I took November and December mostly off from my jobs, both as publisher of Offbeat Wed, as well as my small business consulting work.

It's the quiet season in the wedding world anyway, but it's also the time of year when consulting inquiries slow down. Basically, the internet exhales.

I decided that instead of filling the silence with desperate hamster wheeling or productivity cosplay, this year I’d just let things be still.

In that stillness, I finally let myself hear the truth: The work that still lit me up had almost nothing to do with the weddings.

...this is a problematic realization for someone whose primary income and domain authority (both literally and figuratively) is tied to a 19-year-old wedding publication.

I spent 2023 and 2024 focused on my work at Medium, managing a growing program for indie publishers. I had a couple beloved contractors helping me with Offbeat Wed. Then I spent 2025 back working for myself, splitting my time between keeping Offbeat Wed kicking and doing consulting work with small businesses and values-focused organizations.

By the end of the year, it was clear to me that what felt the most alive in my work was my convos with creative business owners about how they survive changing platforms, collapsing media models, burnout, AI, money anxiety, changing landscapes, and the stress of building their businesses. The conversations I loved were about systems, pricing, attention, trust, and how to run an organization without hating your own guts.

Meanwhile, every time I tried to summon enthusiasm for another wedding trend piece or another advice column about difficult mothers-in-law… I just, well, couldn’t get it up. I couldn't rally my curiosity. I couldn’t tap into any enthusiasm. I went through the motions, but I just couldn’t pretend wedding advice still excited me.

That work mattered deeply to me once, and I’m proud of what it gave people… but it stopped being where my curiosity lived.

That dissonance had been there for years, but I ignored it because Offbeat Wed worked: It paid dozens of contractors, it paid me, and it continued to make money for its advertisers. The publication had almost 20 years of history, traffic, and reputation.

But the longer I stayed with Offbeat Wed’s ad-supported business model, the more it felt like I was betraying my own standards: banner ads everywhere, visual noise, reader attention constantly being siphoned off to the highest bidder.

At times, it felt borderline sketchy… Like I was sitting in a room, talking to a couple planning their wedding, but I was actually in business with the advertisers sitting in the corners of the room, watching from the darkness and hoping to be noticed. Really, my conversations with couples were just so that I could sell access to their eyeballs to the folks sitting in the corner.

To be clear, it’s not like I was doing something uniquely sketchy: that model is just the nature of the advertiser-supported content.

You know the old line: If the product is free... then YOU'RE the product.

The content on Offbeat Wed was free... and so that meant the readers were the product. It worked for a long time… but eventually, not only did it stop working as well, but I started feeling icky about it. 

I told myself this content focus and business model was just the price of keeping free resources online, and for a long time that was probably true. At some point, though, it just started to feel ugly.

I didn’t like triangulating between couples and advertisers. I didn’t like selling directory listings that I no longer believed could meaningfully move the needle for most vendors. Folks were still buying them, but that stopped feeling like a justification... If I wouldn’t recommend a product to a friend, you shouldn’t keep selling it to strangers.

So I made a decision that looks tidy on paper and feels anything but in real life.

Last month, I pivoted Offbeat Wed into a membership-supported, vendor-centered B2B platform. I’m backing that shift with my actual brain, because now every vendor membership now includes one-on-one consulting with me, because that’s the product I KNOW can stand behind. That’s where my experience, pattern recognition, and care actually live.

So yeah: after 19 years, I’m changing what the flagship publication that pays my bills is all about.

Yikes.

I’m a single mother. I’m living off savings. I’m having to invest tens of thousands of dollars into updating the crusty atrophied infrastructure that the site is built on… all for a B2B direction that has yet to prove itself.

While the the response so far to the pivot announcement has been enthusiastic and encouraging… encouragement doesn’t pay hosting bills. The next year will tell me whether this work finds a real market fit or whether I need to recalibrate again.

That’s scary as fuck! But I’m doing it anyway.

After I made the decision to pivot, something else happened that felt like a small, well-timed nudge: I was asked to comment on weddings not as a checklist or a Pinterest board, but as a cultural signal.

When the New York Times called to interview me about neurodivergent weddings, I commented big picture, focusing on the broad sociocultural shifts instead of the minutia of wedding trends.

These days, I’m not interested in telling people what weddings should look like year by year… but I AM interested in what weddings reveal about us, and I’m deeply interested in the people whose labor makes them happen.

As an added bonus, when I was quoted, the journalist attributed me as the founder of “Offbeat Wed, a digital publication for wedding professionals.”

(I'm going to pretend that this means my publication's pivot sorta got announced in the newspaper of record within two weeks of relaunching.💅)

While I don't take a media mention as proof that the pivot would work (again: encouragement & media mentions don’t pay the hosting bills!), I took it as a little BOOP from the universe, and a tiny confirmation that I'm moving in the right direction.

The irony isn't lost on me: I've spent 19 years running a publication dedicated to authenticity... and have spent the past 5+ years feeling inauthentic about my own interests (or lack of interest).

It's like I've been shouting from the rooftops: authenticity for thee, but not for me! Y'all are encouraged to be as authentic as possible, but I am forced to keep publishing this wedding blog until the end of time, even if I'm not interested in giving wedding advice any more.

OOPS.

Here’s the cold hard truth: When you run a small business and secretly resent the thing that pays you, there is no one to blame. You’re the boss, and that means you’re the only one who can change the job when it stops being honest… even if doing so is frightening and risky and might not work.

For me, slowing down long enough to hear that truth was what it took for me to finally find that bravery.

I don’t know exactly where this version of Offbeat Wed will land a year from now, but I do know that now I'm genuinely excited about the work I'm doing!

I mean, instead of writing about wedding dress trends, I wrote about how creatives can hold hope when working through a polycrisis! Now THAT'S the shit that lights me up! Every week, my calendar slowly fills up with one-on-one consulting sessions with the vendor members who support the site, and I get to talk to them about their branding and messaging and systems and processes and I get all excited and flap my hands around because I love talking to creative weirdos about this stuff!!

It feels great to have my flagship publication and the core of my work finally aligned with what I care about now, how I want to spend my attention now, and who I want to be in conversation with these days.

It feels worth the risk.

PS: Random personal notes that I may or may not write more about in the future: