In today’s issue: why do adults with nice apartments suddenly need a signature cocktail to invite their friends over?

Let's just say it: somewhere between the last recession and our first six-figure job, we traded the folding chair for a flatware rental. And nobody voted on this. It just happened. Quietly. Like inflation, or getting really into avocado oil.

the cookout didn't disappear. it got a rebrand, a publicist, and a Pinterest board.

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You know the dinner party. Handwritten place cards. A signature cocktail with a name, like it's a person, like it has a personality (it does not, it's tequila and something pink). Someone's cooking a thing they saw on a reel and narrating it like it's a TED Talk. Everyone brought a $40 candle instead of a $12 side dish, because apparently we don't do casseroles anymore, we do "ambiance." It's beautiful. It's curated within an inch of its life. And it costs somebody about $600 they will not be mentioning out loud, they will simply post the tablescape and let God sort it out.

The cookout was never trying to be beautiful. It was trying to be full. Full driveway, full cooler, full house, somebody’s uncle three drinks deep on aux before the first plate’s made. Nobody RSVP’d. Nobody coordinated a color palette. You showed up because you were family, or you were about to be, and there was always enough, because “enough” wasn’t the goal, “everybody” was.

here’s the part nobody wants to say: the shift wasn’t really about taste. it was about square footage, and shame.

We moved into apartments too small to hold thirty people and a cooler, so we scaled down to eight people and a tasting menu, and then we called it “elevated”. We got embarrassed by the paper plates our mamas used to swear by, so we bought the stoneware. We stopped asking people to “bring something” because it started to feel like we couldn’t afford to host, so we just... hosted less, prettier, for fewer people, and told ourselves it was about intimacy.

It’s not that the dinner party is fake. It’s that it’s cosplay for people who used to have backyards and now have a really nice coffee table instead.

And look, I love a tablescape.

the problem isn't that we made the cookout prettier. the problem is that somewhere along the way, we started believing prettier meant better.

I am not above a signature cocktail, I will absolutely let you name it after me. But I think we owe it to ourselves to be honest about what happened here: we didn't evolve past the cookout like it was a phase, like braces. We got priced out of it, and then we dressed the smaller, quieter, more expensive version up as an upgrade so we wouldn't have to sit with what we actually lost. Which, side note, is a very expensive way to avoid feelings.

The cookout said: however many people show up, we’ll figure it out. The dinner party says: exactly eight, RSVP by Tuesday, we have a seating chart and yes, it's assigned, don't ask..

one leans toward community. the other leans toward content.

I want both, if I'm honest. But I'm done pretending they're the same thing in a different outfit. They're not. One was built for abundance. The other was built for whatever's left once abundance stops being an option, and it deserves better than getting mistaken for growth just because it came with a nicer candle.

So, which one are you actually hosting? And which one are you just performing?

— signed, still figuring out how to gather like I mean it

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P.S. if this made you nod, or laugh, I’d love to know. Leave a comment, send it to the friend who needs to read it, or come find me on Instagram. I read everything, and it genuinely makes my week.

〰 Aaliyah 🌸

The restaurant was too loud for the conversation we ended up having. Low light, a table too small for the number of wine glasses on it, and across from me, someone I did not particularly want to have dinner with.

I’d said yes out of obligation. The kind of yes you give when the invite comes from someone whose work you respect and whose company you’re lukewarm on, and you tell yourself an hour is survivable. I ordered the thing I always order when I’m bracing for a long night. I checked my phone once under the table, like a teenager.

And then we started talking about the actual work, and I put the phone away and didn’t pick it back up for two hours.

We disagreed on almost everything. Our senses of humor didn’t match. I don’t think either of us laughed once. If we’d met at a party with no work attached to either of our names, I don’t think we’d have traded numbers.

And yet I left that dinner sharper than I walked in.

Here's the thing nobody says out loud: we're a little too obsessed with liking the people we work with. We've been sold the idea that chemistry is a prerequisite for value, that if it doesn't feel easy, it isn't real. I think that's one of the more expensive lies "bring your whole self to work" ever told us.

you don't have to like someone to recognize them.

Which brings me to LeBron and Jordan.

I don’t know if they’d be friends. Honestly, I don’t think that’s the interesting question.

Put two people with that much ambition, that much talent, that much certainty about what greatness requires, in the same room, and friendship almost becomes beside the point. They wouldn’t need to like each other. They’d need to respect each other.

Jordan’s competitiveness reportedly bordered on cruelty, he needed enemies, real or invented, to keep the engine running. LeBron’s intensity runs differently, more collaborative on the surface, still just as unwilling to lose underneath it. Different personalities. Different methods. Same refusal to be ordinary.

That used to bother me, the idea that admiration and closeness aren’t the same currency. Now I think it’s the most useful thing anyone ever failed to tell me directly.

respect is its own kind of intimacy.

Every time I meet another phenomenal creative, I feel the internal sorting happen instantly. Is this warmth, or is this recognition? Sometimes it’s both, and that’s the rare, good room. Sometimes it’s just recognition, one driven person clocking another, understanding exactly what it costs to build at that level, without needing the relationship to be soft to make it real.

I used to think that not liking someone personally, while still respecting their work completely, meant something was broken. Now I think it just means two people are being honest about what they actually need from each other.

Jordan didn't need Pippen to be his best friend to trust him. He needed him to be excellent, reliable, and unbothered under pressure. That's not a lesser form of collaboration. It might be a more durable one, because it isn't dependent on either person's mood.

some people raise your standards. not your spirits.

LeBron and Jordan probably would have pushed each other to be better and never once wanted to get dinner together. Two of the most competitive people to ever exist, and the version of respect between them doesn't need a group chat, a birthday text, or either of them to perform closeness for the other. It just needs both of them to keep being undeniable at the thing they do.

That’s not a tragedy. That’s just what it looks like when two people who take the work seriously finally meet someone at the same frequency.

Some people are meant to be in your life. Some are meant to be in your work. Some are meant to challenge you. And every once in a while, someone gets to be all three. That’s rare.

But stop waiting for friendship to be the proof that a collaboration matters. You don’t need to like someone to build something real with them.

You just need to stop confusing the two.

More soon,
Aaliyah <3

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Ella Mai's "10,000 Hours" is playing in my headphones right now, on repeat, the way it always does when I'm trying to think. I'm at my desk, halfway through a workday, typing this instead of the deck I'm supposed to be finishing, when the lyrics finally land and turn into a question I can't shake.

Do creatives fall in love differently?

We already have a complicated relationship with time. We can avoid a project for three months and then create our best work in three sleepless days. We can meet someone and, within months, understand a part of ourselves we hadn't met before. Time matters to us, but intensity matters more. Presence matters more. I think love works the same way.

Which brought me to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule.

The idea that mastery isn't built by simply spending time on something, it requires roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

Violinists. Chess players. Athletes. Somehow that number leaked into how we think about love too, the idea that enough years, enough dinners, enough shared holidays will eventually produce depth, the way sediment eventually produces stone. I don’t think that’s quite right.

the hours were never the point.

I think intimacy was never about time logged. It was always about what you did inside the time.

I know this because my own relationship broke the model entirely and went deeper for it. My partner and I are doing long distance until I relocate to LA in a few months. From the day we met, he made one vow and has never broken it, he sees me every two weeks, no matter what. Our relationship doesn’t move in slow, evenly distributed hours the way most love stories are supposed to. It moves in intense, concentrated stretches, sometimes two or three uninterrupted weeks together, then distance, then immersion again.

I used to wonder if we were doing it wrong, if the distance meant we were missing some essential part of falling in love. Now I think we weren’t missing time. We were creating depth.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to learn, the weeks apart aren’t empty space. They’re what psychologists call an incubation period, the stretch where your brain actually processes what you’ve just lived through. Creative breakthroughs rarely happen mid-grind at the canvas, they happen in the rest after it. Our distance works the same way. It’s not a pause in the relationship, it’s the digestion of it, the solitary hours where we each go back to our own creative lives and come back to each other with something new to bring to the table.

love is a medium.

For creatives specifically, love is a medium.

A collaborative one, the kind you work in the same way you work in paint, language, or sound, except the material is another entire person, and the stakes are considerably higher than a gallery show.

Which is the glitch in Gladwell’s mythology as I understand it now. I don’t think the 10,000 hours are wrong. I think the shape of them is different for a creative. An artist doesn’t paint for twenty comfortable minutes a day for a year, she disappears into a canvas for twenty hours straight and forgets to eat, because the work isn’t draining her, it’s feeding her. That same hyper-focus applies to how we love.

We don’t need five to seven years of polite, evenly spaced dinners to accumulate our ten thousand hours. We can condense that density into a single summer, into a handful of uninterrupted weeks, because we already know how to build something enormous out of almost nothing. We do it for a living.

Which brings me to the real question underneath all of this. Depth is the point, but it isn’t the only point. The bigger question is: who are you choosing to spend those hours with in the first place?

a practice. a devotion. a life you're choosing.

Because for a creative, there are two kinds of love.

There’s the kind that feels like dragging yourself out of bed to maintain something you’re not sure you even want anymore, the kind that asks you to become smaller. It doesn’t just cost you energy, it starts to cost you your creativity.

And there’s the kind that feels like locking yourself in a studio for hours because you can’t stand to be away from what you’re building. That second kind isn’t exhausting. It’s fuel. You don’t dread it, you crave it, the way you crave the fourth hour of a project once you’ve finally found the thread that makes the whole thing work.

That’s the love creatives should be searching for. Not the love that simply logs the hours. The love that makes you want to log them. The love that doesn’t just survive your creativity but expands it, the kind that reminds you being deeply known and being deeply inspired can exist in the same place.

Find the person who does that, and the 10,000 hours stop feeling like a rule you’re fulfilling.

They become something else entirely.

A practice.

A devotion.

A life you’re choosing, again and again.

More soon,
Aaliyah <3

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I used to show up to my own dinners performing.

Not out of vanity. Out of a genuine, deeply held belief that my job as host was to keep everyone entertained. To fill every quiet moment before it had a chance to breathe. To stay in constant conversation, orbiting the table like a moon that had convinced itself it was the sun. To be the hostess with the mostest (whatever that actually means), and make sure nobody felt uncomfortable for a single second of the evening.

I thought silence was a failure I was responsible for preventing.

What I did not realize until I was sitting at the head of one of my Adobe Creator Dinners, with every single person at the table looking at me, waiting for me to say the next thing, was that I had made myself the center of an experience that was supposed to be about them.

I felt less like a host and more like a circus performer.

And the moment I noticed it I decided to do the opposite of everything I thought hosting required. Because what we think makes us a good host and what actually does are two completely different things.

here's what I've learned across years of building these tables.

1. talk about the other person way more than you talk about yourself.

Dale Carnegie said something that has never left me: you can make more friends in two months by being genuinely interested in other people than in two years trying to get people interested in you.

That is not a networking tip. That is a hosting philosophy.

The best dinner conversations I have ever been part of follow an 80/20 split. Eighty percent the other person talking. Twenty percent me listening, diving deeper, and asking the question that opens the next door. Not because I am performing active listening. Because I am actually curious and curiosity is the most magnetic quality a host can have.

My favorite follow up questions at the table:

Tell me more.

Can you go deeper on that?

Put me there… which I say when I want someone to stop summarizing an experience and actually take me inside it.

I also use what is called the FORD method when a conversation needs somewhere to go. Family. Occupation. Recreation. Dreams. Four categories that keep the conversation other-person-centered and almost always surface something surprising and real.

The quieter you are as a host the more the room opens up. The more the room opens up the more people feel genuinely seen. And people who feel genuinely seen at your table come back to it.

2. add one surprise touch.

At every Adobe Creator Dinner I host I give out AirTags.

Not just AirTags. AirTags with a card that reads: may your creativity never be lost.

This was created internally by my colleague Sydney and I have never forgotten the moment I understood why it worked so well.

A guest pulled me aside after one of the dinners and told me she loved the gift so much because she had been meaning to buy one to put in her son's backpack when he goes to school. She had been carrying that thought and we handed her the answer without knowing it.

That is what a thoughtful surprise touch does. It does not have to be expensive. It does not have to be branded. It has to be specific enough to feel considered and human enough to feel personal.

A handwritten card. A book you thought of because of something they mentioned in a previous conversation. A small object with meaning attached to it. Something that says I thought about you before you arrived and I want you to leave with something that reminds you this table was built for you specifically.

The surprise touch is the difference between an event people attend and an experience people remember.

3. let someone be the guest of honor without telling them.

There is a version of hosting where everyone at the table is treated identically. Equal attention. Equal warmth. Equal time. It feels fair. It is also, I have come to believe, a quiet failure of noticing.

Every table has a person who arrived carrying something. Grief they have not said out loud yet. A decision they are circling. A version of themselves they are trying to become and have not told anyone about because saying it makes it real. You will not know who this is when they walk in. You will feel it sometime between the appetizer and the second glass of wine, in the way they answer a question a beat too slowly, or the way their eyes hold something the rest of their face is not saying.

That person needs the table more than anyone else at it.

Give them the good chair. Ask them the question that opens instead of the one that closes. Let your eyes stay on them a half second longer when they speak, so they know, without being told, that what they said mattered enough to be received.

Nobody else at the table needs to know you did this. That is the whole point. The best hosting is not a performance of generosity everyone can see. It is a private act of attention that only one person ever feels.

Some people spend years starving for a room to notice they were hungry. You do not have to feed everyone the same thing to feed everyone well.

the thing I want you to take from this.

The circus performer version of hosting, entertaining, performing, filling every silence, keeps you at the center of an experience that was never supposed to be about you.

The real version of hosting gets you out of the way.

Your job is not to be the most interesting person in the room. Your job is to create the conditions for everyone else to be interesting. To ask the question that unlocks something. To give the gift that lands. To follow up in a way that makes someone feel like the dinner was not just a nice evening but the beginning of something real.

The best compliment I have ever received as a host was not about the food or the venue or the ambiance.

It was when someone told me they left feeling seen.

That is the whole thing.

Build tables that make people feel seen.

The rest takes care of itself.

more soon,
Aaliyah <3

P.S. The AirTag idea is not mine to take credit for. That belongs to Sydney. The best hosting detail I have ever used was someone else’s idea. Which is also a hosting lesson. Borrow what is brilliant. Give credit freely. Build together.

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8am. Iced matcha in one hand, my dog's leash in the other, half convinced I was about to talk myself into some kind of professional self sabotage.

There is a specific kind of fear that shows up right around the time you start doing something people notice.

I believe in radical honesty. So here's my fear: If I keep building this thing that is mine, the newsletter, the community, the name that exists apart from my title, what if it starts to matter more to me than the job that pays my rent? What if I build something real and it makes me want less of the thing I am supposed to want more of?

there's a version of this that I think about like a lighthouse and a ship.

For a long time I assumed my job was the ship, the vessel doing the actual work of getting me somewhere, and anything I built on the side was just decoration on the deck, nice to look at, structurally irrelevant. But a lighthouse doesn't move the ship. It doesn't row or steer or generate any forward motion at all. It just stands there, fixed, visible, telling every ship in the water where the rocks are.

That's what a personal brand does that a job title never can. It doesn't do the job for you. It just makes sure people can find you in the dark, long after the ship you're currently on has changed course, sunk, or sold to someone else.

I used to think building a name of my own meant I was quietly rehearsing my exit. That being excellent at my job and becoming known for something outside of it, were on a collision course, and eventually I would have to pick a side and disappoint someone.

Two problems with that story. One, I had already proven I could do both at once, badly at first, then less badly, then actually well. Two, the fear was never really about my employer at all. It was about me not trusting that I was allowed to be more than one thing in the same body at the same time.

What finally shifted it: I stopped measuring my worth at work by how invisible I made the rest of myself. I had been treating my job like it needed my full disappearance to prove I did great work. And treating my writing like a secret I was getting away with instead of a skill sharpening everything else I touched.

the people I admire most are not just excellent from 9 to 5.

They write. They host dinners. They mentor. They build community. They are becoming known for something, and it is not competing with their day job. It is compounding.

There's a question sitting inside almost every large company right now that nobody has answered yet. What happens when an employee builds something real on her own time, and it turns out to be valuable, not just to her, but to the company too? Most places haven't figured this out. Not because they're avoiding it. Because it's new enough that nobody's had to.

If you are scared that building something of your own makes you less committed to the job in front of you, sit with this for a second. Write down what commitment actually looked like to you before anyone told you that it meant disappearing. Then ask yourself if the version of commitment you are performing right now is one you would choose again if nobody was grading you on it.

Chances are, you already know the answer.

you do not have to shrink to prove you are serious.

That is the trap, and it is a rigged game, one built for a version of the workplace most of us do not live in anymore.

The employee entrepreneur era is not a threat to what you are building at your job. It is just what happens when someone finally lets both halves of themselves show up to the same room.

Forbes contributor Jasmine Browley wrote about this shift recently, and used a phrase I have not stopped thinking about since. She called people like me part of a rising “execu-creator” category. I will let the article make its own case, you can read it here, but the short version is this: some of the wisest moves you will ever make will look, from the outside, a little delusional. A little whimsical.

A newsletter nobody asked for. A dinner series with no clear business case. A dog walk that turns into an entire worldview before your matcha is finished.

I think about the lighthouse again. Nobody builds one because it's efficient.

You build it because eventually, someone in the dark is going to need to know exactly where you are.

Maybe that’s what a personal brand really is.

Not a spotlight.

A lighthouse.

More soon,
Aaliyah <3

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The laundry is going. I am meal prepping something I will probably not eat. My suitcase from last week is finally open on the floor (not unpacked, open) which I am counting as progress.

And somewhere in the background I am negotiating with myself about whether I can start House of Dragons before everything is done or whether I have to earn it.

I cannot earn it. I am going to watch it anyway.

But somewhere between the laundry cycle and the glass Tupperware and the suitcase that has been judging me from the corner since Thursday, something in my chest starts doing that thing.

You know the thing.

It is not quite dread. It is not quite sadness. It is this low hum of a feeling that sounds like: did I do enough this weekend and am I doing enough in general and is any of this actually working and what if I am just busy and not actually moving and I should probably respond to that email all at the same time.

Welcome to the Sunday Scaries. Except I do not think they are scaries at all.

I think they are a receipt.

what the sunday scaries are actually telling you

Here is the thing nobody says in the wellness content about Sunday anxiety: the feeling is not irrational. It is not a disorder. It is not something to meditate away or journal through or fix with a better morning routine.

It is your nervous system doing an audit.

Every Sunday evening your brain looks at the gap between where you are and where you said you would be and it sends you a bill. The anxiety is the bill. And like any bill you can either pay it, avoid it, or figure out why you keep getting charged.

Most of us avoid it. We call it self care. We call it rest. We call it the Sunday reset. And then Monday comes and the bill is still there with a late fee attached.

Monday comes and the bill is still there with a late fee attached.

the three receipts inside the sunday scaries

After years of feeling this specific feeling and finally deciding to sit with it instead of scroll through it, I have identified three distinct charges on the bill.

Receipt 1: The Productivity Receipt

This is the mound of to-do list anxiety. The things you did not finish last week. The things you added this week. The sense that you are always behind on something and the weekend did not actually give you enough time to catch up because it never does.

The framework that helps here is what I call the Three Real Things rule. Pick three. Just three. The things that would make the week feel like a win if they were the only things you accomplished. Not thirty. Three. Write everything else on a different list called Later Which Might Mean Never And That Is Okay. The Sunday Scaries around productivity almost always come from carrying a list that was never meant to be finished. You are not behind. You are over-listed.

Put some of it down, babe.

Receipt 2: The Direction Receipt

This is the deeper one. The quiet voice that sounds like: is any of this actually working or am I just really busy in the wrong direction.

You are doing the events. The newsletter. The applications. The content. The networking that feels like homework. The early mornings and the late nights and the weekends where you work even though you told yourself you would not. And it is adding up to something but you cannot see the shape of it yet and what if the shape is nothing.

That feeling is not pessimism. It is not imposter syndrome. It is your values system sending you a flag because somewhere along the way your actions and your actual desires had a falling out and nobody introduced them back to each other.

The Direction Receipt shows up when you have been optimizing for the wrong thing without realizing it. When you said you wanted freedom but you have been chasing approval. When you said you wanted to build something of your own but you have been pouring everything into someone else’s vision and calling it opportunity.

The question to ask yourself is not did I do enough this week. It is did I do the right things for the right reasons. Those are two completely different questions and only one of them will quiet the hum.

Receipt 3: The Living Receipt

Okay this one. This is the one.

Did you actually live this weekend or did you just recover from last week so you could survive next week.

Be honest. Did I bedrot and call it rest when really I’m just too depleted to be a person. Did I avoid people because I am genuinely introverted and needed solitude or because I am so depleted that human contact feels like a cost I cannot afford right now. Did I do all the chores and the meal prep and the apartment reset not because I wanted a clean home but because I am so anxious about the week ahead that controlling my environment is the only thing that makes me feel like I have any power at all.

Mmhm.

The Living Receipt is your body telling you that the life you are building is starting to cost more than the life you are actually living. You are so focused on the destination that you forgot to be a person on the way there.

And that is important information. Not a crisis. Information.

the framework I actually use

I call it the Sunday Audit in three questions.

Before the week starts I sit with these three questions. Not in a journal necessarily. Sometimes just in the quiet of my apartment with my phone face down.

One. What were the three real things I needed to do last week and did I do them. If yes the week was a success. Full stop. No asterisks. If no, why not and what does that tell me about what I am prioritizing versus what I say I am prioritizing.

Two. Does what I did this week reflect what I actually want or what I think I should want. This one requires honesty. Not the honesty you perform but the honesty you have at 7pm on a Sunday when nobody is watching.

Three. Did I live or did I just manage. Did I have one moment this weekend that had nothing to do with output, optimization, or optics. One meal that was just delicious. One laugh that was not content. One hour that did not count toward anything.

If the answer to number three is consistently no then that is not a scheduling problem. That is a values problem. And no amount of to-do list management will fix a values problem.

the thing nobody tells you about the sunday scaries

They do not go away when you get more successful.

Here is what I know to be true after too many Sundays spent cleaning apartments I already cleaned, texting back people I did not have the energy for, and lying in a bath pretending that counted as rest.

The life you want is not waiting on the other side of the to-do list. It is not waiting until you land the role, hit the number, get the feature, or finally feel ready. It is happening right now in the margins of everything you are so busy optimizing.

The Sunday Scaries are just the moments when you are quiet enough to feel the distance between the life you are living and the life you actually want.

That distance is not failure. It is the most honest thing about you.

And the bravest thing you can do with it is not hustle harder. It is sit still long enough to let it tell you something true. About what you actually want. About what you are actually building. About whether the life on the other side of the to-do list is actually the life you are trying to live.

Put the suitcase down.

The laundry can wait.

Listen to what the sunday scaries are trying to say.

If this landed, buy me a coffee 😊

More soon,

Aaliyah <3

The click-clackity-click of fresh nails on a MacBook keyboard is satisfying in a way I cannot fully explain.

The economy is doing what it does. Restructuring. Laying people off. Making everyone anxious about their next move while LinkedIn fills up with thought leaders telling you to stay positive.

I got chrome nails.

Not as a coping mechanism. Not as a distraction. As a decision. A deliberate, considered, fully intentional decision made by a woman who looked at the current economic landscape and said… yes, and also these.

My iced vanilla matcha is sweating onto the coaster. I’m drinking it on an empty stomach. Again. This is a pattern I have fully accepted about myself.

I look down at my hands mid-sentence and stop.

Chrome. Gold. Copper. Liquid metal that shifts between warm and cool depending on the light. The kind of nails that make you pause because something about them feels like a decision you already made before you fully understood it.

And for some reason looking at them made me think about the Gold Rush.

Stay with me.

1848. California. Hundreds of thousands of people migrating across impossible terrain with nothing but a rumor and an appetite for something better. No guarantee. No promise that the thing they were chasing was actually there. Just the decision, made in the middle of uncertainty, with everything on the line, that the window was open and they were going to move through it before it closed.

Most of them did not strike gold.

But some of them built entire lives in the trying.

And today’s economy feels eerily similar to me.

Not because there is gold in the hills. Because there is the same energy. The same mass reckoning with systems that no longer hold. The same question sitting in every industry, every room, every Slack channel right now:

What are we building instead?

That question is not historical. It is happening right now in your industry, your company, your career.

I have been watching the economy reshape itself in real time.

Layoffs. Restructuring. The slow erosion of traditional career paths that people spent decades building toward. I have sat in rooms where budgets get cut and roles get eliminated and genuinely talented people are left standing there figuring out what comes next without a warning.

And what I keep seeing in those moments is not collapse.

It is reconfiguration.

The people navigating this economy best are not the ones waiting for stability to return. They are the ones who stopped letting institutions define their value and started building something portable instead. A personal brand. A body of work. A community that follows them regardless of what their title says this quarter.

The people who understand that are not panicking.

They are building.

I am optimistic about this economy. But not naively so.

I built an event space with no investors and no safety net. I grew a newsletter to thousands of readers while working a full time corporate job. I have done this while exhausted. While uncertain. While sitting in corporate rooms that questioned the value of the exact thing I was building outside of them.

I have watched creators and entrepreneurs I admire build entire ecosystems in the middle of economic anxiety, and not because the conditions were perfect but because they decided the uncertainty was not a reason to wait. It was a reason to move.

The window to build has never been more open for people who understand that the old ladders are unstable and decide to build their own infrastructure instead.

That is not pessimism about the economy.

That is the most optimistic reframe I know.

Uncertainty is not the obstacle. For the right people it is the invitation.

Which brings me back to the nails.

Every month I make a deliberate choice about what my hands are going to say before I open my mouth. What energy I am walking into rooms with. What version of myself I am building toward right now.

This month I chose chrome.

Not because it is trending. Because it looks like someone who has already decided. Someone who is not waiting for external validation to confirm what she already knows internally.

In an economy that is asking everyone to hustle harder, optimize faster, and prove their value before the next restructuring, the most radical thing you can do is take deliberate care of yourself anyway.

The nail appointment is not separate from the ambition. It is part of it. The deliberate choice to show up for yourself, in the small ways, in the recurring monthly ways, in the ways that nobody puts on a performance review. It is the same muscle you use to build something real when the conditions are uncertain.

That is exactly what this economy requires. Not certainty. Not perfect conditions. Not some future moment when everything lines up and the risk disappears.

Just the decision. Made deliberately.

The nails are a small thing. I know that. But the small things add up to a person.

The Gold Rush folks who built something did not wait for certainty.

They moved.

And so should you.

More soon,

Aaliyah <3

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My boyfriend bought us tickets to see Jay-Z.

Night three. Extra Innings.

And before I tell you what happened, you should know one thing about me.

I’m an event producer.

Which means I have an occupational hazard. I can’t just attend experiences anymore. I reverse-engineer them.

I notice the registration flow before I notice the décor. I count exits without realizing I’m doing it. I watch how crowds move. I wonder where the medics are stationed. I clock whether the A/V team hits transitions on time. Somewhere between loving events and building them for a living, I lost the ability to simply be a guest.

Most of the time it’s annoying.

But at this concert it felt necessary.

My man, meanwhile, was exactly where he was supposed to be. Excited.

This wasn’t just another concert for millennials. It was Jay-Z. And if you took a moment to look around at the thousands of people in attendance, you saw it everywhere. Couples. Families. Friends who had flown across the country to take in this legendary moment. People who had planned around this night for months.

It was supposed to be unforgettable.

It was.

Just not for the reasons anyone expected.

We arrived at Gate 4 with tickets in hand and the naive confidence of two people who had absolutely no idea they were about to spend the next three hours trapped outside Yankee Stadium with thousands of other ticket holders going nowhere.

Apparently, people without tickets rushed the gates.

The stadium responded by shutting everything down.

Every entrance.

Every gate.

No way in.

No way out.

Just thousands of people compressed into a space that was never designed to hold them at a standstill while the temperature climbed and the anxiety spread and the NYPD and stadium staff stood around looking as prepared for this situation as I am prepared to pilot a commercial aircraft. Which is to say, not at all.

This is the moment I stopped being an attendee. I became an event producer again. Because what I was looking at wasn’t just an inconvenience.

It was invisible infrastructure failing in real time.

People think experiences succeed because of what happens on stage.

Most of the time they succeed because of everything that happens before anyone gets there.

Nobody buys a ticket because they love queue management. Nobody leaves saying, “The gate staffing was phenomenal.”

That’s the point. Infrastructure is invisible until it fails. When it fails, it becomes the entire experience. People fainted. Some were pregnant. Some had young children.

When people needed medical attention, there was no medic to push through thousands of compressed bodies in order to reach them.

In a crowd that dense, every minute matters. Then there was the silence.

The people inside the stadium had no idea there were thousands of ticket holders trapped outside. The people outside had no information, no updates, no communication from stadium staff about what was occurring or when it would be resolved. We were standing in a crowd of thousands with no updates, no visibility, no direction. Nothing.

And that’s when I kept thinking the same sentence over and over again.

Information is crowd control.

There are solutions for this. Mass text alerts to ticket holders with real time updates. PA announcements at each gate. A dedicated communications team whose only job during an incident is to keep people informed. None of this is revolutionary. All of it was missing.

Jay-Z eventually walked on stage around 12:32 a.m Monday morning.

The show had been scheduled to begin around 9 p.m Sunday evening.

He didn’t open with a song. He opened with an apology and an acknowledgment..

He said he needed to make sure his people were safe. He thanked the crowd for their patience and their time. He took accountability, fully and publicly, for a situation that had multiple hands involved and multiple points of failure that extended well beyond his control.

That accountability was necessary. And it was big of him to offer it without deflection. But I want to be honest about something.

By the time the show had started the morale was significantly damaged. Three to four hours of heat, anxiety, no communication, and genuine fear does something to a crowd’s spirit that an apology — however sincere — does not fully repair. The energy in that building carried the weight of what happened outside it.

Here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

This was night three. By night three, surprises shouldn’t exist. You have two full nights of data.

You know arrival patterns. You know staffing needs. You know which entrances bottleneck. You know where people linger. You know how your crowd moves.

And yet Gate 4 had one entrance operating. One metal detector. One staff member directing thousands of people while NYPD officers stood nearby looking just as uncertain as everyone else.

During a Yankees game, every entrance is open.

The infrastructure exists. The venue already knows how to move crowds efficiently. So why wasn’t that same standard applied here? I think about whether this would have happened at a Taylor Swift concert.

I don’t know the answer. But I haven’t stopped thinking about the question.

If I had been producing this event, here’s where I would have started.

As someone who has spent years thinking about the gap between what an experience looks like on paper and what it feels like when 44,000 people are actually inside it, none of these solutions are particularly revolutionary. They’re the fundamentals.

Open every door.

With working metal detectors and ample staff at each entrance. This is not a revolutionary idea. This is baseball game infrastructure applied to a concert. The stadium knows how to do this. The decision not to do it, or the failure to require it, is what created the conditions for everything that followed.

Build a real contingency plan.

Not for if things go wrong. For when. Trouble starters, line skippers, crowd surges, these are foreseeable. Plan for them before the first person arrives not after the first incident occurs.

Put medics where the risk actually is.

The people who need medical attention are not inside having the time of their lives. They are outside in the heat, compressed against gates that aren’t moving. Proximity to the problem is the whole point.

Establish a mass communication protocol for incidents.

Real time text alerts to ticket holders. PA announcements at every gate. A dedicated team whose only job during a crowd incident is to keep people informed in real time. Information is crowd control. The absence of it is how panic starts.

Bombard ticket holders with arrival time communications before the event.

Not one email. Not one text. Bombard. Because people routinely ignore things until they cannot ignore them anymore. And because many people at this show flew in from out of town and had no reason to understand the realities of entering a packed stadium in the Bronx. Good event producers know that guests don’t share their context. It’s our job to give it to them.

If I were on Jay Z’s team right now I would be on the phone with Yankee Stadium disputing every fee and every charge because the venue failed to deliver the infrastructure this show required. The artist delivered. The infrastructure didn’t.

Remember: Guests never experience your run of show. They experience your decisions.

Jay Z, if someone on your team happens to read this, I want to offer something more useful than criticism.

A suggestion. From one event producer to the greatest rapper alive.

Announce a surprise show for the Extra Innings crowd.

Not a discounted ticket. Not a presale code. A free show. A makeup night. A moment that says: I know what happened. I know what it cost you. And I am going to make it right in a way you did not expect.

It gives Yankee Stadium the opportunity to do what should have done the first time, under proper oversight. Real oversight. The kind that ensures every door is open, every gate is staffed, every medic is positioned before the first fan arrives, and every ticket holder receives real time communication from the moment they leave their house to the moment they are in their seat.

Because the story does not have to end at Gate 4 in the heat at midnight. It can end with the show they actually came for. Produced correctly. Staffed properly. With the infrastructure that 44,000 people deserved from the beginning.

I’ve spent my career building experiences where people feel seen, safe, and genuinely cared for.

That’s why this night stayed with me.

Not because it was a Jay-Z concert. But because I know how extraordinary Jay-Z is, and how this night could have been.

And I hope the next version of this story is remembered for the comeback, not the collapse.

Until the next room,
Aaliyah ♡

P.S. to the people who stood outside and chose patience over panic, I see you. we didn't come to build community that night. but for a few hours, strangers looked out for one another. sometimes the best part of an experience is the unexpected community beside you. one.

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I’ve been rewatching Insecure lately. Specifically seasons four and five, which, to me, is when the show really settled into itself.

Insecure was special to the Black community for a lot of reasons. The score was immaculate, shoutout to Raphael Saadiq for doing the Lord’s work. The drone shots of LA were always gorgeous. And maybe most importantly, it gave us an awkward Black woman on screen who hadn’t quite figured it out yet. A woman who felt behind, a little messy, maybe a little embarrassed by how long it was taking, and was still worthy of a beautiful life anyway.

I especially love seasons four and five, when Issa starts The Blocc, calls herself a “cultural curator,” and begins building events that feel rooted in Black LA and the people inside it. Watching those episodes this time around, I realized I was less interested in the plot than I was in the possibility of it all. The idea of building something that gathers people. Something stylish and warm and deeply yours.

I’ve also been home this past week for company shutdown, which, if you’ve never had one, is basically seven days of pretending you don’t have a job and remembering life is actually kind of gorgeous when nobody needs a deck or a “quick sync” by EOD.

Shutdown gave me exactly what I needed. Time to regulate my nervous system. I drank orange wine at noon. I slept so much I briefly became someone who naps in the middle of the day. I regulated. I exhaled. It was lovely. Suspiciously lovely.

But somewhere between doing absolutely nothing and rewatching Insecure for the fifth time, I started feeling that familiar itch to start something new. The problem was I had no idea what the thing actually was.

I just knew I wanted to get my cultural curator on a little bit.

At first, I thought maybe a book club. That felt obvious. I love books. I’m constantly recommending them to friends, strangers, and anyone who makes eye contact too long. And book clubs are clearly having a moment right now. Or maybe a dinner series, because obviously I love food, a beautiful table, and a reason to gather. But I know enough people already doing beautiful dinners beautifully (shameless plug to my girl Courtnee and her very chic Brown Butter Supper Club). And I didn’t want to borrow someone else's lane when I could just build my own.

Then shutdown rolled right into Fourth of July weekend.

And if you’re Black, you know the Fourth has very little to do with America and everything to do with cookouts, fireworks, and the kind of joy that requires a folding chair and somebody's uncle on aux. My boyfriend and I were sitting in the living room. Staring out at the LA skyline. Twiddling our thumbs. Realizing we had nowhere to go. No cookout. No backyard function. No home we knew was opening its doors to a room full of people laughing, drinking, eating, talking too loud, and celebrating life the way it felt like people used to when we were growing up.

And I really missed that.

I can name a few reasons why our generation doesn’t gather like that as much anymore, and most of them are deeply unsexy. Square footage. The economy. A lot of us live in beautiful apartments, high-rises, penthouses, whatever — but not actual homes with backyards and room for thirty people plus a cooler. And hosting well is expensive. Food, drinks, music, ambiance, all of it adds up fast. Especially if you’re like me and don’t love the idea of texting the group chat, can everyone bring something? At that point, it starts to feel less like hosting and more like coordinating a potluck, which kind of kills the fantasy.

So yes, I get it. I get why things are the way they are. But it still left me feeling weirdly empty.

And then it hit me: if I were going to start anything, it would be this…

Not a dinner series. Not a book club. A home. A community. A standing invitation. A kickback for beautiful people to eat, drink, laugh, celebrate life, and know they have somewhere to go on the holidays. Fourth of July. Friendsgiving. Cinco de Mayo. Whatever the calendar offers as an excuse to gather, we gather.

The kind of thing that feels warm and easy and alive. Food, love, and good company absolutely included.

Basically, if the cookout doesn’t exist, I might just have to host it myself.

I think I want to build the kind of gathering I was looking for this weekend and couldn’t find. For now, it’s just a thought. But it’s one I can’t stop thinking about. And if you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

Until I host the function myself,
Aaliyah

I have a great job. I also have a very active imagination.

Welcome to “If I Built It,” a series where I take a brand, a brief, or a role that sparks something in me and show you exactly how I think. No applications. No agenda. Just the kind of strategic dreaming that keeps a creative person sane.

First up: Alo.

Director of Experiential and Partnerships. Beverly Hills. The person who decides how one of the most visually iconic wellness brands shows up in the world. Not on a feed, but in a room. At a table. In a hotel in Mykonos. I think about things like this every day in my current role.

Here’s what I’d do with that seat.

Because the brands winning right now aren’t the loudest. They’re the most felt.

Alo already has the product, the aesthetic, and the cultural cachet. What the Director of Experiential role is really asking is: how do we make people feel the brand instead of just see it? That’s not a marketing question. That’s a hospitality question. A cultural fluency question. A taste question.

And I have thoughts…

The Vision. Five moves I’d make:

01 — The Alo Residency

Quarterly, city-specific “residencies” at boutique hotels in key markets. I’m talking Paris, Seoul, São Paulo. Not a pop-up. Not a booth. A full takeover: co-branded programming, curated movement experiences at sunrise, and intimate dinners for 12 tastemakers at sunset. The kind of thing people remember as a feeling, not a campaign. You leave knowing what Alo smells like, sounds like, feels like at 7am in another country. That's the product.

02 — Culture walks through the door

Imagine this: Gunna and his girlfriend Briana Monique lead a Pilates class at an Alo studio. Open to a curated group. No press release. Just two people who actually live the lifestyle. Moving, laughing, sweating, inside a brand that fits their world naturally. That moment travels. Not because it was staged, but because it was real. This is the move I’d make over and over: identify the cultural figures who already exist at the intersection of fashion, wellness, and culture, and build experiences around their actual lives. I would ensure the brand doesn’t chase culture. It creates the conditions for culture to show up.

03 — A global insight loop

Every market is different. What lands in Los Angeles falls flat in London, or reads wrong in Tokyo. I’d build a standing network of on-the-ground cultural correspondents. Stylists, editors, studio owners, community builders, in Europe and Asia feeding real trend intelligence back in real time. Not six months after the moment has already passed us by.

04 — The partner ecosystem, rebuilt from taste

I’d audit every existing partnership through one question: does this feel like us, or does it feel like a logo trade? The only partnerships worth keeping, and building, are with institutions that carry their own cultural authority. Think art foundations, independent film festivals, culinary collectives, architecture studios. Not because it's trendy, but because the Alo woman has 37 tabs open and she notices when a brand doesn’t get it.

05 — The mist but make it relevant

Alo Beauty just entered the mist moment with the Hypochlorous Clarity Mist. A $32 post-workout skin barrier play that is perfectly timed for where skincare culture is going. HOCl is having its SkinTok era, and Alo is positioned to own the post-sweat ritual in a way no other wellness brand can. In my world, this product isn't just a SKU, it's an experiential anchor. Every residency, every studio moment, every cultural activation ends with someone misting their face, catching their breath, and feeling like they just did something good for themselves. That's the full loop: movement, community, recovery. Studio to skin. That's Alo.

I saw a job posting this week that made me close my laptop, stare at the ceiling, and start planning an entire department in my head.

And here’s what I know about the person reading this: you’re not just consuming content. You’re studying it. You’re clocking which brands get it and which ones are performing. You understand, on a cellular level, that the most powerful marketing never feels like marketing at all.

That’s what I want to build. And I think Alo is exactly the right home for it.

Now tell me, what’s the seat at the table you’ve been quietly designing yourself for? I want to know.

Now go build something,

Aaliyah 🫶🏽

Delta broke my suitcase.

In first class. Which feels important to mention not because first class makes the loss more significant but because there is something specifically insulting about having your luggage destroyed while you are sitting in the front of the plane drinking a warm mimosa and thinking everything is fine.

Everything was not fine.

I got home. Went to unpack. And discovered the zipper was gone. Not broken. Not stuck. Gone. Completely missing. As in, I had to open my suitcase with a butter knife. Standing in my kitchen at whatever hour it was after a flight, using a butter knife to pry open my own luggage like some kind of extremely well-dressed hostage situation.

I called Delta with the quiet confidence of someone who assumed this would be resolved quickly and professionally. It was not resolved quickly or professionally.

Apparently there is a rule. You have to report damaged luggage at the airport before you leave. I did not know this rule because I did not know my suitcase was broken until I was already home hacking it open with a butter knife.

Delta said no.

I said nothing for a moment.

And then I went and bought a RIMOWA.

Specifically the black trunk.

You could call it retail therapy. You could call it a dramatic response to a luggage dispute. You could call it a lot of things.

I call it having a point of view.

Here is what I want to tell you about how I shop.

I don’t shop for need. I don’t shop for trend. I don’t even shop for the version of me that exists right now on a random Tuesday doing regular things in a regular life.

I shop for the version of me that lights up.

The one who walks into a hotel room and rolls the black trunk into the corner and the whole room suddenly looks like it belongs to someone who knew exactly what she was doing when she packed it. The one who moves through airports with the specific energy of a person who has somewhere important to be and already knows it before she gets there.

My cart is not a wish list.

My cart is a creative brief.

There is a specific kind of person who understands this.

The girls who clock the aluminum finish and not just the brand. The gays who understand why the color matters, because color is not just a preference, it is a statement. A signal. A quiet declaration of taste sent across a room to find its people.

And my inner twelve year old.

The one who thought a suitcase was a portal.

She grew up somewhere that did not have many portals. Travel was a concept that happened to other people. In movies. In magazines. In the kind of families whose vacations were documented in photo albums instead of just memories. A suitcase meant somewhere. It meant chosen. It meant the world was large enough to need something to carry your things across it.

I bought the black trunk for her too.

For the girl who watched other people go places and quietly decided she would be someone who went places. Who didn’t know yet exactly where but knew it would require the right luggage.

She was right.

Delta inadvertently confirmed it.

Shopping as a practice gets dismissed constantly. Framed as vanity. As consumption. As the least serious thing a serious person could be interested in.

I disagree. Completely. Without apology.

Shopping, real shopping, intentional shopping, the kind where you stand in front of something and feel your entire nervous system either respond or go quiet, is one of the most honest creative practices available to us.

Every object you choose is a decision about who you are. What you value. What version of yourself you are building toward. The finish you notice when nobody told you to look for it. The color that matters to you for reasons you can’t fully articulate but feel completely. The thing you buy not because it’s practical but because it makes you feel like yourself in a way that practical things rarely do.

Your cart is a point of view.

And a point of view is the most valuable thing you can have in a world drowning in options and short on perspective.

The black trunk is sitting in my room right now.

I have not taken it anywhere yet.

But every time I walk past it I feel something. Not pride exactly. Not possession exactly. Something more specific than both of those things.

Confirmation.

That the version of me who knew what she wanted before she could afford it was right all along. That the twelve year old with the portal theory was onto something. That taste is not a luxury. It is a language. And the objects you choose are the sentences you are always quietly writing about yourself whether you mean to or not.

Shop for the version of you that lights up.

She already knows what she wants.

Trust her.

And if Delta breaks your suitcase on the way there, let it be the excuse you needed to upgrade.

More soon,
Aaliyah 🤍

P.S. Delta I would still like my reimbursement. But also thank you. The trunk is everything.

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Bear with me for a second.

You may have noticed something looks a little different around here. The name at the top says The Cultural but the logo still says The Intersection. I know. I see it. I am living inside the contradiction in real time and I cannot decide if it’s a mess or a metaphor.

Probably both.

Here is the truth.

I named this newsletter The Intersection before I fully understood what I was building. I found a Wendell Pierce quote that stopped me completely:

Culture is the intersection of people and life itself. It’s how we deal with life, love, death, birth, disappointment... all of that is expressed in culture.

And I thought, that’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s what I want this newsletter to be. The place where life and people and culture collide. The crossroads. The intersection.

I still believe that. I will always believe that.

But something has been pulling at me lately. Something I can’t quite shake.

The Intersection was a name I borrowed from someone else’s words to describe what I was building.

The Cultural is a name that came from inside me. Completely. No quote needed. No reference required. Just, the word. My word. The one that lives at the center of everything I think about, write about, build toward, and believe in.

Culture. Not as an aesthetic. Not as a trend. As a living breathing thing. The way people move through the world. The way joy and grief and ambition and love and exhaustion all get expressed in the things we make and say and do and wear and build and share.

That is what this newsletter has always been about. And The Cultural says it… fully, specifically, completely, in a way that feels less like a description and more like a declaration.

When I say The Intersection I am telling you where things meet.

When I say The Cultural I am telling you what I am.

And here is where I need you 👀

Because I could make this decision alone. I could wake up one morning and just decide. Change the logo. Update the header. Move on.

But that is not how I want to run this newsletter. This has never been a broadcast. It has always been a conversation. And this particular conversation feels too important to have without you.

You have been reading this. Some of you since the beginning. Some of you since the brand deal newsletter cracked something open. Some of you since the therapy letter. Some of you since last Sunday.

You know what this newsletter is. You know what it feels like when it lands in your inbox. You know better than anyone whether the name matches the thing.

So I am asking.

The case for keeping The Intersection:

It has history. It has the Wendell Pierce quote behind it. It says something true about what this newsletter does… it lives at the crossroads of life, people, and culture. It has momentum. Some of you found me because of that name. It would feel like leaving something behind to change it.

The case for becoming The Cultural:

It is entirely mine. No quote borrowed. No reference needed. It is specific in a way that The Intersection — beautiful as it is — is not. It says exactly what I care about and exactly what you can expect when you open this every Sunday. It sounds like something. It sounds like me.

And honestly? It has a ring to it that I cannot stop hearing.

I need you to weigh in.

Not to be diplomatic. Not to tell me what you think I want to hear. Genuinely, which name makes you want to open the email. Which one feels like the newsletter you’ve been reading. Which one sounds like something worth subscribing to.

Take the poll below. It will take ten seconds. And whatever you decide collectively will genuinely influence what I do next.

This newsletter has always been ours.

Help me name it.

And yes, the logo is still catching up. We’re all figuring it out together.

More soon,

Aaliyah

P.S. The fact that I am asking my readers to name my newsletter is either the most on brand thing thing I have ever done or a sign that I genuinely cannot make decisions without community input. Probably both. I contain multitudes. You know this about me by now.

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I saw a Substack note recently that said “my board of directors:” followed by a grid of women the person had never met.

I saved it immediately because I knew exactly what they meant.

We don’t talk enough about the women we build ourselves around without their permission. The ones who never shook your hand but somehow shaped the way you walk into a room. The ones whose interviews you’ve watched at 2am like they were sending you a message specifically. The ones you screenshot, study, and silently say yes, that to when nobody is watching.

I have a board of directors like that.

They don’t know my name. We’ve never been in the same room. And they have absolutely changed the trajectory of my life.

Here’s mine, and why they have a permanent seat at my table.

Solange — The one who taught me that art is an argument.

Solange has spent her entire career refusing to be the version of herself that was easiest to market. She makes music that doesn’t chase you. She builds visual worlds that ask something of you. She shows up in white silk and quiet fury and dares the room to keep up. She taught me that the most powerful creative choice you can make is to stop making things for everyone. To make something so specific and so true that the right people feel it in their chest. She taught me that legacy isn’t built by being palatable. It’s built by being precise.

Tracee Ellis Ross — The one who taught me that joy is a power move.

Nobody talks about how radical it is to be a Black woman who is openly, unapologetically joyful in public. Tracee moves through the world like she invented the concept of a good time and she wants you to have one too. The bomber jacket. The wide leg denim. The way she walks down a street like it’s already hers. She taught me that softness isn’t weakness and that a woman who laughs loudly and dresses boldly and takes up space without apology is doing something deeply intentional. She taught me that delight is a discipline.

Kelly Wearstler — The one who taught me that vision is a full body commitment.

Head to toe in her own color. Sitting on her own furniture. Inside her own world. Kelly Wearstler doesn’t just design spaces — she inhabits a point of view so completely that everything around her becomes an extension of it. She taught me what it looks like when someone has fully committed to their own aesthetic and refused to negotiate it down for anyone. She taught me that having taste isn’t enough. You have to be willing to live inside it completely. That’s the difference between having an eye and having a world.

Lauren London — The one who taught me that grace is its own kind of strength.

Lauren London has shown the world what it looks like to carry something heavy with dignity. She moves through public life with a quietness that isn’t absence — it’s intention. She protects what matters. She shows up fully when she chooses to and disappears when she needs to. She taught me that you don’t owe the world your grief, your process, or your healing on their timeline. She taught me that a woman who knows what she’s protecting and why is one of the most powerful things you will ever witness.

Rihanna — The one who taught me that the standard is whatever you decide it is.

Rihanna built a beauty empire by deciding that the industry’s existing standard was simply not her problem to inherit. Fenty Beauty didn’t disrupt the industry — it embarrassed it. And she did it while the music industry was holding its breath waiting for her next album like she owed them something.

She didn’t.

She decided she was done making music when she felt like it. No farewell tour. No apology. No explanation. She just pivoted — into fashion, into beauty, into motherhood — all on her own timeline, her own terms, in her own order. Without asking anyone if it was the right move or the right time. Rihanna taught me that the most radical thing a woman can do is decide, that her timeline is the only one that applies. That her standard is the one that matters. That the room will adjust.

My board of directors has never met me.

They don’t know they’re on it.

But I show up differently because of them — in rooms, in emails, in the way I hold my shoulders when I walk into spaces that weren’t built for me.

That’s the thing about women who move with intention. They teach you without trying. They give you a standard to hold yourself to without ever handing it to you directly.

Build your board.

Study them quietly.

Show up like they taught you something.

Because they did.

Who's on your board? Reply and tell me. I actually want to know.

More soon,

— Aaliyah

^{P.S. This piece was inspired by a note I saw from Mya over at Narrative Design Club on Substack.}

“Please don’t make me,” I moan through the hands covering my face.

“Aaliyah.” My PR Lindsey's voice comes through the speakerphone with the specific patience of someone who has had this exact conversation with me before and fully intends to win it again. "Your career isn't just what you produce. It's also keeping your name in front of the right people. This event is a great networking opportunity.”

"I hate networking." I sit up in my bed and rest my shoulders against the headboard, glaring at the phone on the duvet like it personally betrayed me. "I don't feel like peopling."

There is a long pause.

“Aaliyah.”

“Fine.”

I went.

Obviously I went. Because my PR has the specific kind of patience that functions as a deadline and I have learned not to argue with it past a certain point.

It was a mixer. Tech professionals. Creative adjacent people. A room that was — let me be honest — mostly white, mostly industry, mostly the kind of event where everyone is simultaneously trying to seem like they’re not trying. I walked in already exhausted by the performance of it. Already calculating how long I had to stay before I could leave with dignity intact.

And then I met a writer.

Not just any writer. A writer from the exact publication I had been quietly, persistently, trying to find my way into for months. She was standing slightly outside the main cluster of people. We started talking. Something real happened in the conversation. By the time I left I had her contact information and a follow up scheduled.

I almost didn’t go.

Let that sit for a second.

Here is the question I want to ask you before we go any further.

How socially active are you?

And before you answer, I am not asking about your posting schedule. I am not asking how many times a week you show up on Instagram or LinkedIn or how many impressions your last carousel got. I am not asking about your follower count or your engagement rate or whether the algorithm is currently in your favor.

I am asking about your actual social life. The one that exists in rooms. In conversations. In the relationships that get built in the margins of events you almost didn’t attend.

Because here is what I’ve noticed about creatives and professionals who are building something real, and I mean really building, not just performing building online:

They are socially active in both directions. Online and offline. Digital and physical. In the feed and in the room.

And the ones who are only socially active in one direction are leaving so much on the table it should be illegal.

Tip 1: One real conversation will always beat twenty forgettable ones.

There is a reason you leave most networking events feeling emptier than when you arrived.

You performed. You collected. You worked the room like it was a job and left with a handful of business cards and absolutely nothing that felt like connection. And somewhere on the drive home you wondered why you even went.

Here is what I want you to understand. You were not built for breadth. You were built for depth. And depth, cannot happen in twenty conversations. But it can happen in one.

The most valuable thing that happened at that mixer was not meeting everyone in the room. It was meeting one writer from one publication at exactly the right moment. One real conversation that actually landed. One exchange where something true passed between two people who were both present enough to receive it.

That is what being socially active actually means. Not volume. Not reach. How many conversations have you had recently where both people left changed?

Start there. That is the only number that matters.

Tip 2: Scan differently than everyone else.

I walked into that mixer as a Black woman in a room that was predominantly white and predominantly tech adjacent. I want to name that directly because pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t make it easier to navigate.

Here is what years of walking into rooms that weren’t built for you actually develops. A sensitivity. A radar. The ability to read a space in ten seconds and know exactly what’s performing and what’s real. You know how to scan for energy, for authenticity, for the people who are actually present versus the ones running a script.

Most people in that room do not have this.

You do.

Use it. Online and off.

In a physical room, scan for the person standing slightly outside the main cluster. They are almost always the most interesting one there.

In a digital room, stop chasing the verified accounts and the high follower counts. Start noticing the person whose comment stops you mid-scroll. The one asking the real question in the replies when everyone else is performing agreement. The one whose work keeps finding you even though the algorithm never prioritizes them.

Being socially active means being awake to what the room is actually offering. Not what it's advertising.

Tip 3: Show up thirsty for understanding. Not thirsty for opportunity.

Here is the honest diagnosis of why networking feels like a spiritual violation to most people.

Everyone arrives hungry. For something. For the contact, the connection, the introduction, the opportunity. And hunger without generosity is just appetite. People can feel it.

You have felt it too. You know exactly what I mean.

So flip the entire equation.

What if you walked into the room — online or in person — not to be seen but to see. Not to be known but to know. Not to find someone useful but to find someone interesting. What if your only agenda was genuine curiosity about what the person in front of you is actually building, thinking, feeling, struggling with.

The writer I met that night did not become a connection because I pitched myself. She became one because something real passed between us first. I asked her something I genuinely wanted to know. She answered honestly. She asked me something back. And before either of us realized what was happening we were in a real conversation instead of a networking conversation.

That is not a strategy. That is a frequency.

Being socially active at the highest level means showing up on the right frequency. Curious. Present. Genuinely interested in the person in front of you before you are interested in what they can do for you.

The opportunity will follow.

It always follows the genuine thing.

So let me ask you again.

How socially active are you?

Not on the grid. Not in the metrics. Not in the number that appears beside your name on a platform that will change its algorithm three times before the end of the year and bury everything you built overnight.

I mean in the places that actually count.

How many real conversations have you had this month where both people left different than they arrived.

Because here is what I need you to understand.

Your follower count is not your network. Your engagement rate is not evidence of relationships. These are mirrors. And mirrors only show you what you already brought to them.

Real social capital — the kind that opens doors, changes trajectories, puts your name in rooms you haven’t entered yet — is not built in the feed. It is built in the moments you almost skipped. The event you dragged yourself to. The conversation you let go deeper than comfortable. The person you approached even though something in you said what if they say no.

You can have 50,000 followers and a completely dead network.

You can have 500 followers and a room full of people who would move mountains for you by Tuesday.

One is a number. The other is a career.

Go to the event.

Find the one person.

Ask the real question.

And text your Lindsey a thank you when it works out.

More soon,

Aaliyah 🫶🏽

P.S. If the opening of this newsletter felt cinematic to you, I have to be honest about why. It was inspired by a scene in Kennedy Ryan's Score, one of my favorite books, where a conversation between two people cracked something open in me about how we show up for each other. I've had that same convo with my own PR more times than I can count. I could not write this piece without honoring her words first. Read Kennedy Ryan. She will change the way you see people.

I learned the term identity labor on a random Tuesday and I had to put my phone down for a minute.

Not because it was new information. Because it named something I had been carrying for so long without a word for it that seeing it in print felt like someone finally turned the lights on in a room I had been navigating in the dark.

Identity labor. The expectation that employees, especially creative ones, especially the ones with platforms and audiences and personal brands they built with their own time and their own trust and their own integrity, will voluntarily extend that work in service of the company. Without being asked formally. Without a line item in the budget. Without anyone acknowledging what it actually costs.

It is everywhere in creative and marketing spaces. It is almost always unspoken. And it is almost never compensated.

I know because I have been asked to do it. Quietly. Pleasantly. In the language of teamwork and visibility and wouldn’t it be great if.

And I want to talk about it.

Here is what nobody tells you when you build a personal brand while working for someone else.

The better it gets the more it becomes a resource someone else wants access to.

Not maliciously. Not always. But the audience you built. The trust you cultivated. The voice you developed over years of showing up honestly and specifically and in a way that made people feel seen, that becomes attractive to the company you work for. And somewhere along the way the ask shifts from can you help us with this project to can you share this on your personal Instagram to why aren’t you making it easier for us to find the content you’re tagged in.

And if you’re not careful, if you haven’t named what’s happening and drawn the line clearly, you wake up one day and realize you have merged your identity with your job again. That the personal brand you built with such care is now doing double duty. Serving your audience and your employer simultaneously. For one salary.

I have been the person who merged her identity with what she built.

I owned a business once. And somewhere along the way I stopped being a person who had a business and became the business itself. My name was the brand. My personality was the product. My presence was the asset. And when it closed, when I chose to close it, deliberately, with a clear head, I spent years figuring out where the business ended and I began.

That kind of merger costs something that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It costs you the ability to know which parts of yourself are genuinely yours and which parts you assembled in service of something external. It costs you the quiet, private sense of self that exists independent of what you produce.

I did the work to get that back.

So when the ask came to extend my personal platform in service of a company's content needs, I felt it immediately. Not as a policy question. As a person who had been here before and knew exactly where this road went.

I am not going back.

So when the ask came, pleasant, reasonable sounding, framed as a team need, I felt pressure.

The specific pressure of being asked to give away something you worked hard to build with integrity and trust. Not for free exactly. But without acknowledgment of the cost. Without respect for what it means to hand your audience, the people who followed you because they trust you, over to serve someone else’s content calendar.

I post work content sometimes. When it feels authentic. When I want to. When it aligns with what I’m building and what I believe and what I would share regardless of whether anyone asked me to.

The difference between that and what was being asked of me is the difference between a gift and a tax.

One I give freely. The other gets extracted.

Here is what I want every creative professional reading this to know.

Your personal brand is not a company asset. Your Instagram or LinkedIn is not a company resource. Your audience is not a budget line item that your employer gets to access because you happen to work there.

And you are allowed to say that. Clearly. Without apology.

Here is how.

👉🏽 First, know your company’s social media policy before anyone asks you to do anything.

Most people have never read it. Read it this week. Not when there’s a conflict. Now. Before you need it.

Your company’s social media policy will tell you exactly what they can and cannot ask of you regarding personal accounts. In most cases, especially in the United States, your personal social media accounts are yours. Your employer cannot require you to post on them, share company content on them, or grant company access to them as a condition of employment.

Knowing this before the ask comes means you’re not scrambling to figure out your rights in the middle of a conversation with your manager. You already know. You can respond from a place of clarity not defensiveness.

If your company doesn’t have a written social media policy, that is information worth having too.

👉🏽 Second, separate the personal from the professional structurally not just mentally.

The mental separation is not enough. I know because I tried it and it doesn’t hold under pressure.

The structural separation means different accounts for different audiences if you choose to have a work presence at all. It means being intentional about what you share and where. It means not allowing your personal audience, the one that follows you for you, to become collateral in your professional obligations.

This is not about hiding who you are at work. It’s about owning the distinction between what you bring to your job and what you’ve built on your own time with your own name.

Those are two different things. Protect them accordingly.

👉🏽 Third, document the boundary once you’ve drawn it.

This is the one nobody talks about.

When you have a conversation with HR, with your manager, with anyone about the limits of what your employer can ask regarding your personal brand and accounts, follow up in writing. A simple email. Just wanted to confirm what we discussed. Screenshot and save it in a folder. Keep the record.

Not because you’re preparing for a fight. Because clarity in writing protects everyone. And because the people asking you to extend your personal platform for free are almost certainly not thinking about what it costs you. The documentation makes the boundary real in a way that a verbal conversation sometimes doesn’t.

You are not being difficult. You are being professional.

I read the term identity labor and I felt seen. And then I felt protective. Not just of my Instagram or my newsletter or my audience of you, but of the version of myself I have worked so hard to keep intact. The one that knows the difference between a gift and a tax. Between authentic and performed. Between building something that is genuinely mine and selling out the trust of the people who showed up for me.

That version is not a company asset.

Neither is yours.

Know the policy. Build the structure. Document the boundary.

And the next time someone asks you to hand over something you built with your own integrity for free, you’ll have the words for what they’re asking.

It’s called identity labor.

And you don’t have to do it.

More soon,

Aaliyah 🫶🏽

P.S. If this found you at the exact right moment, forward it to the friend who needed the name for what they’ve been feeling. That’s the whole point of this newsletter. Finding the words. Sharing them. Protecting each other.

We were at dinner. The kind of dinner that starts at 7pm and somehow it’s 10pm and nobody is ready to leave because the conversation is too good and the laughter is too loud and everyone at that table is refilling something… cups, spirits, each other.

Someone mentioned a brand deal.

We roared. Because we love when our friends close things. We love when the work pays off. We love the proof that showing up consistently in public means something to someone with a budget.

And then she told us what the email said.

“Your sassy hot takes would be perfect for this campaign.”

The table went quiet in that specific way that Black people go quiet when something lands wrong and everyone feels it at the same time.

My friend is not a sassy hot take. My friend is a no-nonsense social strategist who elevates brands with a sharp, witty, culturally fluent point of view. She has studied this industry. She has the receipts. She has the results. She has built a body of work that says clearly — if you’re paying attention — this is who I am and this is what I do.

The brand wasn’t paying attention.

They saw the surface. They labeled it with the word they had available for a Black woman with opinions. Not thought leader. Not strategist. Not cultural intelligence. Sassy.

And she had to sit with the decision of whether to take the money and be filed under something she’d already outgrown. Or leave it and keep building toward the brand she actually intended.

That’s not just a brand deal problem. That’s a positioning problem. And positioning problems are expensive.

Here is what a personal brand actually is.

Not your aesthetic. Not your follower count. Not the bio you’ve rewritten seventeen times trying to get it right.

A personal brand is what people think of when they think of you.

That’s it. That’s the whole definition. And the terrifying thing about that definition is that it exists whether you built it intentionally or not. You already have a personal brand. The only question is whether it’s the one you intended to have.

Point A is the brand you think you’re building. Point B is the brand that actually exists in someone else’s mind. The gap between those two points is where most people are quietly losing.

For my friend that gap showed up as a brand email that reduced her entire body of work to two words. For you it might show up differently. As a pitch meeting where someone describes your work and you think that’s not what I do at all. As an opportunity that almost fits but not quite. As the quiet frustration of being seen but not seen correctly.

The gap is expensive. And most people don’t know it exists until something makes it visible.

You can close it. But first you have to see it.

Here is the thing about specificity that the internet keeps getting wrong.

Everyone tells you to find your niche. Pick a lane. Stay in it. And then they give you the most generic possible version of what that means — fitness creator, beauty creator, lifestyle creator — categories so broad they contain multitudes and therefore mean nothing.

That is not a niche. That is a category.

A niche is not positioning. Positioning is what you believe, who you serve, and what makes you the only person who could say it the way you say it.

Think about coffee. Premium versus affordable. Fast and functional versus slow lifestyle and craft. Four different brands. Four completely different people reaching for them. The product is not what differentiates them. The positioning is.

The brands that last are not the ones that tried to be everything. They are the ones that got so specific about who they were for that the right people felt like the brand was made for them specifically.

That specificity is what makes something viral. Not the algorithm. Not the trend. The feeling of being seen so precisely that you have to send it to someone who needs it.

Specific is the new viral.

And then AI changed everything.

Content is now infinite. Personalized. Free. The barrier to producing is gone. Which means the only thing that cannot be replicated, the only thing AI cannot generate at scale, is your lived experience. Your perspective. Your specific point of view on a field you’ve studied, lived through, or been obsessed with in a way most people in your space haven’t.

That is the new currency.

Not content. Perspective.

The era of value is no longer about information. It is about lived experience. POV. The thing you know because you lived it, not because you googled it. AI can produce content infinitely. It cannot produce your specific life.

That is what you are building a brand around. Not what you do. What you see. What you believe. What you would say about your field that most people would disagree with or never say out loud.

Three questions worth sitting with this week.

1. What have you lived through, studied, or been obsessed with that most people in your space haven’t? Not your credentials. Your experience. The thing that is yours specifically.

2. What do you believe about your field that most people would disagree with or never say out loud? This is where your actual point of view lives. Not the safe version. The honest one.

3. Who specifically would feel like you were made for them? Not your target audience. The person. The specific human who reads your work and thinks how did she know.

Your answers to those three questions are your positioning statement. Everything else builds from there. Not before.

My friend took the deal.

Because creators have to get their check and there is absolutely nothing romantic about the lights being off. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing weak or compromising about taking money from a brand that didn’t fully see you while you continue building toward the version that will. Your bills do not care about your positioning journey. The rent does not wait for the right opportunity.

But she corrected them first.

She sent the email. Not aggressive. Not defensive. Just clear. She told them exactly who she was. Not the sassy hot take girl, but the no-nonsense social strategist with the sharp POV and the receipts to back it up. She corrected the record in writing before the work began. Professionally. Warmly. Without apology. And she did the work brilliantly because that’s who she is regardless of how they found her.

And then she got strategic about everything she posted next.

Because here is what my friend understood that most people don’t.

The deal was the check. The content is the correction. Every piece she puts out from here is a signal — deliberate, considered, impossible to misread — about exactly who she is and what she does. She is not waiting to be seen correctly. She is building the body of evidence that makes it impossible to get it wrong.

That’s the wisdom nobody talks about in the creator economy. That sometimes the move isn’t the dramatic no. Sometimes you choose the quiet, strategic, keep-your-money-and-also-your-dignity yes. You take the opportunity and use it to build toward something more accurate.

Take the check.

Correct the record.

Build toward the brand you intended.

The right brand will eventually email. And when they do the email won’t say sassy.

It will say exactly who you are.

More soon,

Aaliyah

I have a photo on Instagram that I love and slightly cringe at simultaneously.

Hotel room. Black outfit. Hair done. Full face. Posed on the bed in a way that took approximately twelve attempts to get right. Stomach engaged. Angle considered. Smile at exactly the right wattage… warm enough to seem approachable, confident enough to seem unbothered.

I posted it. It did great. People said I was beautiful. I said thank you and meant it.

And then I sat with this quiet, uncomfortable feeling I couldn’t name for a while.

Because the photo wasn’t wrong. I looked good. The lighting was right. The composition was intentional. By every measurable standard of Instagram content it was a good post.

But it wasn’t me. Not really. Not the version of me that actually has something to say.

It was the aesthetically pleasing girl. Performing for the room. Hoping beauty would translate into something more. Wondering why it didn’t. Wondering why I was putting so much effort into content that felt like a costume I kept wearing to a party I wasn’t sure I wanted to be at.

It took me longer than I want to admit to figure out the problem.

The problem was me.

Not my face. Not my content. Not the algorithm or the platform or the timing or the caption.

Me. Specifically the version of me I kept deciding to show up as.

I had confused being visually appealing with being compelling. I had confused a good photo with a point of view. I had been so focused on looking like someone worth following that I had forgotten to actually be someone worth following.

The aesthetically pleasing girl gets likes. She gets you’re so pretty and body goals and the kind of engagement that feels good for approximately forty five minutes before you realize none of it is building anything.

The strategist gets saved. She gets shared. She gets the DM at 11pm that says I needed this. She gets the comment that turns into a collaboration. She gets the interview. She gets filed under something that compounds.

I knew which one I was. I just kept showing up as the other one.

Here is what I learned about platforms that changed everything.

Every platform is a different room. And every room has a different energy. And you cannot show up to every room as the same version of yourself without eventually losing the plot entirely.

👉🏽 Instagram is the club.

It is loud and visual and about being seen. I still show up there. But I stopped building my life there. I’m too aware of how quickly the music changes and too old for the strobe lights and too honest with myself about what the club was actually giving me back.

👉🏽 Substack is the neighborhood coffee shop.

Slow conversations. Real thoughts. The place you go when you’re not performing, just thinking out loud over something warm. This is where the newsletter lives. This is where I write like someone is going to read it two years from now and want to know more.

👉🏽 LinkedIn is the co-working space.

Where ideas turn into opportunities. Where the brand executives and the Gen Z girl deciding who gets the next creator budget actually hang out. Where people are building things and paying attention to what you’re building too.

Once I started treating them that way I stopped forcing the same version of me everywhere. I stopped posting the hotel pose on the co-working space. I stopped trying to write essays in the club. I stopped performing beauty in a room that wanted strategy.

Different rooms. Different energy. Same person.

This second hotel room photo tells the whole story.

Same kind of room. Different version of me entirely. Under eye patches that say BLESS YOU because my skin needed it and I wasn’t going to wait until I looked ready to document being alive. Headphones on. Sticker covered laptop open. Hair up. White tank. Actually working. Actually present. Not performing anything.

That photo required zero attempts. I just sat down and someone took it.

And it is the most me I have ever looked in a photograph.

Not because I look better in it. I don’t, not by conventional standards. But because it tells the truth about who I actually am. The woman with the skin care routine and the headphones and the laptop covered in stickers that say I am just a girl and take care of yourself and who is writing a newsletter from a hotel bed because the ideas don’t wait and she stopped asking them to.

That woman has something to say.

The posed one just had something to show.

I’m not telling you to stop taking the posed photos. I still take them. I will take more.

But I stopped letting them be the main thing. I stopped letting beauty be the whole sentence when I have so much more to say.

Because here is what I know now about building something real online:

You don’t burn out from creating. You burn out from misplacing your energy. From showing up to the wrong room as the wrong version of yourself and wondering why nothing is sticking. From writing essays in the club and posing in the co-working space and wondering why your audience doesn’t know who you are.

They don’t know who you are because you haven’t decided yet.

Decide.

Show up as the full version. The one with the under eye patches and the sticker covered laptop and the thoughts she needs to write down at midnight in a hotel room because the ideas showed up and she finally stopped sending them away.

That version is more interesting than the perfect angle.

That version builds something that lasts.

More soon,

Aaliyah

P.S. Both photos were taken in hotel rooms. One took twelve tries. One took zero. You already know which one I'm proudest of.

She said have you tried journaling about it?

And I sat there in that chair, the comfortable one, the one clearly chosen to make me feel safe, and I thought about the eleven journals I’ve filled in the last five years. The notes app drafts. The newsletters I’ve published to thousands of people processing my interior life in real time. The essays about grief and becoming and the tax of ambition that have made strangers cry on their lunch breaks.

Have you tried journaling about it.

I smiled. Said I’d give it a shot. And spent the rest of the session performing being helped.

Here’s the thing you should know about me.

My mother is a therapist.

Not was. Is. Practicing, brilliant, the kind of therapist people wait months to see because word gets around that she actually does something in that room. I grew up watching what real therapeutic work looks like from the outside. The heaviness people carried in. The different kind of heaviness they carried out, not lighter exactly, but reorganized. Like something had been looked at directly instead of around.

I know what the real thing feels like because I grew up with it in my house.

Which means I also know when I’m not getting it.

My therapist is sweet. I want to say that clearly and I want to mean it because I do mean it. She is warm and she listens and she never makes me feel judged and the sessions are genuinely pleasant in a way that I have started to suspect is the problem.

Pleasant is not the same as useful.

I leave every session feeling approximately the same as when I arrived. Not worse, she has never made me feel worse. But not cracked open either. Not like something got touched that needed touching. Not like I drove home with something to actually sit with.

I leave feeling like I had a very nice conversation with someone who is professionally obligated to be on my side.

And I have enough of those already.

She says things like protect your peace and you have to fill your own cup first and boundaries are an act of self love and I write them down because I am a good student and I have been a good student my whole life and being a good student in therapy means performing the kind of insight your therapist can recognize and reflect back to you.

I am very good at performing insight.

What I am not good at, what I have apparently been avoiding for the better part of this year, is actually having it.

My mother would have seen through me in twenty minutes. Probably ten. She would have sat across from me with that particular stillness she has and let the silence go long enough that I’d fill it with something true instead of something polished. She would have asked the question underneath the question I answered. She would have found the thing I was decorating around and pointed at it directly without apology.

My therapist asks me how that makes me feel.

I tell her.

She says that makes sense.

And we move on.

I have been in therapy for five years. Almost a year of that with her.

Five years of showing up. Of being the kind of person who goes to therapy which is its own performance if you're not careful. Of telling people I’m working on it and meaning the fifty minute appointment I have every other week where I sit in a comfortable chair and explain myself articulately to someone who tells me my feelings are valid.

My feelings were always valid. That was never the question.

The question is why I can’t receive a compliment without immediately cataloguing everything I haven’t done yet. Why I haven’t been home to see my family in months and keep saying soon like soon is a place I’m actually traveling to. Why do cry in the shower on days when everything is technically fine. Why the uneasiness that lives underneath everything doesn’t have a name yet and I have been in therapy for five years and I still can’t find it.

We haven’t found it together. That’s the honest thing.

The real reason I haven’t left yet has nothing to do with her.

It’s the intake form.

It’s the first session with someone new where you have to open the file and lay it all out again. The childhood stuff. The family stuff. The relationship patterns. The things you’ve worked through and the things you’ve been pretending to work through. The whole archaeology of yourself spread out on a stranger’s coffee table while they take notes and nod and try to understand in fifty minutes what took you twenty something years to become.

I have done that intake. I know what it costs.

And I am so tired already.

So I keep going back to the comfortable chair. To the pleasant sessions. To the therapist who is sweet and means well and has genuinely never hurt me which I have confused for a long time with helping me.

She has not hurt me.

She has also not found the thing.

I don’t think it’s her fault. I want to be careful about that.

I think I found someone safe enough to not push me and I have been using that safety as a way to say I’m doing the work without actually doing it. I have been bringing my most articulate self to therapy and leaving my most honest self in the car. I have been journaling, yes. Extensively. Publicly. For thousands of people.

And somehow still not telling the truth in the one room where the truth is the only point.

So I think it’s time.

Not because she’s bad. Not because she failed me. But because I need someone who will find the thing I keep decorating around. Someone who will let the silence go long enough that I fill it with something real. Someone who asks the question underneath the question.

Someone who makes the sessions feel less like a venting appointment with a licensed witness and more like something is actually happening in the room.

I know what that feels like. I grew up in its home.

I deserve to find it for myself.

The intake form is going to be exhausting. The first session with someone new is going to cost something. Laying out the whole archaeology again is going to require energy I am not sure I have right now.

I’m going to do it anyway.

Because a year of pleasant is enough.

It’s time to find the thing.

More soon,

Aaliyah

There is a specific kind of power in the thing that doesn’t announce itself.

I’ve been thinking about soft launches lately. Not the marketing kind… though yes, that too. The personal kind. The way some of the most significant things in your life arrived quietly. The relationship that didn’t feel like a beginning until you were already in the middle of it. The idea that sat in your notes app for six months before it became the thing everyone knows you for. The version of yourself you became so gradually you almost missed it happening.

Soft doesn’t mean small. It never did.

That’s what this series is about.

Where astro nails were loud on purpose, cobalt and orange announcing you before you opened your mouth, soft launch nails are the opposite energy. They’re the nails you wear when you already know. When you don’t need the room to feel it before you do. When the intention is so clear it doesn’t need to be loud to land.

Each nail in this series is a different frequency. A color that lives in the in-between. Sky blue bleeding into butter yellow. A coral outline on sheer. A swoosh of slate on white. Quiet gradients that catch the light only if someone is paying close enough attention.

And that’s the point. Not everyone needs to see it. Just the right ones.

I designed this set for the woman who is mid-something. Mid-becoming. Mid-launch. Mid-figuring-it-out. The one who is doing the most important work of her life in relative quiet and doesn’t need a press release about it.

Your nails can hold that energy too.

Not every season calls for cobalt. Some seasons call for something that shimmers only when you move. Something that says I know exactly what I’m doing without saying anything at all.

That’s the soft launch.

Wear it and see who notices.

Take this to your nail tech. Show them the template. Tell them what season you’re in. Let the nails keep the diary.

Tag me when you get your set. I genuinely want to see what you create 🫶🏽

More soon,

Aaliyah

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✦ The full spring series all in one place:

spring series: 001 — astro nails For the weeks you feel untouchable. Cobalt. Orange. The kind of color that announces you before you open your mouth. Each nail a different energy. A different mood. A different version of you that deserves its own real estate. View Astro Nails → here.

spring series: 002 — soft launch nails ← you are here Where color is subtle but intention isn’t. For the woman who is mid-something and doesn’t need a press release about it.

More dropping monthly. Stay inside.

I recognized my brand positioning statement.

Not plagiarized. Not copied. Recognized.

I was on someone’s website, scrolling the way you do when you’re procrastinating on the exact thing you’re supposed to be figuring out, and I read six words that stopped me completely.

I help brands build culture, community, and clout.

I sat with it. Read it again. And then felt that specific, quiet, almost embarrassing feeling of finding something that describes you better than you’ve ever described yourself.

I took it. Made it mine. And it became the sentence I now use everywhere — the one that has to work before an elevator door closes. The one that makes someone decide whether they want to share a ride with me or say goodbye in the lobby.

That’s the first thing I want to tell you about personal brands in 2026.

You are not always building from scratch. Sometimes you are excavating. Finding the language that already exists for something that has always been true about you. The discovery is the work. The recognition is the strategy.

Here is what personal brand actually looks like right now, from inside mine.

My website is under construction. The colors are decided, sky blue and butter yellow, a combination that arrived more like a feeling than a formula, but the design and copy are still being figured out in real time. My newsletter is finding its legs. My Instagram and the writing voice and the creative work are all moving toward each other but haven’t fully collided yet.

I am telling you this because every piece of content you see from people who appear to have it figured out was made by someone who was also mid-figure.

The brand is not built and then revealed. The brand is built in public or it is not built at all.

And then there are my nails.

For a while I didn’t know where they lived in my brand world. These nail concepts I’d been designing that people kept stopping for. The astro nails, the color stories, the templates that felt less like beauty content and more like wearable art with a point of view. I couldn’t figure out where they belonged. On the Instagram? In this newsletter? It felt like showing up to a board meeting in a sequined dress. Not wrong. Just needing the right room.

So I gave them their own room.

Behind a paywall. $8 a month on Substack. Not lost. Not floating. Tucked into the brand world intentionally, a paywall that is less about restriction and more about curation. If you want my it girl nail designs that have been stopping people mid-scroll, you know where to find them.

That decision taught me something. Every creative output you have deserves a home not just a platform. There is a difference. A platform is somewhere you post. A home is somewhere things belong.

So here is the free game. What I actually know about building a personal brand in 2026 that nobody in a panel discussion will say out loud.

• It is almost entirely sensory. In a short-form world, brands are not built through long explanations. They are built through repeated sensory patterns that compound over time. What people see when they land on your page. What they hear in your writing voice. The color grade of your images. The pacing energy of your carousels. The typography that shows up again and again until it starts to feel like a signature.

  
  Before you write a bio or build a website or decide on a content strategy, build your sensory world first. Because that is what people actually experience. That is what they remember. That is what makes them recognize you before they’ve even read a word.

  
  Mine looks like this: sky blue and butter yellow. Notes-style carousels. A writing voice that is sharp when it needs to be, warm when it needs to be, and occasionally chaotic in the best way. Educational content that respects the intelligence of the people reading it. And a Newsletter that treats vulnerability like a creative decision and not a confession.

• Build a moodboard before you build a strategy. Answer these questions before you post another piece of content:

  • What is your color world? Not your favorite colors. Your brand colors. The ones that eventually say that’s her without a name attached.

  • What is your typography energy? Clean and minimal? Bold and declarative? Every font choice is a personality decision.

  • What is your pacing? Dense thoughtful carousels? Quick punchy one-liners? Long-form YouTube videos people save for Sunday mornings? Your pacing is part of your brand identity whether you’ve decided it consciously or not.

  • What is your color grade? The way your photos look, warm or cool, bright or moody — is a sensory signal that compounds every time someone scrolls past. It is doing brand work even when you’re not paying attention.

  Every single one of these decisions should trace back to your positioning. To who you are, what you believe, and who you are building for.

You are not posting for the moment. You are building an archive that leads back to you.

Here is the thing about an elevator pitch.

The six words I found on someone else’s website: I help brands build culture, community, and clout… those words have to work in the time it takes for an elevator door to close. If they land, maybe we share the ride. If the ride is good, maybe we share a cab. And somewhere in that journey, the brand has done its job.

But the six words only work because everything behind them is real. The events I’ve produced. The rooms I’ve built. The newsletter I write like someone is going to read it two years from now. The nail designs tucked behind a paywall that is less about money and more about intention. The website still under construction. These newsletters that shows up in bursts and sounds like nothing else in your feed.

The six words are the door. Everything else is what’s inside.

Build the inside first. The words will find you.

And when they do, even if you find them on someone else’s website, recognize them.

That recognition is the whole thing.

More soon,

Aaliyah