2025: A Year of the Wood Snake
2025 has been a year of reckoning with my body. Not one I planned, but one that unfolded slowly, insistently, and without asking my permission. I started calling it the Year of Waiting, not only for myself but my husband and eldest son.
In Chinese astrology, 2025 is the Year of the Wood Snake. The symbolism has felt uncannily apt and surprisingly supportive.
Living With Uncertainty
For those who have followed my journey, you’ll know I completed aggressive cancer treatment in 2023. Like most people in my situation, I entered a five-year surveillance with scans, examinations, and the quiet awareness that cancer doesn’t always stay in the past.
I entered 2025 hoping to move forward. Instead, I’ve learned to sit with unanswered questions, to advocate for myself without catastrophising, and to accept that some decisions are made without certainty.
I found myself navigating surveillance scans, PET results, and medical ambiguity. A lymph node appeared, persisted, and resisted easy explanation. Not growing. Not disappearing. Existing in the grey space between reassurance and concern.
In May, a routine PET scan showed a faint blur in my left groin — vague enough to dismiss. Possibly inflammation. Possibly nothing. We decided to wait.
By September, it had become a defined 1cm lymph node. Still small, but metabolically active. What followed were months of scans and careful conversations. PET. MRI. CT. Each offered information that didn’t quite line up.
The node looked structurally normal, yet lit up like a fire cracker on PET. It sat unusually deep (about seven centimetres into my thigh) in an area just outside the irradiated lymph nodes in 2023. My radiation oncologist called it “most unusual” more than once.
A biopsy followed. It was horrendous both physically and emotionally. In the end, it didn’t provide a clear answer.
By December, I faced a familiar but unwelcome choice: continue monitoring and live in limbo or proceed with treatment without absolute certainty that it was even cancer.
This is what uncertainty really looks like. It is not drama, but prolonged ambiguity. A discipline of patience. Learning to make decisions without certainty, guided instead by values, risk awareness, and self-trust.
Scanxiety
Scanxiety has been one of the defining experiences of this year. What doesn’t show up on scan reports is the emotional toll of waiting. The days leading up to scans are heavy. The hours afterward stretch endlessly.
I learned how to function while my nervous system remained on high alert, bracing for news that could change everything.
Scanxiety isn’t a failure of resilience. It’s the cost of cancer. When your body has betrayed you once, your mind stays vigilant. Every unfamiliar sensation becomes suspect. You rehearse conversations you hope you won’t have to have. You prepare for outcomes you don’t want, just in case.
Living this way requires energy most people never see. It teaches you to compartmentalise, to appear calm while your inner world churns. And it leaves very little room for rest.
The Medicine of the Snake
The Snake has long symbolised wisdom, intuition, and renewal through shedding. Not by adding more, but by letting go. This year quietly asked me to release things I didn’t even realise I was holding.
The Snake doesn’t rush. It watches. It waits. It sheds its skin only when it has to. That is how this year has felt.
Across cultures, the Snake represents the life force itself and a reminder that true renewal doesn’t come from accumulation, but from release.
I’ve had to let go of the idea that finishing treatment means certainty. That my body could ever return to “before”. That cancer treatment has a clear ending. Living with cancer carries an ongoing cost.
Instead, I’m learning to live with complexity and ever deeper levels of surrender into the unknown. To hold gratitude and grief at the same time. To see health not as a fixed state, but as a dynamic relationship with the body.
Most importantly, I’m learning to stay present in a body that has carried me through far more than I ever expected.
I’m learning to feel safe even when my body is anything but.
Strength That Bends
This isn’t just a Snake year. It’s a Wood Snake year. Wood brings patience, adaptability, and resilience. Like a tree, it teaches us to root deeply while continuing to grow not through force, but through flexibility.
This year reminded me that strength isn’t always loud. Sometimes it looks like continuing to show up. Asking difficult questions. Making careful decisions. Accepting limits without surrendering agency. It is the type of strength that is vulnerable, flexible, resilient, and adaptable to change.
I have bent this year physically, mentally, emotionally, but I haven’t broken. This is what vulnerable strength looks like.
The Closing Months of the Snake
On December 23, I decided to proceed with radiation rather than extend the waiting. The plan is stereotactic radiation: precise, contained, delivered over three treatments every second day. If it’s not enough, a longer course remains an option.
It feels meaningful that this treatment falls in January, during the final months of the Year of the Snake, is a time traditionally associated with completion rather than initiation.
This doesn’t feel like a beginning.
It feels like finishing something.
As the Snake completes its cycle, it finishes shedding. Radiation, for me, is part of that final shedding with a precise, purposeful, and contained action. A decision made with clarity, not panic.
The final weeks of the Snake carry a quiet intensity as the Snake enters its final coil. The final weeks of the Year of the Snake stretching into February, carry a quiet but unmistakable intensity.
This is a time of integration rather than initiation. Old fears may resurface, not as threats, but as reminders of how much power they’ve already lost. What feels heavy now is often the final weight of a skin ready to be released.
The Snake doesn’t rush its ending. Nothing needs to be forced here. It makes sure nothing essential is left unexamined.
Entering the Year of the Fire Horse
As Chinese New Year approaches (17 February to 3 March), I can feel how ready I am to leave the inward intensity of the Snake and step into the energy of the Fire Horse.
Where the Snake has been about vigilance and discernment, the Horse speaks of movement, agency, and trust. Fire brings warmth and vitality. Together, they don’t ask me to struggle, force or push but to live.
Without the Snake’s slow clearing of fear, belief, and identity, the Horse’s momentum would scatter rather than propel. The Snake teaches discernment so the Horse can move with direction.
If the Snake asks, “What must I face?”
The Horse asks, “How do I want to live now?”
Symbolically, the Fire Horse brings:
- Vitality and life force
- Independence and self-direction
- Courage to move again
- Action after restraint
- Reclaiming the body’s confidence
Symbolically, this Fire Horse energy matters. This Fire Horse year ignites passion, visibility, and courage. Fire fuels creativity and movement, but it must be intentionally tended to.
Unbalanced fire burns out or consumes; balanced fire warms, inspires, and illuminates. In Feng Shui, Fire rules the Heart and Eyes: how we love, see, and are seen. Use this energy to create connection, not conflict.
Fire adds intensity, warmth, and drive. The Horse adds movement, stamina, and freedom. Together, they don’t whisper they exhale.
The Fire Horse doesn’t erase what I’ve endured.
It builds on it.
For me, the Fire Horse may mean trusting my body again. Making plans that aren’t centred on scans. Reclaiming identity beyond “patient” and “monitoring”. Choosing joy without explanation or permission.
That might look like making plans that are not centred on surveillance, regaining confidence in physical movement, travelling again, even cautiously, and choosing joy without explanation or asking permission.
Not recklessness – embodiment.
It says: You’ve learned how to listen. Now you can begin to move again in your own time, in your own way.
Looking Ahead
For me personally, radiation is precise, controlled fire delivered at the end of the Snake’s cycle. Clearing space, not to erase the past, but to free motion. The Wood Snake taught me how to endure with awareness. The Fire Horse invites me to live with intention.
Root first before you run.
Tend the inner flame so it warms, not burns.
Know when to gallop and when to rest.
This is not an ending.
It is a new skin.
Featured Image: By fine art photographer, author, motivational speaker Brooke Shaden.