2025 asked a lot of me.
A string of “wins on paper” threaded through personal and business turmoil, with a steep rise in caregiving responsibilities, was harder to talk about in public than overseas travel, new content, or product and promo videos.
Professionally, 2025 started out looking steady from the outset: interviews, webinars, integrations, attending ICANN Seattle, and generating thought pieces about registry strategy, DNS abuse, and brand protection that kept me active in the usual corners of the industry.
Shadowing that as the year progressed was a quieter reshaping of my work identity, eventually stepping out of my role at NameBlock in October after three years, and trying to build a consulting pipeline while navigating the emotional drag that comes with instability.
The business side of 2025 for me was less about big deals and more about endurance: trying to stay visible, staying useful, and staying just persistent enough not to disappear without being able to attend any industry events between late March and early October.
What did not show up in my social posts, until this year-end reflection, is how dramatically family-health and caregiving-related responsibilities increased this year. As my father’s health declined, my personal calendar quietly filled with appointments, logistics, and difficult conversations, all layered on top of work, that, on social media, still looked relatively normal.
In late August, that caregiving chapter came to an end with my father’s passing. Grief does not respect project timelines, business challenges, or content schedules, and the weeks around that time were less about any sense of “balance” and more about simply holding things together for the people who needed it most. If 2025 had a single defining thread, it was learning how thin a person can be stretched between professional obligations and family duties, and still try to show up with some semblance of grace.
If 2025 teaches anything, it is how wide the gap can be between what shows up in a feed and what life actually feels like.
There is a temptation, at the end of a hard year like this one, to wrap everything in optimism and declare 2026 will be “the big reset.”
2025 does not lend itself to that narrative for me.
Many of this year’s realities will follow into early 2026: a consulting practice that still needs tending, a domain industry that is as noisy and competitive as ever, and a family life that now includes the quieter work of healing and making sure my surviving parent is comfortable. For now, looking forward feels less like a bold prediction and more like a modest intention: to keep showing up, to keep contributing where my experience is useful and impactful, and to be a bit more honest about the parts of my story that rarely make it into the social conversation.
I’ve said this so many times over the years: If you told me on January 1st that such and such would happen before the year’s end, I’d tell you that you are nuts. Well, every year, such and such happens. Sometimes really good, and sometimes really bad. This year definitely had a mix of both.
I did not intend for this to be a “Debbie Downer” review of 2025. It’s not my true nature. However, this isn’t the neat, upbeat year-end recap I thought I would write. 2025 was a mix of progress, loss, and a few too many hard lessons.
For now, it’s enough to say: I’m still here, I’m still standing, and hope springs eternal.
PINKY BRAND 