Your Life, Your Rules

fuck 'em

It's the beginning of 2026, and despite the political chaos swirling around us—the headlines that seem designed to destabilize, the societal tensions that feel deliberately stoked—I'm optimistic. Not in a performative, toxic positivity kind of way, but in a way that feels grounded in something real: the understanding that regardless of what's happening outside of us, we still possess the most radical form of power there is. The power to decide who we're going to be.

We spend so much of our lives operating on autopilot, following a script we never actually agreed to. Go to school, get the degree, land the job, find the partner, buy the house, have the kids, retire, die. It's the American Dream, packaged and sold to us before we even had the cognitive capacity to question whether it's what we actually want. We absorb these expectations from our parents, our communities, our cultures, from a society that benefits when we're all moving in predictable, consumable patterns. And most of us? We never stop to ask the most important question: Is this mine?

I've been obsessed lately with this one-liner from Scandal—you know the one. Olivia Pope, in her white coat and red wine haze, cutting through someone's bullshit with surgical precision, asking: "What do you want?"

It's such a simple question, but it's devastating in its honesty. Because most of us don't know. We know what we're supposed to want. We know what would make our parents proud, what would look good on Instagram, what would meet the socially acceptable benchmarks of success. But what do we want? What do we want when we strip away the performance, the respectability politics, the fear of disappointing people who may not even have our best interests at heart?

I'm asking you—genuinely, seriously—to sit with yourself and figure that out. Not in a rushed, surface-level way, but in a deep, potentially uncomfortable way. Turn off the noise. Silence the voices that have been narrating your life for you. Your parents' dreams for you, your partner's expectations, your friends' judgments, society's timelines. All of it. And ask yourself: What do I truly want out of my life?

It might take time. You might not have an answer immediately, and that's fine. You might realize the answer changes as you grow, and that's even better. Because here's the thing they don't tell you: This is your life, and you create the rules. Not just once, but continuously. You get to modify them as you go, as you evolve, as you shed old skins and step into new versions of yourself.

There's this Mary Mary song, "Get Up," that's been hitting different this year. There's a lyric that goes: "He said, she said, they said—what you say?" And honestly? That's the entire energy we need to carry into 2026 and beyond. Fuck the opinions of others. I'm serious. Their opinions, their projections, their limitations—none of it matters more than what you say about your own life.

People will always have something to say. You're too ambitious or not ambitious enough. You're moving too fast or you're wasting time. You're too focused on yourself or you're not focused enough. You're too loud, too quiet, too much, not enough. It's exhausting, and it's designed to keep you small, to keep you second-guessing, to keep you compliant.

But what if you just… didn't care? What if you took all that energy you've been spending trying to manage other people's perceptions and redirected it into building the life you actually want? What if you moved with the kind of audacity that makes people uncomfortable because it reminds them of their own self-imposed limitations?

You need to take initiative. Get up—literally, metaphorically, spiritually—and make it happen. Stop waiting for permission, for the perfect moment, for someone to validate your vision. You need to be pushing your shit like crack in the '80s. I'm talking relentless, unapologetic, strategic. Because nobody else is going to care about your dreams the way you do. Nobody else is going to wake up at 5 AM to work on your vision. That's on you.

And yeah, it's going to be hard. Building a life on your own terms, especially when it doesn't fit the template, requires a level of resilience and self-trust that our society doesn't exactly cultivate. You're going to face resistance—from others, from yourself, from the parts of you that have been conditioned to play it safe. But every time you choose yourself, every time you honor what you want over what you're "supposed" to want, you reclaim a piece of your autonomy.

This is your life. Your rules. Not theirs.

So I'll ask you what Olivia asked: What do you want?

And more importantly: What are you going to do about it?

I am willing into being for you mastery over your life, and a life well enjoyed. I hope that this year is a start for you if you're just beginning, or that this be a continuation of what you've already been working on and that you build momentum.

Happy New Year!

Until next time,

Tricky Sol