Happy 2026!
I can't say 2025 went as planned, but I can say I'm grateful that it didn't. Here's why.
Happy New Year to you!
You may or may not have noticed I didn’t send a December Recap. 11 months of consistently sharing with you and then, just shy of the finish line, I didn’t finish. But I didn’t finish on purpose.
I didn’t finish because I decided to give the end of December to myself, to take stock of my month and my year personally, instead of publicly. At the turning of a big page, like a year, I knew I needed that. I hope you gave yourself the same, took a moment to pause and take account of everything that transpired for you over the past year. I hope you found perspective for moments that, while you were going through them, felt impossible. I hope you patted yourself on the back for all of the times you made a change for the better or made a choice (or series of choices) that have brought you to the place you now proudly stand on 2026’s doorstep.
Because I was so consistent at keeping you all updated in 2025, you’re fully aware of what transpired in mine. You’re aware of the highs, like tasting van life for the first time in the Pacific Northwest, being invited on press trips in Charleston, Haywood County, Florence, and Norway, and signing up for a travel writing course that brought me community in my work, and the lows, like National Geographic’s commission take-back, the sudden loss of my steadiest freelance writing gig at Paradise, and the pilgrimage through Tuscany that forced a confrontation with myself. You know what I was aiming to do as a travel writer and you know what happened—the relentless rejection and the relentless hope that I’d get there eventually.
Everything you read in these monthly emails I’ve been sending to you was exactly what I was reflecting on as the year turned. Every month of this past year built on the next and brought me here, to who I am now and what I want for 2026. I hope yours did too.
As I enter 2026, I feel a lot like the lyrics in that Max McNown song: “I’m a little bit hurt, but a lot more free. I ain’t saying that you never took a toll on me.”
2025 was hard, as much as it was loaded with highs. It transformed my biggest dream of all—writing for the big-name travel publications—and re-positioned it, through all of its rejections, realizations, and reality checks, to a place in my life that feels so much better—as a side gig again, and not the gig.
This year, my biggest dream of all is to write for myself on my own blog, and for that to be enough. It’s taken eight years to get my blog to the point it’s at and for this dream to finally feel like something realistic and well within reach.
Because of my roller coaster of a journey with pitching to publications this past year, I value what my own blog offers me, something those publications simply can’t: the ability to write in step with my life as I’m living it, the ability to say what I want to when I want to and how I want to, the ability to shape and create a body of work that doesn’t have to tap into trends or news or what topics are drawing the most clicks at any given moment. I get to create in my own way, using my own life and travels as inspiration. I don’t have to ask permission to tell the story. I don’t have to wait for an answer. I don’t have to meet a deadline. I don’t have to write for free.
My own blog is finally at a point where it’s opening doors to experiences I want to have in places I want to go and with partners I want to work with. It’s providing me a little bit of passive income that’s helping to carry me month-to-month, and it’s letting me share my life and travels with you and the thousands of others who are finding my writing as they’re planning their next trip on Google. I love it. I love the creative control that’s coming into form after eight years of sticking with it.
I’m genuinely excited for the year to come. But, most importantly, I’m open to my biggest dream taking me somewhere entirely different than where I might see it all going from right here. 2025 taught me that. It was 2025’s greatest gift.
What’s your biggest dream for this year? What are you aiming at now because of what you experienced in 2025? What do you want most for your year to come? I told you mine. Now you tell me yours. Let’s get after our dreams together this year. Let’s learn from it all together as we do. And let’s leave enough room for these dreams to take us towards even better ones, the ones we can’t even see from where we are right now.
With so much love on this precipice of a new year,
Amber
p.s. Yes, that photo of me at the start is from the Grand Canyon, something I probably would have told you about if I ever did write that December Recap. If you do want the story behind how I ended up there, I’ve written it all down in my three-part travelogue about my recent road trip around the American Southwest in a campervan. You can go back to the beginning of that adventure here.