I didn't write a single blog post in the last five months.
I didn't send the newsletters I planned. I cancelled workshops I had already built out. I showed up to my shop, but some days I was just a body behind a counter — present in the physical sense and nowhere else.
And I'm not going to wrap that in a bow and tell you it was a "season of rest" or that I was "realigning my purpose." The truth is simpler and harder than that: I was surviving. Just that. Just surviving.
What Nobody Tells You About the Holidays as a Business Owner
There's a version of the holiday season that gets sold to us every year. Warm gatherings. Full tables. Family that shows up. The kind of December that looks like a Hallmark movie and feels like coming home.
That's not my December.
My parents are gone. Both of them. I don't speak to my only siblings. So when the world slows down and turns toward family, I don't have that to turn toward. What I have is the quiet, the weight of what's missing, and kids who are counting on me to make it feel like something — which I do, because they are everything, and they kept me moving when nothing else could.
But running a business in that headspace? Building something from scratch while carrying grief that doesn't have a clean expiration date?
That's its own kind of hard.
I Cancelled the Workshops
This is the part I want to be honest about, because I think a lot of small business owners would've just pushed through and done them anyway.
I didn't.
I had workshops planned. I had the content. I had the registrations. And I cancelled them — not because I didn't care, but because I refused to stand in front of my community and give them 60% of myself dressed up as 100%. That felt like a disservice. The people who show up to PinkPothos deserve the version of me that's actually there.
So I made a choice. I pulled back. I protected my community from a version of me that wasn't ready to serve them well.
I won't lie and say that was easy. Cancelling felt like failing. It triggered every anxious thought a founder can have — what will people think, will they still come back, did I just lose their trust?
But here's what I know now: choosing not to perform when you're depleted isn't unprofessional. It's integrity.
I Almost Paused the Whole Thing
I'll be honest — cancelling the workshops wasn't the hardest decision I made that season. The harder one was the conversation I kept having with myself about whether to pause PinkPothos entirely until spring.
I had that conversation more than once. It felt logical. Protect your energy. Come back when you're ready. Give yourself permission to stop.
But here's the thing: the business didn't get the memo.
While I was depleted, opportunities kept coming. Customers kept walking through the door. The work kept showing up — consistently, quietly, without asking me how I was doing first. And at some point I had to sit with what that meant. Because you can call it momentum, or timing, or just good luck. But I chose to call it what it felt like: a signal. The universe saying not yet. Keep going.
Pausing wasn't the pivot I needed. Surviving was.
Depression Is Real. So Is Running a Business While You Have It.
I don't say this lightly, because I know what it means to put it in writing: I battle depression at the end of every year. The weather, the darkness, the holidays, the absence of people I loved — it compounds. It has for years.
And I run a business.
Those two things coexist in me, and I'm tired of the version of entrepreneurship that pretends otherwise. The version that says if you just build the right systems, hire the right people, post consistently enough, you can outwork your nervous system. You can't. I've tried.
What you can do — what I've learned to do — is survive the season. Stay close to what keeps you tethered. For me, that's Kairo. That's the plants. That's the community I've built, even when I wasn't showing up for them the way I wanted to.
Survival isn't failure. Sometimes it's the most disciplined thing you can do.
Why I'm Back
Not because I've figured it out. Not because I've got some new system or a 12-month content calendar or a rebrand in the works.
I'm back because it's spring. Because the light came back. Because I miss writing, and I miss talking to the people who actually read this. And because I think there's someone out there — a founder, a solo parent, a person who loves plants and builds things alone — who needed to hear that the gaps don't disqualify you.
You can disappear for a season and still come back to what you built.
PinkPothos is still here. I'm still here.
And if December takes me under again this year, I'll come back from that one too.
If this landed for you, share it with someone who needed to read it. And if you've been carrying your own survival season, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.