The Wins: The Anchors
The Losses: The Tuition Paid
The Messy Middle: The Armor
The Instagram Feed vs. The Medical Chart
Damn, it’s 2026 already? I mean, I know for some of us it’s hard to tell a Tuesday from a Thursday, much less 2025 from 2026, but here we are. It can be easy to get that jolt of “New Year, New Me” when you look at the feed across your platforms.
Seriously, though, it’s January. That means the internet is currently drowning in the “Highlight Reel” loop of trending audio and smiling faces. You know the posts. The revenue graphs that only go up. The carefully curated vacations. The “hustle” that somehow looks effortless and aesthetically pleasing.
Don’t get me wrong– it genuinely makes me happy seeing folks happy. Sometimes it’s just hard to align with (especially in an era of social media becoming the grand master of toxic comparison trends).
Seeing these posts over and over creates this heavy pressure to measure your actual reality against someone else’s marketing strategy. It makes you feel like you aren’t doing anything right– especially not according to their standard of right– because when you’re looking at your own life? Well, you are only looking at what went wrong.
Here is a touch of my reality:
If you looked at my portfolio for 2025, you saw the Re:Mapped version of me. And, granted, even the Re:Mapped Atlas still has a bit of dirt under her nails, but it still doesn’t show all the layers building up.
When you saw that more polished version of me…
You saw me breaking SEO records for a legacy insurance firm.
You saw me on the ground in Puerto Rico, leading crews and building sites for disaster relief.
You saw me speaking on stages about Big Art.
But if you looked at my medical chart? Ooft, honey, you saw a disaster.
You’d see the battle with 8 new autoimmune diagnoses.
You’d see the arsenic poisoning.
You’d see the fact that, while I was building digital homes for my clients, I was technically without a home myself, couchsurfing and buffering while trying to find a place to land.
Being human is hard these days. Should I say that a little louder for the folks in the back?
Being. Human. Is. Hard.
Being a founder though? Steering a ship through rough waters while trying to keep the crew fed? That is harder. We are wired to stare at the cracks in the hull and the chipping paint. We obsess over the leak, the burnout, and the fatigue. We obsess so hard on these less-than’s that we completely miss the fact that the ship is still floating. We miss the fact that we are actually sailing.
Feeding the negative grows the negative. And I did plenty of feeding last year.
Trust me. I am not here to write a post about work-life balance– one of the best coaches I ever worked with told me how much of a fable that is. (Shoutout to you Jen Coken!)
Honestly, even if I wanted to write that fairytale, it would all have to come from my imagination, because frankly, that didn’t exist for me last year.
Instead, this is a look at the Wins (the Anchors), the Losses (the Tuition Paid), and the Messy Middle (the Armor) that all ended up teaching me a thing or two about moving from survival mode to thriving. Thrival mode, if you will.
2025 wasn’t about balance. It was about clarity.
It was the year I truly found my calling, and I only found it because I almost quit.
The Anchors: Proof of Concept
Let me get one thing straight: When I talk about “wins” for 2025, I’m not talking about trophies I put on a shelf. I’m talking about Anchors. Ya know, the proof of concept that held the ship in place when the storm hit, literally and figuratively.
These are the moments that proved the method works.
The Long Game: Empathy as an SEO Strategy
We just celebrated over 3 years with one of my favorite clients, Ashland Insurance. In an industry where the average client retention is measured in months, over three years is a lifetime.
But the win isn’t the duration. It’s the data.
Don’t get me wrong, the duration is a big piece to all of this. In the beginning, I was brought on as simply a blog writer for this agency. Over time, though, there were challenges that began to pop up.
Like most of my clients, this business has had its run of specialists over the years. Unfortunately though, this industry is often filled with the kind of specialists that come with a lot of noise. They tend to use what I call the Tech Jargon Isolation Technique. You know the move: using complex terminology to make the client feel small, unheard, and dependent. They spoke over the client instead of to them. They promised the moon and delivered a flashlight.
When the space then opened up for a new SEO specialist to fill the void with Ashland Insurance, I stepped in. But I didn’t reinvent the wheel.
Instead, I stuck to my guns. I doubled down on the belief that good copy is good SEO.
And the data didn’t lie.
While specialists speak in riddles, we publish content that actually answers people’s questions.
- Monthly Visitors: Up 84.2%. We hit a massive peak of 2,022 monthly visitors.
- Organic Keywords: Up 115%. We went from ranking for 80 keywords in the Top 20 to averaging 172.
That is the flex. You don’t need to alienate your client to get results. You just need to do the work, and sometimes the work starts with just listening.
The Calling: Divide and Specialize
This was also the year the mission crystallized. Between Sail Relief, Community Through Colors, and La Finca de Hamberto, the work in Puerto Rico had turned into three sites, and three separate trips. (You all know that story, right?)
But the win wasn’t just signing the contracts and clicking “Publish”. It was living out my own advice.
I am constantly telling founders: “Divide and Specialize, don’t try to Divide and Conquer.” It’s a hard truth for some of us, and especially hard for those of us that are operating on self-taught understandings with a shoestring budget, but seriously, you cannot wear every hat. If you try to be the CEO, the Janitor, and the Marketer, you will fall short at all three. When you specialize, you get your time back to work on what actually lights your soul up.
So, I took my own medicine.
And thus, the drive to serve NPOs specifically was born. It evolved from a simple mission statement of wanting to help marginalized communities, to actually working with those that do the damn work. It was a step from just saying something into actually doing it.
And thus, the drive to serve NPOs specifically was born. It evolved from a simple mission statement of wanting to help marginalized communities, to actually working with those that do the damn work. It was a step from just saying something into actually doing it.
The Stage: Stepping Out from Behind the Laptop
For a long time now, it’s been easy to get stuck behind the laptop. But 2025 made the simple request: step out into the physical world.
I sponsored and built the digital home for the Southern Oregon Burners. All the same work, right. Got it. Lock in and get it done. Simple as that.
The real moment, though? That happened offline. I sat on a stage with two other art installation support crew members to talk about Big Art— how to take a massive, seemingly impossible idea and drag it into reality on the Playa.
I wasn’t terrified. Honestly? I was more worried I’d talk too much.
Public speaking is where I feel the most alive and useful because it’s just storytelling with a whole helluva lot more eye contact. Plus, it came with the benefit of folks not having to guess my inflections, my faces, and cues. All my sass came across crystal clear too.
It was a reminder that, while I may haunt the digital realms, my expertise works best when it’s grounded in real human connection.
The Tuition Paid: The Costs of 2025
In almost all areas of life, we like to frame everything that lands a little harsh as a “learning opportunity.” That’s just the polite way to say it. The reality is that these were losses.
They hurt.
They cost money.
They cost sanity.
But I don’t see them as flat failures. No, they are more like tuition. And in 2025, the tuition was expensive.
The "White Label" Trap
I entered a white-label partnership that was supposed to be a steady stream of work. Instead, it was a masterclass in how not to treat a partnership.
To put it bluntly: The agency owner was selling snake oil. Her clients were promised that my SEO strategy would deliver measurable results in weeks, not months. As much as some of my own clients tell me I can work magic, that was a rabbit I couldn’t pull from any hat.
She was writing checks my reality couldn’t cash, setting everyone’s expectations up for disappointment before I even opened my laptop. And, trust me, I definitely understand the common misconceptions of SEO and expectations, but when these myths are seemingly fortified by an “expert,” that’s a bit harder of a check to balance.
It became a trap of erasure and exploitation.
In the marketing meetings, she positioned herself as the Mastermind.
But when the angry emails came in? Suddenly, my name was dominating the CC line. I was the pre-emptive scapegoat. Though there were moments of clarity and support when the berating from clients got sharp, and cut deep, still somehow I kept finding myself in the place I never RSVP’ed to be.
She constantly cut me off in onboarding calls to play the strategist and savior, drowning out the actual specialism with chaos. I wasn’t being paid enough, I wasn’t being respected enough, and I was watching my genius get lost in the noise.
The Empty Chair
I have a bad habit of holding the door open for ghosts.
I had clients who would sign the contract, maybe, just maybe, even pay the deposit, and then…*poof* they vanish. Radio silence. But because I wanted to be available, and because it sometimes felt like I was more excited about their mission than they were, I held space in my calendar for them.
Seriously, I get it. I get the overwhelm. I get how it is easy to start something but the smoke from the fires you left unattended got too big and clouded the next steps forward.
But leaving space open for an absent roll call? That cost me everything. It cost me the ability to say “yes” to new, ready-to-work clients. And it cost me my peace. Because, the funny thing about those ghosts? They always came back. They would pop back in to rattle some chains just three months into a four-month project, still expecting the original deadline to stand.
I ended up doing rush jobs, creating something from nothing, only to have them comment on the missed mark, but again, they never gave me the ingredients in the first place.
Many times the work.
No extra pay.
The Body Check
Then there was the collision. The moment where the professional chaos met the physical reality.
And let me tell you, the body kept the score.
The diagnoses cascaded into 2025 like a landslide.
Lupus.
Lyme.
Tularemia.
Discovering I had survived West Nile and— I kid you not— arsenic poisoning.
It felt exactly like the Tech Jargon issue I fight against in my work. My doctors were speaking a language I couldn’t understand, isolating me in my own skin. And, in all seriousness, that was almost the worst part because talk about feeling like most of those body issues screamed, “The call is coming from inside the house.”
I still tried to work while going through it all. I responded to messages from the ER. And yet, balls were still dropped.
I stopped telling clients what was happening because I was embarrassed. I was terrified I had become “That Girl”— the one that has them thinking, “it’s always something.”
I felt like most wouldn’t even believe me to begin with. I mean, c’mon, between December 30th and January 1st, I went to the ER and Urgent Care three times. I couldn’t breathe lying down. I got poison oak in my eyes. I fractured my ankle. How would anyone believe me when I tell them I scored the worst hat trick of all time?
And somehow, I still showed up to work, squinting through swollen eyes. But the lesson was undeniable.
The Messy Middle: Building the Armor
Growth doesn’t happen during the wins. It happens in the messy middle, when you are forced to look the threat in the eye and decide if you are going to fold or evolve.
The "Boogeyman" Documents
I finally opened the contract files. The ones I had been too afraid, too busy, or too overwhelmed to touch. What I knew I needed to add just felt too…aggressive.
I sat that little voice down and got to work. I added sections that, at first, just felt a bit harsh to write:
Exclusions and Scope Boundaries.
Payment Terms.
The “Dormant Project” Clause (with a Restart Fee).
The “Scheduling Priority” Clause (with a Rush Fee).
I got in my head about it. My brain kept screaming, “Really? You’re six years into this business and you’re just now adding these? You are so behind.”
For some reason I missed the mark in cutting myself some slack since all of this– my specialty, running a business, operating with subcontractors and new clients– is all self- taught. I beat myself up for not knowing things I hadn’t learned yet.
I realized that my clients— the good ones that I wish I could just copy and paste, over and over— didn’t see these clauses as aggression. They understood them as armor. They understood that these boundaries protected their project just as much as they protected my sanity.
The January Ultimatum
I hit a wall. I admitted it out loud too: “If this doesn’t change, I’m done.”
But instead of quitting, I pivoted to structure.
I raised my costs.
I built templatized workflows so I wasn’t reinventing the wheel every Monday.
I finally focused on my own website.
But the biggest shift was language. I stopped saying, “Pay when you can.” I started saying, “Your payment reserves time in my calendar.”
That simple shift changed everything. It moved me from a Helper to a Professional.
The Motto: "Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough"
Then came the hurricane. Literally.
I had been stuck in a loop with one of my clients, waiting for content that never came. These clients work in disaster relief, so I understand the concept of urgency as it existed in their world of focus, but when a hurricane started bearing down on the Caribbean… suddenly, the founder didn’t care about perfect. He just needed done.
I pulled 19-hour days. I guessed at the content based on my time on the ground, working alongside them. I built something from what I did have– gaps included– while the storm approached.
And we launched.
It wasn’t perfect. But it was there. And because it was there, it could help.
I learned that “Shipping” is a love language.
Displacement & The Unknown
And through all of this— the contracts, the pivots, the 19-hour days— I didn’t have a home.
There is a profound, painful irony in spending your year building “Digital Homes” for other people while you don’t have a physical one for yourself.
I was couchsurfing with friends. Housesitting when I could. In all though, I felt stuck in Southern Oregon, locked in place by the medical chaos. I felt like I was perpetually buffering— trying to load a page for a URL I couldn’t even remember typing in.
But that displacement forced a decision.
In December 2025, I stopped looking for a home planted in one spot. Instead, I bought my dream truck and camper.
It’s an office on the road.
It’s a commitment to the field.
It’s me finally accepting that home for Atlas isn’t a zip code.
It’s the ability to go where the work takes me.
2026: The Protected Year
Looking back, the turning point wasn’t just a signed contract. It was a conversation.
I was in Puerto Rico, boots on the ground, working all things digital in the wee hours of the morning, followed by the day labor of the farm. My copywriter— the one that has been through all the thick and the thin with me— pulled me aside.
He gave me The Talk. You know the one. It’s the conversation where someone you trust holds up a mirror and tells you what you are actually worth, and you realize how far that is from what you are currently accepting.
The decisions that needed to be made were tense, but they were followed by relief.
I realized I had to untie the chaotic knot of that white-label relationship. I had to trust that the space I cleared would be filled by the right clients. And it was.
I addressed the boogeyman in the room. I survived the health scares. I outlasted the imposter.
By no means am I walking into 2026 promising a “Perfect Year.” Perfection is a trap.
I am promising a Protected Year.
For me, that means ownership.
I own my business.
I own my home— my truck and camper— and my ability to move through the world on my own terms.
I own my destiny because I finally put the armor in place to survive the challenges that used to make me crumble.
To those stuck in the Messy Middle:
If you’re reading this and you feel like you are drowning in the Messy Middle, realizing, “damn, that all kinda feels like where I am”— just do me one favor: Keep Going.
Being human is hard, especially when you are trying to build something bigger than yourself. But all that humanity we hold? That’s what makes the life we are living, worth it.
The wins are there. They are just waiting on the other side of the contract updates, the hard conversations, and the “Good Enough” launches.
You don’t have to be perfect.
You just have to be protected.
