New Year resolutions are often dismissed as a 'faulty system'. Many make resolutions with immense enthusiasm, only to break them within weeks. For me, however, they have long functioned as a compass. I have lived through multiple political systems in Nepal: an authoritarian monarchy, a fragile multiparty democracy, a decade-long armed conflict, and the ongoing experiment of a federal republican state. Amid these shifts, writing, especially note-keeping, diary-keeping, and yearly resolutions, all have been my method of grounding myself. My resolutions have remained relatively constant: to stay calm, patient, and consistent. As an extrovert, spontaneous and action-oriented by nature, every year I consciously try to restrain these impulses, which have been my occupational hazard. Diaries and New Year resolutions have helped discipline me to slow down, reflect, and stay anchored. My relationship with writing began early. My late mother, Heera Devi Yami, encouraged me to write my feelings when I was seven or eight years old. Though illiterate in her early life, she learned to read and write later through political activism. She taught me basic math by giving homework on the blank spaces of the Gorkhapatra newspaper. She urged me to write letters to my older siblings studying abroad, planting in me a lifelong habit of reflection through writing. Thus, for me, writing was personal in the beginning, extending to the political later on. Indeed, during the People's War (PW) decade, I brought up my daughter through letters. Similarly, Baburam Bhattarai, my husband, and I mostly communicated through letters, given our different fields of work during the PW. I began keeping a diary regularly in the early 1980s. When I later entered underground political work during the PW in the 1990s, my writing expanded into political notes. After the conflict, as I became a legislator and later served multiple terms as a government minister, I maintained detailed reflections on governance. Becoming the First Lady in 2011-13 further deepened my engagement with state functioning. Embarking on a new leash of political openings through the digital revolution, I began making additional notes on emerging alternative politics. Alongside this, I had long been recording observations on gender relations, beginning as a student in India in the 1970s and continuing through decades of public life. It is to be noted that politics is demanding, particularly for women. This becomes more complex if a political woman's husband happens to be a senior political leader. Losing one's political identity and being taken for granted becomes an occupational hazard. Hence, writing became a form of self-care: a way to track mental and physical health. Reading was equally central for keeping abreast with politics. Over the years, I built a personal library of hundreds of books on Nepal, politics, and gender, often annotating or summarising them for future reference. In 2026, the practice of writing a New Year resolution came to a halt for the first time in over four decades. On 9 September 2025, a fire linked to the recent Gen Z movement destroyed my home. I lost to the fire nearly 800 books amongst 2,000 books gutted. These had been collected from the 1970s to 2025, ranging from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Feminism without Borders by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Daughters of Karl Marx: Family Correspondence, 1866–1898 compiled by Olga Meier, 'Collections of Parijat's works' published by Pawan Chamling, among others. The remaining burnt books belonged to my husband. I also lost something deeply material and symbolic: my desk, books, letters, documents, pens, papers, and study room. I lost my desktop computer and printer to the fire. It felt like the collapse of a system that had quietly organised my life. I reach for a pen but cannot find a notebook; when I write, I lack the books to consult. Even when the will to read and write exists, there is no table, no space. The absence is total. What is missing is what Virginia Woolf famously called a room of one's own – the material and mental space necessary for sustained thought. As a stopgap between political activism and the literary world, I had decided to pursue a PhD on 'Gender Power Relations in Household Space Allocation'. As a result, I was not only collecting reading materials on this topic but had also carved out an open room into a closed room filled with books and reading space. This indirectly influenced my husband, as well. He too began using a separate room for his reading, storing his best books but lost them in the fire. When the PW began in 1996, I had consciously burned the bridges of a past, secured life to begin an underground uncertain political journey. After the war, I embarked upon a new alternative political movement addressing critical modernism and scientific humanism. This time, after losing my home and workspace, my response has been different. Instead of rushing forward, I have chosen to pause – to reflect, redesign, and rejuvenate. To enter what I think of as a 'fresh start' mode, similar to refreshing a computer system before it can function again. Finally, I remain grateful to the digital world: my smartphone, laptop, emails, website, and social media, where fragments of my photos, writings, letters, documents, memories, and public life survive. I am additionally thankful that my book, Hisila: From Revolutionary to First Lady, published by Penguin, is available as an eBook on Amazon's Kindle platform, having lost my hard copies. When physical rooms collapse, virtual spaces become shelters. In the end, the rooms that shaped us most were the ones we built inside our minds – spaces of conviction, contradiction, and resilience. They burned the house, but they also made something painfully clear to me: history is never finished. Perhaps this year is not about setting goals, but about recovery: recovery of a desk, space, a room of one's own, and eventually a home – which I am reconstructing (remember, I am an architect), where writing will once again become a reality for a new course, a new identity, and a new timeline.