My Personal Highlight for 2025 Isn't What You Might Think
And How To Help Make Your Friends' Year When It's Been a Rough One
Everyone has different priorities - different things that matter to us more prominently than to others.
To one person, family matters more than anything else. To another, perhaps it’s wealth, or maybe it’s accomplishments. You get the idea.
For me it’s not exactly ‘accomplishment’ so much as it is ‘wanting to do things that are meaningful’. I was just speaking to my coach about this yesterday.
I made the distinction between wanting to be acknowledged in an egotistical way like ‘I’m so great aren’t I?!’ vs just being acknowledged for being a human and doing something genuinely challenging that I didn’t have to do, but felt was worth the effort.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working to overcome the lack of self confidence and self worth that I began my life with.
One of the most painful and damaging things that was ever said to me when I was a child (and basically encoded into my DNA) was said by someone important in my life who I trusted. That person shouted at me (more than once): ‘you stupid kid!’
Those words echoed in my skull for decades. And much of what I have strived to do in my life was to prove those words wrong. It took me a long time, but eventually did.
But even though I’ve built up a lot of my own self worth, I’ve still tended to feel like my sense of self worth is not reflected back to me by the external world. And that still hasn’t sat right with me.
I probably shouldn’t care, but a common byproduct of that kind of early-life trauma is not wanting to be ‘average’. That sense of needing to prove I wasn’t stupid wasn’t just for me to believe, it was for others to recognize as well.
I’d had a ‘standard career’, in a respectable profession. You might even say I was better than average at it. I’d even worked across a variety of industries. Certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
But just because someone is ‘good at something’, doesn’t mean they’re meant to do it forever, nor might they want to.
I could never fully shake the feeling that I believed I was capable of more, I just couldn’t find the right way to ‘translate’ that into something tangible in the real world.
But after ending up in the hospital last year from burnout, that was my signal that it was time for real change.
2025 became the year where I really went ‘all in’ on myself and went ‘all out’ on building something that felt like it mattered.
As I noted in my ‘ADHD Emporium’ blog post I’d originally wanted to be a multimedia designer extraordinaire when I graduated high school, but it was beaten into me that that was effectively ‘not possible’ if I wanted to also pay rent and buy groceries (and that was before the cost of living spiked 2-4x).
When I began this year and really leaned in to this goal and mission, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. But clearly after landing in the hospital from the alternative, ‘easy’ was not the most critical decision making factor anymore.
I had reached that point where continuing on as I had been felt more painful than subjecting myself to the growing pains of change.
When someone starts their own business, there is a stereotypical milestone and celebration point of ‘earning your first dollar’. In essence, the most basic form of proving you are not a stupid kid in business, you know enough to make a product or service that someone indeed wants or needs.
But that metric/milestone is a lot more ‘old fashioned’ now, since much more business is done electronically and virtually in 2025 than ‘cash based’.
Since my journey has been pretty drawn-out over such a long stretch of time, ‘my first dollar’ is nearly impossible to trace anyway.
My first dollar in this specific business?
Well, technically I lost money on every single event that (my former company) Arty Mix Events put on. But that is also normal. The vast majority of businesses are not profitable for a while.
I don’t think I’ve actually ever told this story here on the blog (maybe I’m just forgetting), but when I planned the first ever PLAYSPACE workshop for Feb 2025, I planned it in partnership with Kara Latta aka The Playful Warrior. (it was going to be called The Play Lab as a joint venture).
Two weeks before the event was set to take place, Kara had a family emergency and understandably had to drop out. I really didn’t want to host my first play workshop solo, so I strongly considered postponing it.
But I knew myself well enough by that point to know that if I postponed, there was a very strong likelihood that the reschedule would never actually happen. Because I wanted to wait until I had a capable co-host and i’d struggled hard enough to find Kara in the first place.
I debated it for a couple of days and talked to a few friends. In the end, I decided to just follow through and do my best to deliver a good experience. And fortunately a friend agreed last minute to be my assistant for the night which helped anchor me (thanks again, Sarah!)
So despite losing money and feeling like i’d had some air let out of my balloon, the celebration was more that I ‘did the thing’ at all, rather than that I sold any tickets to my event.
Yes I am proud of that moment, because it was a moment of growth and believing in myself. But it was more of an isolated incident. And I only ran one more independent event after that before rebranding (because running an events company proved not to be the right lane for me).
So then what was the highlight of this year for me?
Was it my first official paying (or repeat) client as Neuromix?
Was it my cumulative first $1,000 dollars earned?
Was it getting back into my own private living space/studio (after years of bad roommates and instability in my home life)?
Those things were all exciting, rewarding, and validating.
But the first time someone asked me recently what my highlight of 2025 was, the FIRST thing that came to mind wasn’t financial, it wasn’t health, it wasn’t fame.
It was the moment in August when I was on the phone with a lawyer and telling her what I was developing and she said:
‘Yes, you really do have something here - you’re right you should definitely trademark it’
Folks.
After FIFTEEN years of trying to figure out a way to pay my rent besides accounting - this was one of the most validating things that had ever been said to me.
It might sound silly, but I had been at the end of my rope. I literally felt like ‘if this isn’t ‘it’, then I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.’
If that sounds dramatic, remember that some inventors spend years, decades trying to find the one idea that sets them apart and makes a difference. Many give up.
Many artists spend years, if not decades trying to break out and set themselves apart. Many eventually give up.
Many aspiring entrepreneurs - the same thing.
Some people get luckier and break through sooner, for others it takes their entire lives.
I sit at the intersection of many different fields and disciplines: Accounting, project management, design, performance, psychology, therapy…
You would think that having all those extra influences and perspectives would be an advantage for me, but it actually made it harder.
I’ve endured so much rejection, so many false starts, so many times where I’ve hit a wall and had to let something go for survival sake.
If I’m being honest, this is definitely not the first time I’ve genuinely thought ‘I really have something here’ about a project or idea.
But this time something was different. It’s hard to describe, but there was a sort of quiet confidence in my gut.
It was based on a mixture of lived experience and science, and it was addressing something I’ve talked to others about at events for years. I knew I was not the only one noticing the problem, and I was not the only one frustrated by the ‘solutions’ at offer.
So when I spoke to that lawyer and told her what I was developing and heard those magic words it was a gift I’d been waiting a long time for. A gift that no friend or family member could give me because they didn’t have the professional background to make such a claim with real credibility.
This is a professional who deals with lots of business/product/service ideas across industries so they’ve heard just about everything.
If this person was readily recognizing the same value and importance that I felt, that was the green light I needed to know I was finally on the right track, and the struggle was worth it.
I’m going to wrap this up by saying - you probably have a friend or two with ideas, with goals, with dreams. Maybe you’re not a lawyer with decades of experience, but your friends still value your opinion and your feedback.
Most people do not swing for the fences and try to build something big. But putting themselves out there at all is courageous (and badass).
So to the extent that you can, make a point to tell your friends that you appreciate their art. Their ideas. Encourage them to pursue their goals. Encourage them and remind them of their best qualities.
It’s a rough scene out there, especially right now. You might not realize just how much one unsolicited compliment can make someone’s week, month, or year. Maybe it’s the thing that keeps them from giving up for good on something they really are passionate about but feel like it’s futile.
I promise you, taking 30 seconds to tell your friends and peers that you see and appreciate them - sharing their work, buying their book, art print, digital album, etc - makes more difference than you could know.
If you’ve read this far, I feel it’s safe to say that you appreciate me. Now please do me a favour, take the next 30 seconds and go tell someone you appreciate them.
Happy holidays!
Lacey Artemis (she/they) is a neurodivergent speaker, consultant, and media producer. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting which provides sensory comfort and accessibility consulting. She also writes the Beyond Quiet Rooms blog, also on Substack.
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