600 BC. That’s how much runway we had before we got to this hellscape of a year. Somewhere in ancient Greece, storyteller and enslaved man, Aesop first shared his fable, The Farmer and the Viper, a moral so blunt it barely needs explaining: kindness to evil gets repaid with betrayal. It’s a lesson humans’ have struggled with ever since.
But what if you genuinely believe that kindness is in service of something you deeply believe in? Something you might not admit to yourself, but carry deep in your heart like a prayer?
In 1963, civil rights activist Oscar Brown Jr. turned Aesop’s fable into a song, “The Snake.” And when Al Wilson’s version became the one everyone knew a few years later, the story landed like a warning siren: a tender-hearted woman rescues a freezing snake, warms it, nurses it back to life… and gets rewarded with a lethal bite.
The song never tells us what the woman looks like. But if we’re talking cultural tropes, especially the pop-culture obsession with white womanhood as the world’s designated rescuer… I have my suspicions.
And I can’t stop wondering: what happens when that rescue instinct gets transferred from animals to institutions? To the fantasy of “order.” To the promise that if you keep the system alive, even the one that hurts you, it will protect you anyway?
Because here’s what we know: in 2024, white voters backed Donald Trump by a wide margin, and white women backed him too, 51% to 47%, according to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter data. And by the time 2025 rolled in, we weren’t just dealing with a candidate or a party, we were dealing with a governing agenda ecosystem, led by The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” a roadmap for reshaping the federal government.
Ironically, Trump himself helped make “The Snake” famous again, reciting it at rallies, as an anti-immigration parable. But the story’s snake was never meant to be a stand-in for people. It’s a stand-in for dangerous forces you knowingly invite in because you’re lonely, scared, nostalgic, or convinced you can control what you’re rescuing.
And that’s the trap of 2025’s Snake energy: the year didn’t just bite. It exposed. It revealed what America had been carrying, excusing, defending, rehabbing, and calling “normal” even as the snake tightened around all of our lives.
No one predicted that more forcefully, or paid for it more immediately, than America’s Black women.
The Wood Snake didn’t “arrive.” It seeped in.
On the Chinese lunar calendar, 2025 is the Year of the Wood Snake (Jan. 29, 2025 – Feb. 16, 2026). The Wood Snake symbolism is supposed to be about growth and flexibility, strategy, transformation, shedding skin, leveling up.
And sure. That’s in there.
But let’s not pretend “snake” is just a cute spiritual mascot. A snake is also quiet. It moves without announcement. It waits, and it strikes when you’re already tired. Even in the softer cultural framing of wisdom, intuition, and rebirth, the Snake is still telling you: watch what’s hidden, watch what’s coiling, watch what’s being normalized.
Now add in this wrinkle: numerology calls 2025 a 9 Universal Year, the final year of a cycle that began in 2017.
If 9 is “completion,” and the snake is “shedding,” what do they mean together? The message isn’t gentle, it’s blunt and harsh: if it can’t stand up to the truth, you can’t keep it.
And that’s exactly what 2025 felt like.
The bite landed hard on Black women first
Let’s talk about the betrayal part of the fable, because 2025 didn’t just “challenge” Black women. It moved an unattainable goal post while simultaneously changing the rules of the game.
Reporting began noting that more than 300,000 Black women were leaving the workforce between February and April of 2025, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics saying that number could be as high as 320,000. And these women didn’t leave voluntarily, they were pushed out.
At the same time, Black women’s unemployment jumped to 6.7% a number described as a serious “warning sign,” even while the overall unemployment rate looked steadier on the surface.
And the “why” reads like a three-part indictment:
Corporate retreat from DEI: a pullback that lands like a targeted layoff wave when your job title had the audacity to include the words equity or inclusion.
Small businesses cutting back: tariffs and economic shifts squeeze first, and “disposable” roles go early.
Federal layoffs: with Black women disproportionately represented in government work compared to the private sector, those DOGE “cuts” didn’t hit evenly; they landed like a targeted strike on Black women.
It got so bad that Rep. Ayanna Pressley finally said the quiet part out loud, ‘Black women are the canaries in the coal mine, when our numbers drop, the whole system is about to feel it.’
So yes, the year of the snake was metaphor, it was year of prophecy, and it was a year for receipts.
My personal 9-year cycle ended with a question I can’t un-ask
I wasn’t part of the 2025 300-thousand. I lost my job in 2023. But in numerology terms, 2025 closed a 9-year universal cycle that began in 2017.
9 years ago, I was hired for my most prestigious and what might have been my last corporate job. It was the last time I let myself believe stability was something you could earn by being good, by being loyal, by being excellent, or by being palatable.
By the end of 2025, I wasn’t just reconsidering my career trajectory.
I was seriously reconsidering the entire arrangement.
I had to ask myself, do I really want to pour my life force into chasing another corporate role, one where I’ll likely feel unfulfilled, under-seen, or quietly punished for telling the truth?
Or do I put that energy into myself and my work, the work that already knows my name, already understands my purpose, already pays me back in meaning even when it doesn’t pay me back in comfort?
That’s what endings are, really. Not a door slam, but a question that won’t let you keep lying to yourself.
There’s a part America keeps “forgetting”
Black women rebuild anyway…
When Black women get pushed down or pushed out, we don’t just “bounce back.”
We build new rooms.
We become the infrastructure.
We turn layoffs into LLCs. We turn exclusion into ecosystems. We turn “there’s no place for you here” into “fine, watch me make one.”
American culture loves to treat Black women’s ‘Watch Me’ energy like a quirky personality trait, but the data backs it up, the number of Black-women-owned employer businesses rose between 2017 and 2020 and grew faster than women-owned businesses overall.
The growth is real, even as the revenue gaps are brutal and the barriers to capital stay structural.
But that’s the thing about being forced out, sometimes it forces you into clarity.
And now… the Fire Horse is coming.
If 2025 was the year the snake revealed what was coiled under the floorboards, 2026 is shaping up to be the year the floorboards catch fire.
On the Chinese lunar calendar, the Year of the Fire Horse begins Feb. 17, 2026 (running through Feb. 5, 2027).
The cultural framing is loud: passion, dynamism, innovation, speed, and freedom meaning: fire fused to motion.
2026 also lines up as a 1 Universal Year, a new beginning year, so its energy is “spark meets gasoline.”
Translation: the era of slow permission is over.
The Fire Horse doesn’t ask politely. It doesn’t wait for your imposter syndrome to finish its monologue. It moves like this:
launch before you feel ready
pick a direction and sprint
burn what’s dead
build what you need
For some that might be terrifying, for others, it’s familiar. Black women have been doing Fire Horse energy under Snake conditions for generations.
Resources for Black women entrepreneurs
If 2025 pushed you out, and 2026 is daring you to build, here are some solid places to start, whether you need money, mentorship, structure, or community:
SBA Women’s Business Centers (WBCs) – free/low-cost advising and training
SCORE – mentorship from experienced business owners
Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) – planning, financing guidance, operations support
MBDA Business Centers (Minority Business Development Agency) – support for minority-owned businesses
NYC Small Business Services (SBS) – if you’re in New York City, this is a practical on-ramp to courses, advising, and city programs
Hello Alice – grant opportunities and small business resources
IFundWomen – funding + coaching (especially helpful for consumer-facing brands and service businesses)
Black Girl Ventures – pitch competitions + community capital
digitalundivided – programs and support for Black and Latina women founders
Operation HOPE – credit and financial coaching that can matter as much as capital
And if you can only do one thing this week: pick one support lane, money, mentorship, skills, or community and take one concrete step in it. One call. One application. One intake form. One workshop registration. The Fire Horse rewards movement.
Now That I Think About It…
The fable isn’t just “don’t rescue snakes.”
It’s: stop pretending you didn’t know what it was.
2025 made the country look at the bite marks. It made a lot of people confront the institutions they keep “nursing back to health” even when those institutions have always been designed to harm, extract, and betray.
Black women didn’t need the lesson. We’ve been fluent in it.
So maybe the real goodbye to 2025 is this:
We stop spending our tenderness, our rehabilitation and our uniquely magical energy on systems that survive by exhausting it.
Save it for our people. Our work. Our joy. Our freedom.
And when the Fire Horse arrives in February, we don’t just survive the stampede.
We ride at dawn.
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