My Love Letter to 2025

Love Letter to 2025

2025, you were movement, truth, and remembrance.

This year was the light after a series of dark storms. 2022-2024 were by far the most challenging years I've experienced. My marriage, my business, and my overall well-being were quite literally in shambles. But everything (thankfully) comes in seasons, and 2025 was the gift of sunshine after a long season of rain. In 2023, we found out that Jo had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, we temporarily moved to Canada, and navigated some of our most challenging days. All the emotions that came alongside this experience, the fear, the lack of "control" jolted my entire being in a way that made me feel completely powerless. But what it birthed in the end was a deeper faith in God, a stronger connection with my husband, and clarity on what direction our paths were meant to go.

2025 carried me across literally landscapes (as I hadn't traveled for pleasure in too long to speak of) and inner worlds that set the tone for the celebrations of growth, joy, and personal revelation! Each place arrived with purpose. A mix of trips for business and pleasure. But feeling gently transformed and deepened, feeling expanded in each experience. 2025 was my year of coming back home. Home to love, curiosity, adventure, and to myself.

It was a beautiful journey, not because it was perfect, but because it was honest, because it was mine. Because it was an emotional and physical reminder that after the rain, the sun will shine again.

This year asked me to show up fully. To meet myself where I was. To allow life, love, and creativity to intertwine without forcing separation between business and pleasure. What emerged was a deeper trust in my own rhythm, a knowing that my work, my relationships, and my joy are meant to coexist.

We added my handsome and healthy husband to the team as our official videographer, and this added role of partnership has beautifully deepened our relationship even more. It's shown us another level of the power of a team, the impact on creative collaboration, and sprinkled moments of joy and contagious laughter in a myriad of bloopers from making trending reels together and working through the kinks of our working dynamic. It wasn't all sunshine and roses, but it has truly been amazing, and this is just the beginning!

A Year of Radical Honesty and Becoming

2025 became a mirror.

It invited true honesty with myself, my community, and my expression of art. It challenged me to redefine what’s possible when I release outdated narratives and unlearn perspectives that no longer align with who I am now. (like photography style, being an only outdoor photographer, diving into new endeavors that I'm not great at yet)

I evolved this year, as a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a friend.

As a business owner.

As a creative.

Growth didn’t arrive through force, instead, it arrived through listening and letting go. Through honoring the seasons of who I’ve been and welcoming who I’m becoming.

Redefining My Relationship with Beauty

One of the most transformative threads of this year has been rebuilding my relationship with beauty.

As a photographer, that may sound surprising, but my journey began in the modeling industry over 15 years ago, where beauty often felt measured, confined, and conditional. Those early experiences shaped a complicated relationship with being seen.

Photography became my reclamation.

Through LUVJOY, I set an intention to shift how beauty is experienced, especially for my clients and community. I wanted to break the quiet rules. The “isms.” The standards that disconnect us from ourselves. I wanted to create spaces where people could feel at home in their bodies, their stories, and their presence, as they are, right now.

Beauty is not something we earn. It’s an essence we carry always.

This year, that essence deepened, not just for those I photograph, but for me.

Images by Grabazei Photography

Love, Partnership, and Shared Vision

This year offered me more moments to be in front of the camera, magical moments with hubby, rebranding myself and OUR brand. My favorite image this year of Jo and I dancing at his brother's wedding in Spain and sacredly serene moments in Costa Rica, photographying my first internatonal retreat have blessed me beyond words, it lit a fire that will continue to highlight a beautiful and powerful path for what comes next.

These images are reminders that love is movement. That partnership is presence. That joy expands when it’s shared.

They reflect a season of balance, where I no longer feel the need to save, fix, or rescue, but instead exist fully in my gifts, my truth, and my creativity. Where love feels spacious. Where work feels aligned. Where art feels honest.

The collaboration of Jo's detail-oriented strategic brain, my creative intuitive essence together has brought an amazing vision for how we move forward, the stories we share, and the art we create together and whats possible when we lead with faith and not fear.

The Beauty of the Ebb and Flow

Through visual storytelling, I continue to highlight what is true, powerful, tender, and sometimes challenging, because that is where real beauty lives.

In our humanity. In our many roles. In the ebb and flow of life’s seasons.

Nothing new is required of us, only a steady journey of coming home. Remembering who we are. Exercising our gifts. Loving fully and powerfully, within ourselves, within our relationships, and within our communities.

The world will continue to evolve. Events will unfold beyond our control. But transformation always begins with the love, joy, and presence we cultivate within. From there, it ripples outward.

Gratitude and the Horizon Ahead

I am deeply thankful for 2025, for how it challenged me, strengthened me, and brought me back home to myself. For redefining my relationship with beauty and the ease and revival it brought to my nervous system. For expanding my understanding of love. For calling me fully back into my business, my artistry, and the heart of LUVJOY.

As we close out a year that invited us to truly deepen into truth, to shed layers of ego, inner obstacles, and conditioning that reduced our ability to shine, I leave you with these reflections:

1. Where in 2025 did you shine the most brightly?

2. What major lesson are you taking away from 2025?

3. What does success look and feel like to your heart and soul in 2026?

4. What will be gained in 2026 because of what you released in 2025?

Cheers to the next horizon. So many beautiful things are unfolding.

With so much love, light, and joy.

Janeen