studied CPIM for the career I already have, while also starting a Bachelor of Psychological Science and Counselling — beginning the long road towards changing careers and becoming a psychologist.
And during that year, I found Andrea Louise Oracle.
Andrea was my reader first. My intuition had always been there — what I’d lost was confidence in myself. I was questioning what I felt, what I knew and whether I could trust my own judgement anymore.
She helped me find my way back to trusting myself. Not by giving me the answers, but by reminding me that I was already capable of hearing my own.
Somewhere along the way, my reader also became my friend. And that friendship is something I genuinely appreciate with all my heart.
And to Danielle Wood , who has stood beside me through every version of myself this year — the broken one, the exhausted one, the questioning one and the woman I’m becoming — thank you for never making me walk any of it alone.
Then came The Veiled Letter.
A year ago, this page didn’t exist. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t even a thought.
Yet here I am, exactly one year later, posting that photograph on the very page I couldn’t have known I would create.
I’m still not where I want to be. I’m still working. Still studying. Still building. I’m still trying to create the financial freedom and the life I want for myself.
But today isn’t about pretending I’ve arrived.
It’s about looking back and acknowledging how f**king far I’ve travelled.
The woman in this photograph was exhausted. She was hurting. She was questioning herself. She couldn’t see what was waiting on the other side of everything she was trying to survive.
But she kept going.
And today, exactly one year later, as a Pisces, under a Pisces Full Moon Lunar Eclipse, I’m reading her words again:
“As one version of you dies a new one is created…”
A year ago, I couldn’t see the woman I was becoming.
Today, I am her.
And I think she’d be pretty f**king proud of how far we’ve made it.
So if you’re standing where I was a year ago — exhausted, hurting, questioning yourself and wondering how much more you’ve got left in you — keep f**king going.
I’m not going to tell you it will be easy. This year wasn’t easy for me. There were days I was exhausted, days I questioned everything, and plenty of times I wondered what the f**k I was even doing.
You don’t always get to see what you’re building while you’re fighting your way through it.
Sometimes you have to keep moving long enough to finally turn around and see it.
A year can change a f**king lot.
Don’t give up on the person you’re becoming just because you haven’t met them yet.
— Hartley 🖤🥀
