When I was small, I wanted what my friends had — MTV, Benetton sweaters, seemingly drug-free parents, and braces. Were straight teeth and terror-free sleep too much to ask for? Especially when my mother’s face would swell from the pain of rotting roots. Always, the ache. Always, the mouth that resembled a graveyard.

While my friends suffered hallway and courtyard pummelings and endured the taunts of train-tracks and brace-face, at sixteen they rose from the ashes with shiny hair, a new wardrobe and straight, white teeth. Teeth that would follow them to college bars, first-job interviews and engagement photos.

Teeth…

Welcome to America, where experience is traded in for cheaper salaries and smooth, wrinkle-free skin. Where 63% of people over the age of 45 have been unemployed for more than a year versus 36% of those aged 18–24. Yet, we outperform them. Where hiring managers view us a a walking, abacus-toting sarcophagus that couldn’t possible understand the complexities of TikTok (source).

Lest they forget we were the generation left to our own devices before devices existed. I was a ten-year-old who walked home from school and made myself dinner while my mother worked into the night. …

I used to scream streams from the rafters. I preached diversification and mitigating risk, and how more sources of income is the solution. But more is not better, it’s simply more. More streams require more work to be truly effective and profitable over the long haul — no matter what the productivity gurus espouse. Different streams may require different audiences, price points, people, process, and technology, consumer consideration periods, varying customer pain-points, motivations, and journeys which require distinct and disparate marketing and messaging.

All of that requires work. It’s certainly possible — many people, including myself, have done it —…

We play a game. You sit on the other side of a screen and in that baritone voice I’ve grown to hate, you ask me about my wants. If there’s one thing you could have, what would it be? And I cycle through all the regrets — the friendships excised and the cruel words exchanged, a mother’s bones in a cold grave somewhere out in Long Island, all the moments when I could’ve made a better choice. I used to say yes to things. I had moxie, I had energy — I was a woman on the move and the…

I can put up with the scam artists, faux experts, self-serving self-helpers, and predators posing as house pets. I can put up with the concern-trollers who pretend they’re my psychiatrist, GP, etc. The bros who continue to leave comments on articles I wrote two years ago, desperate to teach me about marketing when their sum total of experience is listening to the Tim Ferris podcast. By all means, continue to educate me on a career that I continue to be successful at. Please educate me on what a brand is when you can’t even get a simple definition right.

Google…

I used to be a distance runner. On the estate where my dad lived, there was a miniature racetrack where he’d break the horses. It was covered in grass and sand — one lap around was a quarter mile. For hours, I would run in circles. In the snow. When the rain came down in sheets. On the days in August where the humidity and heat threatened to swallow me whole. Newton’s Second Law of Motion: force equals mass times acceleration.

One evening, my dad stood at the edge of the track to watch me run. I had a Discman…

I’m privileged of having been straight-sized my entire life. And while my weight has fluctuated, and I’m no longer as thin as I used to be, I’ll never know what it’s like to have a debilitating illness or the fear of not being able to provide for my family. I’ve spent years unpacking fat-phobia and American standards of beauty, and this is constant work. It’s okay that I’m no longer as skinny as I used to be is something I say to myself more often than I care to admit.

(Sidebar recommendation: the Maintenance Phase podcast)

Often, I take this…

We kicked our feet to the sky. We pumped and swung and screamed until our throats crackled from the hurt of it all. I remember the parks in Brooklyn — the rough gravel and rock, the tire swing and bodies covered in trash bags. Back then, the sky was our canopy and we held what we could in our hands. The world wasn’t as heavy as it one day would be.

Come summer, we felt the heat. Our faces were shiny and sleek. We wore as little as we could without getting arrested, jumped, or pulled into trash bins behind…