What 2025 Clarified for Me
Six things I’m bringing with me into 2026.
2025 was a year of stretching.
A year of increasing faith.
A year of stripping away what was excessive so I could get to what actually matters.
It was the year I formally introduced Borne to my community.
The year I turned 40 (iykyk).
The year my husband and I marked eleven years in business and seven married.
And through those milestones, something settled in me — a clarity I’m carrying forward.
As I reflect, there are six things from last year I’m bringing with me into 2026. I share them with the hope that it may serve as a mirror — a form of encouragement (Lord knows we need all we can get). If you have a minute, I’d love to hear what 2025 taught you, too.
1. Boundaries.
Boundaries. Boundaries. Boundaries.
2025 made it undeniable: my time is finite, and so is my energy. If I believe I’m here to fulfill a specific purpose, then I cannot afford to spend my energy on what doesn’t return it.
We’re taught to think this way about money — ROI, savings, investments. But this year, I applied that same discernment to my energy. To relationships. To work. To collaboration.
Reciprocity is not optional.
I looked up and realized a decade had passed, like that. Multiple businesses built. Three children born. A bonus child loved. A marriage grown. I have poured out so much — in life, in business, in literally creating and nurturing life.
Now is my time.
Boundaries protect us from the slow leak of energy — the drama that clouds our vision and distracts us from our actual mission. (And yes, sometimes that drama is self-inflicted. Growth will humble you! Okay, me. I mean me.)
2. Autonomy > Attention.
I’ve never needed attention. If anything, I’ve actively avoided it (some might say, to a fault 👀).
Still, we live in an attention economy that insists visibility is the price of success. It’s seductive and FOMO-inducing for the best of us. And sure, maybe there were moments over the past decade where chasing attention could’ve led to faster growth or more money. But I’m done second-guessing.
What crystallized this year is this: I value autonomy more.
I don’t want to have to feed a machine every day to earn a living. I want to build something lasting. Something tangible. Something that exists in people’s hands and lives beyond social platforms.
What once felt like a limitation now feels like my greatest strength — and I’m leaning into it fully.
3. Intuition + Architecture.
Intuition has never failed me. It led me to my husband. To my family. To many chosen sisters. To entrepreneurship. To birth work. To a more expansive version of myself.
But intuition alone isn’t enough anymore.
I’m entering my fifth decade on this planet, and I understand now: if I don’t call the play, someone else will.
In my next chapter, I’m being called to build with greater precision. To design something even more durable. Community-supported. Independent of political cycles, trends or fickle brand budgets.
Systems. Scaffolding. Engines that don’t break.
For Borne, this also means more tangible tools — guides, zines, curriculum, practical information families can actually use to navigate a maternal health system that is overwhelming, fragmented and, too often, harmful.
No one is coming to save us.
We have to build our own structures.
Rooted in our values.
Clearly mapped.
Aligned with the future we’re collectively willing into existence.
4. Flow > Force.
How many times have I tried to force what wasn’t for me?
How many no’s did I take as personal failures instead of redirections?
2025 taught me to release what doesn’t flow.
If it’s for me, it will find me.
If it’s not, I let it go — gladly.
Timing has always been everything in my life. There were projects I was eager to bring into the world years ago — ideas that felt urgent, necessary, obvious. But they weren’t ready. And more importantly, I wasn’t ready to carry them the way they deserved.
What felt like delay was actually preparation. Skills being sharpened. Language being refined. Capacity being built.
Now, when something isn’t moving, I don’t force it. I ask what’s still being built — in me, or around me.
5. Embodiment.
As Queen Badu once said, you don’t get what you ask for — you get what you are.
This year wasn’t about learning more (although I definitely did that too). It was about becoming.
Getting quiet. Pouring into my family. Pouring back into myself. Making time to rebuild my body after powering through three births in four years. Getting to know this new version of me. Treating yoga, pilates, tea rituals, morning walks as the sacred, nonnegotiable work they are.
I realized that my assignment isn’t to be the loudest or the longest-tenured. My assignment is translation: taking what’s complex, clinical and intimidating and making it accessible.
My work is about documenting the return of birth to the hands of those who have always held it: midwives, doulas, mothers, families — the village. It’s about shifting the culture around birth, one family at a time. And my work starts with me embodying that culture and modeling it for my family.
6. Ask for Help.
If I’m being honest, ya girl still doesn’t feel particularly comfortable asking for help.
But I’m learning to do it anyway.
2025 required me to lean on my community in ways that didn’t feel great for my ego. Ways that challenged the version of myself that prides herself on figuring things out, and making it work no matter what.
And every time I asked for help, guess what?
I didn’t die.
Nobody showed up at my house pointing a finger at my failure to do it myself.
What did happen was more subtle. I had to keep asking myself: whose rubric is this anyway? Why is my self-worth so tied to doing things alone? Why have I subscribed to this myth of individualism while committing my life to building community?
Those two things don’t actually go together.
As much as I’m called to serve the people I love, they’re called to serve me too. That isn’t weakness. It’s nature. It’s how we sustain the ecosystem.
Learning to receive without guilt is something I’m still practicing. But in 2025, it became conscious. Intentional. A discipline in its own right.
And that’s something I’m most definitely carrying with me into 2026.
Have you had a chance to reflect on 2025 yet (how are we halfway through Jan??)? What did you take away? What are your intentions for the coming year? I’d love to hear from you. 🤍
Gimme a min I’m crine!!! 🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽