How to think about 2026 if you're not where you wanted to be
A reflection on measuring the wrong things, choosing comfort over growth, and what to do differently in 2026
Hello, friends! Whether this lands in your inbox or you’re catching up on the site, thanks for reading. This one’s a bit of a year-end audit... what worked, what didn’t, and how to avoid repeating the same mistakes in 2026. (There are some planning questions at the end if you’d like to work through this yourself.) If you’ve been building something this year and it’s been slower or messier than expected, this one’s for you. I hope it helps spark a few questions worth asking, and if it does, I hope you’ll share it with someone else who might need the same reminder. x
As the year begins its initial phase of wrapping up, I’ve been sitting with this uncomfortable realization for the past few weeks. The kind that sneaks up on you when you’re looking back at the year and trying to figure out what actually happened. On paper, 2025 was good. I spent most of my time and energy building and experimenting on Substack. I technically joined the platform in 2024, but I didn’t start posting regularly until April of this year—when I decided to take this (and myself) seriously, and set a goal to become a full-time writer by 2026.
Between April and today, I’ve grown my Substack from 500 to 13,000 readers, with 250 being paid.1 A surreal achievement, something I do not take for granted, and am very proud of. (Thank you for being here, seriously!) In that time, I spent countless hours researching and writing, I published over 100 essays and articles—two of which “went viral,”2 and I rebranded from WILD BARE THOUGHTS to BAD GIRL MEDIA because I felt it was more aligned with my overall mission.3
By most visible metrics, it looks like I’m on track.
But when I look at the actual sustainability of what I’m building, something doesn’t add up. The subscriber growth is real and meaningful, but I optimized for the wrong number. I was watching subscribers go up and feeling good about it, but subscribers alone don’t determine whether this works as a living. Revenue does. And my revenue isn’t anywhere close to where it needs to be for this to actually sustain my life. At my current pace, I won’t hit financial sustainability until mid-2026, maybe later if I’m being realistic. I also wanted to bring on more writers and independent journalists for BAD GIRL MEDIA before the end of the year—to start building something bigger than just my own output—but I’m far from that goal, as well. Lastly, I committed to saying yes more this year, to networking and opportunities and visibility that makes me uncomfortable, but I can count on one hand the number of times I actually followed through.
So I’m growing, and I’m on a track, but I’m starting to realize it might not be the right track because I never actually defined where it was supposed to go. The problem isn’t that I didn’t make progress, the problem is that I set goals without defining what they actually meant in concrete terms, and now I’m at the end of the year trying to figure out what I was even aiming for in the first place.
This isn’t about complaining that things didn’t work out, it’s about recognizing a pattern I see everywhere, including in my own work this year. We set goals that sound good without defining what they actually mean, and then we’re surprised when we end up somewhere we didn’t intend to go. If you want to build something sustainable—whether that’s a writing practice, a business, a creative career, whatever—you need more than good intentions and visible progress. You need clarity on what you’re actually building toward and a realistic plan for how to get there.