What Actually Happened After My Traumatic Brain Injury
Closing the gap between creativity and stability—financially, mentally, emotionally.
For years I felt pulled between chasing what I love, doing what I’m good at, and searching for a way to help others.
Six years ago that came abruptly to a head.
A traumatic brain injury from a snowboard accident forced me to completely reevaluate what stability meant—financially, mentally, emotionally. And it led to a difficult and heartbreaking conclusion: I needed to walk away from something I loved.
So I went from splitting my time between the outdoor world and the tech one, to just existing in the tech world. Now, six years later, I’ve been working on something for people like me who’ve felt torn between creative expression and practical stability—between doing what they love, what they’re good at, and what they can do to help people. Turns out, there’s a messy middle with room for all three.
I’ve figured out a way to make it less messy. Sources close to me have reported high levels of stoke from what they’ve seen, confirming that you should be psyched, too.
So here’s the deal…
I created The MAP Year Project to help people close the gap between creative expression and practical stability.
The MAP Year Project is a year-long challenge that follows a Milestone Accountability Planning system I built in the years since my Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). It’s what helped me reach the not-so-messy middle of chasing what I love, doing what I’m good at, and searching for a way to help others.
The MAP Year Project is about exploring a childhood dream—or maybe just a secret side-project that’s been collecting dust—and working toward it incrementally with a group of people doing the same. The idea here is to make things manageable, make your progress visible, and make your support system part of the process. It’s about switching things up in your life, but in ways that actually fit into your day-to-day instead of trying another hustle-culture version that burns you out after two weeks.
For example, it was my dream to become a professional writer when I was growing up. I’ve held that close since I was a kid, and it’s something I’ve only recently let myself say out loud. So that’s what I’ll be focusing on during The MAP Year Project.
Using a Milestone Accountability Planning system creates progress you can see—so slow actually feels steady and smooth really is fast.
I’m looking to connect with other creatives who are interested in collaborating, semi-regularly, on this year-long project. Any takers? Folks looking to close the gap between creative expression and practical stability? People psyched on creating digital, mental, and emotional synchronicity?
I’m doing this either way, it’s just more fun with a group.
I’ll be pulling back the curtain and sharing my own progress throughout the year in my new, separate daily email series called BUDS (Becoming Unobstructed Daily Snippets). Some days will be about the work itself. Others will be about things like keeping myself accountable, the software set up behind all of this, and rekindling a sense of adventure.
I’m kicking off the MAP Year Project September 1, 2025.
If stability has felt out of reach for you, like it did for me, signing up for BUDS is a great step toward learning more about removing digital, mental, and emotional obstacles.
If you’ve felt torn between creative expression and practical stability—between doing what you love, what you’re good at, and what you can do to help people—I’d love to have you join the MAP Year Project. I shocked even myself when I found that it’s possible… and it’s iterative, which is why I’m doing it again.
More on that in a bit.
Since the goal here is connection, I want to make this accessible.
If you feel called to participate, you can do so to the level of your comfort. Get free emails, join free monthly calls with other creatives, get weekly paid resources from me, join paid group calls with me + others… up to you.
We let the voice that says “you can’t” get the better of us more often that we should.
It was a Monday morning and I was sitting at my kitchen counter. Like always, I’d scanned my inbox with a cup of coffee in hand. Plenty of the names were familiar, but there were a few notable ones missing. So, after refilling my coffee, I went looking for them, since those names belonged to writers I’d wanted to hear from.
“Maybe I missed their latest?” I’d wondered while checking the spam folder. Nothing. Well, nothing from them anyway… but plenty of other junk.
Growing concerned, I’d searched and clicked through to their page from an old newsletter. Scrolling, I’d sat back and let out a sigh. What I saw made me sad: they’d dropped off. No new posts, no explanation. It’d been weeks since hearing from someone who’d published reliably for as long as I’d been subscribed. Which got me thinking, “who else haven’t I heard from lately?”
Turns out, quite a few people.
Sitting back and taking a sip of coffee, I speculated as to why they might’ve stopped writing. It could be anything—life got in the way, they stopped liking what they were doing, they were just taking a break, something happened in their personal life…
“Or”, I’d thought, “maybe, they’d felt under appreciated?”
I wondered if they knew people like me went looking for them? Then I kicked myself for not telling them how much I liked their work.
It was a good reminder to hand out compliments freely, so long as they’re genuine. I’ve been so caught up in what I’m working on with Becoming Unobstructed, BUDS, and The Map Year Project that I think I’ve had a bit of tunnel vision when it comes to where I direct my attention. Ok, a lot of tunnel vision...
In a weird way, I’m grateful for the nudge brought about by this writer’s absence. I have some calls to return, texts to reply to, and overdue coffee catch-ups to enjoy. But if you, like me, need the reminder: tell people when you like what they create. Compliments are free! They don't have to be a grand gestures, either.
Otherwise, you might just find yourself at your kitchen counter one Monday morning, staring blankly into a cup of coffee, and you’ll wonder why the name you wanted to see in your inbox wasn’t there like you’d hoped it would be.
Milestones can be hard to see, that’s why MAPing them works. Like this…
I celebrated a pretty big milestone recently. Sitting in the driver’s seat of my truck, I’d looked out the window. Split concrete led to a green field on the other side of the parking lot. Vermont’s green mountains sprawled leisurely beyond and maple trees framed the grass within.
I was on the phone with my step-sister, Ali. Dead air hung between us. Well, it wasn’t so much “dead” air as it was “air at rest.” It’d been quite some time since we caught up. Families are funky. An upbringing spent walking on eggshells turned into years of dancing on cracks thereafter—it’s a choreography we share.
“Is part of why you like to write so much because it lets you tell your story on your own terms?” she’d asked after a bit of catching up. It was a good question. Like, a really good question that I wasn’t sure I was prepared to answer. After some back-n-forth about a piece I’d published recently, catching up turned into catching glimpses—of each other and the paths we took to the lives we lead now. And while her question settled, I thought hard about why it is I like to write.
It brought me back to a couple of moments. The first, I’m 22 years old smoking a cigarette outside of a college town bar at 2am. And I’m wondering what life might feel like if I didn't perpetually numb myself to it. The second, I’m 27 years old running an ultramarathon in the Tetons. Surrounded by towering peaks and expansive views, I’m conflicted between how I spend my time and how I pay my bills.
“There’s a difference between liking an activity and liking that you’ve done an activity” I said, finally. “I like to write because it’s how I like to spend my time.”
It’s not about having written or having a story to tell on my terms… it’s for me.
Walking on eggshells and dancing on cracks wired me to tread lightly with others. And that’s the kind of thing that strains relationships before they even exist. So I knew that in order to live a fuller life, where I could actually connect with people, I needed to learn how to communicate differently. Facing that discomfort would be hard but worth it, I’d figured.
And so I started, by writing one essay at a time.
Today, I published 103.
I smiled as we said bye and hung up, proud of how far I’ve come by using my MAP system and by not taking shortcuts.
If you’re constantly recalibrating, you rob yourself of time that could be used for creating.
Living a life beyond productivity hacks starts with removing digital, mental, and emotional obstacles. If your days are spent rearranging tasks, drafts, thoughts, and stressors… that’s organization, not output. Which means finding room for creating starts with focusing on prioritization, not reorganization.
Constant calibration doesn’t leave space for creation. More on that here.
Tech advancements are helpful, but they don’t magically make it so you have time for the side project you love. We do this thing where we feel the need to pretend we’re keeping up—even on normal days, where things go somewhat according to plan. Why do we do that, anyway? And wasn’t AI supposed to simplify day-to-day life instead of jamming more into it? You and I both know things never play out like we thought they would. So of course we’re not fully keeping pace like we feel we should, either.
Earlier this week, I was sitting at a table by the window of a coffee shop I like.
I’d chosen this table and this coffee shop, specifically. The crowd’s a respectful one where people type, read, or chit chat jovially over brief lunches. Then, they filter out at a moderately steady clip by late afternoon. I like doing creative work here because it offers just enough social energy to trigger the part of my brain that says, “Hey—focus up, pal” without being mean about it.
Everything was running like clockwork until the guy at the table in front of mine was joined by a rather loud guest. The pair of older gentlemen carried the nonchalant bravado you might not expect from their casual T-shirts and white hair, but that also wouldn’t surprise you all that much, either. As their banter continued back and forth, their volume increased. It was like watching a verbal tennis volley. Except, instead of a competitive air, there was one of excitement.
I wanted to be mad. I was mad. But only for a bit.
Then, I asked myself why I was mad. I thought about how people move through their days with the baseline adrenaline of someone who just heard siri scream “RECALCULATING” while driving through a foreign city. Watching the gentlemen at the table settle into a gleeful, almost mischievous sense of camaraderie, I felt... shame.
Are all of our digital nudges really better than if we just let ourselves be surprised?
I know, I hear it, too—it sounds ridiculously counterintuitive. But I think our nervous systems might actually be more fried from the constant pings, dings, and buhzzingsss. Maybe it’s not entirely AI’s fault that modern writing seems flat… seriously, how many ways are we supposed to build suspense with:
“she begrudgingly refreshed her email”
“they let out an exorbitant sigh before opening their laptop”
“reaching for his phone, he winced at the thought of unread slack notifications”
Eventually the pair of friends slid their chairs back and made their way to the door. Watching them walk out, I hoped to find people who I can gibber-jabber excitedly with like those gentleman. That’s what I want for the free monthly Creative Circle calls of The MAP Year project.
MAPing my year of writing full-time and sharing how I use tech to make space for creativity.
It was my dream to become a writer when I was growing up. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Something I’m pretty proud of is that I’ve never given up on this dream. Sure, I’ve tried many different paths of trying to get there, but it’s always been in service of reaching the same goal. To understand where this year-long plan to chase my dream came from, you’ll need to know a few things.
Part 1
First, my career path looks pretty non-traditional. I used to work as an outdoor educator and guide. Now I’m a business strategist who pivoted to start a media company.
Second, in the early 2000s, I was big-time into snowboarding. And writing. The time I’d spent reading snowboard magazines and watching sponsored video projects each year is where I began scheming. But very quietly. Like, didn’t even tell my friends.
I loved the artistry of snowboard culture. I still do. There’s just something about the freedom of expression and the desire to create a new story each year that speaks to me. Secretly, I started wondering, “what if I built my own media company where I could orchestrate these publications and projects?”
Was I good enough?
Part 2
In the 2010s, an outdoor leadership program foundationally changed me. It reshaped virtually every skill I use to manage myself and others. While I’d studied marketing and communication, I ended up pursuing a career as a mountain guide. At least by day. But by night, I was ruthlessly learning, trying, and failing my way forward in a marketing technology career.
Building a business in college was the best crash-course for understanding different job functions and what they require. Tinkering is how I learn best—I need to see how something works to understand its mechanics. This is what I still do as a strategist in pursuit of writing.
Part 3
In the 2020s, I suffered a traumatic brain injury. As I lay still for many months in a dark room, I was forced to completely reevaluate what stability meant to me. Inactivity and financial strain nudged me to a difficult and heartbreaking conclusion: I needed to walk away from guiding and toward full-time tech life (instead of splitting my time as I had been).
My corporate skillset was supposed to be a way to fund my dream, not prevent me from reaching it.
This past year, everything changed again.
A question along the lines of “what would you do if money wasn’t the motivator?” popped up during a conversation with my partner. It’s the same sentiment that sparked my media-company-dreams all those years ago while reading stories in snowboard magazines. Because what that question really means is, “how do you want to spend your time every day?”
And so I poked at myself with few follow up questions:
What work do I actually like immersing myself in?
How does my work immediately help people?
Do I like to create or delegate?
Money was the motivator for a long time. And that’s how I found myself drifting from the path to the destination I really wanted. But my dream never left. It’s the same reason why I’ve tried to create different media publications over the years. It’s even why I finally started a newsletter in 2024. And a podcast in 2025. Even though I’ve been publishing weekly, I’ve never talked about what it’s been like to build the scaffolding I’m using to chase my dream. Nobody’s seen the work going in, just the newsletters and podcast episodes that go out.
So, here’s where that changes.
I’ve learned the work I actually like doing is writing. I know!! Shocking, right? I used to help people navigate technical terrain in the mountains. The way I see it, writing’s just a different type of guiding. Making it possible for people to have their own ah-ha moments makes me so damn happy. I love it.
I help people to the digital starting line. I’m the architect and contractor that creates your digital space—setting up things like websites, email marketing, and different account profiles... even your storefront and the sign on the door (web page).
You’ll never be fully ready to announce something you're excited about. But you should do it anyway (so I'm told).
Part of The MAP Year Project for me is writing a new, daily email series about all of this—closing the gap between creative expression and practical stability. Since this newsletter is called Becoming Unobstructed, I’m calling these daily emails BUDS (Becoming Unobstructed Daily Snippets).
Over the last year and a half, I've settled into a rhythm of creating, editing, and publishing this weekly newsletter and podcast. It took some trial and error but it fits in my day-to-day life now, largely without thinking. That’s part of why I’m taking on this new challenge. It’s an incremental step forward, and that’s exactly what The MAP Year Project is about. This is the not-so-messy middle of chasing what I love, doing what I’m good at, and searching for a way to help others.
I’ll be over here click-clacking and creating if you want to join me.
The MAP Year officially begins September 1, 2025.
Your ego wants things to be perfect before you tell anyone, but I’ve learned that you should make it real first—you can make it perfect later. So that’s what I’m doing. And that’s what The MAP Year Project is: a chance to close the gap between creative expression and practical stability, one step at a time. Get free emails, join free monthly calls with other creatives, get weekly paid resources from me, join paid group calls with me + others… up to you.
But if stability has felt out of reach for you, like it did for me signing up for BUDS is a great first step toward removing digital, mental, and emotional obstacles. That’s also where I’ll be sharing more about the MAP Year Project kickoff on September 1, 2025.
onward.
Free subscribers to Becoming Unobstructed get:
Weekly essays and podcast episodes.
NEW: Monthly Creative Circle calls — a chance to share progress with other creatives.
NEW: Paid subscribers get everything above, plus:
NEW: Weekly podcast companion essays to help put the core takeaways into practice.
*NEW: Monthly live-troubleshooting group calls — group sessions for untangling your websites, email lists, or other creative tech clutter. This is where you get hands-on help to set up your creative systems.
*A yearly paid subscription to Becoming Unobstructed is $96 annually, which is 20% cheaper than if paid monthly at $10/month. Live troubleshooting calls typically start at $200+ per session with strategists like me that have 15+ years of marketing software systems experience. But, there’s no pay-as-you-go model for tech support out there... So I’m offering a heavily discounted rate. How long I’m able to do that depends on how quickly things grow beyond what I can reasonably handle.
Such an inspiration my friend!