2016

Revisiting the most exciting year of my life – ten years later.

The 9 year numerology cycle that just closed ran from 2017-2025. With the year of the horse now underway, we are ushering in a lot of new, and folks spent January looking back at 2016 to see, I guess, where we each were in our lives prior to that 9 years. What did life look like before that cycle began? What might we return to? What do we wish we could? What do we hope we don’t?

The flood of 2016 throwback posts last month took over social media, and also my brain. But it took me a while to process how I felt about what I found there, a decade ago. First I had to look at what had happened since: In 2017 I met my now ex-husband, and unrelated but in quick succession I retired from my work in entertainment, stopped writing my column for The Tennessean, and then lost my fitness business. Later, two years into my marriage and a year into parenthood, my marriage ended traumatically.

Anyway, thank god that nine year loop is over.

2016, though. What was happening then? Who was I before… all the rest? What might I reminisce about? What might I even reconnect with?

I turned to photos and social media archives to bring it all back to me. And holy mother of pearl, I’m not exaggerating when I say it might have been the best year of my life. It might have been the most exciting. And it might have been the most myself I’ve ever been.

At the start of the year I went to Las Vegas for an event, and from there to Park City for Sundance film festival where I went skiing, fell in love with the town, and danced all night at the festival afterparty. From there I traveled to LA for a “women in country music” event, and then drove a camper van from LA back to Nashville with one of my touring clients, stopping for a night in the Grand Canyon which I got to see that morning at sunrise before we hit the road again. All of that was for work, running my own entertainment industry management and marketing firm.

I worked A LOT, and I loved nearly every minute of it.

In addition to running my company, I wrote a weekly column for The Tennessean, and was planning to open a boutique fitness studio which was my favorite hobby and was desperately needed in Nashville.

In the Spring I went to Paris with my mom on vacation, and then to Mexico City to meet the cycling trainer we hired for my studio (the legendary Noël Nocciolo), where I got to stay with my friend Erin who was living there.

In June I visited my hometown in PA where I’d been invited to give the commencement speech at my high school’s graduation, and went straight from there to Bonnaroo. Sure, “for work.”

My client roster was full of lovely and talented country music artists as well as other folks in fashion or music or literature or film. My take on marketing and management has always been heavily intuitive, story-and-brand based, a little scrappy, with high value placed on relationships and my artists being true to themselves over any kind of trends. I had so much fun working with these people and was continuously honored that they trusted me with their work and their art and their careers.

It wasn’t without its challenges. It’s hard to make money as a new artist, and it’s hard to build a business when those people simply can’t invest in your work long term. It’s hard to motivate someone again and again to stick it out for years in an industry that takes years, at minimum, to “make it”. And nothing is guaranteed.

I often lost folks back to their hometowns after we’d put together a fantastic package of their work and were really at the starting line for what was to come.

It’s a long road. A beautiful, exciting, colorful, fulfilling, exhausting, and really rare long road. I’ve never belonged anywhere else the way I did while walking it.

Looking at these photos, I see myself more than sixteen years into the career I’d started as a teenager, and now I almost can’t believe it ever existed. There I am directing a photo shoot. Producing a music video. In the recording studio, making an album. Backstage at a music festival, my client on the stage. Juggling their radio interviews. Setting up their cowriting sessions. And in every city I visited, spending hours in coffee shops on my laptop answering emails, editing graphics, managing social media, sending press releases, planning artist showcases, and writing (my greatest love, writing) my column about it all.

I snuck in some hobbies, including getting ready to open the cycling studio which I was designing the buildout for. In pictures I’m picking finishes for the studio, choosing brand logo colors, and standing on the dirt lot right before we broke ground.

At the end of summer I traveled back to the Pacific Northwest where I backpacked three days on the PCT, among other hiking and camping trips, or I spent days rock climbing indoors, or went for long runs outside.

People didn’t think I could do it all.

2016 was the year I proved to myself that I could.

That fall I opened the pop-up of my cycling studio while the big studio was being built. We called it Underground, though it was anything but. Word spread and a community grew, and my hobby became my second business but never ever just that.

And I ended the year in NYC, listening to my favorite band perform, and later that night outside a saxophone player on a New York street corner played auld lang syne.

And 2016 was done.

And I didn’t want anything to change.

And then everything changed.

I’m hardly the first person to switch careers or become a mother or get older and wonder where all that energy went, where all the creativity went, where all the ME BEING ME went. And really, it’s none of those things’ fault. Parenting hasn’t taken myself away from me. Age hasn’t either.

The years that followed may have beaten me the hell up, but I healed, too.

During 2016 and for years before, I suffered greatly from anxiety. Now, it’s rare that I feel anxious at all. A lot of my “motivation” back then was my belief that my value was related to my productivity, my efficiency, my connections, or my success. I know better now. And parts of my life now are things I dreamed of then. Then, I had wanted to move back to Portland. I couldn’t wait to be a mother to a daughter. And that is my life now.

The big question for 2026 is clear: Can I reconnect with the excitement of creating through my work in a way that feels unique of me, and challenging, and fulfilling? And what kind of support do I need to make that happen, in this new place that I love, as a solo parent to a kindergartener, and as a person has healed from anxiety and burnout and adjusted to a slower pace? Can I find that support? Can I even figure out what any of this looks like?!

There’s one thing I know from 2016 life that I don’t need photographic evidence to remember:

Yes. I can.