Reflections & What’s Next

This post is different from my usual. Rather than an important societal issue, the topic I’ll be exploring here is what it has been like to pursue this passion project over the past year, and where I’m headed next. If my personal reflections are of interest to you, read on! If not, stay tuned for my next post.

One year ago, I started something brand new unlike anything I’d done before. I started this blog – a whole new career venture, something between a creative outlet, a passion project, independent persuasive journalism, and a climate communication platform. You can find my first post here, explaining all my vague yet visionary plans for this space at the very beginning. The past year has been a huge experiment in every way. I made an agreement with myself to do this for one full year, and see how it went. Twelve months later, it’s now time to assess. I’ve moved away from rigid New Years goals over the years, but I am a huge fan of reflecting, and I love the opportunity of a new year to check in, assess the big picture, and come up with new, better informed strategies to try. As with any experiment, some things worked, and others didn’t. 

First of all – THANK YOU

If you have followed along with Clarity in Catastrophe at any point over the last year, I want to thank you. Your time and attention holds so much value, and I deeply appreciate you trusting me with any amount of it! Solo writing and research are thoroughly lonely, doubt-filled endeavors, and every ‘like,’ comment, follow, share, and check-in I’ve received has gone an extremely long way in keeping my morale afloat. I’m someone who has always dreamt of building my own creative thing, and is stumbling through the murkiness of turning it into a reality. As such, your readership and support has meant the world to me, truly. So thanks for being here.

Second – Where Have I Been?

You may or may not have noticed my absence last month. I took December off from Clarity in Catastrophe for some personal life events but mostly to step away in order to reflect on what’s not working and why. And what might work better in 2026. I turned off my paid subscriptions because if you pay to support my work, you deserve regularly scheduled, quality posts.

When I started art school back in 2017, I didn’t know the rigid external structure of school would turn what had been my #1 creative passion from the previous four years (photography) into a rather lifeless practice over the course of just a year and a half. I learned a very important lesson then about the risks of mixing creative passion with career and money. Now that I’m trying to mix them again, I’m keenly aware of when it is wise to stop and reassess a passion for a moment when it starts to drain rather than bring me joy. I’m very protective of my crafts now. Sometimes you need to take a step away from something you love – briefly – in order to discern what exactly you miss about it when it’s gone.

So, the past month without writing has brought me ~clarity~ I desperately needed. I knew certain things weren’t working for me because over the second half of the year, this work started feeling mostly like labor, with very little intrinsic excitement to fuel me. When a passion project starts to lose its spark, then it’s just…a project? I can return to a 9-5 if that’s what I want.

Anyway, these were my pain points I discovered from my work on Clarity in Catastrophe last year.

Challenges

I won’t belabour the challenges, but I’ll sum them up like this because each challenge helps point me toward a solution. Perfectionism. Imposter syndrome. Vulnerability. Uncertainty. Emotional heaviness. Consistency. Self-discipline.

A lot of these are par for the course and unavoidable if you are putting your creative work out to the world independently. Some reflect those elements of working for yourself and doing creative work that are inherently difficult. Things you just have to make peace with in order to get the benefits on the other side of that coin. Perfectionism, vulnerability. Others require practice and perhaps therapy methods to navigate, and then the discomfort can dissipate with time. Imposter syndrome, uncertainty, self-discipline. But still others can be at least partially alleviated with a change in strategy in the work itself. Those are pain points that aren’t part and parcel of the job necessarily, but, to me, point to a bad fit, something clashing with the way I’m wired and simply not working for me. Emotional heaviness, consistency. 

Emotional heaviness has become a challenge for me with this work because the topics I’ve been researching and writing about are very, well, heavy. And I’m a very emotionally sensitive person. Like a sponge, I absorb deeply what I’m exposed to. Choosing to turn the faucet of difficult external stimuli on high, as this work requires, means I am making life heavier and more exhausting for myself. The solutions, I’ve realized, are to find a way to share that emotional weight, and to introduce some levity to accompany it. More below on how I’ll seek to implement those moving forward.

The other major frustration from this year’s work has been the topic of consistency. One piece of standard advice I took for fact this year is the notion that a consistent, regular posting schedule is a pre-requisite, non-negotiable for building a following and finding success as an online creator. I tried that. This prioritization of consistency did give me a highly valuable structure to kickstart my efforts in the beginning. But as time went on, I found that it hindered my work more than it helped. Some posts require a larger, unexpected amount of research and reflection than others, which takes more time. Shoe-horning those topics into a predetermined schedule for the sake of consistency makes me feel I’m compromising quality. To adapt, I tried stockpiling posts so I could work ahead at my own pace. However, I found that the longer I sit on a piece, the less relevant it feels and the easier it is to talk myself out of posting it. It’s time to try something new.

What to Expect in 2026

Revisiting my initial introductory post, what I imagined as my north star, it’s clear that the intentions I laid out remain the same. They still ring true. The only difference is the path I take to pursue those intentions. I’m making a few big, concrete changes to my approach in order to address those two primary pain points that revealed themselves this year. 

Things are changing

1. There will be no ‘regularly scheduled’ posts. I’ve chosen to free myself from the highly regarded advice of a regular posting schedule because it hasn’t felt right or worked for me. Instead, I’ll try working on one post at a time, and simply hit publish when it’s done. 
2. Interviews will become part of the workflow. I’m no longer going to do the entire process alone. Life is a lot harder when you carry heavy things alone. I’ve realized that collaborating with other people on any level makes a huge difference in how daunting the work feels, so I’m going to lean into that.
3. I’ll be incorporating my photography into each piece. One of my greatest joys of 2025 was that I managed to regain my passion for photography by implementing a weekly practice. While I’m still trying to ingratiate myself with oil painting once more, and remain open to new art forms finding a creative home in me, I’ve realized that photography is still my #1 art form that fulfills me. And I want to treat it as such, bringing it into the fold of my writing work above other visual mediums.
4. Weaving humor into my writing will be a priority. Comedy has long been a love of mine, and the communicators I most admire are actually comedians. People like John Oliver and Josh Johnson, who have found a way to talk about the most important, boring, uncomfortable, downer topics in ways that actually feel good – with the magic of humor. For the clear efficacy of such a strategy, and also to help myself enjoy the writing process more and feel a lighter emotional toll, I’ll be giving humor a full seat at the table.

Beyond these, I now have a year of data to work from that tells me what practices brought me closer to my north star, and which methods brought me further from it. Here are my ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ for 2026 – which practices brought me closer (so I’m gonna keep them around), and which didn’t (and thus, I’m saying bye to).

Outs

• Paying attention to subscriber numbers (it’s addicting and entirely unhelpful)
• Wasting any thought into what The Algorithm might want (it simply distracts from my own individual voice and personal value as a creative)
• Putting energy toward social media promotion on platforms I don’t align with (waste of time and energy – why would I want to try to build a following on a social media site I hate?)

These are all common pitfalls for online creators, and I was not able to escape them in my first year of this. Now that I’ve felt their detriment first-hand, I’m going to stay as far away as possible from them this year.

Ins

• Experimentation and beginner’s mindset
• Following my own internal compass rather than external advice that feels inauthentic / unhelpful to me
• Finding my voice by using it (the best advice I’ve gotten, and what has become my mantra)

I’m excited to see where these strategic tweaks bring Clarity in Catastrophe by January 2027. If you want to keep following along with me on this journey, I’ll see you in the next one!