Last week I went on my friend Suzy Weiss’s podcast and somehow we ended up talking about Spencer Pratt entering the LA mayoral conversation. And by “somehow” I mean it’s currently on everyone’s mind in Los Angeles. Politics in LA right now feels half civic process and half group chat discourse. Half existential crisis and half reality show. A little spooky if you ask me!

Watching the LA mayoral debate, I kept having flashes of being a reality television producer almost twenty years ago. Not in a cynical way. More like muscle memory. Watching the candidates manage tone and timing and audience reaction. Noticing who understood performance and who resisted it. Watching people try to seem authentic while also trying to win. Honestly, it felt icky all around, like the moment was new and we’ve also been here before all at once.

I produced MTV’s The Hills for seven years of my life. And later The City. And one of our, cast members, Spencer Pratt, is literally running for Mayor of Los Angeles. At this point producing The Hills suddenly feels a little like having produced The Apprentice. Did the producers of The Apprentice know Donald Trump would become president? Probably not. Would they believe it if they saw it? I bet absolutely.

A quick map of the race, since I’ll keep circling back to it. Karen Bass is the incumbent, running on experience and continuity, with the fires response as the line her critics keep returning to. Nithya Raman, the District 4 city councilmember, is running as the progressive option, with a council record on housing and homelessness she’s leaning into as the case for City Hall. Spencer Pratt is running as the anti-establishment outsider, leaning into voter frustration over homelessness, crime, and wildfire response. He filed after his home was destroyed in the 2025 Palisades fires.

Which makes the race feel even more bound up with media and narrative and emotion. The people who show up aren’t just voting on policy. They’re voting on feeling. On trust. On frustration. On who they believe understands the moment they’re living through.

And I can see why different people are landing in different places. Some want institutional experience because the city feels unstable. Some want disruption because the system itself feels broken. Some want someone emotionally reassuring. Some want someone loud enough to match the chaos they feel around them.

Here’s the truth. I love LA. And I think all three of them do too. Bass is running on the steadiness argument. Nithya is running on the policy-record argument. Spencer is running on the disruption argument, where bluntness reads as awareness. I’m still working through how I feel about each of them. And I think that is allowed.

But at this point you can absolutely imagine landing at LAX during the Olympics and seeing Spencer Pratt’s face the second you walk out of the terminal. Which might just be the producer in me.

Because that’s not just politics anymore. That’s audience psychology.

That reaction didn’t come out of nowhere. I’ve lived inside the world of reality and performance and audience attachment — or the start of whatever we’re calling parasocial anymore. From ages twenty-three to thirty-one I had a front row seat to the exact moment reality television stopped being a guilty pleasure and started becoming the operating system for modern life.

People always ask me if The Hills was fake and the answer is both yes and no. Was it 100 percent fake? No. Was it 100 percent real? Also no.

So here’s what this moment takes me back to. // A reflection on The Hills

This was my first big girl job as a newly minted “talent producer,” which at the time sounded fake even to me, because nobody really knew what reality television production was yet. A talent producer was basically the liaison between cast and production. Part producer, part therapist, part negotiator, part emotional support hotline (my blackberry.)

It’s your birthday and you want to celebrate? Great, let us book Koi. You and your friend have tension? Maybe it’s best to discuss at Toast Cafe. These were all locations that lived in the pages of Us Weekly in the early 2000s. I’d sit in vans and watch the cast eat two or three meals to capture two or three minutes of dialogue. The job was listening to relationship problems in real time and gently guiding conversations without breaking the illusion that nothing was being guided at all.

That strange middle space was the entire point of The Hills.

When The Hills started in 2006, it really was one of the first shows sitting between scripted television and traditional reality. It looked cinematic. It looked aspirational. But the feelings were real. The heartbreak was real. The friendships were real. The jobs were not — to us, at least. To them, sorry, Teen Vogue.

The New York Times TV critic Virginia Heffernan once described our cinematography as creating “tension as in a Michael Mann movie.” If Laguna Beach looked perpetually like late afternoon — the mellow light of cocktail hour, the promise of a party — The Hills looked like a workday.

That was Hisham Abed, our DP, doing color grading and online finishing on what people were still calling junk television. Rachel Morrison, our other DP, would later become the first woman ever nominated for a cinematography Oscar. We were lighting it like a film. At every location we’d arrive hours before call time just to make sure our talent was lit right. We were serious people doing a not-so-serious job. I loved our cast. I used to call them “the kids,” even though I was only four years older.

I cried when Lauren and Jason broke up. I cried when Heidi and Lauren broke up. Those dynamics felt real because they were real. These were actual young people trying to figure themselves out while also becoming public characters in real time. Transplants to Los Angeles building identities and relationships and careers with cameras following them around.

We loved making it. It might’ve been my favorite job to date. I loved watching Brody on a date debate whether lobster bisque counted as pasta, and watching Lauren and Whitney stress in Teen Vogue’s office (completely forgetting they were on the cover of the magazine).

Filming through nightclubs without ever having to party myself. The restaurants and clubs of Los Angeles still feel like my own personal sets. The confidence I feel in a crowd or location is thrilling — I can always find the exit, and I still look at the lighting and wonder if Rachel will ask for more setup time.

We shot all over LA and it really became a love letter to the city. Katsuya dinners. Les Deux nights. The Grove at Christmas (where Santa told me he sold a script at Paramount.)

Tiny apartments in Hollywood. Long lunches on Robertson. Malibu beach houses. Parking lots in the Valley at midnight after someone stormed out crying. Me on my BlackBerry mid-scene, BBM’ing the cast: this episode airs after Christmas, do not mention the gifts.

After a while you really start to see human behavior patterns. You anticipate them. You know when a breakup is coming before the couple does. You know when someone is trying to hold back tears. You know when tension is about to erupt at dinner. Reality television changes the way you observe people. LA itself started to feel like a set sometimes. Or maybe the set just became LA. We were building fantasy out of real emotion.

Reality TV existed before us, of course. The Real World. The Simple Life. Survivor. But something shifted with The Hills era and that whole early 2000s reality wave. Suddenly audiences didn’t just want celebrities. They wanted intimacy. Access. Emotional realism mixed with fantasy. They wanted to feel like they personally knew people.

At the time, this still felt contained. The Hills peaked at around 4.8 million viewers an episode in 2008. The series finale drew about 3 million. Big numbers for cable, and for us.

That isn’t where we are now. Reality TV is over 35 percent of prime time programming today. And that’s just television. TikTok delivers reality-style content — day-in-the-life vlogs, drama exposés, friend group fractures, public unravelings — to more than a billion daily users worldwide. The genre didn’t shrink. It escaped containment.

And honestly we all know reality television arrived during a larger collapse of trust — in institutions, in media, in polished authority figures who felt distant and managed and impossible to read. Reality characters felt different.

Not because they were always better people, or even always honest people. But because they were characters. You understood their motivations. You understood the role they played in the ecosystem. They became familiar. Predictable in the way people you know in real life become predictable.

I remember sometimes arguing with Lauren about story or behavior and she’d say, “I would never ever do that.” And of course she meant it sincerely. But at a certain point even to us she had become a character too. In post-production we were shaping emotional arcs, defining traits, deciding what storylines felt true to who the audience believed she was. Not fake exactly. Just a heightened narrative. (Also, there is no one funnier than a reality TV editor. They are comedy geniuses.)

And weirdly audiences trusted that because emotionally the characters felt coherent. You trusted coming home to them every week. You understood who they were. Or at least who they were inside the emotional logic of the show.

This is the thing I think reality television actually did to us. It taught us to fall for real people. — but because real people are legible. You can read them. You can predict them. You feel like you understand what they want and why.

Here’s what reality television figured out before the rest of culture did. Performance was no longer something to hide. Performance became the virtue.

That’s how we got here.

Not just influencers. Not just politicians. All of us. We learned to narrate ourselves in real time. To shape our pain while still inside it. To think about our lives as story arcs. To understand attention as currency. To confuse visibility with intimacy. To package authenticity until authenticity itself became a kind of performance.

Reality television didn’t create this entirely. But it rehearsed it. It trained us for the internet that was coming.

I personally cannot fully watch most reality shows anymore because I can hear the machinery too clearly. The ADR is too obvious. I can hear production nudging scenes. I notice the room tone reaction shots immediately. Somebody glancing away during silence suddenly becomes a devastating emotional reaction in the edit.

Human drama remains undefeated. Because the rise of reality was never really about television. It was about the rise of the performer. And performer means something different now. We used to think reality television was reflecting culture. Now I think it was training culture.

So that brings me back to the current moment, the one we are living in now, built in part on reality shows just like this. I picture that Mayor greeting us at the airport at LAX. Does that image look right? Would I put it there? Does it matter?

These are the questions I’m thinking about!

• Are we choosing leaders, or casting them?

• When trust in institutions collapsed, did legibility quietly become the new credential?

• Is performance now a disqualifier, or the actual qualification?

• Where’s the line between a public figure and a public character — and does it still exist?

• If betting markets are the new polls, what are the polls?

• Would The Hills be difference if we had secured the Kelly Clarkson song we wanted instead of Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten?

• Is the Grove really Feng Shui?

• Would Koi work if it was open now?

I will admit I had to defend this position recently. A friend came at me with evidence that froyo was over, done, a relic, a nostalgia play at best. But I knew my Los Angeles ways were witchy and right on this one. There is a difference between a category going quiet and a category getting ready. Frozen yogurt was getting ready. Go Greek or go home baby!

I’VE BEEN ABOUT THAT FROZEN YOGURT LIFE. Growing up we lived the Laguna-Manhattan coastal dream. My dad is a surfer, born in Long Beach, a longboarder specifically, which meant we had to live by the water and live by the swells. And in first grade we took a field trip to Penguins — one of the original Southern California frozen yogurt chains, open since the early eighties, at its peak with over 120 locations across LA — and learned how frozen yogurt was actually made. Not just learned — they let us go behind the counter! LOL! We got to add the ingredients into the big machine ourselves. What that was teaching us I don’t know. But it sure was fun. Later, in Beverly Hills, my school field trips would be to the set of In Living Color to watch the fly girl dancers. But this was more wholesome. Frozen yogurt is in my blood. I was an early adopter.

The obsession only grew from there. At some point — peak froyo era, peak me — my HelloGiggles co-founder and forever partner in crime Zooey Deschanel gave me a frozen yogurt machine as a gift.

A dream realized. I was going to make my own. I was going to be the kind of person who makes her own frozen yogurt. What came out was soup. Enthusiastic, well-intentioned soup. Turns out making frozen yogurt is much harder than it looks and significantly less fun than just going somewhere and piling your own toppings. That said — and I stand by this as a genuine entertaining hack — if you order good Greek frozen yogurt and set up a toppings bar for a dinner party, you will be the most popular host. No machine required just details. Honey, cacao nibs, granola, fresh fruit. Huge hit. You’re welcome.

Here is the thesis before we go any further, because I think it matters and it also might trigger you: frozen yogurt has always followed the dominant diet culture of its moment. It was born from low-fat obsession. It died when low-fat died. Pinkberry resurrected it as a celebrity accessory and aesthetic moment. That died too. And now it’s back because protein is the new low-fat. Same human impulse — find a way to feel good about dessert.

If you feel like going down the historical rabbit hole with me, keep reading — because I did the research and it was genuinely very fun!

Here is what I found.

The first frozen yogurt chain in America was Everything Yogurt, which opened in New York City in 1976. New York was first — which surprised me! It’s so cold there! Everything Yogurt eventually had over 200 franchises.

Then came I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt in 1977 — which famously sued TCBY and has a murder at one of its Austin locations in 1991. There is actually a docuseries about this. It’s called The Yogurt Shop Murders and it debuted on HBO in August 2025. INTENSE.

Then TCBY — The Country’s Best Yogurt, which is a very sincere and sweet name — opened in 1981 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and became the one everybody actually remembers. By 1984 there were over 100 frozen yogurt chains nationwide. It spread across America like a rumor that being good could taste like something. Isn’t that so eighties. We were all just trying to be thin and feel okay about it. Or I mean I wasn’t — I was a child — but the adults around me sure were.

And worth noting for any classic New Yorkers: there is Forty Carrots — tucked into the seventh floor of Bloomingdale’s, back by the bedding department, where it has been serving frozen yogurt since the early 1970s. Predating Everything Yogurt. Predating TCBY. Predating all of it. They’re now serving their third generation of loyal customers and never needed a comeback because they never left. I cant think of a reason to go to Bloomingdale’s and I bet you can’t either.

Frozen yogurt was, essentially, the Diet Coke of ice cream. It was the thing you ordered instead of the thing you wanted, dressed up just enough to feel like a choice rather than a sacrifice. And the diet math was very specific: a cup of regular ice cream ran 250 to 350 calories with 14 or more grams of fat. Frozen yogurt clocked in closer to 100 to 150 calories with almost no fat. In the fat-phobic eighties and nineties that was the entire pitch. Low fat. Low guilt. A transaction you could feel good about.

I need to name something : frozen yogurt can be extremely ED culture coded. A diet hack masquerading as a treat. A lot of us grew up watching the adults in our lives treat froyo like a moral achievement — a reward for restraint. That was the vibe and it was complicated. And here is the thing that I’ve quietly observed : the tallest, skinniest, most effortlessly chic people I have ever met eat full fat ice cream and drink regular Coke. They are not doing the math. They are not negotiating with their dessert. They are just eating what they want. The diet hack was always a little bit of a lie and I think on some level we all knew it.

Frozen yogurt sales had risen over 200 percent per year through the late eighties and early nineties, and then fell by more than half by 2005. Low-fat diets fell out of fashion., finally. Snackwells are so gross. Ice cream came back in low-fat formats and cut into froyo’s whole reason for existing. The category got culturally stale and everyone moved on.

And then Pinkberry changed everything. READER I LOVED PINKBERRY.

Pinkberry was different not just because of the yogurt — which was genuinely tart and genuinely not sweet, a real departure from the creamy sugary eighties version — but because of the place itself. A lime-green interior, plants everywhere, modern globe pendant lights. It was designed to be photographed before Instagram existed. Two flavors only. Fresh fruit on top. No walls of toppings, no chaos, no by-the-ounce scale that would come later — and I personally hate weighing my food but that’s just me.

Founder Shelly Hwang originally wanted to open an English teahouse on that same tiny residential street in West Hollywood. The city rejected her alcohol permit. So she went with her backup plan. A rejected liquor license launched one of the most culturally significant food moments of the decade. You really cannot make this up. Also, West Hollywood filming permits are triple other cities, just a fun fact I remember from producing The Hills.

By spring of 2006 they were serving 1,600 customers a day — I think that sounds like a lot, but again I don’t know! Charlize Theron. Oprah. David Beckham. Everyone was holding a pink cup. The city of West Hollywood was issuing so many parking tickets from people double-parking to get there that Pinkberry became known as “the taste that launched a thousand parking tickets.” They had stanchions outside like it was a club. And in a way it was. We filmed The Hills all over that neighborhood — the Melrose location was practically a cast member or a crew snack favorite.

The original Pinkberry location closed in 2010 and was converted into an office building. There are about 72 locations left in the US — down from a peak of 154. The stanchions are long gone.

The self-serve era followed — Yogurtland, Menchie’s, sixteen flavors and a wall of toppings and the specific chaos of paying by weight. This was also, ultimately, too much. We got tired. We moved on — or back to ice cream.

The artisanal ice cream decade arrived and suddenly everything was small batch and the flavors read like a Diptyque candle. Lavender honey. Rosemary olive oil. Brown butter cardamom. You didn’t eat it so much as experience it. Salt & Straw had a line too but it felt more intellectual somehow. The more complicated the flavor the more precious it seemed. I remember pretending to love raspberry goat cheese to impress a co-worker. That trend is still here but quieter.

But another diet trend has appeared: the protein-packed psychosis everyone is currently in.

Which finally brings me to Go Greek.

A cup of Greek yogurt has 14 to 21 grams of protein. The average protein bar has around 20. A protein shake runs about 25. Which means your froyo bowl is pulling the same weight as your post-workout shake, just with a honey drizzle and cacao nibs on top. We went from counting fat grams to counting protein grams and frozen yogurt won both rounds. Greek yogurt went from diet food to just food, and the frozen version followed. It’s not the thing you eat instead of the thing you wanted. It’s the thing you wanted.

Go Greek Yogurt was born and raised in Beverly Hills in 2012 — the yogurt made in Greece and flown directly to Los Angeles, which is either insane or exactly correct depending on who you are — and has since gone full franchise mode: Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Texas, and now New York. They just opened their first NYC location in NoHo two weeks ago. It’s their twentieth location. I also want to say that Julie Rice, the SoulCycle founder, saw this coming a long time ago. When Go Greek first arrived in Beverly Hills I remember her begging them to franchise. They weren’t ready. And now my friends are opening the Larchmont location in the next few weeks and it’s going to be my new watering hole. Come visit me?

I want to end where it all originally started — New York — because the viral trend of lines around the block and cups in hand is giving full Pinkberry fever.

Birdie’s opened in the West Village in January — in the dead of winter, three degrees outside — and people lined up anyway. Mimi’s came to Nolita in 2025 and immediately opened a second location in Greenwich Village because the demand required it. And now Myka — which started as a small concept in Madrid, expanded to 16 countries, hit Miami, and has just landed directly across from Birdie’s in the West Village —The lines at all of them are real. People are waiting. For frozen yogurt. In 2026.

We are so back. Frozen yogurt is back and it is forever, baby.

My classic order, for the record: original with blueberries and cacao nibs. Simple. Perfect. Non-negotiable. I didn’t talk prices in this piece because talking about money is gauche — but I will say that none of this is cheap. You are not at Menchie’s paying by the ounce anymore. You are at a yogurteria. There is a difference and apparently we are all willing to pay for it. Myself very much included. Drop your order in the comments!

Here is a theory I’ve landed on. Women in friendships fall into two categories. They are sister or family, or they are exes. That’s it. There’s no third category.

Sister or family energy is an active relationship. Someone who is still in your life. You trust them. You see them with a good eye, ayin tova. You support them, you want the best for them, you are genuinely rooting. Their win lands in you like your own.

Ex energy is different. There’s a grievance in there, whether it’s been acknowledged or not. And the thing about ex energy is it’s not always the people who are gone. Some of your greatest haters are right under your nose. Not in your group chats, but close enough to watch. It’s that ex-type jealousy. Precise. Intimate. Someone who knows you well enough to make it personal, and does.

Some friendships come in hot, instant intimacy, matching energy, a feeling like oh there you are. And some end with the specific confusion of a friend breakup, where someone is furious at you and you’re standing there thinking, I’m sorry, did we f*ck? What is happening.

I have exes. I am someone’s ex, several people actually. It is not always balanced or even. Ex friend energy is haunting. Friends get into the deep parts of your soul. And when they’re gone, they still have little satellites in there.

Recently one of my best friends got upset at me and brought out the big guns, past resentments, the full arsenal from a birthday trip in 2021. It threw me off completely. But here’s the thing, we are family. So we got through it. Less than 24 hours later we were laughing about it, we had inside jokes about the infamous fight we had just had. Had we been exes, I would have screamed back with insults masked as resentments as fast as I could. Instead I was like, oh. So this is what it’s like to have a sister.

The ex is different. I had a friend who talked shit about me to our other friends. I knew it. I didn’t want to confront her, so I let it go. Then she moved away and I stopped keeping up and I didn’t see any missed calls on her end either. Here is something I’ve learned. If a friend doesn’t ask you questions and relies on you to just listen, that’s not a friendship. That’s an assignment. So we faded out. Then I see she unfollows me. I unfollow her back. She blocks me. And there you have it. We are exes.

You know what it’s like to have a friend feel like an ex even while you’re still in the friendship. Conversations feel tense. They are scanning you for secrets, for shadiness. You are edging back. The intimacy is still there but it has curdled into something that looks a lot like surveillance.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about ex friend energy versus family energy. Feeling left out or slighted and going silent about it, that’s ex energy. Family says invite me bitch and means it warmly and you laugh and you fix it in thirty seconds or however much time you need. It’s family. It will be fine.

If you are asking your friend for more than they are giving you, that’s ex energy. If you are at ease, with grace and comfort, that’s family energy. Family doesn’t need constant keeping up. You pick up where you left off. No pressure. And when there is pressure, you handle it. You don’t punish it. Family cancels and says ok love you and means it. Family calls you out and stays in the room. Family has seen you be wrong and they’re still not using it. Family doesn’t have an energy bill. Nobody’s tracking who owes what.

The ex goes lethal instead of logical. The ex treats a rupture as evidence instead of just a rupture. And here’s the thing nobody talks about. You could be friends with someone right now and not know which one they are until you get into a fight. That’s when you find out. Family fights and comes back. An ex fights and files it.

I used to put my entire sense of value into how good a friend I could be. Now I’m just like, I’m a person. I’m a good friend and I’m a bad friend and those things coexist in me without apology. I have friendships where I’m the ex energy. I know that.

But if you are chasing the high of the start of the friendship, good luck. Family doesn’t need that high. Family is quieter than that. It’s steadier. It’s less addictive and more real.

I still get a little ping of pain when I remember a funny line my ex best friend used to say. To this day I will watch a movie and think, she would love this. And I know it to be true, my wifi signal to her is still connected.

Names are not included here to protect the innocent, and that means all parties. Look around at your friendships. Savor the sisters. Have compassion for the exes. The ex in you that might never move on, or the ex in them that might never forgive.

And then when you find that instant, forever connection with someone, remember how lucky you are to have found your family.

If you are an ex reading this, hi.

A few other things on my mind

Speaking of exes, Twitter is an ex I still visit. We don’t play nice anymore. I scroll, I feel a little bad about myself, I leave. You know how it is. But I loved it once and I think about what it gave me. Short, stupid, silly, a little unhinged moments and a way to frame my humor. That’s just how my brain works.

Substack is doing a lot at once, newsletter, podcast portal, community. But the Notes section is giving me something close to what Twitter gave me and I’m here for it. It’s slightly giving Threads but I’m ok with it.

Books I need to read now that I saw this news. A tradwife influencer wakes up in 1805. I have never ordered a book faster. It’s called Yesteryear. Yesteryear
Anne Hathaway is producing the film. Obviously.

Miranda July is doing something on Substack that is very cool. She’s putting people on dating profiles. Go see for yourself.

Poog is back to being Poog. For those who didn’t track the detour, it briefly became Berlant and Novak, which, respect, but Poog is Poog.

I am still doing To Be Magnetic and I am still a believer. The current thing I’m working with is nervous system resets, which is, I’m aware, the new somatic. Every few years healing gets a new word for the same thing. The thing still works.

My new Starbucks drink is the mango energy refresher. I am a teen. Dry freeze strawberries included. My Red Bull!

I have been writing from bed. This is not a confession, it’s a lifestyle and I like it.

I don’t do book clubs. What I do is read a book and then schedule one on ones with specific friends to recap. I know which friend gets which book. It’s a better system and I will not be taking questions, unless we are reading together.

That’s it for now.

The Artemis II crew just splashed down in the Pacific last Friday, the first humans to fly around the moon in more than fifty years, and they keep trying to tell us something simple. Look at this. Look where you are. Look who you’re with. It felt like sermons in space.

We are just a small, beautiful planet floating around with all these tiny worries and enormous joys. The crew called it “moon joy,” that feeling of seeing the moon up close for the first time, colors and craters and a surface that looks nothing like the moon you see from your backyard. Did you know there were colors on the moon? If you knew, let’s be friends.

Astronaut Christina Koch said that looking back at Earth, what struck her wasn’t just the beauty but the blackness around it. That the blackness made it more special. That the same thing keeps every single person on Earth alive. And then she said the thing that stopped me. “Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbed in the universe.”

UNDISTURBED! That is not how I would have described my experience on Earth or if you look within, you either!. But she is right. We are so taken care of in ways we take for granted.

She said being in space didn’t change her perspective, it reaffirmed it. That our purpose is to lift each other up, to create instead of destroy. And then Koch said we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other. If you think Mars is the solution, I love you for that. Truly. But I’m staying here and taking all this awe in! New perspective unlocked! I also think it so silly how serious we take ourselves, we literally live on a planet thats so cinematic

All this awe brought me to this Chasidic idea that a person is where their thoughts are. And if that’s true, then where am I actually living most of the time? At any given moment, my thoughts can be anywhere from my new haircut feels uneven, to we need a Glee remake with TikTok stars asap, to wow I finally understand space but not taxes. Happy tax day BTW to those that observe, cuties.

I remember first learning Transcendental Meditation and the teacher said your thoughts are like the waves of the ocean and we want to get you to the bottom where there is peace. Which is a beautiful metaphor. Personally, a bad one for me. Because when I turned 40, I tried to get my scuba license in Malibu in winter during Covid. I cheated through the written test and then showed up to the in-person session where the instructor said, cheerfully, so we are here today to learn rescue diving. I had accidentally signed up for a Malibu rescue dive certification. Anyway. My thoughts were not peaceful down there staring at bunk sand dollars. I’ll say that.

So I’m trying something new. I am going to conquer my thoughts, or at least clean up the subconscious mess, and honestly it might be over for you hoes.

What is this bold new era, you ask. What mountain am I climbing now. MANIFESTING!

Manifesting. I know.

There comes a point where your algorithm stops feeling like entertainment and starts feeling like a mirror. Suddenly it’s women in matching Alo sets telling you to manifest your dream life and something in you gets a little… defensive. I am a recovering psychic addict. I used to outsource my inner life to whatever sounded the most certain. Vision boards, affirmations, crystals, a woman on TikTok who “just knew.” That girl had to go. I laid all of it down and gave it to God. Fully.

So I was not, in theory, a candidate for this. And yet last week in my spiral about my life I reached out as a lifeline to a friend I’d been quietly envious of. She has that life that feels full in a way you can’t fake. Creative, grounded, loving to herself and other people, beautiful home, real family, the whole thing. They say follow your envy. It will show you where you want to go. And unfortunately I wanted to go directly into her life. She was so excited to share her tips. She told me to download the To Be Magnetic app and sent me a stack of books.

Now before you roll your eyes. Think to yourself, are you living your dream life? and if you are congrats and if you aren’t then be a little open minded to a woman wanting to live hers and tap the like button to this post!

Because here is the thing. This isn’t about pretending your life is amazing while your nervous system is like, absolutely not. This is about what you actually believe underneath everything. The part of you that quietly decides what you’re allowed to have.

And this is where it gets annoying. Because there is actual science here. Not in a woo woo way. In a your brain is a pattern recognition machine kind of way. Your thoughts are constantly filtering reality through what you already believe is possible. It’s basically the Reticular Activating System doing its job, that just means the neurons in your brain, sorry I’m just so STEM now. You tell it something matters, it starts finding it everywhere. You tell it something isn’t for you, even subconsciously , it quietly edits it out.

So when people say manifesting, what they really mean is… training your brain to stop rejecting the life you say you want. I can’t fully explain it. I just know something is shifting.

It’s been five days and I feel peaceful, which, if you know me, is not a casual word. And it’s not because everything changed. It’s because I can imagine good things happening. Specifically. Big and good and nice things. For me. For the people I love. Even for people I don’t know.

It’s important to list your manifestations big and small! I want an aligned partnership. I want a navy or burnt burgundy vintage Kelly bag. I want a La Cornue stove in green or steel gray. I want healthy boy girl twins, however God or science decides. I want a life that feels full and shared and real. And I want to be someone who can imagine that life without flinching. and a life that someone else would feel envious of and I can pay it forward.

The more you surround yourself with people living lives that feel true and expansive, the more your nervous system starts to believe it’s possible.

There’s something about awe for life or even others that changes things. It pulls you out of the small version of your life and drops you into something bigger. Astronauts talk about this all the time, that being in space doesn’t make you want to escape Earth, it makes you love it more. You don’t need to go to space to feel that, I certainly won’t be! But once you touch it, even a little, it’s hard to go back.

Awe is magnetic and we can be too! Let’s all be magnetic beings on this cute little planet we share shall we?

MORE THINGS I’M THINKING ABOUT

THE OLYMPICS

The Olympics are in Los Angeles, July 14th through the 30th, 2028. The Olympics. Here. In two years. I missed the first ticket draw, registration closed March 18th, and I was apparently not paying attention, but here is what you need to do right now. Go to https://la28.org, create a profile, and sign up for the newsletter. Once you’re registered, you’re automatically entered into every future draw. Nearly half of all tickets are under $200. The cheapest ones started at $28. For the Olympics. In your city. There is no excuse. I want gymnastics and I want basketball and I intend to be sitting in a seat somewhere watching a human being do something physically impossible and crying about it.

LACMA

I am very excited about the new Geffen Gallery at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It opens next week for members, April 21. Yes, I am a member, I’m so cultured! Apparently the exhibition is curated around bodies of water, which feels both calming and a little conceptual in a way I trust. Also, Erewhon Market is doing drinks there, which feels like exactly the kind of crossover we need. Let’s get people interested in art again. Or at least get them there and let the art do its job.

THE LOCKET APP

The kids are using this app called Locket Widget where you share photos directly to a small group’s home screens. Up to 20 friends. It just appears there. No feed, no scrolling, no performance. It’s kind of beautiful.Very intimate. Which is probably why it works. This is a good sign for humanity. Simplicity in social media is becoming a trend.

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

I got this from seeing The Drama, GO SEE THE DRAMA . Sometimes I think about how quickly you can get to the truth if you just skip the surface. Like asking someone the worst thing they’ve ever done. Or the worst thing they’ve ever thought about. Brings it all back to the power of thought, should we punished for our thoughts? The movie wants you to think about that, so go and think about that!.

One more!

Text a friend out of nowhere and ask, what’s your core wound? Time to learn about the people you love so you can love them more freely. and the core wound question came from the work on the To Be Magnetic app. See I’m in the work !

A RESET

I highly recommend looking at a photo of your younger self. Or someone you love as a kid. It always centers me. Just this immediate feeling of wow, I love that little cutie. And then remembering that person is still here.

Anyway, I’m feeling peaceful on earth not despite it all because of all it!

@aditibussells2026 is the year of whimsy and collective effervescence. I’m calling it. #science #millennial #spacetok #hopecore #humanity

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I am writing this from my bed, recovering from a stomach bug I caught from one of my best friend’s kids at Passover. No one to blame. I knew she was sick. I also knew she needed love and maybe I did too! So I rolled the dice. No regrets.

A brief note before we begin. It is Passover. Which means the standard post stomach flu recovery protocol, bread, rice, toast, applesauce, is simply not available to me. The BRAT diet does not exist during the eight days. Matzah is not the same and I will not pretend otherwise. I cannot tell you how much I am thinking about bread right now. You do not realize how central bread is to every single meal until it is gone. Thursday night, when Passover ends, I am blessing a pizza and a bowl of pasta. I’m trying to tell you I’m a hero!

Also something I did not expect. The stomach bug forced me into silence. ME! Chatty ole me! And it turns out that silence is exactly what this moment calls for. It’s Spring but almost spring, it doesn’t feel spring forward vibes yet, it’s also the Jewish month Nissan which is connected to speech. Watching what we say, how we say it, and what we leave unsaid. I say things flippantly. I overshare when I am anxious. I fill silence like it is a problem to be solved. What makes you more quiet than a stomach bug. Nothing. Apparently I needed to learn this the hard way. The body knows.

I had a lot of time to think and it had me thinking of advice I give freely and receive reluctantly. I am very good at seeing other people’s situations clearly. My own FOGGY! Marine layer. Total marine layer. This is not unusual, just not ideal for someone who considers herself a seeker.

So here, from my bed, slightly post IV, is advice I have been given that I am still learning to take.

The Ralphs Test

A few years ago I was in a lawsuit over my company, had committed what I can only describe as the ultimate friendship crime, think Summer House level scandal and I was not Ciara ( I only know what that means from podcasts) and I was talking to my sister slash mentor Jenni Konner. Talking is generous. I was sobbing. She said tell me the worst thing that could happen. Say it out loud.

At the time the worst thing was that I would lose everything, have no friends, and have to work a Ralphs checkout. No offense to anyone working at Ralphs. I had an internet company and the idea of being on my feet all day genuinely terrified me. Her response is something I think about at least once a month, maybe weekly. She said okay, so you work at Ralphs with no friends and you make new ones. You are still okay.

It reframes fear. Stage fright exists for a reason. It means something is at stake. The Ralphs has since been updated. My current worst case scenario is that I will have to move to a kibbutz and work the land forever, alone, off the grid. The fear upgrades and maybe that sounds nice? I am still okay.

I played this game on myself this week. I woke up at 3am in a shame spiral about my life. Forty four, a career reboot, no partner, no kids. And I just let the worst case land. And when I did, I was okay. Not thrilled. But okay. You have to accept your life exactly as it is and find the joy in it. I love my friends, I love my family, I love my apartment, I love God, I guess that will have to be enough for now . DAYANU!

This too shall pass

This too shall pass. It appears in a ninth century Persian Sufi poem and in Jewish folklore. King Solomon himself asked his wise men for a phrase that could humble him in pride and comfort him in sorrow. TAKE THAT IN! They brought him a ring engraved with those four words.

This weekend I passed my first real test of it. In the thick of the stomach bug I did not panic. I did not call someone and ask is this forever in a way that was only ever partly about the nausea. I did not spiral. I rode it. I sat with it. I trusted, actually trusted , that it would pass. I am still riding it as I type this. And here is what I can tell you. It is passing. It always passes.This time I felt it in my body and I let it do its work.

Nothing solves anything like a good night’s sleep

I cannot stress this enough. A bad night’s sleep and I am a wash. A good night’s sleep and it is over for these hoes. That is simply the truth. Huberman bros are right!

No one is thinking about you as much as you are

This one hit me hard this week. I went to sleep panicked and woke up panicked, and thankfully had my best friend on NYC time to talk me down. Her reminder. No one is thinking about this more than you are.

She is right. I love my friends deeply. I believe in them and their timelines and I root for them constantly. But I am not sitting around cataloguing their perceived failures. I just love them. That is what most people are doing. They are just loving you, not auditing you.

Find the gratitude

True. Also sometimes terrible advice to receive. Do you know how hard it is to find an attitude of gratitude when you literally have an attitude. The other day all I could come up with was I am grateful for flowers. That was it. Flowers. Some days I cannot stop listing things. Other days, flowers.

In Ethics of Our Fathers it says you do not speak to someone in the middle of their anger. You cannot scream gratitude at someone who is not there yet. Sometimes the most loving thing is to meet people where they are. That is also advice.

Your thoughts create your reality

This one stresses me out. If that is true I am in serious trouble. My thoughts are all over the place and I guess so is my reality. All this manifestation talk makes me feel like I am one anxious thought away from summoning a disaster. Working on it. Slowly My new thought is I am hot and good person and I know I’m not a bad person because a bad person wouldn’t worry about being a good person, would they!

What you eat, watch, and do matters

I hate that this one works. Take the walk. Eat the protein. Put down the phone. The week I do all of it I feel like a person. The week I do none of it I feel like a throw pillow thrown around. So yes. Fine. It matters.

You have to laugh about your life

This one comes from my friend Erin. When I first met her she brought photos of herself from boarding school and said I did not always look like this. I was not in the market for a pretty blonde friend and she made me laugh immediately. She could laugh at herself and that changed my life.

So now when something horrible happens, you have to laugh maybe not right away but real soon! You genuinely have to. So much of life is actually very funny if you are willing to see it that way. The boarding school photos were the proof of concept.

One small step splits the sea

It is Passover, which means we are in the season of leaving Egypt. The Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, means narrowness. The narrowness of our minds. The places we keep ourselves small and stuck and afraid. And the sea did not split on its own. It split when Nachshon walked into the water up to his nose. One person. One step. Then the miracle.

Last week, sick and scared and a little bit embarrassed about where I am in my life, I took a step. I posted my podcast. That was my action. That was my water. I do not know yet what splits. But something always does.

Thank you for listening or watching. It was hard to be vulnerable but I needed to do it. You can find it here on my Spotify I was so rushed to post it that I linked it to my personal account, but what is personal anymore. Listen here.

Who should I interview next on God Girl? Leave it in the comments. I am genuinely asking.

Maybe the practice is not the arrival. Maybe it is just the returning. Over and over, to yourself, to the quiet, to the thing you already know and keep forgetting. It passes. It always passes. I am still here and I am still ok and as best friend tracy says at 3am “you are safe and you are loved.” And if you are in a season where you need to hear that, I will be happy to give you that advice, while I learn to receive it!

Other Things On My Mind

This lip balm. Best friend Tracy Dubb makes it. And separate from her excellent friendship I love this product. It actually shocked me, I didnt want to be rude and my shock, but I have never connected to a lip product the way I connect to this one. It feels like someone injected electrolytes directly into my lips, which, given that I just had an actual IV, I say with full authority. The brand is Isla. She made sure to tell me it is a balm, not a gloss. Got it.

This essay. Lindsey Hall writes one of the best Substacks going and this piece, about stumbling onto her boyfriend’s ChatGPT and what she found there, is haunting because it’s the new snooping. She did not want to spend her life beside someone who had to talk himself into her. Also if my ChatGPT were ever revealed I would be exposed as a hypochondriac with an eating disorder who is anxiously attached. But if I saw what someone actually thought about me. No thank you. Hard pass. Read it here.

I also have been thinking of this advice by author OTTESSA MOSHFEGH from her substack

is it more important to be fair or right? Probably right, but we’ve all have failed and landed at fair, haven’t we?

This Substack news. My friend Blair sent me this and I am excited about it. Substack just launched a recording studio built right into the platform, desktop only for now, where you can pre record a show with up to two guests, get auto generated clips and thumbnails, add your publication branding, and publish when you are ready. No separate tools. No stitching anything together. For those of us doing a podcast on here, this is a big deal. A fun fact I do not love. When you post a podcast or a song to Stories, Spotify sends it as a DM to your followers. Sneaky. I am noting the bug. Read about it here.

Zofran, and my theory about women. I have never been on How Long Gone podcast but they have a segment where they ask guests their favorite prescription drugs. Mine is Zofran first, Xanax second, and the order matters. I have a theory that women are two types. Tummy ache girls and headache girls. I am a tummy ache girl, pre and post GLP 1’s. Zofran, for the uninitiated, is an anti nausea medication, the thing that keeps tummy ache girls vertical. I did literally mainline it this weekend via IV. Shoutout to my friend Emily for the Modwella rec, and a special shoutout to technician Omar, who saw me in a dark place and good spirits.

This shirt, and what pointelle is. My friend Babs told me about this H&M white pointelle knit t shirt and then had to explain what pointelle even is. A delicate knit with small intentional holes that give it a lacy, textured look. It reads elevated. It costs nothing. My friend Simone also posted this Gap button down as a wardrobe staple in her Substack about uniforms, the concept of just deciding what you wear and being done with it. Her piece is worth reading if you have ever wanted to stop thinking about getting dressed. I want that constantly.

What I am currently putting in my body, supplement edition. My friend Lydia has been working on her ferritin numbers and shared what has been moving them. Optiferin C, an iron supplement with vitamin C built in for absorption. Her protocol is three to four times a week on an empty stomach, waiting ninety minutes before coffee, with steak added to her diet. Filing this immediately. My ferritin and I have been in a long negotiation and I welcome all intelligence from the field. I am also trying something the influencers have been doing. A creatine and electrolyte combo packet from Create. The promise is muscle support and hydration in one shot. It feels like saving money and time. We shall see.

This book, which is about to become my whole personality. My friend Chana Arnold texted me from her Passover program that Byron Katie’s Loving What Is was becoming her whole personality, so naturally I ordered it immediately because that is how I operate. Four questions that are supposed to change your life. and since Passover is about four questions it felt kismet. And if you have not gotten the general idea from this essay, I need to change my life. Or at least how I relate to it. Same thing maybe. Will report back

What I am listening to. Tara Brach podcasts. Abraham Hicks podcasts. I also recently discovered GiggleSquad and that is new. I do not believe falling asleep to podcasts is healthy. I believe it is a cry for help. But that is where I am this week and I am reporting it honestly.

Watch this space. And literally, go watch space.

Here’s the thing about me: I’ve tried everything. Every acupuncture needle in California has jabbed me. I’ve worshipped every crystal. At some point I was paying a woman to clear my energy over WhatsApp. I come by it honestly, I’m a daughter of Los Angeles after all! But somehow, after all of it, the only thing I kept coming back to was God. Not religion exactly. Not a denomination. Just God. The through-line underneath everything I was already chasing.

So I made a podcast about it. I called it God Girl and yes, I mean God, not G-d. I grew up being told you can’t use God’s name in vain, so I defaulted to the hyphen out of habit. Then a wise friend said: “I don’t think God needs us to do that.” She was right. So it became God Girl. I filmed it at The Free Press studios. The plan was simple: interview people whose relationship with a higher power is the center of their life. Celebrities, religious figures, real people, unexpected people. Me, but useful.

And then I didn’t finish it. Until now. Sort of.

One of my first interviews was with Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican friar at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village. This past weekend, he went viral and not in a way I could have predicted. A TikToker named Anthony Gross has been making a series ranking NYC Catholic churches, and when he gave St. Joseph’s the number one spot, something cracked open. Mass attendance increased by 15 to 20 percent. The young adult program Father Jonah runs after the 6pm Sunday Mass, a cheese-and-wine discussion group called In Vino Veritas, grew to more than 200 people, filling the church’s compact lower-level space. “The past few Sundays, we’ve had people standing literally on the front steps of the church trying to get to Mass because there’s just not room,” Father Jonah said. He was also featured in Feed Me this week, if you want the full story.

This is not an isolated moment. The number enrolled in St. Joseph’s Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, the process by which adults convert to Catholicism, had tripled since last yea. Eighty percent of the congregation’s members are in their 20s and 30s. “Materially, we have everything at our fingertips, and it’s not reaching our hearts,” Father Jonah said.

So why is being Catholic cool right now?

I have thoughts, and I want more of yours. I think it’s the aesthetic, the robes, the architecture, the candles, the whole visual grammar of it that Instagram was essentially built to photograph. I think it’s the gathering, the radical act of showing up somewhere in person, with your body, on purpose, every week. I think it’s the wisdom, centuries of it, just sitting there, waiting, while we were all doom-scrolling. I think it’s the community at a moment when everyone is desperately, almost embarrassingly, lonely. I think it’s the ritual. I think it’s the mystery. I think it’s that young people are watching things fall apart and deciding that maybe organized religion isn’t that bad. And I think it’s probably ten other things I haven’t thought of yet, which is exactly why I want to hear from you.

I saw it all blow up this weekend and thought: I talked to that guy. I have an hour of footage. I haven’t watched it since we filmed it because I’m too scared to. Not because I don’t think I did a good job. I’m sure I did fine. I’m scared to watch it because when I made it, I was really excited. It felt like my destiny. And then when it didn’t go anywhere, I thought: well. Maybe it’s not my destiny.

And now I’m thinking maybe destiny is just discipline. Maybe those are the same thing and I’ve been waiting for a feeling that was actually just a next step.

But what I kept finding, making that podcast, , talking to my best friends Lydia and Veronica (they are my original and inspiration for God Girl,) talking to anyone willing to discuss their interior life, is that it almost never comes down to the religion. It comes down to the faith. The desire for connection to something larger. The hunger for meaning that apparently not even New York City can fully suppress.

Here’s the thing though. I am a person who cares deeply about your interior life and what everyone is feeling and who said what to whom and WHY! And I couldn’t figure out how to hold all of that at once. So the podcast started to feel a little earnest. A little Jay Shetty. And I am not Jay Shetty. I have nothing against Jay Shetty. I am simply not him.

The dream guest list, if I’m being honest with myself: Justin and Hailey Bieber. Kim Kardashian. Katy Perry. Nick Cave. Bob Dylan. Dolly Parton. Regina Spektor. Stephen Colbert. Kris Jenner. The Dalai Lama. Matisyahu. Athletes whose talents feel so God-given you can’t explain them any other way. Singers who clearly have a direct line to something. CEOs who are quietly funding the thing everyone is privately hungry for. Real people too, because Theo Von interviewing the lunch lady is often more illuminating than Theo Von interviewing anyone famous, and that energy is what I was after.

The through-line isn’t religion. It’s the question. How does a modern person find God while still staying themselves? I don’t have the answer. That’s the whole point.

Here’s what I do know: to start something, you need someone to see it in you. You just do. Outside validation, yes, I know, bad, dependent, co-dependent, not the goal. But it’s also information. It’s direction. So here I am. Trying to have some discipline. Trying not to give up on a thing I loved just because it got quiet

.

I’m going to ask you to watch it first. I’m not ready yet. But I want it to exist. If this connects to you, let me know. If it doesn’t, please don’t. I’m still tender

.

I love media. I’ll say it. I love producing it, I love reading it, I love sharing it. I grew up obsessed with music videos, got into reality TV, The Hills specifically, then Glee, then started HelloGiggles, built it, sold it, and then took a sharp long turn into CPG spices. Random or burnout or culinary curiosity. I’m still not sure.

Media used to be my job. Then it became my hobby. Then honestly it became my boredom disease. I have a group chat and, this is the embarrassing part, a Slack, for my friends, where we send posts and things I cannot stop thinking about. I do this because I cannot help it and because someone needs to and because the algorithm is not going to do it for us.

So it’s time to make it a job again. I relaunched this as Between Friends Media. I am extremely online and also extremely emotionally intelligent. Get you a girl who can do both. Rather than ration off who can handle my links and posts, I’m putting it all here for you to enjoy or ignore. Maybe a podcast next. For now we start here. You know exactly who to forward this to.

MAHJONG MADNESS

It’s still March Madness and it’s also Mahjong Madness. The only thing I really know about March Madness is when Obama went on ESPN and did his bracket picks and I remember thinking that was a pretty cool move.

For the uninitiated: mahjong is a tile based game that is one part strategy, one part memory, one part luck, and one part trying to look like you know what you are doing while absolutely not knowing what you are doing. It is so hard but maybe fun? You are building hands from 152 tiles trying to match a winning combination listed on the annual card. Four players, but you’ll need to invite ten people because people flake. I am that person. Text ten. You will get four. That is the math.

Mahjong was something my friends’ parents or grandparents did, not mine. My family are a different kind of immigrants. Their Moroccan culture read egg shells for fun. Different world view entirely. But the last few years the ladies are gathering and the last few weeks the ladies are flocking. There is an energy in the air where people are trying to lock down their version of a sorority and apparently it involves tiles. I have never been in a sorority or even gone to college but watching the college version of all my friends new and old is endearing.

My friend Emily invited us over to be taught by the one and only Marvelous Mrs. Mahjong — an excellent teacher with equal parts charm and genuine confidence in us, her students. The tiles are beautiful. Whether that makes up for how confusing the whole thing is remains to be determined. But I will continue playing.

The game itself is Chinese, became an American version in the 1920s, and Jews absolutely ran with it. Jewish women in the Catskills were playing because they weren’t allowed in other clubs so they made their own veryclassic move. The National Mah Jongg League was founded in 1937. The founding president was Ruth Unger and now her sons Larry and David run the nonprofit, publishing the annual card that determines the winning hands for the year. We are almost getting our 2026 card. I am told this is important and I believe them. My friend Emily kept saying we need a full profile on Larry and David. And we do. Those women in the 1920s were certainly sipping on something because the rules are real confusing but there is a consistency that confusion that feels cozy.

How to get in: Get a set ($30–$80 on Amazon, $150–$300 at The Mahjong Line for the ones you actually want on your coffee table). Get the annual card from the National Mah Jongg League — $14, large print $15. Practice at Real Mah Jongg online. And find your Marvelous Mrs. Mahjong — every community has one. I learned from mine and she made me feel capable even when I was absolutely not.

EVERYTHING I AM INTO RIGHT NOW

Harry Styles’ new album. I loved the Runner’s World cover. Very cool move. It is clear he has found a very particular frequency aka maybe MDMA and the album lives entirely inside it and honestly good for him. American Girls and Taste specifically. I am not a runner but I think it is hot when others are. Full marathons under three hours or bust. None of this casual half marathon energy, leave that for literal children. The album is a pleasure and I am in the car a lot and I am giving it my full attention.

Made this March This playlist. Just listen.

LA Material. Just launched and anything that makes Los Angeles feel legible is for me. City politics is one of my pleasures, it is just gossip. The team is Julia Wick, who won the 2023 Pulitzer for breaking the LA City Council tape scandal, her sister Sarah who ran Crooked Media, two-time Pulitzer winner Matt Hamilton, and my friend Hayes Davenport. Free weekday newsletter. Subscribe here.

“Transference in the Afternoon” — Granta. Obsessed with this story. Jesse Barron spent years on a piece about a therapist and her hedge fund patient who had an affair nearly every week for ten years. Both married, always in her office, him still paying cash. Then he goes to therapy school, learns about erotic transference, and rewrites the entire decade. Was it an affair or was it abuse? Both of them have a version. Neither is wrong. He went through 6,000 pages of their emails. Also: sleeping with your therapist in NYC is considered rape. Scary stuff. It makes you feel like you could be any of these people. Secrets and shame collapse time. Ten years. Gone. I know the feeling! I’ve had a 13-year situation that defies logic and time! A real Bat Mitzvah of a relationship. It’s a dense read but the kind of story that is very fun to bring up at a dinner party.

The Class by Taryn Toomey I am apparently the last person in Los Angeles to take this class and I loved it. It is a somatic workout which means it is cardio but also it is crying, if that is what needs to happen. Bodyweight movements, repetition, music, and at some point beautiful women in Cartier bracelets are moaning somatically and you stop questioning it and join in. I left feeling euphoric but also sad that so many people are going through it. Go. First three classes for the price of one right now.

This notebook. My friend Jamie suggested it for morning pages and I have been writing the most unhinged jibberish in it every day and I mean that as the highest compliment. If you are doing The Artist’s Way or just need somewhere to put the noise, this is the one.

Starbucks. I know. I know. But the app is genuinely the best loyalty program in existence I said what I said and my order is a pistachio cortado and a cold brew with coconut foam and I will not be taking questions. The points system is so good it should be studied.

BOOKS I AM RECOMMENDING BUT HAVEN’T READ

Clutch by Emily Nemens. Published February 2026 and already getting attention from the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times. Five women, twenty years of friendship, all turning forty, all of them in the middle of the biggest moments of their lives at the same time. Careers imploding, marriages fracturing, IVF, addiction! Described as White Lotus with more sincerity and heart. That sounds like a diss but I’ll see the positive in that . This book sounds like a group chat.

The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff. Emly recommended this to our Mahjong group. Getting into it and reporting back.

SO…

I am against peptides now. Something about them feels creepy and I am going with that instinct. If I get a little rounder I get a little rounder. The too-skinny aesthetic is aging people and it is not chic. This is my position until further notice.

Retatrutide. Everyone is on it. Where Ozempic targets one hormone receptor and Mounjaro targets two, retatrutide hits three at once. Which is apparently why it is producing the most dramatic weight loss numbers ever recorded in a clinical trial. Not even FDA approved yet and here we are. What I keep hearing about is the hunger shift, it is not like Mounjaro where the food noise just goes quiet. With retatrutide the food noise gets replaced by a very specific and insistent desire for protein. A friend told me it is making him feel like a “little protein pig.” All the gay men are apparently bulking on it, doing what Mounjaro couldn’t and actually adding muscle. I find all of this fascinating and am watching from a safe distance while taking my creatine. Do not quote me on any of this.

TMJ. TMJ is real and it sucks and it is deeply annoying because it ruins both my sleep and my mood. Got a face massage at Sousla where the woman told me the jaw is where we hold emotional pain. This used to really get me, tying anything physical to the emotional or the spiritual realm. Now it soft triggers me. But I just want my mouth massaged and it was a perfect massage.

That’s what I’ve got this week. Some of it will land, some of it won’t, all of it is genuinely what is living in my head right now. Forward it to the person you always forward things to. Subscribe if you want more of this. And if you have something I should know about: an article, a take, a class in Venice, a drug that is not FDA approved.. send it my way. That’s the whole point.

See you next week.

— Sophia

The other day I was on a walk with one of my best friends, a fellow former girl boss, the one two punch. We call ourselves the board of directors of each other’s lives. She is one of the best leaders I know. She builds things and sees them through with structure, heart, and follow through that I genuinely admire. I have the instincts and the ideas. She has the execution and the vision to land them. Together we would be one complete person but instead we are each other’s advisors and honestly I will take it.

A girl boss, for anyone lucky enough to have missed that era, is basically an ambitious woman who turned herself into a brand, a job, a personality, a whole operating system. It’s a little sexist and annoying, but that’s a different essay. Ambition really does look different on women.

She’s about to launch her new company and I’m circling relaunching a modern day version of HelloGiggles, my old company. We were talking about where we get stuck, where we over and under perform, why are we even doing this vibes. And I said: isn’t it funny when you are aligned, when you go for a walk or say your prayers or have a great workout or a great night’s sleep, you just know what to do. You know who to call. You know the next move. But when you’re tense and fearful you think everyone else has the answers and you seek and seek and seek.

And as I was saying it I thought: I need to take my own advice.

Because I have tried everything. Every psychic, every healer. And the times I won the most in life were the times I trusted myself completely. Blindly, even. That is what youth gives you, a kind of delusional confidence that actually works. Wisdom is a gift. It really is. But it does make you move more cautiously. You see the edges now. You know what things cost. And sometimes that knowing slows you down in ways that youth never would have allowed.

Which is why I think we need to add something to the conversation about ambitious women. We talk a lot about the cost of ambition. The personal life deferred. The relationships that didn’t survive the building phase. And yes, that part is real and it certainly sucks. But I think we have it backwards. The answer is not to want less. The answer is to want more. An ambitious life deserves a balanced life alongside it. We should be rewarded for the building with the living. Not forced to choose between them. We have to honor the achievers in us.

These are not prescriptions. They are not a program. They are not the ten steps to trusting yourself again. They are simply the things that helped me get quiet enough to hear myself. And I offer them the way you offer a friend something that worked for you — not because it will definitely work for you, but because maybe it will, and that is worth saying out loud.

Getting quiet is a lifelong project. I am not there. I am a work in progress. I am, if we are being honest, one chatty bitch who has spent years filling the silence with seeking and searching and very expensive healers and the occasional candle that burned for seven days. The quiet is not my natural state. It is something I have to choose, over and over, every Tuesday morning when the email feels impossible and the resistance is loud and every tool on the shelf is right there asking to be used.

But when I do get quiet enough — even for a moment — I can hear her. The version of me who knows. The one who jumped without looking down. I literally have bungee jumped.

So here are some tools that helped me get there.

The Artist’s Way — Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron’s twelve-week creative recovery program. Two tools: morning pages and artist dates. The morning pages keep me accountable to myself, three pages every morning, longhand, no filter. What I’ve noticed is that I say the same thing over and over until I can’t ignore it anymore. Lately what keeps coming up is this: I am not living up to my potential. FUN STUFF! The artist dates, a weekly solo outing just for play and curiosity, remind me that I am allowed to be more than productive. I am allowed to be playful. Both of those things together are doing more for my clarity than any psychic has.

The War of Art — Steven Pressfield

I picked this up on a recommendation from my artist way buddy Aura because I needed something that was not going to ask me how I was feeling. What I found is that the enemy is not other people. The enemy is resistance. My own. And resistance is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something matters. The dragon at the gate is not there to stop you. It is there because you are close.

The Let Them Theory — Mel Robbins

Stop trying to control what other people do. Let them. Your clarity does not depend on their choices. The permission to stop managing other people’s behavior and come back to your own, that one stayed. Also, I once screamed “let them!” during an argument with an ex. He said “don’t mind if I do.” Technically correct. Deeply not the point but hilarious.

The Tanya — Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi

The foundational Chasidic text that teaches, among other things, that every person has a divine soul that already knows. The work is not to find it. The work is to get quiet enough to stop drowning it out. It does not ask me to improve. It asks me to listen. That is the most useful thing anyone has ever asked of me.

Talking out loud to God

Hitbonenut. Personal prayer in your own words. Not liturgy. Not a formula. Just you, out loud, saying what is actually true. I do this on walks. In the car. Sometimes at red lights. It always works and somehow it’s the hardest one to do. Maybe because I know it means I will have to listen.

One honest conversation with a friend

The board of directors model. One person who knows your strengths better than you do right now. Who can say: you already know what to do. You just stopped trusting that you know. That conversation on that walk did more than any healer I have ever paid. And I have paid a lot of healers. They know who they are.

And it is a new month tomorrow! Rosh Chodesh Nisan, the start of the Jewish astrological new year. I don’t fully know what that means and I don’t need to anymore. I used to need a framework for everything. A system, a sign, a woman on Instagram who could tell me what the stars were doing and what I should do about it. I outsourced my knowing for a long time.

Not anymore.

Small steps. All of it counts.

Also, I just started taking creatine and I think it is helping my moods. I am not going to take peptides because they freak me out. And that is me trusting myself.

Chodesh tov. May this new month bring you the courage to honor the achiever in you, the quiet to hear what you already know, and the wisdom to stop seeking and start trusting.

I say it the way other people say a prayer. At pharmacy counters. At intake desks. At two in the morning in waiting rooms that all start to look the same. It is the one thing the system never forgets, because I never let it. It’s my father’s birthday. I know it better than my own. Once, picking up my own prescription, I gave it by accident. The pharmacist didn’t notice. I didn’t correct her. I just picked up his meds and moved on with my day.

I’ve been an executive assistant, a producer, a CEO. Different titles, same job: get the right information to the right people at the right moment and anticipate the problem before it becomes a crisis. Which means I accidentally know how to produce cancer.

My father was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer shortly after his seventieth birthday. It eventually spread to his lungs and later to his brain. He is seventy-seven now, which according to every statistic we were handed at the beginning is something close to a miracle. Seven years in and he keeps collecting extra lives like it’s a video game.

Cancer doesn’t travel alone. It brings friends. Sepsis. Pneumonia. Most recently a fractured hip from a dangerous fall. Over the past several years I have been to emergency rooms over 50 times with him, across about ten different ERs in Los Angeles. Each one greets us like we have never existed before. Hospitals are not all equal. Religiously affiliated hospitals have been consistently better in my experience. Adventist Health and St. Joseph’s have been the best for us. Not an ad. Field research done the hard way.

The medication list we confirmed at the last hospital is gone. The allergy that nearly killed him two visits ago is news to everyone. Seven years of history is stored somewhere in a filing cabinet in a dimension I cannot access.

And yes, we have MyChart. The portal of hell. The catch is that MyChart belongs to whichever hospital system issued it, not the one you’re standing in right now at midnight. So even with every piece of technology supposedly designed to fix this, I still have to walk a new nurse through twenty-plus medications and seven years of history from memory every single time.

The official explanation is HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act passed in 1996. Its Privacy Rule was designed to protect your medical information and give you control over who sees it. We are literally at the hospital. Please discuss his history all day. That is why we are here. WHAT PRIVACY!

Here is the twist. Under HIPAA you actually do have the right to your own records. You can request them and have them sent to another provider. Hospitals are legally required to comply within thirty days. Thirty days. I am usually back in an ER in two.

So I stopped waiting for the system to catch up and became the system myself.

After seven years I’ve learned something important: hospitals are not built to remember you. They are built to treat you in episodes. One visit, one crisis, one shift at a time. Then you are discharged back into a system with no memory of what just happened.

Every ER is its own island. The information doesn’t travel with you. The chart rarely follows. This is not an accident. It is architecture. HIPAA gets the blame but HIPAA is mostly the excuse. . I’m no Erin Brockovich but don’t we have the technology to fix this. AI is supposedly going to transform healthcare, connect the data, close the gaps, carry the history forward. I need this to happen now!

But the people inside this broken machine are not the problem.

These are people who chose a profession built around keeping strangers alive. They are all better than us. They are doing it with incomplete information, impossible hours, and a handoff system that would make any reasonable person weep. The nurse on her third twelve-hour shift who just inherited your parent is doing her absolute best. The volunteers handing you a clipboard at midnight are genuinely trying. Some of them are angels. I mean that without a shred of irony.

The system makes failure likely. The people absorb the blame. The patients and families absorb the cost. Not just financial cost. The cost of time, of repeating yourself until your voice goes flat, of watching someone you love get treated like a stranger in a place that should already know his name.

Think of it like 50 First Dates. Every new shift, every new nurse, is meeting your person for the first time. She is starting from zero and so are you.

A family member told me early on, “When your dad is in the hospital, that’s the safest place he can be.” I hold onto that like a life raft. When the call comes, and it always comes, I feel the pit in my stomach, take a breath, and remind myself that he is somewhere with doctors and monitors and people whose entire job is to keep him alive. My job is just to get there and make sure they know who he is.

THE ER CHEAT SHEET What to do when you suddenly become the medical producer

Bring a one-page medical summary. Diagnosis and short history. Full medication list with exact dosages. All allergies clearly flagged. Key doctors with phone numbers. Recent hospitalizations with dates. Print copies and keep a photo on your phone.

Bring the actual medication boxes, not a pill organizer. The boxes with the pharmacy labels. The doctors don’t like you to take medicine they don’t have control over but sometimes your patient will need specific cancer meds the hospital cant provide. They need to see the box.

Ask the nurse to read the medications back to you out loud. It feels awkward. Do it anyway. You are not being difficult. You are being thorough.

Food helps more than you think. If the nurse approves outside food, bring something they will actually eat. Also, you have to go greet your postmate’s downstairs

Use a group chat for updates. Tell everyone once so you don’t spend the whole day texting. And if you’re the friend on the other side . Show up with something specific and don’t require a response.

Ask for the patient advocate if you are stuck. Hospitals have ombudsmen whose job is to solve problems during a stay. Ask for them by name. You are not complaining. You are using a resource that exists specifically for this moment.

Your job is not to fix everything. Sometimes your only job is to be the steadiest person in the room.

ER Bag

Keep a bag by the door that is always ready. It has the usual things : charger, Kindle, snacks for me and one thing that is personal, my great-grandmother’s blanket. We bring it every time. There is something about wrapping my father in it, this man who is seventy-seven and has survived things that should have killed him, and knowing that his grandmother’s hands made it. That he is being held in some way by her. I don’t know a softer thing in the world than a grandmother’s love. In a room full of fluorescent lights and beeping machines, that blanket says something simple: you are still a person and you are still loved.

Me and my grandma. just because !

Turns out it’s actually a strange honor to produce my father’s cancer. Not the disease, but the job of making sure the system remembers the human inside the chart. If you find yourself in your own production era, I’m here. We all deserve an advocate.

10/12/1948.

I’ll keep saying it until the system learns it too.

Every woman I know is exhausted.

Brain fog, fatigue that has you feeling cursed. We have all turned into Victorian sleeping brides — pale, horizontal, barely conscious. My friends Erin and Sara Foster literally named their production company the Fatigue Sisters. That’s not a bit. That’s a diagnosis.

I have friends who, at 2pm, have to take naps. Full naps. We are adults. Is it working from home? Is it age? Is it 5G? (I still don’t fully know what 5G is, but I’m not ruling it out.) Whatever it is, something is very wrong and I refuse to accept it.

Right now this just feels like a quiet epidemic of exhausted women. Everyone has a theory, I’m sure Andrew Huberman has one, but I’m not listening to the bros anymore. It could be hormones, glucose levels, stress, screens, perimenopause or even Adderall crashes. The internet is full of solutions- magnesium, cold plunges, red light therapy, electrolytes. And yet everyone I know is still tired. Deeply, existentially tired. Not “I stayed up too late watching Netflix” tired. The kind of tired where the battery never quite charges all the way back up and it’s slowly driving you mad.

What does it feel like to be tired? Everyone describes it differently. For me it’s physical — because spiritually I feel the energy. I have the dreams, the plans, the ambition, the enemies to outlast. But motivationally I feel completely unplugged from the wall. The gap between wanting to do something and actually doing it is enormous. And I know the difference — or I sort of remember it, through the brain fog. Now when I see people running in the streets, or just visibly full of energy, I am so envious that I need a nap just from the envy. When did that become me? When did I become the person watching from the window? If this sounds like you, go get your labs.

I Am a Lab Person. Sorry.

If you are in my life and you get your labs done, I will talk about them with you. That’s just who I am. Log into Quest Diagnostics and talk to me, baby. And my newest obsession is ferritin — the gas tank of the body.

Mine is 27. That’s low, but not rock bottom — I have friends walking around at 6 and 7 like actual zombies. Optimal ferritin for real energy is generally considered to be between 50–100+. I get fatigued so easily and it’s defeating. I’ve had this before — in high school I had chronic fatigue, spent a month just sleeping with no cure, and it eventually went away on its own. That was probably EBV, the kissing disease. Keep your opinions to yourself, we are talking about health here. Recently I thought I had it again, so I went and got my labs done. The algorithm agreed something was up: ferritin was the culprit.

Once I cure this fatigue, it is over for you hoes. I have big ideas to accomplish. I need energy.

Don’t Talk to Me About Electrolytes. Actually, Fine, Let’s Talk About Electrolytes.

I take an LMNT a day. That salty treat just really does it for me. To be honest I was doing 2–3 a day for a while. That is too high and your body will let you know. A friend texted me the other day: “I’m so sad to have to drink regular water.” And I felt that in my soul. Some people love water and genuinely enjoy it, and good for them, I guess. I do not. I am not a regular water person. I am an LMNT person and I have made my peace with it. One a day. That’s the deal.

The Problem With Just Taking Iron

Here’s the thing: taking actual iron supplements is hard on your body — your stomach, specifically — and there are a truly annoying set of rules around it. Take it with vitamin C. Take it two hours away from caffeine. When am I ever two hours away from caffeine? The answer is never. I am never two hours away from caffeine. But you can try it.

The Plan (Unhinged But Effective)

So I called an IV place in Los Angeles, and the woman who answered said: “My passion is fatigue.” What a passion. What a calling. But also — do you know how many people are walking around on low battery? Not living a full life. Just surviving. That is not enough.

Here is what I am doing to get my ferritin up. Yes, some of this is a little insane. I’m doing it so you can learn too and I get obsessed with things.

Cast iron pans.

I ordered them. When you cook in cast iron — especially acidic foods like tomato sauce — small amounts of iron actually transfer into your food. This is not a wellness myth. It is real (who knows if it’s real.)

Lentil soup, every single day. I am becoming a lentil soup machine. Every lunch. A uniform meal, like a uniform outfit. Lentils are one of the best plant-based sources of iron. If you don’t feel like soaking your own lentils — same, honestly — Kreation in LA makes a great one to go. Their Lebanese lentil soup is perfect. You’re welcome.

The metal fish. Okay, this one sounds unhinged, but hear me out. It’s called the Lucky Iron Fish — an actual product, not something I made up. You boil it in water with a little lemon juice (the acid helps the iron leach out) and drink the water. It started as a Cambodian public health initiative. There is legitimate research behind it. I don’t know all of it or even any of it, but it’s there. I ordered one. here . We are boiling fish over here.

IV iron infusion. This is the fastest path. Bypasses all the annoying oral iron rules, goes straight into your bloodstream, and actually moves the number. My passion-for-fatigue woman is ready for me. I’m going in.

You Don’t Have to Live Like This

If you are tired all the time, if you feel like you’re running on fumes, if 2pm feels like midnight — please go get your labs. Ask specifically about ferritin. A lot of doctors will tell you you’re normal when you’re not. Know your optimal ranges, not just the clinical minimums. And if it’s not iron, keep searching, keep asking the questions you want answered. We all deserve a better life.

I will be reporting back in real time from the trenches.

Please get your labs. We’re not going to be Victorian sleeping brides forever.

We have things to do.

It’s Frieze week in LA and it has fully become the Netflix Is A Joke of the art world. Activations everywhere. Frieze even showed up in my lobby. Artists coming at me hard.

I texted my group chat: what kind of art are you guys drawn to? Mostly because I was excited to report that I have finally discovered mine. Purim is coming up — a holiday about hidden identity. Mine, apparently, is Post-Impressionist. Done. I know myself.

I’ve been doing The Artist’s Way, and week two is about recovering a sense of identity - not who you’ve been told you are, but who you actually are when you’re paying attention. I didn’t expect the answer to arrive this fast or this clearly. But apparently my subconscious was waiting for a museum.

Years ago, when I was producing The Hills on MTV, we spent hours crouched in a van called Video Village — seven of us watching the cast go on dates or sit on couches or do absolutely nothing while we waited for something to happen. So many nights sitting in the parking lot of Koi, watching them ramble and riot while we stared at monitors and ate second-dinner pizza while they had crispy rice.

One of the girls had just bought a house. Her friend asked what style it was. She wanted to sound grown up. She was 23 and it was genuinely impressive.

She said: “It’s traditional, Spanish, modern, mid-century, Mediterranean.”

Her friend nodded along completely.

Aww, sweetie. It was a new build. Contemporary in the way a hotel room is contemporary.

I am fully the actress who just discovered a new charity and is now speaking about it as if it has always been her life’s cause. Post-Impressionism is roughly from the 1880s to the early 1900s. Key artists include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. Less about documentation, more about feeling. less landscape, more women. Less what the world looks like, more what it feels like to be inside it. Interior life, yes please. That’s my taste.

The Pearlman Collection at LACMA

My chic friend Jenni Konner took me to LACMA for the reveal of the Pearlman Collection donation. We wore our best sophisticated-but-subtle fits. We kept turning to each other going — can you believe how cultured we are? We live in LA. We know how rare it actually is to use it.

Such a good story. A Jewish businessman named Henry Pearlman who made his money in cold storage and fridges, spent his life collecting art, and ended up with a Van Gogh. An actual Van Gogh — Tarascon Stagecoach, 1888.

Which he is now giving away to the public, because public art is more important than hanging in a billionaire’s powder room. The family donated the entire collection to LACMA, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum, and then stepped back and let the curators do their thing.

He wasn’t Rockefeller rich. He wasn’t old money or big rich in that way. He was just a Jewish Russian immigrant man who loved art so deeply and with such respect that the collectors and artists let him in. That’s a different kind of wealth entirely.

The show is called Village Square — nearly 50 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec. And here’s the thing — they weren’t just great artists in the same era. They were actually friends. Again, I just learned this last night. But pretty cool to be a group of friends that define a genre. The Brat pack of art.

After the Bath

My favorite piece of the night was Degas’ After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself.

She is completely collapsed into herself, utterly spent. I saw a TikTok recently that said: do you need to sit down in the shower? Because that’s a symptom. That’s your body telling you your ferritin is low. Ferritin is the protein that stores iron in your body, and when it’s depleted you don’t just feel tired you feel like you are made of wet cement. Every single one of my friends said yes to the shower question because we all have low ferritin. Mine is 27 (needs to be 80.) We have all been walking around exhausted and emotional. The Degas understood. Maybe women have always had low ferritin.

With photography I always feel like I could do that, I couldn’t, but I feel it. There was also a block art exhibit there that night. That one I genuinely felt like I could do.But standing in front of the Degas, I didn’t feel that at all. I just felt seen.The intimacy of post-impressionist work is what pulls me in. It’s not as simple as the male gaze — it’s the male gaze into the interior. I personally enjoy the male gaze, sue me! I want to be one of these women. Someone paint me please. I believe I have a face for art. I didn’t say a model. Couldn’t this be me? Think about it!

In More Art Interests

I have been following Rose Florence on Substack for her art obsessions.

I find it completely transportive. This is where I also discovered that Matisse’s great-grandson makes ceramics. His name is Alex Matisse and he founded East Fork Pottery in Asheville, North Carolina

Matisse is my mother’s favorite artist. Which means for years, if anyone asked me what kind of art I liked, I said Matisse. And I do love Matisse. But I now understand that was inherited taste, not my own eye. There’s a difference between what you grew up with and what you would have found on your own. The Artist’s Way is helping me figure out which is which.

Homework: Herb & Dorothy

Jenni recommended a documentary I’m watching this weekend — Herb & Dorothy.

on PBS and YouTube link above. A postal clerk and a librarian who spent decades buying art before it had a market. If it fit in a taxi and they loved it, it was theirs. They befriended the artists before anyone knew their names, and then gave it all away. To the public. Because that's where it belongs. Public art keeps beauty from becoming a private hobby. This might be my new cause!

Other Details I’m Paying Attention To

Erewhon has officially announced that you can’t order the Hailey Bieber smoothie by name anymore, but they know exactly what you mean when you say it.

Started a Notes app with my friend Lauren where we both list what we’re working on — it sounds simple, and it is, but having someone else see your list means you actually mean it. She calls it being on “the board” of each others lives. Highly recommend! Did 80% percent of my tasks! 80/20 rule applies here.

Always take the walk. Been taking daily walks and talking out load (headphones in so I don’t look crazy.) Look what I found, beauty!

Attention is how you build a life. Details are how you know it’s yours.

For years I couldn’t really listen to music at all. I relied on playlists other people made for me, or on podcasts, podcasts are just NOISE, but sometimes necessary noise. I still need it. A close friend recently came out of a stretch of depression and said, “I can listen to music again,” and it landed in my body like both a diagnosis and a hope. OF COURSE! You cannot fully feel art when you are avoiding your own expression. Here is a playlist I’m currently listing to though.

I just set the stage for where I am this week, add a lingering cold that Monica Heisey gives me permission to feel apocalyptic about in her Substack “Top 10 Worst Feelings.” I too feel a little in jail and in need of visitors. This essay will do. So will the Tell Me Lies finale. My take: we all have Lucy in us. I probably have more than most. And Steven needs to actually go to jail.

But meanwhile, How is my algorithm doing you asked? Well my entire algo has abruptly gone Chinese

TikTok and my group chats are deep in a phase where everyone is adopting Chinese wellness habits: TCM, house slippers, congee, earlier bedtimes, herbs for everything. The calendar apparently came with it. Suddenly it’s the Year of the Fire Horse everywhere. Some people (many on my group chats) don’t even seem to realize it’s the Lunar New Year. It’s just another spiritual meme moment on the internet. Or maybe it’s collective consciousness, Chinese New Year edition.

Last year was the year of the Snake, very shedding-in-private energy according to TikTok. This year the Fire Horse is supposed to move forward, steady and purposeful. And yet my horse is still in the stable, pacing. Full of energy with nowhere to go. Which, if I’m honest, feels a lot like desire wearing an envy costume.

I personally follow the Jewish calendar and have great respect for other calendars that follow the moon. Everyone is looking up at the same moon and drawing different conclusions, some even concluding that it’s not real! We’ve just entered the month of Adar, when you are instructed to increase joy, not wait for it, increase it. At the same time it’s Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, when people voluntarily give something up. Ramadan is beginning too, a month structured around fasting, discipline, and reflection.

Different traditions, same assignment.

Focus. Restrain. Pay attention. Choose deliberately.

However you slice it, or faith it, this feels less like coincidence than a collective tightening of the lens. A season of commitment. Of deciding what actually deserves your life force.

All of this pushed me back toward one of my favorite containers for creativity.

I am, once again, back on my bullshit doing The Artist’s Way. It’s not bullshit. That was just fun to type.

The Artist’s Way

If you don’t know, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is a 12-week creative program built around daily writing, weekly solo play, and exercises designed to surface fear, envy, procrastination, and creative shame. I’ve done two full rounds and kept up morning pages for years. I love the structure.

But do I feel like an artist yet? Absolutely not.

And that makes me furious. Envious. Restless. I’m wanting again and that is both humiliating and holy

Nothing exposes desire faster than structure. The minute you commit to a practice, everything you’ve been avoiding shows up. For me, that thing is actually making things. Not supporting. Not curating. Not helping someone else midwife their brilliance into the world. Actually making something myself, which feels both obvious and strangely forbidden, like I might get in trouble for it.

I texted a few friends to join me and sent the quote that wrecks me:
“Sometimes we find ourselves hanging out near the door of our dreams without ever going in.”

I felt physically sick being that seen.

I also felt seen this week devouring Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers. At one point I felt personally divorced and left with three kids in Martha’s Vineyard during Covid. Honestly, it almost sounded fun. Art can do that.

In week one Julia talks about core beliefs that hold you back, the invisible rules about who you’re allowed to be and what you’re allowed to want.

Some of mine are that I can’t spell, I have nothing to say, and that it’s humiliating to want to be an artist. English wasn’t my first language, I’m a true ESL kid, so writing felt risky from the start. Safer not to try. Talking is so much easier! I have the gift of gab and sometimes gossip!

It felt like a secret. And that secret made me especially good at supporting other people’s creativity, seeing their brilliance clearly while staying just outside the spotlight myself. I share my negative believes so you can locate yours YOU ARE WELCOME!

Cameron calls this a “shadow artist,” someone who supports other people’s creativity instead of claiming their own — the producer who never writes, the curator who never paints, the person everyone calls to make something happen but who quietly cannot answer, “What are you making?” I’ve surrounded myself with some of the best artists, and standing in their light has kept me very warm for a very long time.

Starting this Substack feels like stepping into a spotlight I can’t turn off. And honestly, how thorny is it to even try? Desire is humiliating mostly because it refuses to stay hidden.

So I returned to this process.

This time I’m doing it with a small group of close friends, and I’m leading it. It’s one of those self-help things I love because it incorporates the divine. And oh, do I love the divine. It’s wonderful if you publish the book or record the song or finish the thing. The point isn’t applause it’s alignment. There are 12 weeks of this, so get ready to ride with me!

Maybe this is what Adar and the Year of the Fire Horse are asking of us this season. Not to manufacture joy, but to notice where it already exists. Joy is found, not fought for. All of this feels like it’s meeting me exactly where I am, still in the stable with my Fire Horse, discovering small, surprising routes back to joy through a creative life.

So if you’re feeling restless, envious, overly tender, or like your life force is pacing inside a stall, maybe nothing has gone wrong. Maybe you are simply full of something that wants to move, maybe even gallop.

I support you. And I’m learning to hold my own reins, too.
In Adar, we don’t chase joy. We make space for it to find us. Sometimes that means staying in the stable until we’re ready.

If you want to do The Artist’s Way with a group

I’ve found group versions incredibly supportive and fun. If you’re looking for structure or community, here are a few options that I have loved:

• Elizabeth Kott runs guided groups with weekly check-ins and Artist Dates. Very encouraging and efficient.
• Aura Schwartz offers groups with a Jewish lens and spiritual structure, which can feel especially grounding if that language speaks to you.
• You can also form your own small circle of friends and move through the book together.
• Some people prefer doing it solo but sharing morning-page insights with one accountability partner.

There’s no “right” way. The point is showing up.

This is my first review. I’m not writing it to defend the film or even spoil the film, it’s a classic book babe with a modern remake, you get it. I’m writing it because I am in awe of it. I’m also pretty mad. Before I even sat down in the theater, I saw the review in Vulture. Film critic Alison Willmore described it as “Emerald Fennell’s dumbest movie, and I say that with all admiration, because it also happens to be her best to date.” Having now seen the movie, that word still riles me.

DUMBEST!!!!

Having now seen the movie, that word still riles me. Not because it was meant cruelly. It wasn’t. It was meant casually. But because nothing about what I experienced felt dumb or casually in this movie. We need to remove being casual about cinema or even about art. It felt ancient. Elemental. The only accusation I will allow is that it felt like a music video, guess what I fucking love music videos! My first internship was music videos, and so were some of your favorite directors first jobs. That’s not a diss, thats discovery!

I also virtually watched the marketing propaganda of Margot Robbie and her girlies going to see it and screaming and gagging for hottie Jacob. That it was for the ladies. That it was a vibe. A corset campaign. So naturally I gathered my own party. I invited ladies along with me, starting a new Galentine’s tradition. I went in expecting spectacle or sexy silliness.

Also, I am not a style critic. I will leave that to the experts. I was, however, seated among extremely well-dressed women who were audibly impressed, which feels like a reliable metric. It was stunning.

I did not expect to feel undone. Within minutes, the air in the theater changed. The laughter thinned. The posture shifted. Whatever we thought we were getting quietly dissolved.

The weather is the cinematography here. The rain is doing as much acting as anyone on screen. And I’m not even focused on the performances, but we do have to give Margot and Jacob credit for working overtime to hide those Aussie accents.

I also just learned what moors are — open, uncultivated, windswept land. Maybe my new favorite kind of scenery. That is the landscape of the soul.

And then there’s Isabella Linton, played by Alison Oliver , she’s kooky, kinky, aching. Her friendship with Catherine feels real and tortured like how friendships can feel too. Love is disgusting here. It’s clingy and comedic . It’s humiliating. It’s obsessive. . I loved her.

My friend Alissa texted on the way home, “I feel like I held my breath for two hours.”

Exactly.

It wasn’t the sex that undid me — though twenty rain-soaked declarations of “I love you” between the two most beautiful people alive will absolutely lift the levers of your heart whether you’re prepared for it or not.

And still, that wasn’t what wrecked me.

It was the devotion. The way Heathcliff and Catherine love like oxygen and then resent each other for needing it. The way pride sits between them like a third character. The way neither of them will bend first. Two people raised in cruelty choose each other as salvation and then spend a lifetime punishing each other and everyone in their orbit for it.

That’s what lingered for me. Not the corsets. The choices.

On screen, you can see it clearly. You can see where they could have turned. You can see the moment pride wins. You can see where love hardens instead of humbles. In life, it never feels that obvious.

We see our own choices in hindsight. In film, we see them clearly. Which is why we return to stories like this. Stories that show us the ugliness of love before we call it destiny. Stories that let us witness the fork in the road before the damage is done. We return to the classics because they rumble and wreck our parts unprocessed. Thank you to those Bronte sisters (what a family right?) Withering Heights and Jane Eyre. The moods of those moors !

But watching their choices unfold illuminated something I had been thinking about all week.

Earlier this week I returned to Tanya class. Tanya, written in 1797 by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, is basically mystical Jewish self-help before self-help was a genre. A psychology of the soul. A manual not to be run by your instincts but to stay with them and form them.

My teacher said, “Imagine the world as if only you have free will. Imagine the entire moral weight resting on your choices.” It shifted me. To see the world as my responsibility. To stop waiting for other people to be better first. To understand that everyone is in their own storm, choosing in real time.

Fifty years later, in 1847, Wuthering Heights entered the world.

Two different centuries. Same human problem.

In Tanya we learn that we are inherently good. We have a divine soul and an animal soul. We do not erase the animal soul. We refine it. Free will lives in that tension.

Watching Heathcliff and Catherine, I did not see monsters. (Her father, yes. An actual monster or sad gambling drunk? or both.) But them? I saw what happens when instinct is indulged instead of elevated. They are not evil. They are unrefined. And yet it was her father who took in Heathcliff, which means he also gave us the very destiny he later resented. He set the story in motion. No one chooses in isolation.

Catherine is often accused of weeping. Of being dramatic. Of feeling too much. I have often been accused of that too. And sitting there in the dark, looking at the credits, sobbing, I realized I wasn’t just afraid to cry. I was afraid to say, out loud, that I loved this movie. That I love, love. And sometimes I love viciously. And sometimes I love revengefully. And sometimes I love lustfully. And sometimes I love clinging.

See? I can make anything about me. I’m connected to the classics, what can I say? I read Anna Karenina like a beach read — not to brag, just to establish context and to also brag.

But the reason these stories last is because they tell the truth. Love is not polished. It is hungry and ugly. It is humiliating. It is savage. Even if I have free will I also have ugliness. Compulsions.. All of that can either be refined or left raw.

The lights went up.

To my right, my friend Keri was crying.

To my left, my friend Katy said she hated it. LOL.

And that’s allowed too. I guess. People will hate the things I love. And I will still love the thing. That is also free will. Earlier this week I said the highest form of art is to love first. This film allowed for both.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Cupid’s arrow hurts for a reason. Love wounds. Love refines.

Please go see it. Let yourself cry. Let yourself feel your own ugliness.

I am in awe of love.

Free will is what makes it holy & hot

Shabbat shalom.

reminder listen to this soundtrack

We are being lazy calling this a ’90s erotic thriller revival.

To Die For. Wild Things. Fatal Attraction. Spooky sexy was the style. A woman who could ruin your life and your marriage in a silk blouse and a razor-sharp pencil skirt and still look composed while doing it. Also, when I reference Wild Things, I mean the pool scene. Gun to my head, I do not know the plot. I remember the pool. We all remember the pool scene. I loved that era.

But this is not that.

Now it is horny horror.

I watched The Housemaid and immediately started looking up Zillow homes in upstate New York. And fine, if it comes with some murder. That’s excitement, I guess. Amanda Seyfried deserves an Oscar and Sydney Sweeney already has so much, so we just wish her well. She is the face of Horny Horror and she wears it well.

Horny horror is seduction charged with sabotage.

It always takes place in a nondescript town. Not quite the Hamptons. Not quite anywhere. But there will be nature. Wide hallways. Kitchens with multiple islands and a row of identical stools. Closets the size of condos. Homes that pretend to be restrained but quietly scream money and murder will happen here, just you wait.

Sex will happen too, but you do not have to wait for that. It is either in the opening scene or already humming in the air. The tension is in the interior design. Affairs conducted between school drop-off and wine at dusk.

You are not watching to see who is good or bad. They are all bad. That is the electricity. Everyone wants something. Everyone is calculating. Sure, it is maybe gory, but it is gorgeous.

And I think we like it because the real world feels destabilizing. We need Savannah Guthrie’s mom home now. Everything feels vaguely apocalyptic and slightly absurd. Horny horror gives us danger we can see, touch, stage. It turns anxiety into choreography. It lets us flirt with catastrophe instead of being crushed by it.

The ’90s erotic thriller had tension.

Horny horror has an appetite for destruction.

And I will absolutely take that morally messy energy.

Substack I’m Loving

Monica Heisey just launched Work Life. She introduced me to a poem I cannot stop thinking about: Having a Coke with You. and it’s about someone reciting that poem from memory and realizing, mid-walk, that maybe love is higher than art. There’s a line about the “idiocy of caring about art at all when you could spend all that energy caring about someone you loved instead,” and it has rearranged something in me.

When you think love is higher than art, there is so much artistry in that.

Simone Harouche’s Substack Many Hats has had me seriously considering a short leopard fur for the past two weeks, which is growth. I can. And I will. But what I actually love is her decisiveness. The links. The edits. The tone. It makes fashion feel like perspective instead of consumption. Getting dressed as authorship.

Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, which the New Yorker book review put on my radar, as well as my slack sisters Emily Jane Fox and Caroline Kassie. it sounds messy and hungry and risky in exactly the way this moment feels.

I took Instagram off my phone because it was boring me but that’s my fault. I was boring myself. I was confused with envy and I am not a visual learner. I am a paragraph girl. Just ask my ex.

Right now I am in a committed relationship with Substack. I want it to be so many things and I think they do too. Is it my twitter feed? My news feed? My social commentary intake? We don’t know yet . But somehow it feels slower. More intentional. Less scroll, more stories.

AI and the Privilege of Not Panicking

Because I contain multitudes and multiple group chats and Slacks, we are obviously talking about AI.

It started with this viral essay Something Big Is Happening. Comparing this moment to early 2020, when everything still felt normal right before it wasn’t. The “this seems overblown” phase before everything quietly rearranges itself. Calm’ish tone. Urgent timeline.

Since then the debate has been aggressively binary and boring. Fear or freedom. Automated into irrelevance or handed leverage. Private school or AI Alpha School. Public school just sitting there, as usual. No jobs left or entirely new ones we cannot even name yet. Very Scott Galloway coded. Apocalypse but make it a panel. I love the obsession with Scott. He tells men to get dressed and drink tequila and suddenly he is our economic father. Sure. Okay.

Here is the twist. My Slack spiritual friend Mo Koyfman told me that viral essay was probably written 80 percent by AI. And it still touched people. That part feels important.

Instead of panic, I felt curious. Because if machines handle the mechanical, what are we left with? Taste. Discernment. Conviction. Soul. Maybe the tool does not erase the human. Maybe it sharpens it. Maybe it expands the human mind. Maybe we add taste and discernment to the list of actual assets.

Here is the honest part. I do not really have a job for AI to take. That is my privilege. Also being cute is a privilege. Let us not pretend otherwise. My employment appears to be having extremely specific cultural takes on the internet and hoping a niche but powerful group of women nod along. Taste. Timing. Vibes. I am currently anti peptide, minus the weight loss ones. I do not need to glow from the inside that badly. That is the work.

And I have built something before.

HelloGiggles my media company started as a feeling. A tone. A specific kind of friendship and humor on the internet. It was women wanting to talk to each other without irony poisoning the room. It was taste, and timing, and a point of view you could feel.

Now I want to build again.

Between Friends makes me feel excited and curious. It feels less like content and more like infrastructure. A cozy salon for paragraphs. A place where the group chat becomes something you can actually live inside. A place for women (and men) who do not want to panic, but do want to pay attention and play!

I do not know which future is coming. I just know which one I would rather build toward. It is the last week of the Year of the Snake, which my group chats have taken very personally. Talk to me next week in the Year of the Horse. For now, I will be watching horny horror, which I am almost certain AI can handle.

I’ll keep having great taste.

And then Tu B’Shevat arrived this week. The New Year of the Trees. A holiday where we celebrate trees when they look fully unwell. No leaves. No blossoms. No visual evidence that anything productive is happening. And yet we gather around them and say blessings because beneath the surface, something has already begun.

It is a holiday built entirely on trust in root systems.

Judaism is very comfortable with unseen processes. We bless the new moon before it appears. We count toward harvest before there is wheat. We say the Shema, which literally begins with the word Listen, as if hearing itself is an act of faith. It is the prayer we whisper before sleep and greet the morning with, a daily reminder that faith begins not with speaking, but with listening. We are trained to honor what is happening underground, to believe that invisible does not mean absent.

For weeks, I could not access any of that wisdom. I was not at Sinai. I was at urgent care.

What started as a simple sinus infection did what inflammation loves to do. It migrated. Pressure in the cheeks. Fullness in the ear. Jaw clenching like I had taken on competitive stress as a hobby. Because apparently everything in your face is connected and conspiring. The sinus pressure triggered TMJ. The TMJ masqueraded as ear pain. The ear pain whispered, what if this is something worse. My nervous system said, yes, let’s spiral.

Here is what no one tells you about minor pain. It demands your attention more than it has earned. Not dramatically. Not heroically. Quietly. It hums in the background of your day like a refrigerator you cannot unplug.

I left one appointment with my fourth antibiotic and a bill. Do not get me started on in network versus out of network. It is rude. It is confusing. It is somehow always my fault. I stopped Sudafed because my heart felt like it had joined a spin class without my consent. I got twenty units of Botox in each jaw because we are living in 2026 and apparently this is now a medical intervention and not just a Housewives subplot. I scheduled acupuncture. I bought a nightguard. I googled red light therapy and discovered all those tanning salons are now red light salons. Interesting.

Meanwhile, TikTok teenagers are “mewing,” pressing their tongues to the roof of their mouths in pursuit of jawlines sharp enough to slice sourdough.(which BTW I’m back into.) A doctor told me your tongue is actually supposed to rest on the roof of your mouth at all times. So maybe the teens were onto something.

What I did not expect was the destabilization. The way physical discomfort quietly erodes your spiritual confidence. I am someone who believes in meaning. I build narratives around meaning. And yet one inflamed muscle in my face and I was Googling neurological disorders at two in the morning like a Victorian woman with a fainting couch.

This is where Tu B’Shevat found me.

Celebrating trees that look dormant while trusting that growth does not require spectacle. Honoring progress before it performs. Believing that unseen does not mean absent. Because if I am honest, this whole season has felt like that. My body is healing in ways I cannot yet measure. The steroids will end. and they need to they are making me ravenous like a Blumhouse film. The inflammation will settle. The Botox will do its small modern miracle. The nightguard will quietly train my jaw out of its aggression. Something is recalibrating even if I cannot watch it happen.

And spiritually, maybe the same thing is true.

There is a line in the Shema that commands us to listen. Not to react. Not to fix. To listen. I keep thinking this season is less about solving and more about noticing what is happening underneath the noise.

The people who steadied me deserve to be named. Reader Jordan Klein kept me tethered to reality when my brain tried to say I had entered panic attack season. She reminded me the Flonase and Sudafed cocktail could be driving this. and recommended these Youtube videos.

And reader and friend Katy Jensen texted me something that genuinely shifted my nervous system: “You are in your Yolanda Hadid chronic illness era.” It was so specific and so absurd that I laughed. Which, it turns out, is its own kind of medicine.

Here is what I am realizing. I have spent years obsessing over personal growth. Podcasts. Therapy frameworks. Optimization rituals. Biohacks. Morning routines that require their own Google calendar. I know how to fix. I know how to improve. I know how to search.

What I am less practiced at is staying.

So I am making this a practice. A recurring one. Each week, I am going to braid my obsession with personal growth into something much older and steadier. I am going to let Jewish study interrupt my optimization instinct. I am going to take one piece of Torah and ask not how do I hack this, but how do I live inside it. Less self improvement. More self placement.

Instead of asking, how do I upgrade this season, I want to ask, where am I in the text. Maybe that is the real root system. Not constant becoming. Belonging. Tu B’Shevat does not ask the tree to prove anything. It simply asks us to bless it anyway.

So this is me blessing the season that looks bare. Blessing the jaw that clenches and is learning not to. Blessing the body that is recalibrating in ways I cannot yet see. Blessing the faith that sometimes feels like muscle memory more than fire.

And because I am a woman of both faith and Google, here are a few practical things that helped me if you are dealing with sinus pressure or TMJ and trying not to spiral:

A heated compress on the jaw and cheeks twice a day. It sounds simple because it works.

Gentle jaw stretches and consciously resting your tongue on the roof of your mouth, which apparently is where it has been meant to live this entire time.

Sleeping slightly elevated if pressure is flaring, even if your body protests at first.

Magnesium in smaller doses if your system is sensitive, not the full hero dose

A nightguard if you are clenching at night. Expensive. Annoying. Worth it.

And most importantly, a friend who will calmly say, you are inflamed, not doomed.

A buccal mouth massage that will have you soothed and screaming

nose breath strips sorry not mouth tape.

If you are in a season that looks dormant, I hope you remember that growth does not need to be visible to be real. I hope you trust what is quietly strengthening beneath you. I hope you give yourself permission to heal without performing the healing.

Even when it feels like nothing is happening, something is.

Shabbat Shalom. May this week bring you more blessings than inflammation.

I’m back from a retreat in Ojai with some girlfriends for one of my best friends’ birthday. And while everything that happens on a retreat should absolutely stay on a retreat, it left me thinking about something important. Retreat etiquette.

I went into this retreat really needing connection and nurturing. Which I hate admitting, because I prefer to believe I am low maintenance, spiritually evolved, and powered entirely by insight and magnesium.

But I was coming off a seven week flu. Seven weeks. At a certain point it stops being an illness and starts being a personality. My body forced me into a level of embodiment I’ve spent years politely avoiding. There is nothing like relentless sinus pressure to remind you that you are not a floating consciousness with opinions. I also discovered panic attacks but thats another post.

Being in your body means being in discomfort. There is no shortcut.

And that is especially frustrating if, like me, you tend to spiritually bypass. I am excellent at reframing. I love a protocol. I love conquering. I am far less interested in sitting still while my energy is low, my chest feels tight, and there is no lesson yet.

This retreat was a gift from our friend for her birthday, which already tells you everything you need to know about her. Beyond how much we love her, she’s one of those rare people who experiences awe and joy naturally. She doesn’t hustle for it. She doesn’t optimize it. She doesn’t ask if it’s productive. She just notices things. Sunlight. Music. Other people.

I’ve been to a lot of retreats, workshops, and conferences. Some for work. Some for the soul. All in pursuit of that very loaded idea of “bettering yourself.” And over time, you start to notice patterns. What works. What ruins the vibe. What makes people quietly unbearable.

So here are my rules.

1. Do not go in talking shit.

The second you agree to a retreat, you agree to go in open minded. You do not want to be the person complaining to the hosts or whispering critiques in corners. Energy attracts energy, and complaining is a fast track to bad vibes.

Once, on a work trip at Bonnaroo, I was walking with a colleague judging the tents and accommodations, assuming we were aligned. She stopped me and said, “Everyone here came to have a good time. You’re the one who stands out.” It stung and stuck.

You don’t need to be the best student or the class clown. You just need to radiate that you’re enjoying yourself. That energy does more work than perfectly articulated insights ever will.

If you show up, you glow up. I just made that up, but it’s true. Go in curious. Get a kick out of it. Treat it like something you’ll forget the details of but remember the feeling.

2. When you share, you care.

Most retreats involve sharing a thought, a question, or an emotional moment. I forget sometimes that many people are deeply shy about their inner lives. I am not. I am a professional sharer.

When you share thoughtfully, you get more out of it. Do not share just to hear your own voice and do not be long winded. Listen closely to the guide, notice where something actually connects to your life, then share from there.

Sharing also gives other people permission to connect to themselves. It’s like that meme when one person orders a Diet Coke at the table and suddenly everyone feels safe ordering a Diet Coke. That’s what sharing does.

3. You are not changed.

You absolutely cannot say you’ve been changed by the retreat. You have not been changed, and no one respects you, or the process you just did.

You might feel moved, rearranged, or like you picked up a few useful tools. You probably made camp style friends you’ll keep forever. But you did not transform into a new person in three days. You had good snacks and eight uninterrupted hours of sleep.

Set the bar correctly. Expect to feel a little clearer, not reborn.

4. Retreat friends are the new camp friends.

Retreats suspend time. You are out of your element, every interaction feels intimate, and you hear people’s deepest stories and then are eating soup together. It is summer camp for adults.

These friendships are real, but they exist in a specific time and space. Do not clique up. I have gotten in trouble for this before, and cliques make people feel left out. Spread your attention around. Talk to people you would never normally talk to. You are in the woods in Ojai. Why not.

Also, asking people what they do for work is a rude assignment. Try this instead.
“Are you feeling creative right now?”

5. You are your own safe person.

A few years ago it became a thing in my friend group to declare someone a “safe person” before events. Someone anxious would choose a person to anchor to. It is intense. You have to check in, monitor, stay available. While you get credit for being a great friend, it is exhausting.

Full disclosure, I have also needed a safe person before, and it can be a relief to know someone is in it with you. But over time I got rebellious and started telling people I was unavailable because I planned on being wild. Wild for me means dancing or social hopping, but still.

At retreats especially, be your own safe person. Roam. Wander. You will get more out of it. If someone truly needs you, you can decide what kind of friend you want to be. Just don’t default into the role.

6. Do not make them your guru.

This is the most important rule. I am personally addicted to people who see me and want to help me. I help others constantly, and somehow I always end up bonding with therapists, healers, and guides.

Remember that these people are human. They are conduits, not saviors. They are mirrors, not answers. Do not get overly attached. Take the lesson and leave the pedestal.

7. At the end of the day, do not call people back home.

When you get back to your room at night, resist the urge to call friends or family from the outside world to recap everything. It will not make sense to them and you will sound unhinged. It also feels a little like spilling secrets mid spell.

You have likely consumed a lot of information or released a lot of emotion. This is not the moment to narrate it. Process with the people who are there or do something completely mindless.

Bring your full nighttime routine. Skin care. Face masks. Whatever helps you come back into your body. You will want something to gently numb out on, and that is normal.

My best friend Jamie and I shared a room and ended each night in face masks watching the sitcom Mom, which I do not recommend because it is very random, but you get the point.

8. Do not audition your trauma.

There is a difference between sharing and performing your pain. If you feel the urge to escalate your story so it lands harder than the last share, pause. If you notice yourself shaping your experience for reaction, validation, or gasps, pause harder.

Healing is not a competition. Vulnerability is not an Olympic sport. No one is handing out medals for Most Broken But Brave.

Share what is true. Share what is relevant. Let it be enough. The goal is not to leave as the person everyone remembers for their trauma. The goal is to leave more intact than when you arrived.

9. Do not flirt with becoming the main character.

Retreats have a way of quietly casting someone as The One. The person who shares just a little deeper, cries just a little harder, and gets just a little more attention from the guide.

If this starts to happen to you, step back on purpose. Do not ride the high. Do not confuse visibility with growth. Being the emotional center of a group can feel validating, especially if you are used to being the helper or the unseen one, but it distorts the container and pulls you out of your own work.

The deepest shifts usually happen quietly.

10. Listen like you are not next.

Really listen. Do not listen while planning your share or rehearsing your story while someone else is being vulnerable in real time.

Do not act bored. Zoning out, sighing, or dramatic shifting is rude. If you feel restless, take your ADHD to the bathroom, pace it out, and come back when you can be present. The group can feel it when you are not.

Listening is part of the practice.

That’s the etiquette.

Show up open.
Share honestly.
Stay grounded.
Leave lighter, not delusional.

I didn’t mention the retreat itself not to be secretive, but to avoid being prescriptive. The point isn’t where we went. It’s that we went. That said, if you want retreat recommendations or are thinking about doing one, AMA.

That’s the game.

You throw out something cultural and decide which bucket it belongs in. No Googling. No defending your answer. Just whether it still shows up in real life.

Dubai chocolate feels like a fad. But could it be the new salted caramel? Cottage cheese is the future, not because it’s exciting but because it’s endured. Same with matcha. Same with Birkenstocks. GLP-1s are the future. Oat milk. You tell me. Still here. Still polarizing or normalizing?

Someone said bagels were a fad, which remains incorrect and offensive. But they are having a moment. And moments either sail into the future or crash out. Crocs are forever, unfortunately. Natural wine depends entirely on who you’re talking to and where you live.

And then there are failures. Clean ones.

Quibi.
Juicero.
Clubhouse.
NFT’s

I like this game because it’s not about being right. It’s about noticing. What people think will last says a lot about what they value.

It might become an ongoing series here. Or it might be a fad. We’ll see.

Substack itself. Fad or future. Honestly. Close call.

FAD ☐  FUTURE ☐  FAIL ☐

What I’ve Been Watching

Veronica Mars is on Netflix now, so I’m a first-timer. It’s strangely comforting. I fully thought it was supernatural at first. Mars. The name. The implication of something cosmic. It isn’t. It’s procedural. It’s teaching me patience. Things unfold slowly. Clues stack. No magic. I like that it doesn’t rush to resolve itself. It’s also something I can just live inside without committing to. I’m loving how many episodes there are. Great cameos too. Adam Scott. Paris Hilton. Leighton Meister. I can already feel myself heading in a The Good Wife direction next

.

Tell Me Lies (Hulu) This season is less sex and more stress. No spoilers, but I can’t seem to quit. Steven has crossed some invisible line for me. He went from hot toxic to genuinely frightening. Not suddenly. Slowly. And yet. I’m still watching.

Industry. Not watching, but I respect that it’s good. I also know, culturally, that everyone liked the second episode more than the first. Real finance guys think it’s a joke. Regular people love the finance. That’s my drunk history recap of Industry.

Things I’m Reading and Recommending

(Including Books I Haven’t Read Yet)

Belle Burden, Strangers
I haven’t read it yet, but it’s the book everyone is passing around, casually labeled “rich porn,” which feels both accurate and lazy. The appeal isn’t sex or scandal. It’s proximity to money, power, and emotional collapse. Watching an ultra-privileged life come apart in real time. People are hooked. My friend Caroline read it in one sitting. This doesn’t feel like a bedside-table book. This is a read-right-away book.

A rich-porn book I have read and loved was The End of Normal by Stephanie Madoff Mack, which my friend Emily recommended to me years ago. All I’ll say is this. Bernie Madoff’s wife is the real toxic mom. Same genre, less glamour, much darker psychology

.

One of my favorite writers, Lili Anolik, wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about Dorothy Stratten, and it’s been sitting with me. Dorothy was a small-town Canadian teenager discovered at a Dairy Queen, pushed into Playboy by an older, controlling boyfriend, quickly turned into a Playmate, then Playmate of the Year. She was trying to become a real actress. She was twenty. And then she was brutally murdered by the same man who had built his life around her success.

What makes this piece land is that Dorothy’s family is still alive, and they approved it. It finally feels like her story, not everyone else’s mythology. Lili places it exactly where it belongs culturally. The rise of Hugh Hefner. Power disguised as taste. Ego disguised as empathy.

It touches on Playboy and Chippendales. How unsexy does that sound today? What a world. One I’m very happy not to be in, but deeply interested in reading about. link here

Takes I Heard on Podcasts

(These Takes Are Not Mine, but I Co-Sign)

On The Toast, sisters Claudia Oshry and Jackie Oshry discussed the Beckham post heard around the world, and their take has had me giggling all week. “It’s giving Spare.” Accurate.

They’re both boy moms and happily admit they would absolutely be the toxic mother. They are sickened by this realization. Same. The memes were funny but also kind of sad. Like, how does Victoria Beckham recover from her son calling her a perv on the internet? You don’t.

I always see both sides. I could be the bitch wife. I also have brothers who feel like my sons. I could absolutely be the toxic mom. That’s why this story works. It’s family drama, but it’s also fun. A cultural pressure valve.

Update

I waited until the end to say this, because I know it sounds insane, but I’m still recovering. Week five. At this point, my friends and family are understandably exhausted by it, but TikTok strangers seem to recognize the pain immediately, which is both comforting and alarming.

I have a sinus infection, which somehow makes pneumonia feel simple. Silly, even. Pneumonia was linear. You get sick, you recover. A sinus infection is psychological warfare. It lingers. It lies. It convinces you you’ll never know peace again.

When the ENT told me I didn’t have a deviated septum, I was genuinely devastated. I said, so… no nose job? When I told a friend this later, she said, “You can still get the nose job.” This is why you keep real friends around.

Anyway, sinus infections are brutal, and I’m here for anyone going through one. Me personally, if this ever happens again, I will be put under. I don’t need details. Just lights out.

I know we’re all a little allergic to reflecting on 2025 or predicting 2026. Everyone’s tired. No one wants a lesson. People already seem exhausted by 2026 and it hasn’t even properly started. I know I am.

But I’m also still in rest/ recovery mode. I am a pneumonia and flu survivor. A warrior. A hero. But enough about me. Truly. I am sick of myself.

Still, in Chinese astrology, we’re in the Year of the Snake, and we don’t enter the Year of the Horse until February. Which means there’s still time.

I tend to follow other calendars. You follow the Gregorian calendar? That’s sweet. I follow the moon. Even when I’m not totally sure it’s real. I mean, I am. But I know some of you aren’t. And I respect that. I also follow the Hebrew calendar. We’re in 5786, with a new month this Sunday. Shoutout to my Rosh Chodesh people.

What’s interesting to me isn’t the astrology itself. It’s the fact that so many of us want themes at all. Frameworks. A sense of timing. That alone feels like a cultural tell. We want movement. We want to feel like participants in what comes next, not just passengers.

And then Merriam-Webster named the word of last year “slop.” Which felt right. I think we’re shedding slop. The stuff that filled space without feeding anyone.

The color shift tells the same story. Last year was Mocha Mousse. Damp brown. Emotionally wet. This year moves to white. Not perfect white. A soft, breathable white. Less sludge, more space. It’s not a finish line. It’s a clearing.

Also, such a dumb color to make for the year. But I will find the theory in it for us all.

So as we move toward the Year of the Horse, the question isn’t speed. It’s agency. I also just learned what agency actually means, which helps. Agency is the ability to make choices and act on them. Got it.

The Horse is about movement, direction, forward energy. But you don’t get that without self-responsibility. Without deciding what you’re done pretending about first.

Right now, we’re still in the in-between. Between slop and discernment. Between damp beige and open sky. And honestly, that feels right. There’s no rush to gallop.

A few places where agency is already making itself known.

Bloodwork Is the New Wellness Obsession

I refuse to be proud of your Oura sleep score. Keep that to yourself.
But I would love to know more about your bloodwork. Show me your labs any day, daddy.

This feels like the next stage of wellness literacy. I’m not sponsored. Yet. But I already know I’ll be obsessed.

Enter Function Health. Founded by Mark Hyman. Yes, the six-pack hottie doctor from Instagram. And yes, a real, respected doctor.

Function is a membership-based lab platform that runs over 150 blood tests, twice a year. It’s about $355 right now. The pitch is simple: test more, test earlier, and actually understand what’s happening inside your body.

One of my BFFs, protected by my own version of HIPAA, did Function and found out she was iodine deficient. Not because she’s unhealthy. Because she, like the rest of us, swapped table salt for Maldon years ago. A tiny aesthetic choice quietly changed her biology. That is genuinely interesting.

Because here’s the truth. You can have a concierge doctor or a regular doctor and the experience is still mostly the same. Labs get taken. Numbers appear. Someone says “everything looks normal” and moves on. No synthesis. No translation. No help connecting how you live to what your blood is recording.

And do not talk to me about the portal. I can DM a doctor on Instagram faster than I can get my actual doctor to respond.

So of course people are pasting their lab results into ChatGPT and asking what they mean. I’m grateful for it. Not because it replaces doctors, but because it explains things medicine no longer has time to explain.

If we’re going to track anything, it should be our blood. Not our steps. Not our protein. Not our sleep. Blood is the only wearable that actually tells the truth to me.

We’re in the Post–Self-Help Era

I’ve always treated self-improvement as both a hobby and a habit. And if you want to know where culture is going, look at what it thinks needs correcting.

When I look at the self-help books being released in 2026—Grit, The Book of Boundaries, The Year of Less—I see a clear message. These books are not asking you to hire a coach. They’re not offering a system. They’re not promising transformation through experts.

They’re telling you to internalize authority.

Have grit.
Set boundaries.
Want less.

This isn’t a culture asking to be guided. It’s a culture being told to guide itself.

We spent years outsourcing our sense of direction to therapists (BetterHelp podcast ads, go away), wellness trends, optimization culture, gurus with podcasts. Somewhere along the way, self-awareness turned into dependence. The correction now is blunt and almost unsentimental: stop looking outward. Stop waiting to be told. Decide. Hold the line. Carry your own weight.

We keep Mel Robbins because she feels like the bridge. Less mystical than the gurus, more actionable than therapy speak. But even her message boils down to the same thing: you already know what to do. Just do it.

What’s interesting, too, is how spirituality sneaks back in through the side door, disguised as gratitude. Gratitude journals. Perspective shifts. Quiet thankfulness. Not God. Not faith. Too exposed. But gratitude as a socially acceptable way to think beyond yourself.

That said, those of us who believe in God know it’s always been about gratitude. So whatever gets you there, honey.

Jumping, Apparently

Another thing everywhere right now on my Instagram and TikTok is jumping in the morning. Literally. One hundred jumps. There is talk that it’s good for the lymphatic system. Or the soul. Either way. Why not.

The idea is that jumping, sometimes framed as Qigong or a very simple routine, wakes the body up fast. Blood moves. Breath shifts. Brain fog clears a little. Lymph doesn’t have its own pump, so it relies on muscle movement and breathing. Hence the jumping. Hence the rebounders. Hence the rebrand of extremely basic movement as somatic work, the current wellness buzzword of the month.

It’s not magic. No one’s cured. Even experts say the benefits are modest, which honestly makes it more believable. What it does do is give you a clean energy lift and a bit more focus. Your nervous system gets the memo that the day has started.

I’ve started doing it. Counting to 100 is genuinely harder than you’d think, which kind of forces you to be present. I’ll report back on the benefits, but so far the only downside is realizing how long 100 actually is.

Admin Is the New Social Life

I blackout at the sight of an admin task. Lose your wallet. Need to order a new insurance card. And don’t even bring up taxes.

There’s a trend going around right now where people are getting together for something called admin night. I live alone, so it’s all on me. I know, I know. This is the year of taking self-responsibility. But the second admin appears, my brain shuts down and the song WHERE IS MY HUSBAND starts playing on a loop.

Admin night makes sense. Instead of going out, friends stay in with laptops, phones, snacks, maybe a glass of wine, and finally do the boring life stuff they’ve been avoiding. Cancel subscriptions. Book appointments. Answer the emails quietly haunting them.

Doing admin next to other people makes it feel lighter. Less shame-y. Somehow doable. Just enough accountability without turning into a self-improvement performance.

Last year it was game nights with friends. This year it’s admin night. Same snacks. More passwords.

The Point

And so, in conclusion to this TED Talk disguised as a Substack where I confidently predict trends, I will also be participating in them. Actively. Join me?

I will be getting my labs done, jumping in my living room, and hosting admin night, all while pretending this is very intentional and not just me trying to feel mildly in control.

I am also counting down the seconds to watching Tell Me Lies on Hulu and trying to get my hands on a GLP- 3. With intention.

It is almost the Year of the Horse. I am getting ready to gallop.
Come gallop with me. 🐎

Three full weeks of being sick. Three weeks of my body collapsing in a way it never has before.

So when I was sick and someone said, “At least you do not have cancer,” it landed wrong. Not because they were cruel. They were trying to offer perspective. It landed wrong because caretakers live in a different nervous system. Anyone who has been a caretaker knows this. Often, the caretaker keeps functioning. The patient is allowed to depend.

And then there is this part.

For seven years, my father has had stage four cancer. I have been his caretaker. Doctor’s appointments. Chemo infusions. Medication refills. Seventeen hour surgeries. More than fifteen emergency hospital visits, including multiple sepsis events. It has been almost a full time job, and I have not had a job in years, so I would know. As my stepsister says, my dad has a million lives like a cat, and I have been there to care for all of them.

I also have spent my entire life being a good friend. I give such good friend. I literally had a Tumblr called BFF Productions that somehow turned into this Substack, so this tracks. I liked that about myself. I was proud of it. Maybe too proud. I collected best friends. I loved the intimacy of being there for someone. Over time, I learned to look for balance, but the core never changed.

I show up. I listen. I remember the details, especially the ones you forget. I stay. I am the person people call in a crisis and in anything they decide is a crisis. And let me tell you, people in a crisis cannot determine what a crisis is. But to me, that does not matter. If a friend needs help, I want them to feel safe. I love being someone’s safe person. I love being the emotional caretaker.

You also never have to explain yourself to me. I will bury the bodies with you. Literally. If you kill someone, it is none of my business. It is our business. Also, who wants to explain themselves to someone they love? How exhausting. With me, do not worry about it. You can tell me you hate your husband. You can tell me you think your kids suck. No explanation needed.

Recently, my friend Nicole and I were targeted on Instagram with the idea of the “yellow friend,” the one who brings warmth and steadiness, who shows up without judgment, who becomes a kind of emotional sunlight. I am a forever yellow friend. And thankfully, I have great yellow friends too. Being there for people has always felt natural to me. It shaped how I see myself.

Until it did not.

Getting sick forced me to ask a question I had never really asked before. Who takes care of the caretaker?

Getting sick also forced me into a role I hate. Someone who needs help. I minimized symptoms, which somehow led to maximizing my anger. I did not want to burden anyone. I did not even want to burden myself. I hated that too. Instead, I seethed.

This was the first time I had taken antibiotics, and I learned that as much as they kill the infection, they also kill the good parts of your gut. I joked that I had no gut instinct anymore. The antibiotics wiped it out and replaced it with chaos. I could not even weigh in properly on toxic mom group drama. I was switching sides left and right. I have learned that when I become a mom, I will absolutely write a Substack about moms if they cross me. I cannot help it.

But anger was never part of the plan. But it sure showed up like a wrecking ball. I went from a bad personality to an actually, truly angry personality. Needing people made me angry. Being sick made me angry. The slowness. The dependence. The loss of control. I used to think anger meant I was failing at compassion. Then my body took me out. I could not reframe my way through it. I could not optimize my way out.

The anger has passed, and I am slowly gliding into gratitude. What remained was clarity. I needed support, from myself and from other people. That cracked something open. What hurt more was realizing how unkind I have been to myself for years. That was the real grief.

And along the way, it was hard for me to notice the good parts. Panic has a way of shrinking your vision. But they were there. Friends who checked in, brought cough drops, stayed with me while I spiraled, made me laugh, and watched Landman with me like it was a prescribed treatment plan. I did not clock it at the time, but I see it now. Care does not always feel dramatic. Sometimes it is just someone staying.

Caretaking is not a metaphor. It is logistical and relentless. Paperwork. Waiting rooms. Holding your breath while machines beep. And this week, while I was sick, I realized something that stopped me cold. I am also my own emergency contact, and I do not know how to do that yet.

Being sick forced a question I have avoided. What are my needs? Not preferences. Not optimizations. Needs. My therapist has been working on this with me for months and often asks me to refer to a simple list.

Rest. Gentleness. Kindness. Someone believing me when I say I do not feel okay. I could not outrun those needs. That scared me.

But here is the lesson I am keeping. You can tell the truth without being cruel. You can name your needs without becoming a bitch. Because honestly, who wants to help a bitch? This season is teaching me how to say what I need without self erasure and without swinging the pendulum the other way. Calm. Direct. Human.

I have also used spirituality to stay focused on niceness. I reframed instead of confronted. Forgave before I felt angry. Jumped to compassion before I told the truth. That is spiritual bypassing. You cannot heal what you refuse to name. Anger does not disappear because you are spiritual. It goes underground. It shows up in your body. This week made that impossible to ignore.

If you love a caretaker, do not minimize. Do not praise strength instead of asking how tired they are. But also, yes, praise the strength. Offer specifics. Let them be human.

If you are the caretaker, you are allowed to have needs. You are allowed to name them. You are allowed to ask for help. Self kindness is not indulgence. It is back pay. I do not know who takes care of the caretaker. I only know I cannot be her anymore without being taken care of too. And I am not going back.

Here is what else I learned these last few weeks. Straight women seem more obsessed with Heated Rivalry than gay men. Fiber is the new protein. and everyone is now reading Heart the Lover. Being sick is humbling, but it is also clarifying. And apparently, if you stop long enough, your body will teach you everything you have been avoiding. Also, twist. I am making sourdough right now. It felt like the new me should try again.

I feel like Tony Robbins now. I want to go on a speaking tour about how I overcame this illness. I want a headset mic. I want a stage. I need an audience. I want to tell people that being sick is deeply emotional, that time becomes endless, that you start bargaining with God and TikTok at the same time. I want to tell them that the flu is not just physical. It is existential. And then I want to walk off stage and cough and have people say, “Poor girl.”

So welcome to my TED Talk. I will be talking about recovering from this flu forever. There is BF (before the flu) and AF (after the flu).

I was really sick for eight days, and during Hanukkah, each day grew brighter as I somehow got sicker. Now, some of you are thinking this is not a big deal, and you would be correct. But you would also be rude, because it was a really big deal to me.

But again, I’m from California, and I’ve barely even had a cold. I’m not like these East Coasters who grew up with the kind of colds you take antibiotics for. I’ve never even taken an antibiotic. This isn’t bragging. This is context. Every symptom felt like a mental threat to my sanity. I found myself texting my group chat constantly for sympathy for each new symptom. It was all so new to me.

TikTok said this was Influenza A.
ChatGPT said it was the common cold.
My doctor on Zoom said, “Here, take some Tamiflu.”

My doctor also didn’t seem to know about Xofluza like tik tok did, and so I probably need a new doctor. But it’s something I’d seen online that East Coasters were apparently rushing pharmacies for like it was Black Friday. I was past the 48-hour symptom window, so Tamiflu wouldn’t work, my doctor said. Another friend swore Tamiflu gave her suicidal thoughts, and I was already on the edge. I could not take on dark thoughts. Don’t quote me on the suicidal thoughts. I’m not a doctor and barely a good patient.

But something happened to me by day two or three. I fully turned into someone with a bad personality, which is devastating, because my personality is something I pride myself on. I texted like someone you already want to get out of a conversation with. I wasn’t interesting or interested. I couldn’t watch, read, or listen to anything. And rest is not fun when it is required. It’s offensive.

It’s also important to know when you have a bad personality. If you think you aren’t capable of having a bad personality, that’s a problem. You have a problem. It happens to the best of us.

I decided I was going to win this flu.

This involved a trip to CVS, where I asked an employee to unlock the cold medicine (so undignified), had my ID scanned to purchase Sudafed, and purchased a Neti pot for the first time. I was not messing around. I was sort of shocked the pharmacist didn’t offer comfort or curiosity about my raging illness, but that’s a side effect of the bad personality disorder. You think you deserve curiosity when you really just deserve courtesy.

I also fell straight into TikTok Remedy Culture. The algorithm, generous and unhinged, offered me boiled pears from Chinese medicine experts and mothers. Raw garlic. So many versions of raw garlic. Eating raw onions for immunity and punishment. Gargling salt water. Soaking your feet in salt water. Steam, but not too much steam. Sauna yes. Sauna no. Zinc, but never on an empty stomach unless you want to spiral harder. And a viral drink called a “flu bomb” by Barbara O’Neill, which involved ginger, garlic, lemon, honey, and fear. No idea who this woman is, but here is her viral recipe:

Barbara O’Neill’s Flu Bomb Recipe

Ingredients:
1 large clove of fresh garlic, crushed or minced
A 1-inch knob of fresh ginger, peeled and grated or sliced
Juice of 1 whole lemon
1 tablespoon of raw organic honey
1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
1 to 2 cups of hot water

At one point I stopped and thought: if this were 1800, I would already be dead. Dramatic much?

Here are a few other things I learned:

Tea is so boring. Like, so fucking boring. Hot water. Pathetic.
Honey is wasted on the sick. I can never look at honey again.
Children get this too, which is humbling.
“Feed a flu, starve a cold” is something people say, and no one actually knows if it’s true.
No one has any idea what they’re doing, and certainly not online.

Breathing is a gift for calmness and for life. Which I wish I knew how to do.
Xanax is a miracle drug.

This too shall pass. I guess?
You are safe and can be trusted.
You will laugh again (mostly at yourself.)
You will feel better (my chat promised me this).
This will eventually feel like a blur, but it will leave a huge lesson behind.

I let people take care of me.
I trusted myself to take care of me.

I grew up this week. THE FLU IS MY NEW HOFFMAN RETREAT. You want to go away for seven days and work on yourself, or do you want the flu? ASK YOURSELF THIS NEXT FLU SEASON.

And smack in the middle of all this, I developed anxiety. A fun new symptom. A really cute way to lose your mind. I’ll use the buzzword and call it a nervous system issue. It was one too many cold medicines, not enough food, and one ill-advised attempt to have coffee that took me over the edge.

I basically had my first flu and my first anxiety attack at the same time.

Anxiety is sacred? OK, I’ll listen.

What unsettled me most wasn’t the symptoms. It was the loss of trust. Every cough felt meaningful. Every sensation felt like data. My body, which I usually experience as a quiet assistant, had become a suspect. I just want you to close your eyes and imagine having never been sick before, then imagine experiencing it for the first time, and apologize to me in your mind for whatever you’ve been thinking so far.

I suddenly had empathy eyes for every sick person I’ve ever silently judged. I thought every cold and every sniffle was a reflection of someone’s lack of discipline. I now understand why people spiral over mild illness. Spiral away, sweetie. I’m here for you now. When your body stops behaving predictably, your brain fills the gap with stories. Dark ones. Loud ones. And worse, really boring ones. I am so bored of myself and now subjecting you to this boredom.

I was super grateful for friends who let me spiral. Truly. I needed to say the same fear out loud over and over until it lost its power. I needed people who didn’t rush me or fix me or tell me to calm down and also promise me this would make me feel skinny. “You are one flu away from your goal weight.”

The things that helped weren’t the remedies. They were the people. My group chat.

Being teased helped.

One constantly sick east coast friend roasted me for reacting to this flu like it was the plague. My goddaughter cried laughing at me and said, “Fifi, it’s just a cough don’t be ridiculous.” That helped too. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t just a cough to me, but that felt way too intense. She’s ten.

When my other best friend, Lolo, texted me that she had the same thing on a family vacation and was hysterically crying, I felt less insane. I wasn’t alone in it. I wasn’t uniquely weak. We were both being flu babies and we couldn’t bypass this part.

At one really low point my Rabbi and Rebbetzin were hosting me for Shabbat, and I was panicked and convinced I needed to go to the ER. Sick people can be quite convincing. I felt like the first person in the world to ever be sick. Instead of judging me, they looked at me and said, “We are here with you, and we will go wherever you need to go.”

That calmed my system immediately. ( I didn’t go to the ER and I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to either but my MIND didn’t know that.)

Somewhere around then, I realized I wasn’t actually looking for remedies. I was looking for witnesses.

TikTok wasn’t healing me. It was saying: other people have been here.
ChatGPT wasn’t just diagnosing me. It was calmly repeating, in different tones: you’re still inside the range of normal.

I don’t say this for pity. Maybe a little. Pity feels good sometimes. We should welcome pity more, but that’s another essay. Mostly, I say it because being sick is depressing, and feeling better is a blessing.

At my lowest, I was texting things like: Am I going to be okay?

I knew I was really down bad when I didn’t even care that I’d lost weight. And I knew I was feeling better when I suddenly felt ready to GLP-1 again. I’m back, baby.

My inner child was fully activated, and she fully grew up this week.

I’m fully acting like a survivor of the flu and hopefully my personality comes back this week, I missed her.

I survived. I’m hungry. I’m vain again.
We’re so back.