What Happens in a Year

On Sunday, November 2nd, 2025 on a beautiful fall morning, I ran 6.2 miles with a thousand other runners and finished the City of Oaks 10k Race in 1:13. And I did it two minutes faster than my goal time which felt delightful.

I ended up running about 75 miles in the 10-weeks before that race.

That’s not nothing. And I have another race I’m training for right now. So, I suppose I started (or maybe continued) running in 2025.

A 2025 Retrospective

One of the ways I look back at the year is to browse through my calendar and my money to capture what I actually did in a year.

How did I spend my money and time? What actually happened?

I went to Greece for 17 days with my partner in July and we went to Costa Rica for a week over Thanksgiving and my 40th birthday. I drove to both sides of North Carolina for retreats and gatherings in October. There were also trips to family, a few in-person and virtual conferences and a long weekend at the beach.

Last January, I got Lasik. I’ve been taking Spanish classes and piano lessons all year. I’ve played quite a lot of sand volleyball and slow-pitch softball, practiced yoga, and went on a million walks with my dog.

My friend and I had season tickets to watch the local women’s professional soccer team, the NC Courage, and we went to a dozen games in sunshine, rain, and even a thunderstorm or two.

I organized and co-hosted the 3-day, in-person, Ampersand Gathering in Washington, DC in September and 96 people signed up with rave reviews and such warm feedback.

One of the biggest happenings this year are the shifts I’ve been making in my work. I’ve been self-employed since 2016, which is when I started Daring Studios as a container for my then-human-centered design/visual practitioner/facilitation/etc. work.

The first four years of my business I had one main big client, and the next five I had a different one, with a smattering of side projects with mostly one-off clients.

This year, things shifted with my work.

The world shifted and so did my main big client. But the good news is that I saw it coming so I could prepare and it was honestly a relief because I’ve also been wanting to shift too.

This year has been a transition for me. I’ve been exploring few types of new work to braid into a career - one being developmental and line editing for fiction books - as well as doing a lot of deep inquiry about how I want to reposition my work and what I need to do to make the strategic shifts required to build a new version of Daring Studios.

But it’s like putting in the mileage required to train for a race. It’s a messy work-in-progress with efforts and experiments accumulating into change and progress over time.

So, we’ll see what happens in the next year, besides a 10k or two.