Hey there! Welcome to my virtual home. — Vitals Born & raised in New York. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for the past six years. Started career at an investment bank: A time I’d like to forget. Ditched the suit to build a profitable dot.com in 1999. Built a boutique digital agency from $1MM to $20MM in 4 years. …

At least sometimes I can still hear the music — I watch videos. A woman swaddled in plush cashmere brews her iced lattes and pads about her expansive home preparing for a sponsored Mexican holiday. Cut to mangroves and foamy seas and a room that costs $1700 a night. She needs this vacation, this time in a tropical paradise, because…

I miss life before the internet — The days smelled of salt and burning leaves. We’re eating salami sandwiches wrapped in butcher paper, running barefoot on the hot sidewalk, and our heels splinter and bleed and it’s fine, absolutely fine, because we could feel something. We chew, we cough, we bleed. We ride busses to towns called…

Sometimes, it’s okay to give up. — I’m jumping. My legs soar through the air and I land on my friend’s bed and we’re in Miami and there’s an expansive pool outside the glass doors because her family’s wealthy, the severe and alienating kind (does there exist any other?), and I press all the buttons in the…

I will always be my own worst enemy. — I reach my hand across the country. I do the thing I’m not supposed to do, don’t mingle with the enemy, don’t let them see you small, weak. A shivery colt that can barely stand on its hind legs, but I can’t help myself — I write the only mother…

And if you tell me to “you have it better than me,” I will punch you in the face. — Horror movies calm me. The first movie I remember watching in the theater was The Shining when I was five. The swinging bat, the bear suit man on his knees, Danny’s mouth gaped wide, and the screen awash in blood was terrifying and fascinating in ways I still can’t describe. …

Mental health stigma continues to be real. — Sad does not mean suicide. Years ago, I said this to a friend who sounded the alarms. Called in the brigade and kicked up a fuss. You might say, this is a friend who cares. This is a friend who wants you alive when all I want to say in…

When you climb out of your seasonal depression — It’s as if I suddenly woke up. February to April is my darkest time. It’s akin to trying to breathe underwater. And there you are, gasping for air, trying to climb to the surface and depression is the boulder weighing you down, pushing you further and deeper into the shallows. …

This life wasn’t the plan. — New York was how we liked it, dangerous and dirty, not the swept-up and mopped-down anesthetic it would soon become. We’d become the walking numb. It was gimme shelter before Scorsese ruined it. It was my mother’s arm caught between the subway doors all the way from Dekalb to 9th…