I landed at LAX in the evening. Traffic was mercifully light, only 30 minutes to the east side. Perhaps the rumors of mass exodus were true. It’s been 6 months since my last visit. Last November had felt celebratory, like a homecoming. This felt more like driving through a museum of past lives.

Around 10 years ago, I met my friend Ariel for coffee at Trails, a woodsy cafe nestled in the foothills where Los Feliz bleeds into Beachwood Canyon, where they make their own almond milk and lemonade with crushed strawberries and baked eggs in baskets of sweet, dark Irish bread. My ego and I had been going through something of an all systems failure that summer. I was recovering from the emotional and hormonal aftershocks of an abortion, and from what I’d perceived then as unrequited love but ended up being the banal thoughtlessness of a boy I would go on to date through the second half of my 20’s.

I’d recently left my job of 10 years around which I guess a lot of my identity had been built, but I wasn’t thinking about that then. I’d earned company stocks over those years which I was counting on to sustain me financially until I figured out my next move, but they’d crashed overnight in a highly public corporate battle that eventually ended in bankruptcy. I was 25, and had been steadily employed since I was 14. I’d always been told I was so “mature” for my age, but that year I’d felt steeped in childish foolishness, learning too late about the concept of diversifying your portfolio.

From there, things had unraveled. I’d found an eviction notice on the door of my apartment, a magical 400 square foot studio on Hightower Drive I’d lived in for three years, made famous among film students by the 1970’s film The Long Goodbye. I’d rented it out for the weekend without permission to help pay for a friend’s bachelorette party in Palm Springs. The landlords had only given me three days to leave. With no family in the country and nowhere to go, I fell into the only safety net I knew. I moved back into the 1920’s mansion on the hill I’d once sworn never to go back to.

It was different than it’d been when I’d first arrived in LA at 19. Its 10 bedrooms were still filled with a similar mix of middle-aged men and much younger women. But an air of decay had replaced its former opulence. The place was run down, and utilities left unpaid too long, there was no hot water. My old room, the biggest in the house, was being rented out to “an old friend” to help pay the bills, a man whose vibe I found suspicious, mainly because he was always startling me in the kitchen, creeping silently on the travertine floors, standing too close behind me as I’d turn around. I avoided the place as much as I could, but I was grateful for the small, pink-wallpapered room, with its heavy brass lock on the door.

After coffee, Ariel asked if I wanted to join him and a couple of friends for lunch in Thai Town. I said sure, I had nowhere else to be.

Along to join us at the picnic tables walked a long-haired man who, I guessed by his calculated yet disheveled appearance, was a “very cool artist”, and a woman in vaguely futuristic athletic wear whom I immediately recognized. She was a pop star whose songs had defined many a core memory of my youth, songs I’d danced on my own to in that cathartic way we often do in our 20’s and not often enough after that. I might have otherwise been star struck, but I was too raw and too tired to muster the affectation of fandom.

Over a lunch of glossy pad see yew and pork larb so pungent with the funk of fish sauce, perfectly balanced in its limey acidity — she asked me about myself, and I told her plainly. Things were a mess. I was trying to figure it out. Turns out even pop stars get the blues, and we connected, deciding to stay behind after lunch and go on a walk.

We developed a friendship that summer that revolved around the wholesome habit of hiking, which I’d learned is just walking in places people hadn’t ruined. I’d pick her up in my beat-up Suzuki, which had a lapsed registration and looked like a dirty laundry hamper, and we’d drive to Malibu. I sensed that she found my lack of effort charming, my inability to deflect from the humility of my circumstances a refreshing contrast in a city where fantasy and pretense were commonplace. I don’t know if she knew that I was just depressed.

I remember us both tender and blank, disappointed about relationships that hadn’t worked out as we’d hoped, and people we’d tried and failed to be. We were at the mercy of our respective hormonal rollercoasters — hers from freezing her eggs, and mine from my recent abortion. The poetry of it escaped me at the time, that her wanting to have a child on her own and my trying to avoid that exact fate had left us in more or less the same frail state. In any case, it was in that state that we connected, despite our differences, because there in Temescal Canyon, where the sun hit the tumbling ivy and dusty air so as to suggest the presence of fairies, we allowed ourselves to be seen.

We don’t talk much anymore. But I sometimes think about this one thing she said on a warm day in the canyon. It was something about how her path to healing or inspiration was often an indirect one. Sometimes you can’t just work on your feelings or your life or your art. Sometimes you have to approach it obliquely, following the breadcrumbs of your attention towards something seemingly unrelated and unproductive. That’s the compost that enriches dead soil. I wonder now if I was one such breadcrumb for her, as she’d been for me. An idle exploration, given meaning by its context.

The past few years remind me a lot of that time. I’ve had a son, and I’ve witnessed myself change in ways I still struggle to find language for. The world changed, my body changed, my work and my relationship to it changed. I’ve spent much of these years fumbling in the dark for myself, as I had that never-ending summer.

It’s the oddest thing when the light suddenly appears at the end of a long tunnel. Optimism pops in unannounced, like a familiar friend I realize I haven’t seen in years. I find myself cringing at my newfound joie de vivre, and at the earnest and inadequate words I use to describe it. My journal is filled with “gratitude”, “peace”, “alignment”. In my defense, it’s hard to find words the internet hasn’t ruined. I wonder why optimism can be so grating, why we often liken cynicism to critical thinking, and pain to poetry.

In any case, I’m surprised to find myself out of the learning curve, and dare I say, in flow. I wonder often in disbelief if this is what a “regulated nervous system” is. I ask, to no one in particular, how many people just go about life in this easeful state.

I still experience little spikes of panic or despair, like tired sputters from a failing engine. I notice it first in the sharpness of my voice, my evaporated patience. Thankfully the return to center is becoming reflexive. Presence, calm, and even joy are beginning to feel native and less suspicious, not so easily thrown by any erring trigger.

I’d taken the oblique path, the pop star’s detour.

I’d read and hiked and swam and cried a lot. I’d looked up classes about jewelry making, woodwork, ceramics. I’d allowed myself to be lost, opening every can of worms I tripped over. Like deciding to organize your closet on a whim, things got a lot messier before any recognizable sense of order revealed itself.

I’d watched lots and lots of violently targeted internet videos pertaining to terrifyingly specific aspects of my private struggles. The videos themselves offered little, but the fact that the algorithm saw me so clearly alarmed me — was I so transparent? — and solidified my intention to get to the other side.

And I did, I think.

Ever grateful for my progress, I keep doing my part, my little chores. I keep gym and sauna sessions like doctor’s appointments. I started making and keeping my actual doctors’ appointments. I protect my alone time with the uncalled-for ferocity typical of fresh boundaries, like your high-strung, newly gluten-free friend. I eat both clean and for pleasure. I don’t really drink anymore but if I feel like a briny martini or a cigarette, I’ll have them, without guilt and preferably together. I stopped wearing deodorant because I stopped smelling, and while I’m not educated in the exact mechanics of detoxification, I take it as a good omen. I trust good omens.

I recall the pop star’s frustration at her most iconic songs being born from grief or pain, that it’s what people connected to and inevitably wanted from her. She’d grown up a lot since she’d written those songs, and yearned to be well and create from that space. I’d felt a little guilty, wondering whether I was the sort of needy fan who’d unconsciously wanted her to stay the same, to give us the goods, like junkies for catharsis. I’d been, after all, a loyal audience to my own suffering for some time.

I had a tendency to get attached to certain seasons, the ones I deemed most “successful” in myself, in others, in the world, fooling myself into thinking that with a little luck, things could be that way always. I was prone to wistful nostalgia, or to anxiously calculating whether the future would hold similar fruit. It was easy to forget how fertile the land I stood on could be if I could just stand still and tend to it.

Parents know that growth, like grief, is nonlinear. We observe our kids’ regressions and are reassured that they’re normal milestones of their development. As an adult, I’ve had regressions too, as a response to loss or stress, but have rarely given myself the same grace. The idea that good things simply go in one direction — from good to great, to even better, indefinitely — fails not because it’s inherently bad, but because it’s unnatural. And good thing, too. In my lows and lulls, I clean my inner and literal house. I look for clues of dissonance. I take the steps even if I’m not sure where I’m going yet. And occasionally, I understand peace as something I’m entitled to, and wonder why I’m so quick to give it away.

Listening to the pop star’s music since that summer in LA, I was comforted knowing that joy did find her, and that it produced art just as resonant as her pain had. In dark times, joy feels particularly potent, even subversive. In the meantime, there’s peace in the idea that the messy middle of deconstruction and regrowth is often the ripest field for connection. That’s where the concepts we have about ourselves feel most permeable, where what separates us from one another feels most porous.

I wake too early from the jet lag and walk the Silverlake reservoir alone, with headphones in my ears but no music playing, catching excerpts of conversations, friends diligently bringing each other up to speed. I see the 1920’s mansion, stark as it towers over the reservoir, and scan my interior for the familiar flinching. It doesn’t appear and I cling to that as proof of progress. I wonder who lives there now, but don’t actually want to know. Maybe it’s abandoned, or just a museum.

Last week I went to the beach by my house in a break between meetings. I felt in my chest something new, a reluctant hopefulness, like the turning of a corner on something long and hard. I curled up on the shore of the cool sea facing the ground, a pose of unintentional surrender, going limp as the waves rocked me against the shore.

I looked closely at the wet sand on my hands. Each grain a unique fragment of something that had broken down and softened through friction and time.

Billions of them, forming a whole golden and glistening and yielding.

I let it engulf me.

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I was a puddle.

That’s the most accurate thing I can tell you about the days following my launch last week. Voice notes and texts from friends and customers, and me, unable to respond without crying. Not really sad crying. Just the release that occurs when something you’ve been bracing for materializes, and your body doesn’t know what to do with the sudden absence of adrenaline. To the outside, this didn’t look materially different from any other launch, save for the debut of a new logo. Yet for months, preparing for this launch had felt like holding our breath, waiting for a signal about whether hope was warranted.

Part one of the collection was well received. Better than I allowed myself to expect. I collapsed.

There’s a specific kind of depletion that follows a long rally. You don’t feel it while it’s happening — you’re too busy coordinating the shoot and the assets and the website and all the invisible machinery that goes into getting something over the finish line. You feel it the second it’s done. I shot this collection at my house, still recovering from a flu I’d caught the previous week traveling with a toddler, scrambling in the days before to find a local assistant with no luck. Still, it was a magical day with Judit. And then I ran out of gas so completely that the good news, when it came, hit me like grief.

My best friend Cloé has known me since I was couch-surfing and living off credit cards, back when Gil was just an idea. She sent me a voice note after the launch. She said she didn’t want to offend me, because she’d always loved the brand, but that something about this new direction felt more honest, more whole. Like it was growing up and growing into itself.

What it named — and what undid me — was the sense that the invisible work of these past years had somehow become visible. Not the struggle, but the transformation the struggle produced. The growth, not the growing pains.

Here’s what you couldn’t see.

This collection almost didn’t happen. There were months of real deliberation — me, mostly alone with this, because I don’t have a cofounder or CEO or investors — about whether we could afford to make it. Whether it might be our last one for a while. While we got it over the finish line, and I’m proud of that, I also want to be honest that it cost me.

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I’m on the daybed in my home studio. Film canisters and cameras strewn about, loose clothing tags printed with my last name in a slight font with colorful accents, a rolling rack of samples a colleague of Jordan’s generously muled here from LA, the clothes steamer underneath producing the familiar smell of overheated plastic and damp limescale buildup. I have been thinking a lot about tunics.

I wonder whether my deepening interest is a matter of fashion. Are tunics about to have a moment? I used to have a sense for these things. Or, whether I’m just aging. Staring at my messy office, I’m faced with contemplating my relevance and mortality at 36. In the past I’ve associated tunics with the matronly, even elderly, but lately they just feel…right. More than an elegant solution to discreetly cover an ass I used to deliberately put on display, they’re also uniquely versatile. A top, a dress, a beach cover up. Cinched at the waist or loose. Maybe I am old. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Does being on the pulse of what’s cool with the kids matter, as a maker of things? Will my customers age with me, or will I need to find young blood to mine for inspiration on how to dress for a life I no longer live?

This is what I think about when I think about tunics.

I believe a good closet is a toolkit, an organ of remedies built lovingly over time. Style emerges when you are no longer dressing to become someone — buying your way out of feelings of non-belonging — but to return to yourself. The trouble is that returning to myself, at 36, looks suspiciously like a tunic.

There is a version of this story — the easy one, the one the “industry” would prefer — where I am simply telling on myself. Admitting that my taste is contracting, the woman who once made cropped tops for women in their twenties is now making something looser for women her own age, and calling the contraction evolution because evolution sounds better. The slow fashion rhetoric runs on this kind of self-flattery. Aging is rebranded as discernment. Comfort is rebranded as luxury for “real” women with “real” lives. The tunic, in this story, is the (locally-knit-) cotton-clad coffin in which a woman buries her relevance and tells everyone the funeral is actually a baptism.

There is another version where I am doing the thing I have always done, which is pay attention to my own body and trust it to be a reasonable proxy for the bodies of the women I make clothes for. The tunic, in this story, is the next honest garment. It looks good with and without a postpartum stomach. It fluctuates and moves with a body that also fluctuates and moves. It doesn’t ask anything of the wearer. It is, possibly, what a thirty-six-year-old woman wants when she has finally stopped trying to look like she’s twenty-six. And if I’m right about this — if I’m still picking up the signal — then the women who have followed me here may be looking for the same thing.

A tunic is older than the idea of fashion. Egyptian, Greek, Roman — for most of human history, in most places, the default garment was a piece of cloth with a hole for the head. Tailoring — clothes cut to follow the body, to reveal it on the body’s behalf — is, comparatively, a recent invention. The tunic predates the waistline as a concept worth enforcing. It’s what women wore before the body became a problem to be solved by clothes.

Except the tunics I made are not, exactly, the tunics I just described. One has a corded, corset-like waist that cinches, or doesn’t, and can be worn with this detail in the front or back. Another is slit all the way up the sides, open enough to show ribcage (and side-boob) if you move a certain way. They cover more than a cropped top and less than a caftan. They can be worn loose or pulled in, modest or not. I designed them this way without thinking too hard about it, and only afterward, looking at the rack, did I notice what I’d made and what it revealed. I’d refused to pick a side, and instead built a bridge.

I’m not sure if this is integrity or indecision. And also I’m not sure there’s a meaningful difference. What I know is that the woman who designed these tunics is not the woman who has stopped explaining herself, and she is also not the woman she was at twenty-six. She is somewhere in between, and the clothes are honest about that — which may, in the end, be the only kind of honesty a garment can offer.

I shot the collection at my house on my friend Judit, who like me, is 36. She lives in a neighboring village, and in a turn of kismet, was already a longtime Gil Rodriguez customer. She even owns pieces from our 2018 debut. The first real friend I made here had been wearing my clothes for nearly eight years — probably more if you count my American Apparel years — before we ever sat down together. She put the tunic on and looked immediately like a woman wearing something that had been made for her. I watched her in it and thought: either I am right about this garment, or I am wrong about it in a way that flatters exactly the kind of woman I am now. The tunic looks good on Judit. The tunic looks good on me. I like to imagine that’s enough.

There are days when I’m sure I’m still building the brand I set out to build in my twenties, only a little slower and with more honesty about what it costs me. There are days when I suspect I am letting it shrink to fit me and where I’m at. The collection launching this week and next was made on the latter kind of day and the former kind, in roughly equal measure.

What I can tell you is that I no longer trust the question is this trend coming back to be separate from the question am I aging into this. And I no longer trust either question to be separate from the one underneath. What does it mean that the most honest thing I've made in years is also the oldest?

I suspect the assignment is to make the thing that feels right now but still carries the DNA of who I’ve always been. Things that, with any luck, I’ll still want to wear at 50 and 70. Maybe it’s the nail in my coffin. Either way, you can bury me in this tunic.

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The sea is freezing but I find myself swimming anyway. I’ll catch a glimpse of the turquoise water and reflexively start getting undressed. I’m usually unprepared, walking home with wet underwear soaking my trench coat pocket. I can’t resist it.

A friend from LA sent me a voice note which I listen to with great interest while flossing my teeth. Since moving to Europe last year, sending long recordings back and forth has deepened the intimacy of friendships across time and space. The vulnerability of talking into my phone uninterrupted is surprising. I often hear thoughts as if for the first time, discover things I didn’t know I was feeling.

She wanted to ask me about The Fear. Some people call it the Fear Of Missing Out, or FOMO. She says she tries to ignore it, but it feels inescapable. She wonders if I’m immune to the feeling entirely, or whether being geographically distant makes it worse. Do I feel like the “real world” is happening without me, or, from my coastal Mediterranean perch, have I simply stopped caring?

I ponder the most honest answer while I brush my teeth and scrape my tongue. It seems like any time I’ve made a large commitment in life, I’ve left the real world a little, at least for a while. I’ve come to see it as the natural cost of the things I wanted — a business, a relationship, a child. Everything has a cost, even the good stuff.

LA, from a distance, is a strange thing. There are no town squares, no free communal spaces where life happens. There are members clubs, cult coffee shops, luxury grocery stores. There’s the reservoir and the canyons, but to commune there you must be in constant motion. Life by appointment, a series of events. The best places are undoubtedly private: lush, secret gardens with high walls and tight guest lists. On nights I’d stayed in with the baby on the monitor, laptop open trying to catch up on work, brain mush — I’d watch other people’s evenings scroll past like a reality tv show. The world going about its glamorous business. Me, in a parallel universe, somewhere outside of time.

But leaving the States was different. This time I didn’t just sit out another social season from the bench. I physically withdrew from the ecosystem that had defined my adult life. One in which I’d experienced some measure of success or access.

For many years I felt a nagging sense of misalignment in Los Angeles. I fantasized about escaping, but The Fear always crept in. I’d miss out on opportunities. I’d disappear, be forgotten. I told myself I could only leave once I had achieved enough, that success alone could afford me the privilege of stillness. Until then I’d just have to push harder and run faster. I simply couldn’t justify stepping out of the light before I’d earned the right to.

We finally moved last February. The past thirteen months have been largely defined by discovering what lives on the other side of that fear. I can’t speak in absolutes, of course. I’m essentially writing this from mid-air, having made the leap but still blind to the landing.

What I can say, as I massage my cheeks in slow circles with a boring but luscious drugstore cleanser, is that this time, disappearing was partly the point. I’m going through something, and it feels safer to go through it out of sight. I’ve heard it referred to as going to the mountain. Some people call it an ego death, others an identity crisis. All I know is that I'd outgrown the person the world (and I) had decided I was, and that transformation, while painful, became inevitable. What many don’t know about caterpillars is that they don’t just grow wings. They dissolve completely. Before anything new forms, they endure a process called pupation and become, for a time, just a bunch of cells. Potential without shape, inside the safety of the chrysalis.

I rinse with cold water and pat my face dry with a dense blue towel. I’ve felt this before — the unmoored, fumbling-in-the-dark feeling that tends to precede something new. I felt it 10 years ago and from it I created Gil Rodriguez, something I’m genuinely proud of, not only because of how it touches people but because of the growth it demanded of me. I don’t yet know for sure what this period of transformation is asking of me — I’ll admit it’s still pretty dark in here — but I sense it has softer edges. I’m feeling pulled to release The Fear, the rush, the instinct to always push through, always show up and always be seen doing it. I’m feeling compelled to relax and not to take myself so goddamn seriously.

I mix a few drops of various oils between my palms and work them up slowly across my chest, neck, face in long strokes toward the lymph nodes. I’m feeling compelled to open my hand, after years of holding my career and the business I built like sand in a closed fist. Writing this, once a dangerous, unthinkable act of self-exposure, feels like part of that opening, as does allowing myself for the first time to even imagine what my business would look like in the hands of the right partners. I don’t know where the chips will fall, but the point seems to be the process, the opening, the loosening of the illusion of control.

I suspect I have my son to thank. Matrescence did something to me I didn’t expect. Not unlike adolescence, it dissolved who I thought I was, reorganizing my entire identity.

My friend asked if I felt The Fear. The honest answer is, lately, no.

I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything, although realistically, of course I am. There are chance encounters happening every day in rooms I’m not in. I just don’t know it, and that’s the point. We’re not supposed to be exposed to all the parallel paths our life might take, because that would drive us crazy. It does.

From all the way over here, the term “rat race” seems painfully on the nose: I look at my old life, my old self, and see a very tired mouse racing other mice in a maze, oblivious to the experiment or the exit.

To be clear, LA itself was never the problem. I see that now. When I visit, I walk the same reservoir I’ve walked hundreds of times, except now I stop to chat with the city tree-trimmer and space out watching the butterflies in the meadow gardens. Now I walk the reservoir like I walk my village, and it’s allowed me to experience it through a different nervous system. It had never occurred to me before that I was allowed to slow down. The stakes always felt too high and the margin of error too thin. Now that I’ve released some of that pressure and learned to calm the fuck down, I can actually appreciate the density of energy and culture that major cities offer. Those experiences feel incredibly rich now, like eating a gorgeously decadent meal.

What I’m discovering is that The Fear has a habitat. Certain environments make it flourish. Distance, whether geographic, emotional, or simply a matter of selective attention, can transform it into something you notice without being at its mercy. You can feel it, name it, and let it sharpen your curiosity or deepen your delight in other people’s joy.

And sometimes, under the right conditions, it fades almost entirely.

We live amongst systems that compete relentlessly for our attention, and hold it by making us feel either behind and left out, or like we’re outpacing others. It’s addictive, and it’s by design. Stressed out, disconnected people who are trying to keep up simply buy more things. We’re sold belonging.

My friend knows this. She’s one of the smartest people I know. But knowing the maze is a maze doesn’t always make it easier to stop running.

I just wanted her to hear it from someone who has, and is ok.

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The daughter of two agricultural engineers (essentially educated farmers), I’ve always liked being close to my food. As a kid, we would pick (steal) still-green sweet corn from the fields of McGill University’s agricultural campus at the start of the season and make cachapas, stripping the cobs of their starchy-sweet kernels in the front yard. When my mother visits a place, even if only for a week, the first thing she does is befriend the local farmer with the happiest-looking lambs, so she can make our favorite roasts and Venezuelan curries. Growing up, food rarely came out of a box, a preference I’ve carried into adulthood. I love to cook and avoid processed food as a sort of cult religion, where making things from scratch brings you closer to god.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a job and a child, and shortcuts in the form of boxed broth and pre-washed greens are taken routinely. But the from-scratch approach is still my favorite, and actually efficient if you look at food as medicine and cooking as therapy.

I didn’t grow up loving beans. This makes me a terrible Venezuelan, and trust me, I feel a lot of shame around that. But after a brush with elevated cholesterol in my postpartum bloodwork, I was forced to leave my carnivorous ways behind and embrace plant protein. You can imagine my aversion to the highly processed, gelatinous mounds in various shapes that grace the shelves of the plant-based section at the grocery store.

This left me, essentially, with beans.
Reluctant but determined, a culinary rebirth was upon me.
I was resolved to love beans, not just tolerate them.

Fast forward a couple of years since my unfortunate “diagnosis,” and I can proudly report that I am obsessed with beans. They are foundational to my lifestyle. I’d go so far as to say that whether or not I’ve made a great pot of beans in a given week directly correlates with how much I love and respect myself. Like drinking enough water or getting enough sleep, it has become a primary marker of self-care. Making beans is the ultimate gift to your future self: the busy, stressed, or rushed version of you who will inevitably need something warm and nourishing to ground and sustain them through hard times.

When I first started, I was making very over-the-top beans. Insecure about their lack of animal flesh, I compensated with all kinds of theatrics. Over time, the recipe became more elemental, and dare I say, elegant. My go-to method for gloriously brothy beans is incredibly simple and requires very little oversight, so much so that they’ve become something I often make on Monday mornings while I work from home.

Ingredients

• Beans. Any kind. My go-to is a white bean, on the larger side if I have the time. If you live in the US, my favorite provider is Rancho Gordo in California, and you can buy them online. A 1 lb bag makes a big pot with about 5 to 6 servings.

• Olive oil (2-3 big glugs, or about 1/2 cup)

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Raise your hand if you’re a pleaser.

Not me.

I’m direct. Accuracy matters to me, and while I think of myself as empathetic, I’ve occasionally been called abrasive in my honesty. I respect the feedback, but it hasn’t meaningfully shifted my directness as a core trait. Mostly because I like this about myself. It’s also something I deeply appreciate in others.

In other words, I’ve never thought of myself as a pleaser.

But alas, it’s never too late for deeper self-awareness.

Over the past few weeks, I started paying closer attention to my thoughts around my family, and specifically the men in my life: my partner and our son. What I noticed was that I was expending a surprising amount of energy trying to manage the emotional climate of our home.

How is my partner feeling? How is my son feeling? Hurt? Tired? Sensitive? Maybe if I behave a certain way, get ahead of their emotions, I can prevent discomfort and maintain harmony.

To be clear, no one asked this of me. None of it was conscious. I suspect it’s a reflex many women are socialized, or perhaps even evolutionarily primed, to serve as the emotional backbones of families and communities.

The problem is that our projections of other people’s inner lives are often off-base. And perhaps more importantly, running that empathy simulation for every micro decision in an attempt to protect others from discomfort is an enormous energy drain.

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I still remember the first time it worked. I was sitting in my home office on Baxter Street in Los Angeles, five months postpartum and three months back at work, staring at a blank sheet of sketching paper. I was three weeks late delivering designs for a new Gil collection, and my team was waiting on me to be inspired. I had nothing.

My body still felt alien to me, and I couldn’t remember what it was like to care about clothes. Desperate, I did something I hadn’t done in years. I lit a candle, put on music, and smoked a joint.

This is a story about crutches.

Like most, I first found weed in high school. I developed a friendship with a local dealer — a sweet, harmless boy who tossed me little baggies for free to smoke with my classmates. In my early twenties, living in LA and working for American Apparel, I picked it up more seriously. I was working seven days a week, living in a hilltop 1920s mansion belonging to my boss, with no boundaries and no real agency over my life. Every morning in bed, I’d roll an enormous spliff shaped like a baseball bat and smoke it before my feet hit the travertine floor. I was always high. It was less recreation than weather control — a daily attempt to make the atmosphere of my life feel tolerable.

It ended accidentally. A work trip to Miami stretched from days into months, as they often did in those days, and without access or time to find weed, I got sober by default. The first few weeks felt like deprivation. I was convinced I needed it for my anxiety. Then, around week four, a fog lifted. I realized that how I’d been treating my anxiety was also in some part responsible for generating it. I’d been trying to put out a fire with lighter fluid.

I quit without ceremony. For years after, I’d occasionally succumb to peer pressure at a party and always regret it. The weed in California was too strong, and I’d overshoot the good part entirely — straight past any looseness or clarity, into a paranoid paralysis that overstayed its welcome. I wrote it off.

Then I had a baby.

I was happy to be a mother, in theory. And yet some mornings I would wake up with fantasies of all the creative ways I might end my life. I later recognized this as postpartum depression, but at the time, I just thought I wasn’t cut out for the life choices I’d made, that I’d gravely miscalculated my own capacity.

I went back to work eight weeks after giving birth. It was a hazy period of sleepless nights and fried nerves, underscored by the rhythmic sound of my breast pump. The memory of that sound, like a knife scraping against a plate, still sends a chill up my spine. The days were grueling and required constant code-switching — between CEO and mother, creative and operator, the person my business needed and the person my baby needed. It wasn’t the volume of roles that wore me down so much as the friction between them. A law of physics: friction dissipates energy. Every forced transition bled momentum, and by the end of the day there was nothing left to give anyone, least of all myself.

I was recovering from my depression. The darkest thoughts had passed, but I was still running on fumes, reactive, creatively blocked, and carrying a confusing resentment around work I had once loved. I was looking for a way back to myself. I didn’t expect to find it where I did.

I remember the early days fondly. When I smoked weed, I felt connected to my energy source again, genuinely excited to finish the work on my plate. Instead of resenting my responsibilities, I felt grateful for the privilege of being a mother and of doing work I cared about. Friction gave way to a sense of ease, flow, inspiration. My partner Jordan loved the new me, affectionately dubbing her hippie mommy. The free, unburdened person I was when he fell in love with me was finally back in the picture.

I started using weed as a transitional device — a way to shift gears when I’d find myself anxious or spiraling, or when I needed to create on a deadline. I’d clear my afternoon, get high, and build out an entire collection. I could suddenly tackle unpleasant tasks and conversations unbound by the tense inner dialogue and emotional pageantry that often kept me stuck in procrastination. When I was shooting campaigns, I’d smoke a little and find more playfulness and levity, connecting with my team to collectively create something inspired rather than just pushing through a grueling day with 40 looks. Perhaps most importantly, I began treating the people in my life with far more grace, tact, and empathy than I had in a while. I started using weed in moments of overwhelm as a parent and partner. I would step away raw, reactive, resentful, and come back calm, present, and playful.

After a while, something unexpected happened: I learned to access that state of equanimity without being high. Just knowing another perspective was available to me in a moment of reactivity was enough to choose it. Weed had shown me a door. Eventually I was able to walk through it on my own.

I still smoked regularly, two or three times a week, careful to leave at least a day in between, wary of dependency or of it losing its magic powers. I lived in California, where weed is not only legal, but a highly optimized consumer business. Weed stores look like Apple stores, and customer service reps can feel more like pharmacists than stereotypical stoners. I found the exact strain and dosage that worked for me through methodical self-experimentation: I’d get several varieties, try them on different days, and take note of how I felt. Post-its on each box. “Good for parties, bad for admin.” “Great for solo creative time, 1-2 puffs, NOT social.”

I mostly kept it to myself. Occasionally I’d get stoned with dad friends for whom it served a similar purpose — a pressure valve for the stress of balancing work and young children, a bit of well-earned levity, a return to self. I never found a mom who shared the habit. I kept it quiet outside my close circle, less out of shame than a read of how it would land. A mother who gets high is a different cultural proposition than a father who gets high. I understood that.

A year ago moved to Europe with my family. I was still navigating the effects of years of burnout, and adding the stress of moving and the learning curve of life in a new country had me leaning on weed more than ever. But the positive effects were becoming less reliable, and brain fog, sleepiness, and mild paranoia began creeping in. I’d lose my phone and find it in kitchen cabinets. I could feel my eyes glaze over when someone was telling a story I struggled to follow. I started to notice cracks in my own narrative around the drug, and worried that I was using it as a crutch. A switch had flipped. It was the end of an era.

Again, I didn’t quit ceremoniously. I just stopped turning to it to perform a function it no longer reliably performed, and in doing so, realized that perhaps I no longer needed it. I’d come a long way, it turns out. For the most part I was no longer depressed or anxious, and had developed tools to self-regulate, both practical and spiritual, that didn’t require psychoactive intervention. I was off my crutches.

The nature of a crutch is that it meets you where you are. It doesn’t ask whether you deserve it, or whether it fits the image you have of yourself. It just takes some of the weight off while you heal. The mistake is thinking that needing one means you’re broken. The bigger mistake is not knowing when to put it down.

A crutch held too long causes the atrophy of the very structures it’s supporting. Do you know what you’re leaning on?

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December 23, 2025.

I wake up groggy in a hotel room with all natural light blacked out by highly efficient electric shutters. I normally avoid blackout shades; they make me feel disoriented and depressed, but we got back from LA a week ago and are still jet lagged. It’s past ten. My son is sleeping, and Jordan left a note saying he’s downstairs catching up on work. My son turned three one month and two days ago, the day after we landed in Los Angeles, our first time back as a family. I feel as though I haven’t caught my breath since, despite a nagging urge to pause and take stock. Three years a mother.

Today is also my birthday. I’m 36 years old. In the hotel suite, I shut the dividing door to where my son is sleeping and let daylight into the main room. It’s cold and rainy in Barcelona, and it will be freezing in Paris, where we take the train tomorrow for Christmas Eve.

I was never very fond of my birthday. It being so close to Christmas was a mild but repetitive childhood trauma. But three years a mother feels significant. Plus, it’s almost January, one year since the fires in LA, the catalyst for us coming here. I wonder about the usefulness of taking stock of the past, when my mind is already so difficult to wrangle into the present. But sometimes the urge comes, to look at where you are and where you came from, in an attempt to develop some sense of agency, however illusory, over where you’re going.

I’m obviously not alone in this impulse. As January approaches, so does our yearly collective reckoning, along with its resolutions and manifestations. I always enjoy this time of year, and some of the writing I’ve read on the subject has been rather useful.* It seems we’ve learned, whether through ancient wisdom or videos of influencers slinging proprietary manifestation roadmaps (instant digital download!), that the life we want sits neatly on the other side of our “limiting beliefs”. To achieve our wildest dreams, we need only deprogram ourselves of these deeply entrenched, often subconscious notions.

I sometimes wonder whether one person’s groundedness is another’s limiting belief. Or whether one generation’s reverence for pragmatism and being realistic is partly responsible for shackling the next to financial scarcity, bad relationships, and sub-dream bodies. I have no doubt that some versions of success do require, or are at least facilitated by, a certain level of delusion, or lack of limiting beliefs. Personally, I have a soft spot for that brand of delusion, especially in women. Fewer women than men move through life with a deeply rooted sense of entitlement, and when I see it I tend to admire (and even envy) it. Would my life be better if I were a little more like that?

Something about the modern language of manifestation both attracts and repels me, leaving me more or less in the same place, just slightly agitated.

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I’m in Los Angeles for a few weeks, a welcome respite from the currently very sleepy Spanish coast. I’ve been busy working and squeezing my friends very very tightly and haven’t had much downtime to write, but I figured I’d jump in for a quickie (unedited, forgive me) and talk about some of the things, places and people I love and miss most about this city.

I didn’t technically grow up in LA, but I came of age here, and I feel entitled to claim LA-home-status for a few reasons, including but not limited to the following: I’ve been roofied at both Bardot (2009) and Tenants (2019), I learned early and the hard way that famous actors shouldn’t date civilians, I’ve been in a cult, I know never to break up with someone at LAMILL (they will make you walk the reservoir with them, it’s inevitable), and I once paid Gwyneth Paltrow’s healer $500 an hour to spit her proprietary blend of floral holy water in my face and convince me to break up with an emotionally unavailable music producer (a bargain, tbh). It’s the place I’ve lived the longest by far, and this is the closest thing to a homecoming I’ve got.

On my second day I decided to make the most of my jet lag and beat the crowds at Courage Bagels, but even at opening, the line was a half-block deep. While I begrudgingly waited in line to purchase a $26 bagel, an unhoused man dragged three enormous trash bags filled with glass bottles, making a loud screeching sound for which he was visibly embarrassed. I kept wanting to scream DON’T BE EMBARRASSED, WE’RE THE ONES WHO SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED FOR STANDING IN LINE FOR $26 BAGELS AT 7AM but I didn’t. It was a jarring reintroduction to the city after months of social services and sub $1 espressos, and one I later recalled to my mother in tears, reinforcing the narrative that I am too sensitive for the United States. It was a truly great bagel, although sadly not a Montreal bagel*.

I’ve already had wonderful meals at Ototo, Triste, Found Oyster, Speranza and Anajak (who take reservations now!), and am so excited about trying Sal’s Place tonight which is in the old Il Piccolino (gorgeous) and is only open for the winter (chic). Also looking forward to checking out my friend Karla’s Chainsaw Café, a new brick and mortar spin off of the iconic underground restaurant she ran out of her garage in Echo Park.

At the risk of sounding cliché, I’ll admit I was very excited to get my pistachio matcha on tap from Canyon in my old neighborhood, and that our favorite baristas hadn’t forgotten us. We also stopped into Camel coffee for their cream top although they changed their name to Handles which was weird (broke off from franchise (?), still good). I went to Beverly Hills Juice for their carrot coconut which was worth the detour west, and hit Scout on the way back. All in all, LA still reigns supreme in the morning beverages space, but I guess lattes are $9 now.

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“You have a lot of tension and stress in your body, a lot of rage. From your intestines to your head, it’s tight (closes fist). You’re a perfectionist, and you’re angry. You are too young to feel this weight, this responsibility. You need to learn to put yourself first, always first, then others. You need to learn to let go of control.”

It’s not unusual for a massage therapist to tell me that I have a lot of rage. I don’t understand exactly how they get this information, but I believe them. I want to tell her how far I’ve come, that I used to hold so much tension in my jaw that the muscles in my temples would bulge comically out of my head and give me debilitating headaches, that I would crack my teeth in my sleep from biting down so hard, that I’m doing so much better now. But instead I just say, I know.

Rio, who’s almost 3, has been going through a regression since our move, exacerbated by being sick more often than not since starting school. He claims that he’s a baby again, can’t walk, and needs to be in my arms at all times. Some days I can’t shower or use the toilet or take a call without him seeking me out, climbing me like a tree, or loudly protesting my absence.

There is a part of me (ego) that loves feeling this needed. He was a restless baby who never let himself be held for long, so the physical closeness I’ve enjoyed these past months — the cuddles, the gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes — it’s been nice. But you really can have too much of a good thing, and I’ve found myself touched-out, overstimulated, and starved for alone.

By the time he’s asleep, I’m exhausted, and I doom-scroll. It’s a petty rebellion, a limp grasp at autonomy. But some days, it’s the only kind of “me-time” I can muster.

It’s predictably draining. Stale iterations of my own taste and opinions are reflected back at me — an influx of “inspo,” eerily homogenized, streamlined, over-circulated, and over-curated — or worse: videos that “break down” what makes certain things (outfits, interiors, films, etc.) good or interesting, making me cringe at the banality of things I once genuinely found good or interesting (i.e. why all the cool girls are into Art Deco).

It doesn’t bother me that this content exists, but I resent it being targeted at me without my consent. To attempt to demystify things of beauty — beauty whose value lies in its mystique — is, to me, to glaringly miss the point.

Any meaningful amount of time spent on social media leaves me sad and creatively barren. While I used to go online to dig up references and inspiration, now I retreat into the old world, also known as the “real world”, to escape the algorithmic onslaught of trending ideas and echo chambers of recycled references. When “good taste” is democratized, it is also depersonalized, castrated, and ultimately flattened.

Much like “good taste”, “good advice” has suffered a similarly sad fate. Seemingly overnight, masses of online personalities have reinvented themselves as guides, coaches or teachers — or strangest of all: creators whose content is about how to create content, or digital products about making digital products. Much of it leans on the idea that everyone has something to teach, and capitalizes on the fear that the economy as we know it is collapsing, positioning the content economy as our life raft.

To be clear, I don’t judge any individual exploring this. My interest applies only to the phenomenon at scale — and I have questions.

For instance, if we all become teachers, who are the students? With as many competing and contradictory perspectives as there are people, won’t we feel more lost than found? I don’t deny that some of these tools are valuable, some perhaps even life-changing — but a great many more are gratuitous, misinformed, and so eerily tailored to our specific private struggles, they feel downright predatory. The sheer volume makes it harder to sift the good from the bad.

At my most cynical, I feel that this reveals a culture of addicted users and consumers, trapped in cycles of relentless self-optimization, shifting only from the endless consumption of physical products to the endless consumption of digital ones. A culture that insists that you capitalize on your experience at any level, and most concerning, one that has misplaced its reverence for mastery, and the sacred role of great teachers, coaches, and guides.

The silver lining is that some of these platforms and systems — the ones we’ve operated in for so long that we’ve come to consider them vital — are becoming so predictably unbearable that we’re being forced to rediscover our vitality right there where we left it: in nature, in craft, and in the wisdom of older generations, often only accessible offline. This is what’s been healing me lately, and I believe in time it could heal us all.

“If we are to journey beyond the hamster wheel of consumerism, people will need to select new things to buy whose appeal and usefulness can survive the fading of their novelty. It’s hard to believe that we can create an abundant economy with fewer, but better things, just as it’s hard to imagine you can produce as much food on ten healthy acres as on 100 industrially planted acres that are barely alive.” — Vincent Stanley and Yvon Chouinard, The Future of the Responsible Company

Hard to believe, maybe, but true nonetheless. The idea of fewer things (whether physical or digital) of more enduring value isn’t new — it’s at the very foundation of Gil Rodriguez — but to collectively adopt the philosophy as a lifestyle at scale feels more urgent than ever.

What regenerative farming is doing to restore our soil, we must now do to restore our inner worlds, and to build a sustainable economy. Industrial farming pushes land past its limits — constant extraction and disturbance, short term yields at the expense of long term health. For years I moved through life in the same way: overstimulated, overextended, and over-extracted — putting short term productivity and the needs of others above my own wellbeing, and seeing wellness as a collection of commodities to be consumed, rather than a state of being to be cultivated.

Regenerative practices, on the other hand, are more productive over time. You stop tilling. You let the land rest. You plant what nourishes instead of drains. You rebuild the invisible structures that support the ecosystem. It’s slower, but it creates real resilience.

The way I see it, that’s all self-care is — and as a person who makes things, I’ve made it a critical part of my work. It’s my job to tend to my soil — to loosen what’s been packed down for years, the pressure, the heat, the old instinct to clench — to learn to be still long enough to dive deep into the narrow slice of time that is the present, instead of skimming its surface. Because it always seems to be in those depths that creativity emerges, along with the kind of connection required to develop new solutions and real value — it’s the place you need to inhabit if you want to be useful in your work, if you want your output to meaningfully improve the quality of life of the community you serve.

Otherwise we’re just sleepwalking through life — buying things, or worse, making things no one needs, and finding clever ways to convince people they’re lesser without them.

These past weeks have been a haze. The routines that normally keep me grounded slipped away, and time stretched and contracted in ways my mind stopped tracking or trying to make sense of. Anyone who’s ever had a sick kid knows what I’m talking about.

Rio gets febrile seizures — a condition where seizures can occur when a fever spikes too quickly. While it leads to dramatic emergency calls and midnight ambulance rides, the condition is thankfully benign, something he should outgrow by his fifth birthday. Still, it means we live on high alert whenever he’s sick, which, since he started school, has been every other week. At the first sign of a sniffle, I rearrange my days and nights around him. We co-sleep, which neither of us is very good at, so I can monitor his temperature through the night. With Jordan away making a movie, Rio and I have been in our own world, oblivious to boundaries and bedtimes.

This Substack is a delicate balance. I want consistency, but not the kind of dogged discipline that can stifle a practice that’s still new and fragile — one that’s helping me make sense of things. So instead of forcing one of my ten unfinished essays, I’m showing up as I am: depleted, disoriented, a little lazy, but more well than I’ve been in years.

A lot of you have asked about my spending more time in Europe, and given the current climate in the U.S., I understand the curiosity. The truth is, it wasn’t exactly planned, but in hindsight I’d been setting the table for this transition for a long time.

I always said I’d leave L.A. when I had kids. I grew up in Montreal, and even after sixteen years in the States, I never got used to what feels like an obviously corrupt political system — and how it shapes vital institutions people depend on every day, like healthcare and education. I may have grown up “poor”, but in Canada that meant something very different. We didn’t feel cut off at the knees and still expected to run the race. We had accessible public resources and, as far as I could tell, the same opportunities as anyone else. Free healthcare. Affordable childcare (less than $5 a day by law). I went to McGill University — sometimes called the Harvard of the North — for $5,000 a year, paid for with a minimum-wage after-school job. By U.S. standards, I was rich.

I love L.A., but to deny that it’s deeply segregated by class and access to opportunity is futile. Sadly, its near-perfect climate left me too soft for Canadian winters, so naturally I began fantasizing about southern Europe. My maternal grandmother, Yaya, had fled Spain as a refugee in her teens and eventually returned when Venezuela started to unravel. I visited her in Barcelona every chance I got, always anxious something might happen to her before I could learn all her recipes, hear all her stories, absorb every last drop of her wisdom. The algorithm sensed my restlessness and filled my feed with stories of Americans buying crumbling houses in Italy, Spain, or Portugal, restoring the buildings along with their sanity.

Still, my work, team, and community were in L.A., and I was what gamblers call pot-committed — too deeply invested to walk away. But things kept getting harder. The cost of living had become almost comical: childcare alone cost us over $50,000 a year (roughly what I paid myself at Gil), rents soared, and organic eggs had reached $16 a dozen. Nearly everyone I knew who didn’t come from generational wealth — even objectively “successful” people — were secretly struggling in a city where abundance is king. I felt trapped between the pressure to perform at work and a serious bout of postpartum depression, my body begging for balance. I committed to taking better care of myself — working out, eating well, therapy, PTSD exercises, more sleep, gratitude — and made real progress. But I still found myself in survival mode more often than not.

Then one day in January we woke up to air thick with smoke. Wildfires are considered a season in California, but this time was different. We were at the mercy of the winds, which had reached over 90 miles an hour, with local officials admitting they were powerless to stop or even predict what the flames would devour next. The city felt dystopian. We packed the car with a couple of days’ worth of essentials and drove south to Jordan’s mom’s in Orange County. We spent two anxious weeks, steeped in grief, surrounded by evacuated families — some who had lost homes, pets, schools, entire neighborhoods — trying to process our own, smaller grief while feeling the weight of survivor’s guilt.

The Gil team stepped up in a way that still makes me proud: our L.A. store became a donation center, our customer service team a concierge for displaced families, helping to navigate housing, donation distribution, and the administrative burden of disaster. I was scared — for our health, our city, our small businesses. When we finally returned home, we sealed the windows and ran air purifiers in every room. Rio couldn’t go to school or even to the park.

At some point Jordan and I looked at each other and thought: What the hell are we doing here? We were working ourselves to the bone to afford a life we could barely live — and now we couldn’t even breathe the air. I had just hired an operations manager, which meant for the first time in the history of my business, I could step back. The rest happened quickly, a blur. We sublet what felt like the skeleton of our L.A. life — house, car, and even arranged for our nanny to stay on with the family renting our home — for four months. It wasn’t profitable, but it covered enough that we could try something different and still have a way back if we wanted it.

We went to Lisbon first. I’d never been to Portugal, but I found a beautiful furnished rental that fit our needs and budget, and we didn’t overthink it.

A couple of months in, Rio got sick. The paracetamol wore off faster than expected, and he had a seizure. The ambulance arrived in minutes, and we were rushed to a nearby public hospital. For two days we received compassionate, competent care. When it came time to pay, I explained, face swollen and cheeks streaked with tears, that we were foreigners without insurance. The man at the front desk looked confused, then sympathetic, then kind. If we couldn’t pay, he said, he’d simply waive the fee. The bill was for €180 — about $200. For context, the first time Rio had a seizure in the U.S., the bill was over $4,600 — with our private insurance that cost $1,200 a month.

What I felt coming home from the hospital that morning was equal parts shock, gratitude, and anger. My baby was okay. Having a sick child hadn’t endangered our family’s financial health. But perhaps most shocking was realizing that for my entire adult life, I’d been a consumer first, and a human being second. To encounter a humane healthcare system, in a moment of vulnerability, was nothing short of moving. Leaving L.A. was beginning to feel like coming out of an abusive relationship.

Fast-forward through a few (admittedly annoying) bureaucratic hurdles, and we’re now in Spain. Closer to Yaya, and closer to nature. Little by little, with every hike that turns into an impromptu swim, with every aimless village stroll, I’m reclaiming the space in between the obligations that used to make up my entire life — along with my creativity, sanity, and health. My body feels like it’s returning to itself: I lost a little weight (despite all the croquetas), my perioral dermatitis is clearing, my jaw unclenching, and for the first time in a long while, I can hear myself think. One layer at a time, the armor I built for a war I’m no longer interested in fighting is dissolving, and I’m learning to trust that I’m safe without it.

Professionally, I’ve learned to loosen my grip — to trust and be honest with my team — and they’ve surpassed all expectations. I’m a more grounded leader, and more passionate and creative than I’ve been in years. Learning to trust others with what I once tried to hold alone has opened something in me — a new ease, and even a hint of excitement, about finding the right partners who see the same potential I do.

We project so much onto the lives we see online, and I hope this satisfies the curiosity while grounding it in something real. I try to avoid giving unsolicited advice, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s this: don’t rush. Don’t measure your pace against anyone else’s. When it’s time, you’ll know — and you’ll move.

Not everything blooms just because you’ve tended to it. Some things — some lives — aren’t meant for us, no matter how hard we try.

In the end, the grass is always greener where you water it. The question is, do you ever feel like you’ve been watering someone else’s lawn?

P.S. I gave Yaya my favorite Gil striped set — how fab is she!?

“Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter, I was sent, a recalcitrant 31 year old child, to Hawaii, where Winter does not come and no one fails and the median age is 23.” — Letter from Paradise, Slouching towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion.

I realize quoting Didion in my third Substack essay is painfully on the nose, but five minutes into a prescribed staycation I opened the book to this page, and it felt too fitting to ignore.

Earlier today I was dropped off by my partner Jordan with my son asleep in the backseat at a hotel 15 minutes away from our house. I was to “relax”, something I’ve apparently had a hard time doing lately. It’s true, I’ve been a little on edge. I stay at Isabella’s on the beach, because the staff knows me and the prawn and bottarga pasta is excellent and because it’s not too expensive and money is one of the things I’ve had a hard time “relaxing” about.

I walk for two hours before dinner. I love to walk. It’s my favorite (free) way to reboot a mind stuck in familiar loops, to loosen a grip I didn’t realize I was holding. I sense how tense I am as soon as I begin. Then comes the disorienting realization that, for thirty-six hours — aside from the kitchen’s hours — there is no clock time I need concern myself with. The feeling is depressingly foreign.

The restaurant is well lit, but I forgot my book, and there’s a 28 person party celebrating something. So I put in my headphones and make a playlist. It’s a cathartic walking playlist, because cathartic walking is the only sport I’ve ever been truly good at, and it is greatly enhanced by music (different than that of cathartic driving).

Of course the playlist is almost all women, documenting various stages of grief and rebirth. It gets me thinking about this new puritanical era we’re in politically (culturally?) and about how good women have always been at communicating with one another, almost in code, through art.

It gives me a hopeful feeling to think that through the unburdening of our quiet feminine rage, we might be entering a potent creative era. Feminine rage need not be quiet, of course. The loud stuff is on the cathartic driving playlist, naturally, because you can scream in the car. But it does sometimes feel as though the movement has turned inward, gone quiet, as if to protect itself while it goes through a much-needed metamorphosis.

By “the movement,” I mean feminism, though it feels awkward to talk about feminism directly. I identify as a feminist by definition, but if you asked me what the movement is up to right now, I couldn’t tell you.

When I was coming up, us feminists were very preoccupied with work — specifically, with beating men at their own (usually corporate) games. An ambitious young materialist and good little capitalist, I dreamt of being a high-powered CEO, and in my late teens became the protégé of the fashion industry’s then-most infamous (and notoriously toxic) founder.

I drank the Kool-Aid, worked the hundred-hour weeks, rose through the ranks, and let the sexual harassment roll off me like beads of sweat during a marathon. I became a little baby boss myself — running multiple departments in a half-billion-dollar public company in my early twenties.

I left American Apparel and eventually started Gil Rodriguez, determined to do things differently (predictable). I rejected outside investment in favor of slower, organic growth — a naive but necessary rebellion against the world I’d come from, one fueled by risky capital and a belief that growth at any cost was the best measure of success.

I remember Dov taking me to dinner with the board the night before they ousted him — sharing wine, laughter, and expensive steak with the very people who’d planned a coup for the following morning. The months that followed were like corporate Game of Thrones (season one — eek). Being one of “his people” in a newly hostile environment was a kind of purgatory.

So I started Gil with little money, a deep mistrust of investors, and a slow-and-steady ethos. Our beginnings were modest but promising. We gained momentum through word of mouth, and became known in fashion circles. When SSENSE placed their first order — $14,000 — it felt like a miracle. The day they launched Gil, it nearly sold out; the next day they came back with an $80,000 order. I had to call the buyer and explain that I was still running the business out of my house, and that I couldn’t afford the fabric to start production. They wired me $30,000 the next day.

SSENSE was an incredible partner (pre-acquisition, before things went south) and helped us build Gil. But bigger business meant bigger problems. I was back to hundred-hour weeks, this time with no safety net, no margin for error, and an ever-present sense that one bad fabric lot could end me. How do you build a lifestyle brand when your own lifestyle looks like this?

Whenever I wanted to quit, I clung to the startup mythology — the founder sleeping in their car before becoming a billionaire — the religion of scarcity dressed up as grit. I was ambitious, yes — propelled by the belief that momentum was safety and exhaustion, proof of purpose. A nervous system rewired to fear rest.

I wonder now how much of that ambition was born of trauma — or more banal, from the fear of a mediocre life. At some point I realized no one had asked this of me. I was the one setting the terms, mistaking pressure for purpose.

The beauty of entrepreneurship was always supposed to be autonomy — doing things your own way. Doesn’t that mean building systems that support how you actually want to live and create? For years I clung to ambition as if it were the only thing separating me from obscurity. Now I find that the better I feel, the less urgent — less desperate — my ambition becomes.

As Nadia Meli wrote recently, “there is no seasons with ambition, no pause, no rest, there is no cyclical living, no hibernation, no scaling down, only scaling up. But we, as humans are deeply cyclical beings.”

I’ve learned that denying that rhythm has consequences — that if you don’t choose a time to rest, your body chooses one for you. I’m in a new season now, with different needs and strengths. Motherhood made me less accommodating and more exacting. I want to live now. I want him to see his mother building and creating, yes, but also resting and receiving.

To experience abundance every day — that, I’m realizing, is the real metamorphosis.

Maybe this, too, is a kind of feminism — a subtler season, the work of reimagining how to live and be well inside a system that wasn’t built for us.

So how do I do that? How do I redefine success within it? I’m still figuring it out. In many ways, that’s what Slow Times is — me, figuring it out in real time.

Speaking of metamorphosis — “I walked off an old me,” sings Maggie Rogers in Alaska, a song quite literally about cathartic walking. I hope this gives you permission to take a very long walk.

Disclaimer: I only claimed to be good at cathartic walking, not at making playlists. My taste in music remains firmly guided by the fourteen-year-old girl inside me, and I will not apologize for this.

Cutting a few flowers from the garden and arranging them in an empty wine bottle with the label still on (all our vases broke in the move) is healing me after a long week (year).

It reminds me of a truth I return to often: that making my home feel clear, warm, or alive — not as service to others, and without clinging to perfection or performance — can work wonders on a frayed nervous system. It builds momentum, a shift from chaos to calm, quiet proof of self-respect with ripple effects of its own. Or maybe our environment is simply one of the few things we can control. In any case, when I’m really fried, I reset by smoking a little weed and partaking in what I call domestic meditation.

Nothing really does it like cooking though. Surrendering to my role as mother (NOT founder/CEO/mother) by making something impossibly wholesome allows me to temporarily escape competing energies (Production! Efficiency! Performance! Ambition!). I sink into the calm, familiarly feminine frequency of domesticity. Ambition takes on softer forms: can I nail my grandmother’s oven-baked fish and scalloped potatoes? Can I make a cake I feel good about giving Rio and actually want to eat myself? I get to be a bit trad, and I like it.

Speaking of cake. I’ve been tweaking this recipe and I think I’ve finally nailed it. It’s adapted from one my oldest sister, Mariana, used to make — egg-free because my niece was allergic. The yogurt gives it a gorgeously moist, almost mochi-like texture, and the carrot, ginger, and turmeric bring the spiced warmth we crave this time of year (without the pumpkin spice ick), while baking into a beautiful sunset ombré. It also happens to be simple enough that it makes for a soothing weekend activity with kids. I’m learning that making things is the best way to help Rio regulate his own nervous system (it’s small — but very loud).

Notes and disclaimers. I don’t really love cake. I wouldn’t touch a traditional birthday cake with a ten-foot pole, even as a kid. This one uses less than half the sugar of most recipes and is great for kids or people who don’t care much for cake. While it has carrot, it’s not a carrot cake — so if that’s what you’re after, look elsewhere. That said, if you do frost it, cream cheese icing (as with any good carrot cake) would be the move.

Obviously, adapt it to what you have on hand. No ginger? Try orange zest. No vanilla? It’s just as good without. That’s actually how I landed on this glorious combination of aromatics — my sister’s version was plain vanilla, and I didn’t have any.

Another pro tip: Once you’ve read the recipe through, jot the steps in broad strokes on a piece of paper. Cooking is infinitely more pleasant without tapping your phone with buttery fingers. Do this with your go-to recipes and before long you’ll essentially have written a cookbook by hand — just imagine the satisfaction in that.

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Ginger Carrot Cake aka Sunset Cake

1. Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius, or 375 Fahrenheit.

2. Add 1.5 cups of flour w 1tsp of baking soda and a pinch of salt to a sieve over a mixing bowl and sift.

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As I write this, I’m sitting on a bright orange sofa in a distinctly 1970’s sunken living room. My partner is putting our two-year-old to bed. I look out the window of our new house, a furnished rental near a village we’d only ever been to on vacation, onto an entirely new view. I don’t see any other houses, just the canopies of trees that open up to where you can sometimes see the sea. I’ve re-read and re-written these words too many times, impossibly embarrassed by their earnestness. Yet here they are. Not perfect, but done.

Since I started my company Gil Rodriguez in 2018, I’ve had a complex relationship with being visible online. Gil began really small, and I was deeply grateful for the visibility and growth we were able to achieve thanks to pre-algorithmic Instagram. As the business grew, I felt a responsibility to represent it, and to protect its reputation. But to be honest, I didn’t feel like being “the face” of anything. I was burnt out, and running the business was brutally unglamorous behind the scenes. That, combined with my natural tendency towards introversion and anxiety — and behold, the dreaded social media paralysis I’m sure many founders know well.

It wasn’t just the internet that felt less safe. I was living in Los Angeles. If Instagram is the movie, LA is the theme park. The self-imposed pressure to be visible, but not known, wasn’t conscious. Only when I physically removed myself from the city and its social circles did it become obvious. I don’t see any other houses. Armed with this newfound space and my new-girl-in-town anonymity, I shed my paralyzing self-consciousness (ok, WIP) and found myself writing a lot. All that said, I am at once terrified and exhilarated to be here on Substack.

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This space — Slow Times — is where I’ll share weekly findings and explorations: from essays to practical resources, to recipes and inspiration, on topics like business, motherhood, aging, friendship, and style. You might find the occasional product recommendation, but this isn’t a shopping newsletter. In many ways it’s about slowing down enough to find clarity and connection — untangling ourselves from compulsive consumption as a way of filling voids, keeping up, or self-soothing.

The lovely , who writes the incredible newsletter , posted this recently as I was poking around Substack, trying to muster the courage to just begin, and when I saw it, I took it as a good omen for .

For context: I’m 35 years old, an immigrant (thrice over), a Latin-American woman, a mother, a creative professional and a business owner. My three sisters and I were raised by a single mother who I now recognize to be “on the spectrum.” I started working in fashion at 15 and spent a decade at American Apparel, a company that defined that decade for better or worse (yes, that’s me in the Netflix doc, and no, they didn’t have a release for that). I’ve built a business I’m proud of without investors or a trust fund. I’ve struggled with anxiety, PTSD, and postpartum depression, and have (mostly) managed to approach them with curiosity and compassion. I’m also a deeply curious person, who tries to meet life with not just self-awareness but self-accountability, knowing I’ll sometimes fail. These experiences and identities inform what I’ll share here.

I recently moved (three times in six months), and if you have ever moved, you know that I am now dead. That, along with the state of the world, a toddler who hates change, and my own anxious tendencies, and some days I feel as though I’ve been quietly lobotomized. My answer, for now — is diving.

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I’ve been scared of diving my whole life — something about throwing myself headfirst feels counter to my survival. But with a pool outside for the first time, and in the name of neuroplasticity, I’ve been practicing. I even started filming myself, correcting, trying again. It’s clumsy, humbling, and surprisingly liberating to be a beginner at anything as an adult. Practicing diving headfirst has come to feel like a symbol of everything this year has asked of me, and a reminder of the tools, courage, and humility I’m finding in the process.

My hope is that Slow Times can feel like that for you too: permission to step off the hamster wheel and try something different — something that might open a door you might not have known you were looking for.

And perhaps most importantly, I’d love for this to be a conversation. If something here resonates — or stirs a memory, question, suggestion, or challenge — I’d love to hear from you.

Welcome to Slow Times. I’m really glad you’re here.

x Eliana