Every year I look forward to writing my year in review blog post, and every year I go to start it and wonder what in the hell I was thinking and how the heck can I get out of it?! A lot goes into these posts. They take ages to write, I’m not sure many people read them but here’s why I keep doing them: because I often figure out a lot of things about myself in the writing of them. And so, if all I get from this is some insights into myself, then I feel like that’s well worth it really. In which case, I shall ramble on!
2025 Word of the Year
Let’s start with my favourite thing of all… my words for the year. Continuing with the three words premise, my words for 2025 were:
Open
I chose this word because I felt it was all about noticing and being open to opportunities as they came along. It also felt like it tied in well with being open with my audience—particularly in how I shared with them.
Cultivate
This word felt very nurturing. It was a word that I’d used in my tag line for a number of years and it felt like it connected well with my desire to not set goals but to plant seeds for the year ahead.
Heart
This word felt like a return to something. The heart had been a part of my original wedding photography branding. I have a heart tattooed on my arm and there’s a lot of meaning behind the word for me. It came back for 2025 because I wanted a word that showed intention but was also soulful. It felt like a word that signified where I make all my decisions from, as well as give reason and feeling to everything I was going to do going forward.
I’ll dig into my thoughts about these words later!
2025 Seeds
I feel like I barely remember what seeds it was I wanted to plant at the beginning of 2025 so I’ll copy and paste these from my planning document and laugh at my optimism!
The seeds I planted for 2025 were, in no particular order:
Consistent monthly income (Good – $3000, Better – $4500, Best – $6500)
Blog quarterly as a minimum
Rewrite website
Restructure website
Redesign website
Set up print store on website
Create About Page Copy Kit and release
Start getting articles commissioned and written
Build out SOPs
Keep guesting on podcasts
Create more connections/referrals with other business owners ← Main lead gen for 2025
Have a marketing plan in place and stick to it!
Read 40 books
Reintroduce the Inner Strength Project
Finish editing novel and send out to beta readers
Start doing yoga / continue gym / start walking
Hire a cleaner
Visit Ireland and Malta
Decorate my office
Buy a better office chair
I read through that list and find myself thinking two things. First of all, damn woman, look how much you actually checked off that list! The second thought is, I really do need to be more specific about certain things I want to achieve. Reading back over my last year’s plans is always a bit of a revelation, both good and bad!
Here’s what actually happened
I won’t lie… this has been another tough year for many reasons. But it’s also been pretty damn awesome at times, too. Get ready for the ride!
January
The year began with high hopes and expectations, especially as I jumped almost straight into a big website copy project with the awesome Bri Ellington Photography (thanks to the awesome peeps over at Inkpot Creative for the referral!). This was the start of writing website copy from some really amazing clients this year, particularly because I got to see their words in action on their newly designed websites. Bri’s website turned out just stunning!
I spent a thoroughly lovely morning being hypnotised by the amazing Stef Fournier prior to working on my vision board for the year. A practice I loved so much, I went back this year to do it again. Here’s the vision board I created:
I gave a talk to a group of therapists through the Fuse Mastermind all about how to write a bio that connects with your audience. It was a lot of fun and the group was so engaged and lovely.
And at the end of the month, I got my first tattoo of the year! A beautiful fineline hummingbird designed and created by Ellie at Miso Inked.
I’ve been wanting a tattoo of a hummingbird for a while now for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the very first day we were in Vancouver visiting and scoping out the place before we decided to move here, we saw a hummingbird fly into a bush and I was absolutely enthralled. I hadn’t even considered that there were hummingbirds here in BC and it was one of the (many) reasons I wanted to move here! I adore watching them at the feeder out on our front porch too—all year round! Another reason is because I learned that in First Nations cultures they symbolise joy, love, beauty and resilience. That felt like a good reason to have one inked on my arm.
Oh, and I discovered a love of Lego at the beginning of the year too. Stu had bought me a Lego kit (Chrysanthemum, I do believe!) and I put it together one rainy Saturday afternoon and had a thoroughly lovely time doing it.
February
Had a great little headshot session with a repeat client early in the month. February is normally a pretty crap time to shoot outside so I was especially pleased to be taking photos in a cute little studio space.
I also caught up with an old client in February. She’s totally switched her business from being a baby photographer (which is when I used to write blogs for her) and is now a web designer. It was awesome to catch up with her and chat about our businesses.
I finally started to get more serious about my creative writing this year and it got underway in February when I had an awesome chat with my Big Magic friend, Chris (we met at Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic Workshop back in 2017!). Chris writes for screen and stage and I love how organised he is with his various writing projects. So, I wanted to pick his brains and figure out how I could get more organised with my writing! So began the writing board which lives on the wall next to my desk.
The end of February got a little bit chaotic when our friends arrived from the UK to visit and we started getting some work done to the house. Although it didn’t get completely crazy until March.
March
At the start of the month, we took our UK visitors to see an ice hockey game. It is, after all, the ultimate Canadian sporting experience! I had yet to see a game and, I have to say, we had the best first experience I could have ever hoped for. We went to watch the Vancouver Giants play—Michael Buble’s team—at their home arena (rink?! I’m still learning the lingo!) and it was so much fun. It didn’t take me long to get hooked and 2025 became the year we got very into watching the Abbotsford Canucks play.
I got to work on a copy audit for a local elopement photographer, which was a lot of fun to dig into. I really enjoy doing copy audits, for some reason. Being able to highlight not only what needs fixing but what’s also working well makes me feel a bit like a school teacher (and I always loved playing teachers as a kid).
I also started working with an ADHD coach around now—something I’d been considering doing for a while but hadn’t found someone to work with. I was fortunate enough to find someone local who was really in the early days of her coaching business and she helped me out a lot through the year.
The first week of the month was a little crazy. Our friends who were visiting went away to Vancouver Island for a couple of days and the moment they left, the painters moved in. We got most of our house (the main areas) repainted and our kitchen cupboards resprayed for a more modern look. In the meantime, we also changed the countertops to wood and installed a new sink. It took a little bit of time to get it all done, but we love our kitchen now.
Not long after all that craziness, I packed up my car and drove down to Oregon to meet up with my L.A. friend and fellow writer for our own writer’s retreat. We rented a beach house on the Oregon coast which couldn’t have been more perfect, while the UK contingent had their retreat in Northumberland. It was during this week that I was able to finally send my novel out to my beta readers, which I was super excited about. Unfortunately, going over the border into the US was a very stressful experience for me, though, and I started hearing crazy stories about people being whisked off at border control and being detained. I knew the moment I got back into Canada that I wouldn’t be crossing the border again for a while (and I won’t until a certain orange idiot is out of office).
April
Early in April, my husband, Stu, and I were invited to chat on the Relocurious podcast (you can listen to the episode here) about our experiences of migrating to Canada. It was really interesting to chat about it together, actually. I hadn’t realised how some of our thoughts about the whole thing differed so much.
I gave a talk to the Soulmate Client Society about how to write engaging emails—definitely one of my favourite topics of conversation.
And I reconnected with an old friend in April, too, for face to face chats over cake (always a bonus!).
Later in the month, I guested on The Visibility Impact Show Podcast where I got to chat about all things home page (another nerd topic for me!). You can check out the episode here!
I got to work with a returning client in April, as well as on a VIP week for a great photography and videography team.
And at the end of the month, we got to go and see Sarah Millican live in Vancouver. All in all, a pretty good month.
May
May was mostly about retainer work for my ongoing client, which filled up most of my month. I also gave another talk to the Fuse Mastermind, as well as a talk on personalised lead magnets to my copywriting membership that I’m in.
May was also the month I FINALLY finished my website rewrite and rebuild. A massive win which went on way longer than I’d anticipated. I was so happy to have it finished!
And I started getting super excited about my hydrangeas this month. They started budding! As someone who’s not the most greenfingered of people, you must understand this enthusiasm for my garden is definitely unusual.
June
I got to turn my website writing and building skills around onto my sister this month, helping her to create a small site that showcases her work she did for her Masters on domestic violence. I’m very proud of my sis and her work (and the website looks pretty great too!).
I had a Human Design reading this month, which was super interesting and enlightening. I would love to dig into this some more but it definitely helped me realise some things about the way I work.
It was the husband’s birthday in June and we went and stayed at a nice hotel for the night, where we also got to have dinner at the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant. It was a fantastic experience and the food was amazing, of course! We went for the signature dish… Beef Wellington. And it was sublime.
I was lucky enough to do another photo shoot with a returning client this month, too. Janessa had some headshots done with me a couple of years ago as she was starting to explore an acting career and, after securing some work on TV shows, she wanted to come back for more headshots for her portfolio. We also took a bit of time to do some more dance photos, too, which was super fun.
Oh, and towards the end of the month, Stu won two tickets to a beer festival at the zoo! It was so much fun to wander round all the various stands and tasting all the beers and ciders, whilst also feet away from a variety of big cats and other animals. Since it was after hours and adults only, we were allowed to see the lions being fed, too!
July
We finally got a proper backyard this month! When we bought the house back in 2021, the backyard was a slab of concrete on which I parked my car (Stu’s went in the garage) and we had a little bit of grass that connected with our neighbour’s yard. Nothing wrong with that, but it didn’t really feel like a place where we could hang out in the warmer weather. We finally took the plunge, got a fence installed and a deck laid and it is a glorious space. It looks a bit big and sparse at the moment but we’ve got plans for it this year!
I tackled another VIP week for a wedding photographer in July—actually a client I’d been in touch with for a couple of years who was finally ready to get her copy written. Such a fun experience!
And the month wrapped up with a Copy Intensive for an Alberta pet photographer who I’d previously done a Copy Audit for. It’s always lovely to see the work they’ve done based on the audit report I gave them and give their copy a final polish before they get it on their website.
August
August was the month of travelling! On the first day of the month, I was off to the airport and on my way to Malta. And a day and a half later, I arrived on the tiny island in the sweltering sunshine and heat (oh the heat!).
I got my second tattoo of the year a few days after I arrived. I’d been wanting this tattoo ever since I got my Maltese citizenship back in 2020 and I’d wanted to work with Lisa from the moment I knew she did tattoos. I’ve followed Lisa for years, back when she was an artist (I have one of her very early pieces!) so when I knew she was doing tattoos, she felt like the obvious choice for my Malta-themed homage to my citizenship. When I saw her flash pieces that were themed around the island, I fell in love and I got a little stamp which I love.
I didn’t do much work while I was in Malta (which was lovely) but I did buy a new Airtable system and started setting it up while I was there. Game. Changer. It’s called The Get Shit Done Hub by Disobedient Business Co. (that’s an affiliate link but I share it all the time because it’s SO. GOOD.) and it’s completely changed the way I manage my tasks now. No more specific calendar time blocks that I was constantly failing to stick to. This system is now a basic running to do list that focuses on my energy levels and what I feel able to tackle on a day-to-day basis. And I’ve been accomplishing more in the last few months than I probably have in years, in all honesty. Highly recommended!
Anyway, back to Malta – where I celebrated my belated 40th birthday (it was actually my 45th but my 40th got spoiled by a certain pandemic we no longer speak of). I also got to enjoy (!) the Mosta feast again, something I haven’t been able to see in years. And it was super lovely to catch up with cousins who are now grown ups and have kids of their own which, of course, made me realise my own age. Gah!
I also got to photograph my sister again (she’s so photogenic!). She needed a few new headshots so we had a bit of fun getting those while on a wander around the streets of Mdina.
After my birthday, Stu and I headed back to the UK and spent a week doing touristy things in Nottingham and Derbyshire. We spent a day up at Nottingham Castle, went on a ghost walk, had afternoon tea at Chatsworth House (ooh la la!) and also caught up with my good friend, Carla, on a day trip to Ely (which is a beautiful place, by the way!).
September
Early September is our wedding anniversary – 12 years this year! We went out for dinner at a favourite restaurant but didn’t do anything else given we’d just got back from a decent trip away.
I had another great brand shoot with a coach, Camila, later in the month. We did a lot of work in her home but also went to this gorgeous nearby heritage farm, too, and got to enjoy the last of the pretty scenery before the weather started to turn.
I also had my first pet sitting job (I do drop ins as a little sideline through an app called Rover!). It was quite the job too. Daily drop ins to feed, clean and water 7 cats! And the majority of them had some medical issues and anxiety problems too. I was a bit nervous but it turned out pretty fab. The cats were all super lovely and I found myself falling in love with one of them, a cute little thing called Fluffy who has asthma. When I look at my photos for September, it is mostly many, many pictures of cats!
Oh, and the end of September is when we got our new kingsize bed. I will never regret making that upgrade. The extra space is blissful!
October
Another VIP session was tackled this month, this time for a Vancouver Island-based elopement photographer who I’d already worked with on a copy audit. Sometimes I know the audit report can be a bit overwhelming, so it’s always possible to hire me to do the work for you, if you need that! I loved just how fast the client got her new words up on her website too. It all came together beautifully!
Later in the month, I was honoured to do a copy audit for a fellow copywriter (even if it was a little nerve-wracking to be critiquing her work!).
I had a lovely catch up with a biz friend midway through the month. She suggested we meet at this epic coffee shop called The Black Casket Cafe. The food was great, the decor was sooooo much fun!
I was excited to finally get into Vancouver for an in-person catch up with the awesome ladies of the Radical Women Mastermind that I’ve been in this year. I usually struggle to make it because it’s a full day out so I was very excited to get the chance in October.
And just before Hallowe’en, Stu and I went for a ghosty night out at the historic Fort Langley. Freezing cold but a whole lot of spooky fun!
November
November is always about wrapping up projects in my world, since I don’t do client work in December (a long standing boundary I’ve kept for a number of years now).
This November, I wrapped up a Copy Intensive project with a fab pet photographer, and wrote up a bunch of copy for a returning client’s next quarterly newsletter magazine she’d be printing in the new year.
I also joined a local writing group in November. Honestly, I’d been on the hunt for a group for a while and was starting to think I might have to set one up myself (but was heavily resisting that). Thankfully, someone beat me to it and I saw a notification go out for the first group meeting at the local library on the second Saturday of the month. It was a glorious autumn day—bright blue skies and yellow and orange leaves laying all over the ground. I had the best time at the meeting and I’m happy to say it’s got me even more focused on my writing in the last few months.
December
And then it was December. No client work this month but there wasn’t a whole lot of other work that happened either as my friend came back for another visit from the UK—her third in under 18 months! Always happy to have her visit, of course.
The weather was pretty miserable for her entire stay. It rained most days, we had a couple of atmospheric rivers and so it meant we didn’t get out and about too much (although we did do plenty of shopping and we went to Vancouver for the christmas market with her).
I spent the first week of the month feeling pretty sick, though. Totally my fault. In a rush while out and about, I made the mistake of buying a shitty Maccie D’s and my gut told me, in no uncertain terms, the following morning, that it was NOT happy. I was rough for at least 5 days and it took me a while to recover. Needless to say, I will no longer be dining at the golden arches!
December was also the month I started hormone therapy and within a few days, I felt unbelievably different. I realise now, looking back, I struggled through most of 2025 in terms of my health but I hadn’t realised just how much I was struggling until I no longer was. It’s still early days but I’m already very impressed with how the treatment has changed my life. Perimenopause is a bitch!
Christmas and New Year were exceptionally quiet around these parts—just the way we both like it. Oh, apart from when the Holiday Train came into Agassiz (an annual tradition where a train covered in Christmas lights makes its way across Canada and stops at various places on route and the guesting band on board plays a little concert). The last few years, the train has had a couple of small country bands and singers that I don’t know (country’s not really my thing) but imagine my surprise and delight this year when I learned the Barenaked Ladies would be on board! It was a fab 20 minutes, even if it was cold and wet. The rain did kindly stop while the band played though!
For the rest of the holidays, we rested a lot. We watched a lot of movies. Ate some yummy food and we saw in the New Year fast asleep in our massive and very comfortable bed. No regrets!
And that about rounds up the year!
So what about those seeds then?
Well, let’s start by covering what I didn’t achieve, shall we?
I didn’t:
Manage a consistent monthly income – there were some good months but definitely not so good months, too!
Blog quarterly as a minimum
Create About Page Copy Kit and release
Start getting articles commissioned and written
Build out SOPs
Keep guesting on podcasts
Have a marketing plan in place and stick to it!
Read 40 books
Reintroduce the Inner Strength Project
Hire a cleaner
Visit Ireland
Decorate my office
But I DID:
Rewrite website
Restructure website
Redesign website
Set up print store on website
Create more connections/referrals with other business owners
Finish editing novel and send out to beta readers
Continue going to the gym
Visit Malta and UK
Went on writing retreat in Oregon
Buy a better office chair
Some thoughts on all of this…
Revenue
I think the general consensus is that 2025 was a tough year all round, but especially for small businesses. People were being a lot more careful and selective about how they were spending money, for one thing. And do I even need to say AI? I’d say that had a significant impact too, because apparently people are happy to have the robots write their copy these days for the price of a monthly subscription. And you know what? That’s fine, for a little while. But I fully expect a massive resurgence of people wanting humans to write their words sometime in the very near future, especially when I see AI now being described as “slop”!
But back to the money thing. It was another hard year as revenue goes but I’m a freelancer and massively flexible to boot. I had a couple of side gigs that brought in a little extra cash and you do what you gotta do, right?
The Website Re-Write
Egads! Re-writing my website really did become a labour of love in 2025. I’d known I wanted to start this project at the end of 2024 and I estimated it taking 3-4 months but, as it turned out, it actually ended up taking 7 months all in.
That being said, I did take a slow and steady approach to it all this time. I spent a lot of time restructuring the site and figuring out what pages I needed. Then, of course, there was the writing side of things—I really dug into my own messaging and my brand voice and did a heck of a lot of work behind the scenes before I wrote a single word. I got an SEO audit from the very talented Tanja over at Chunky Squirrel. And the super awesome Rhiannon Adler audited my website layout and design and gave me a ton of great tips for the new design.
Once I got my head down and focused just on the website copy, things flew. Who knew getting focused on just one thing instead of trying to do all the things at once could make things happen faster?!
And once the copy was written, I worked super hard on the re-design, learning from all the mistakes I’d made previously and making sure the website worked just as well on mobile as it does on a laptop or desktop. The end result is actually pretty awesome! It’s still not a “professionally designed” website and one day I’ll actually have the budget to pay someone to do that, but it’s not half bad and I’ve got a lot of pride in sharing my URL with people now!
The Things I Didn’t Do
I just want to touch on a couple of the seeds I planted that didn’t go anywhere. Namely:
- Creating and launching the About Page Copy Kit
- Blogging quarterly (at a minimum)
- Building out my SOPs
The blogging seed is one I’m really sad I didn’t stick with. I actually miss blogging and I think not doing it regularly has had an impact on my website traffic over the last couple of years. So it’s a seed I’ve brought back for this year.
Around three quarters of the way through the year, I lamented to my ADHD coach about how I felt so crap about not getting my SOPs done. It’s a task that’s lived on my to do list for almost as long as I’ve lived in Canada and I still haven’t done it. But she gave me some great advice—namely that just because a goal was on my list, it didn’t mean I was a failure for not completing it. She also really got me to think about why it was on my list and, honestly, I’m not even sure. Because it’s a “should”? Probably. So, with that in mind, I’m not worrying about it until I need to.
That tussle with the SOPs really guided how I was feeling about the About Page Copy Kit too. I had plans to work on it in the latter part of the year but when I got there, I realised I was so exhausted, I just didn’t want to do it. I made the decision to pause it and I’m hoping to tackle it in 2026 instead.
Personal Goals
Let’s start with what did happen because, honestly, I’m super proud of them! First up, there was the finishing up of editing my novel and sending it out to beta readers. I actually sent it out while I was on writing retreat back in March, so I achieved that goal pretty quickly. It’s been slow going with the novel since then although things are picking up pace again now, I’m glad to say. But I’ll talk about that another time, no doubt.
The other thing I was super proud of managing to do was finally getting my print store live and up on the website. That has also been a goal that has lived on my list for a number of years. But it was only once I rebuilt my website that I finally managed to get it done. Right now there’s a small collection of prints for sale but I’ll be adding more to it slowly.
I was super happy to get to do a bit of travelling last year too. The trip to Oregon for writing retreat was lovely (if a little stressful when crossing the border) but the highlight was definitely my trip to Malta and the UK in the summer. I felt like a proper tourist, barely opened my laptop and thoroughly enjoyed spending time with my family. Sadly, I didn’t manage to incorporate Ireland into that trip like I’d originally planned but I’ll get back there at some point. I’m desperate to see my sister’s new house!
Finally, there was the reading goal and I’ll obviously go into this more in my annual book review post very soon. I knew 40 books was ambitious and I wasn’t wrong. I finished up with a little over 20 books in the end. It was a year of struggling to read, especially in the latter part of the year. But I did read my own novel at least 5 times. Does that count?!
Lessons learned
It wouldn’t be a review without learning a few lessons along the way, would it? Here are the things that come to mind…
Open, Cultivate, Heart
‘Open’ really stuck with me through the whole year, I have to say. I tried to keep my eyes and ears open all the time for possibilities and opportunities and I definitely got to meet a lot of new people along the way, because of that.
I struggled, though, when it came to ‘Cultivate’. You should know, I’m not the most greenfingered of people and cultivating things isn’t a strong skill for me. Lesson learned there. And I think I struggled, too, with ‘Heart’. Not because I lacked it for any reason, but more because I found the year so generally hard in its entirety—with my business, my health struggles and the weight of the world. It was, perhaps, not the right choice for the current times, in hindsight.
Health Does Matter
As someone who used to work in the health service, I know that not having your health is a huge road block. But I honestly hadn’t realised just how much my own health had suffered over the course of last year—not until I started hormone treatment and suddenly got so much back! I’m proud of myself for pushing through and for continuing to advocate for myself but oof, it was hard at times and a real slog, while waiting for referrals and appointments. I’m definitely looking forward to better things in this area of my life in 2026.
Somehow, Things Work Out
And actually, that right there was something I’d brought into 2025 from the previous year. I definitely went into the year with less “desperation” and more “what will be, will be” and I think that, at least, put me in pretty good stead for a hard year. I dread to think how things might have felt otherwise!
—
And so wraps up this year’s review blog post! I feel like these posts get longer and longer but I do love doing them. They help me to realise and learn a lot of stuff as I work through them. Hopefully they’re as interesting to read! It’s a tradition I plan to keep up, anyway. Even if it is just for myself!
If you’re interested, though, here’s where you can read the last seven years of posts: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018
