Between Two Birthdays: What A Year It has Been
Photo by Travis Bartnick
Twelve words. That’s all my friend Anne wrote.
“You are very far away from where you were a year ago.”
Twelve words, dropped into a comment thread, probably taking her less time to type than it has taken you to read this email so far. That’s all it took for me to hit pause and recognize where I’m standing right now. What a gift her comment was for me.
Every year, on or around my birthday, I celebrate the new year. Calendar years are somebody else’s bookkeeping. And for the better part of the last decade I’ve done two things to mark the occasion, both of them an honest look back at how much ground I’ve covered during this latest rotation around the sun. The first is making a self-portrait on my actual birthday. Watching my life unfold in this one image, taken every year, over time, has been fascinating. I highly recommend it.
The second is a tradition I adapted from my incredibly talented writer and comedian friend, Mark. I sequester myself in an atmospheric hotel room or inspiring Airbnb and remove all distractions. I put on my favorite music, pull out a fresh Rollbahn notebook and set up my favorite LePen colors, each one color-coded to a topic. I bring out the wall-sized Post-It notes and my Sharpie collection. Then, I get to work. I chart out my creative goals for the year, like the personal projects I’m working on. I chart out my professional goals, and then start brainstorming how to get there. And then, I list out all the fears I have in pursuing those goals, because naming them takes the bite out of their bark. Or so I tell myself.
Once a large-scale vision has begun to take shape, I sit down at my keyboard, channel my inner Aaron-Sorkin-on-ten-cups-of-coffee, and begin writing. I don’t stop until I feel like I could not possibly write more. Then I write more.
Much of what comes from these sessions stays hidden from view, known only to me. Some of it comes out in pieces over time. But all of it means something to me, and it’s a ritual that I’ve come to look forward to as much as a vacation or a bucket-list trip. It’s the gift of time, my favorite gift of all, and choosing it each year is the greatest act of kindness I’ve shown myself these last few years.
“You are very far away from where you were a year ago."
A year ago, I was in a small, one-room cabin in Alaska, waiting. Waiting is generous, actually. I was hiding, in the nicest possible way. One room. One window. Not much else. But it was exactly enough space to bide the two weeks I needed to get through before I dropped the bomb and everything in my life would change.
By then I already knew that the partnership I’d rebuilt my career around years earlier wasn’t standing on the ground I’d been assured it was. I had known what was going on for months at that point, long enough to have already been well into planning my way out. Previous attempts had taught me that the one thing my plan required, the only thing really, was that nobody else find out until I was already three moves ahead and at the point of no return. So I kept my head down, did the next two workshops, and every night before I went to sleep I did the math on how many days I had left before I could stop pretending.
Forest ecologists will tell you that the dangerous rot in a stand of trees is often invisible from the trail. The canopy can look full and green for years after the roots have already started to fail, quietly, out of sight, while everyone keeps looking up instead of down. A tree doesn’t fall because of one bad week. It falls because the damage has been working on it for a long time, until one ordinary afternoon the wind is just strong enough, and down it goes.
The most consequential collapses rarely come with warning, but I knew exactly which roots had gone soft. I had been collecting and cataloging that information all summer long. I just had to wait for the right week to let the tree fall on my terms, instead of on someone else’s.
What I didn’t know, while I was busy monitoring the canopy and trying to keep that particular tree upright just a little bit longer, was that an entirely different kind of ground had started shifting under me at the same time. During a stretch of days when the ground already felt like quicksand, a routine mammogram found a lump. Then the biopsy. Then the particular flavor of waiting that reorganizes your days into “before the phone rings” and “after the phone rings.”
It’s a strange realization when a lump in your breast turns out to be the least earth-shattering part of your past few months.
There was a season after all of this when I had to do the hard job of letting people show up for me. That is far more difficult than it sounds like, especially for someone who has built her career around being the capable one, the guide, the person who knows what to do and where to go next. I am not naturally good at being taken care of. But I did it, reluctantly and poorly, in real time, and with an audience.
A lot of you showed up for me in more ways and in more corners of my life than you could ever possibly realize. When I pulled the plug on the little that remained of previous life, I received hundreds of emails and messages in a span of days, all of them incredibly supportive. Many of them, I still have saved. Some of your emails and notes made such an impact, they are even printed and hanging next to my computer monitor at home.
Without knowing it, many of you dropped in at just the right time with a level of grace and good humor that got me through some genuinely rough patches. Nobody demanded explanations from me, they just showed up. Somehow, that was exactly the right amount of care.
Listing every kindness would be its own essay, but let me say this: I did not do the hard parts of the last year by myself, even when it felt that way sometimes from the inside.
There’s plenty more I could say about that stretch, but suffice it to say that I am profoundly, enormously grateful to be on the other side of all of it. I’m healthy. I am, without exaggeration, the happiest I’ve ever been in my adult life. Those chapters are closed and far enough in the rear view mirror that I sometimes have to remind myself they happened at all, the way you might look at an old scar and need a second to remember which incident actually caused it.
I'm sharing this with all of you because I think it’s worth naming what a single year can actually hold for a person: anger, grief, reckoning, fear, loss, love, joy, abundance, gratitude. All stacked together, almost comically so, one after another after another. Miraculously, right in the middle of that tornado, the quiet architecture of a completely different, better, and more plentiful life was emerging underneath everything else.
Which brings me to now.
2026 has been, in the best and most literal sense of the word, a reset. Some of you have known me for years. Some of you reading this have only scratched the surface. And some of you found me through work that had somebody else’s name over the door, and have learned that I deserved my own name and my own headlines the entire time. So this year I rebuilt that work from the studs, under my own name, on my own terms, and let me just tell you that it was both terrifying and also the single best professional decision I have ever made.
When I wrote last year that 2026 was my coyote year, I couldn’t have been more dead on. For most of the last century, this country trapped them, poisoned them, gassed their dens, and shot them from low-flying airplanes, in numbers that would have erased almost any other species from the map entirely. Coyotes didn’t just survive that campaign. They answered it. Under heavy pressure, coyote populations breed earlier, carry larger litters, and disperse into new territory faster than they otherwise would. Every serious attempt to wipe them out only pushed them into more ground than they’d held before. They’re on every kind of landscape this continent has to offer now, not because anyone made room for them, but because they made the room themselves.
That’s the closest thing I have to a metaphor for my 2026. I said yes to opportunities I would have talked myself out of twelve months ago. I made room in the places I wanted to be, even when some felt I didn't belong there. I leaned hard into the parts of this work I love the most: the teaching, the writing, the fieldcraft. I found my voice again, and used it even when it came out a bit shakier than I cared for. And I let go of, without grief, the parts of my old life that had never actually been serving me or my clients well to begin with.
More than a few people who’ve known me a long time have said some version of the same thing to me lately: I seem lighter. Looser in my shoulders and quicker to laugh. That my smile and happiness are infectious as of late. I’ve noticed it myself, in the ordinary ways that one notices a shift like that. Like how much easier it is to fall asleep these days. But it means something more, something extra when, in all of that work, others actually "see" you and take notice.
Some of that is simply time and distance from a genuinely hard year. But most of it is far more deliberate than that. Most notably, I was no longer auditioning to be “enough” anymore. I realized I am enough. And as soon as that realization snapped into place, everything else started snapping into place, too.
This was the year I realized I am finally home, where I’m meant to be. This was the summer I got to be curious again — not for work, but for fun! I learned about wild sarsaparilla, sustainably harvesting ramps, and the difference between an interrupted fern and a sensitive fern. It was the summer I fell back in love with the prairies, the pine barrens, and that edge of land where they meet my beloved boreal forest. It was the summer that my dog, Susan, and I got back to hitting the trails and adventuring together like we used to. She even saw her first black bear this year (she's not a fan).
I’ve hired some help, and hope to interview for a second set of hands to join us soon. That was a move I never saw coming at this point. And while it will take some time for everyone to be fully onboarded, I’m already feeling the benefits of having room to breathe again.
I started taking weekends off. Like... real ones. Ones where we tromped around the Northwoods on our own unhurried time, our dogs at our heels, with no itinerary waiting on the other end of it. There were evenings where time ran amok, with live music some Fridays and later-than-expected nights around a fire in the backyard, filled to the brim with good conversation and even better stories. The kind of weekends that you don’t really have a plan for, but turn out better than anything you could have planned for all the same.
That’s true of the version of Alaska that I got this year too, squeezed into a narrow window of time between my coastal brown bear trip and my muskox workshop that is still a couple of days off. I’ve worked this state in every season, but this year it handed me something different: for one stretch of time, Alaska wasn’t the job. It was everything I never made time for during the years I actually lived here. And in that, it became something new.
We hiked up to a glacier I'd never been to, we explored one of my favorite spots in the Mat-Su Valley, we visited places that had always existed on my “want to do” list but never somehow managed to be checked off. We fished. Oh, how we fished. The Kasilof gave up silvers in that milky green current only a glacial river produces. A rain-soaked day on the saltwater swell turned into coho after coho after coho, with halibut landing in the middle of that, and rockfish coming up almost as afterthoughts. Eighty pounds of fish filets, boxed and bound for home, might be one of the best souvenirs I’ve ever packed.
This turn around the sun is closing with a heart that is overflowing with happiness and gratitude. I'm finally myself again. And with that, I am straight back into finishing my business rebuild with a renewed sense of purpose.
I’m still learning that rest isn’t the thing you earn once the real work is finished. Some days, rest the realest work there is. That’s an absurdly hard lesson for anyone self-employed, where idle hands feel like a moral failing even when the actual failing is never putting those hands down. If 2026 was the reset, then 2027 and 2028 are shaping up to be the payoff.
Later this year, I’ll keynote Mid-Atlantic Photo Visions, following in the footsteps of so many photographers I’ve long admired. I’m now sponsored by Sony Alpha Female, and have some incredible collaborations and events coming along with that in this next year. I’ve landed some incredible guests for my forthcoming podcast, and I can’t wait for you to hear the season when it’s finally ready to launch. And in short order, you’ll all be among the first to see my rather significant rebrand, the final artwork and concept being brought into the final stages of life as you read this.
I have only a few openings left on my 2027 trips, a spot each on my Brazil trips having just had cancellations earlier this week. There’s one chance left to join me in Patagonia for pumas and penguins, too. 2027 will be the last year to join me in Brazil or Patagonia, as I shift into some less crowded, but equally incredible, destinations. I've also built out several custom, private trips for people, including one to Kenya in partnership with award-winning photographers and writers Michael Hodgson and Therese Iknoian (and there is one spot left - email me for details)!
I have a new online workshop format launching this fall - live workshops where I can teach fieldcraft and related photography skills in-depth. I have never once been made smaller by another photographer getting better at this thing we all love, and the notion that expertise is a scarce resource to be kept behind a gate and slowly rationed out is one of the more tiresome habits of this industry. I’m hopeful this new option makes learning from me accessible to more people, especially those who can’t make it into the field with me in person.
None of this would exist if I hadn’t spent this year dismantling the entire structure and deciding, deliberately, what deserved to be rebuilt and what didn’t. What would best serve the community I'm trying to build and what wouldn't.
I didn’t get to choose the mess of a year that made all of this necessary, but I’m not going to pretend for even a single second that I’m not grateful for what’s come out the other side.
Twelve words, “You are very far away from where you were a year ago.”
A year ago I was standing on a business foundation that wasn’t what I’d been told it was, waiting on a callback I didn’t want either, and giving what I thought was a fairly convincing performance of someone who had it all together.
This year, I’m not performing anything. I’m doing work I am proud to put my name on.
This morning, I made my self portrait, one more frame in a project I didn’t realize I was building until I looked back and saw how much of my life is written across it. A couple of days ago, since I'm in Nome and scouting muskox locations for my actual birthday today, I listened to music loud enough to drown out my self-doubt and I wrote myself into the happy tears. This letter, in a lot of ways, is this year’s version of that same ritual, only I’ve handed it over to you instead of storing it on a shelf.
I don’t know exactly what the next year holds, and after the one I just walked through, I’ve stopped pretending I could predict it if I tried. But I know this much. I’m walking into it more optimistic and more determined than I walked into the last one.
Thank you for reading this far, and for being part of the years that got me here, the hard ones and the good ones alike. Anne was right. I am very far away from where I was a year ago. And I couldn’t be happier for it.
Here’s to how far the next one takes us, all of us, together.