When I was thirteen, I got my first job.

Three of my friends and I spent all summer cleaning the new apartment of my friend’s dad. It was a new apartment because the bald dude cheated, and he and her mom were getting a divorce. The divorce apartment was overlooking a square mostly inhabited by elderly people, their caregivers, and pigeons. Lots of pigeons. By the end of summer, I rolled into school wearing a cool new pair of jeans with bright yellow stitching across my ass.

The following summer, I was fourteen, and I worked as a waitress at a hotel by the beach in Tel Aviv. Mudi and I, a forty-year-old Arab from Jaffa, would do a mean 7 a.m. breakfast service. I remember the twelve-hour shifts, although there was nothing particularly memorable about them. Later I worked at an ice cream shop, as a telemarketer, at the supermarket, in a clothing store. You name it, I did it. This was before even turning seventeen.

I hated it. I hated all of it.

I never questioned the job. I questioned myself for hating it. Somewhere along the way, exhaustion started to feel like evidence. If I was tired, I was doing enough. If I wasn’t, I wondered what I had missed.

But don’t be so naive to believe this story began with me.

Some would call it generational trauma. I prefer cosmic inheritance.

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Around two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, my parents got married. Inflation was such a bitch that with the money they received for their wedding, all they could really afford was a pair of sunglasses for my mom.

Growing up, I heard that story countless times. Not because anyone wanted me to feel sorry for them. It was simply one of those family stories that gets told over dinner, at your grandparents’ while looking through old photo albums, or while washing dishes.

Over the years, the sunglasses slowly disappeared. But the road leading to them had already been etched into the blueprint of my life. That in order to get the things you want, you need to be running. Falling. Crawling on bleeding elbows and knees. Quietly saying, “thank you,” while gathering breadcrumbs with your dirty fingernails.

Does working odd jobs at thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen make you hardworking? Resilient? Disciplined? Maybe. But they also taught me that difficult meant meaningful. That the harder something was, the more worthwhile it became. Easy felt suspicious. Whenever something came naturally, I instinctively looked for the catch. Surely the things worth having were supposed to cost me something.

Wait.

Maybe this was never about endurance. Maybe it was about my tolerance for joy.

What the hell. I got it all backwards.

I stared at that sentence for a while. It annoyed me. Mostly because I knew it was true.

It got me thinking about work, and about that strange phrase we use so casually:

Earning a Living.

I’ve always found it oddly unsettling. As if life itself had already sent me an invoice. The “gift of life” was supposedly given to me freely, yet somehow, from the moment I was born, I started accumulating debt against it.

Earning a living.

Earning... a life.

Instead of becoming a way of participating in life, expressing who and what I am, work became a way of proving I deserved one.

Maybe I wasn’t trying to earn a living. Maybe I was trying to earn a life.

Friendship.
Safety.
Love.
Rest.
Community.

Someone dropping off homemade soup because they know I’ve had a long week.
A friend spending their Sunday helping me put up shelves.
Someone remembering the smallest thing I mentioned weeks ago because they were, in fact, listening.

But if life had to be earned, then suffering couldn’t possibly be meaningless.

Looking back, I don’t think I was searching for meaning. I think I was trying to justify the price I’d already paid. Every coincidence wanted to become a sign. Every heartbreak insisted on becoming a lesson. Every ending asked for a metaphor.

I kept turning life into literature because I wasn’t sure I could survive it as prose.

I wasn’t afraid of boredom. I was afraid that a life, any life, could pass by unnoticed, even by the person living it.

What if I kept giving suffering a purpose because I couldn’t bear the possibility that it had none?

Clever, Alex. Clever.

Me?

Infatuated with suffering?

What in the Soviet immigrant generational trauma was that?

I thought to myself as I walked inside my favorite coffee shop I go to every Saturday to write, read, chat with strangers and ponder. This morning was no different. Before I even reached the counter, the barista looked up, smiled, and said: “Alex! It’s you.” and handed me my usual iced coffee.

My biggest fear was never pain. It was the possibility that life was going unnoticed. That maybe things weren’t happening for some grand poetic reason. Maybe they were simply happening. And maybe joy wasn’t waiting on the other side of suffering. Maybe it had been quietly sitting beside me all along.

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Carl Jung once said something along the lines of: we don’t really heal anything; we simply let it go.

The nature of some relationships takes years to uncover. And then even longer to rewrite. But once you learn how to rewrite the story, each revision becomes easier. Quicker. Smoother. Eventually, you catch yourself in the act. An old fear (or infatuation) knocks on the door. A familiar narrative begins to unfold. “Go harder, Alex, fight for it.” Before it has the chance to settle, you smile.

Not you again.

What once felt like undeniable truth now feels almost comical. These days, I’m much more interested in the being hot and have fun philosophy. The scars may remain. Some probably always will. But they stop asking for your attention. One day you realize you haven’t looked at them in weeks. Not because you’ve forced yourself to ignore them, but because your life has quietly grown around them.

Healing isn’t forgetting what happened. It’s forgetting to keep telling yourself the same story.

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It took me nearly thirty years to realize that facts and stories are not the same thing. The facts stayed exactly as they were. The story was the only thing that needed rewriting.

Two years ago, after moving back to Tel Aviv from Berlin, I found myself back in my childhood bedroom. Depresso espresso. After burning every bridge, I had nothing and no one waiting for me here. Erasing your old operating system and building a new one in your thirties is... “hardcore” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

But as life persists, I persist harder, damn it.

So after wiping away my tears, I washed off the dirt from beneath my fingernails and swore this would be the last time I’d indulge in manual labor.

Only this time, I was building something different. Today, every single person in my life, with no exceptions, is kind. Not perfect. Kind. People cook for me. Friends build things for me. They surprise me with thoughtful gifts. They check in. They make room for me. A few years ago, I probably wouldn’t have even registered half of it.

That was it. I stood there holding my coffee. “Do you want to pay now or later?” The barista asked. “Later...” I was about to say when I heard someone say “I’ve got it,” said a voice behind me. I turned around. It was someone I chatted with at the café a few weeks earlier. Something warm bubbled up inside my chest.

I never imagined love might sound like someone remembering my name.
Or a barista already making my usual coffee.
Or someone quietly saying, “I’ve got it.”

No lesson. No sacrifice. No symbolism. Just people who were very much happy to see me.

I’d spent years trying to earn something that only becomes visible once you stop trying to earn it.

I wish someone had told me sooner. It genuinely hadn’t occurred to me that some people love without keeping score. The final disappointment came when I realized there was actually no one waiting for me at the end of my suffering to hand me a medal for it.

And even if they had, what exactly would I do with a giant gold medal for suffering?

So maybe the question was never:

What is your relationship with suffering?

Maybe it was always:

What have you convinced yourself you still need to earn?

As always, meet yourself in truth, and keep being magnificent, my friend.

Until next time,

Alex

❤️

It was what seemed to be a typical Tuesday.

I exercised, wrote my morning pages, meditated, and rode my bike. Later, I had a long meeting with my psychology supervisor discussing some cases, followed by a long group supervision meeting in which I presented a therapy case to think about it together. I usually bring a video of the therapy session into these meetings, since, funny enough, I find it more comfortable to be as exposed as can be in the ever-changing dynamic in my therapy room rather than be bothered writing what happened word for word. One of the many invisible jobs of a psychologist.

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I got some compliments for my playful nature, connecting it to the writings of Anne Alvarez. In her work, she spoke a lot about alive presence in the therapy room. But most of all, I believe my apparent bravery with coming emotionally naked into these meetings isn’t bravery at all, but rather my innate need to be able to express myself fully and honestly. The fact that I was filming a therapy session I had with a child eliminated my ability to perform completely, creating the perfect conditions to be expressing whatever it is that I was, or felt. Moment to moment to moment.

In other words, being witnessed.

When I finished work, I sat down in my garden and wrote May Love Letter and published it here on Substack. A few moments later, I rode my bike to meet my friend on the beach. It was Pride Month, and they were having a small party on the beach. So naturally, this was where we were going.

I was riding my bike by the shoreline as I watched the big S floating in its orange attire, almost kissing the crystal waters underneath. And suddenly, without any warning, I felt my chest getting warm, and then warmer, and then a hot sizzle burning me from the inside out. “Fire, fire!” You thought I would scream, but instead it spread through my entire body. A perfect moment in which I existed and did not exist anymore.

And then suddenly it occurred to me: I am experiencing the perfect day.

“It is the perfect day. This moment is perfect,” I wanted to scream. But instead, my mind rushed into thinking: how can I make it last longer or recreate it on command? Because in a matter of seconds, it will be gone. How can I customize it? Share it? Teach it? Have it in my pocket forever?

I ran towards my friend, trying to tell him all about it, but I couldn’t quite find the right words. While I was stuttering, “Look, Alex, look,” he said, pointing to the horizon. The sun was about to be swallowed completely. We watched her go, little by little, fast and slow, until there was nothing left of her.

We sat and had some beers first. Our conversation carried into brainstorming a mutual creative project of creating a children’s book. I would write it and he would illustrate it. After that, we went dancing, and then biked all the way towards Jaffa, me telling him a folklore story about a giant beast turned into stone in the water beside us.

On the way home, I kept thinking about zoocosis: the strange, repetitive behaviors animals develop in captivity. Pacing. Swaying. Circling. A body trying to make a world out of an enclosure too small for it.

I wondered if we do something similar with joy.

The moment something beautiful arrives, we begin pacing around it. We ask how to keep it, how to recreate it, how to make sure it happens again. We take the living thing and place it behind glass. We call it gratitude, documentation, a plan. Sometimes it is all of those things. But sometimes it is simply fear, the fear that life will not come back for us in the same way twice.

You cannot seduce life by chasing it. You seduce it by being seducible.

To be seducible is to leave a little room in yourself for the world to enter. It is to move through the day without deciding in advance what would count as enough. It is to let a meeting become more than a meeting, a bike ride become more than transport, a sunset become more than a photograph you should take before it disappears.

The perfect day did not arrive because I had designed it perfectly. In fact, none of its most beautiful parts were planned. It arrived because I was porous enough to receive it. I had not yet asked the day to belong to me. I had not tried to turn it into a system, a ritual, a lesson, or a guarantee that I could summon again next Tuesday.

Maybe that is the trap of trying to capture a perfect moment: the second we ask it to belong to us, we stop belonging to it.

We leave the experience and begin managing it from the outside. We pace around it, trying to find the exact sequence that produced it, as though joy were a creature we could keep alive by studying its cage.

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There is a question people ask when they look back at a photograph, an old apartment, a version of themselves they did not know they would miss: How did I not know those were the good old days?

But maybe the better question is: How do you know you are in them?

Perhaps you know because, for one second, you stop trying to make the moment mean more than it does. You stop reaching for proof that it will last. You stop asking life to give you a receipt. You look around and understand that nothing needs to be added, fixed, captured, or explained. You are here. The day is here. And somehow, that is enough.

Perhaps that is how you know you are in the good old days: not because everything is perfect, but because for a moment you are no longer trying to escape, improve, preserve, or explain the life you are already living.

Life is a seduction game. It does not belong to you, and you do not get to keep it. But when you stop trying to capture it, you may find that YOU belong to it completely.

Until next time,

Be Magnificent,

Alex.

❤️

Everytime I sit down to write it feels like I’m doing it for the first time. Let’s try it once more, with spirit. I’m going to hold your hand when I say this: the things you want always take longer than you think.

But hey I made some progress, a few weeks ago I took my mom to a spa day.

This sentence is far less ordinary than it appears. We got massages, spent the afternoon at the beach, and somehow ended up booking flights to Amsterdam together for next January. I can already feel myself getting cold and it’s not even peak summer. The Alex from a year ago would’ve never believed that sentence. Mother-daughter relationships have a way of distorting time. Years pass. People change. Old wounds heal. New ones appear. And yet every conversation somehow contains all previous conversations. You are never speaking only to your mother. You’re speaking to every version of her you’ve ever known. Not too long ago I would see her name appear on my phone and let it ring a little longer than necessary. Now we’re planning a trip together.

Was this fast?

Or slower than I thought?

How does one actually measure?

I’ve been carrying that question around with me lately because despite all available evidence, I constantly feel behind. My life keeps moving and somehow I remain unconvinced. The relationship with my mother changes. I open a private practice. I build an app that somehow ends up sitting in the App Store. I spend the last two years writing a novel. I become interested in investing and (sometomes I think) accidentally develop an entire framework around it. My life keeps producing evidence. I vowed to myself that I will always follow the trail of my own excitement, to th best of my ability and without expectation. And I do it, that curious cat that I am, playing with the string of yarn the gods throw at me, and it’s actually fun.

So why do I feel so restless?

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It comes in waves, usually accompanied by a little boredom. An emotion I don’t feel often and am not particularly comfortable with. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. Because if I’m being honest, the restlessness isn’t new.

I don’t do casual anything. Not casual conversations. Not casual relationships. Not casual curiosities. Especially not casual obsessions. The older I get, the more I realize that every meaningful thing in my life began exactly the same way. Not as a plan, but a little pebble of fascination. A tiny thread. A question. A curiosity that felt alive enough to follow.

The novel began that way. The clinic began that way. Neolux began that way. The investing poc began that way.

At some point I stopped trying to predict which interests would change my life and started paying attention to which ones made me feel more alive. This sounds obvious until you actually date to try it. Most people want certainty. And I’m no different, the letting go was a bitch.

A few weeks ago I went for a morning walk on the beach, that accidentally became a two-hour walk. Somewhere along the way I found myself thinking about ordinary people.

Or rather, my fear of becoming one. I’ve been afraid of that for as long as I can remember. As the eldest daughter and the first grandchild of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant family, you’re a wish fullifilment and a grandiose fantasy. That I felt obligated to deliver.

The problem is that the longer I thought about it, the less certain I became that I knew what ordinary meant.

Who exactly are these ordinary people?

The people who stop dreaming?

The people who settle?

The people who never leave home?

The people who don’t build things?

The people who don’t ask questions?

The people who don’t become?

I stopped near the beach and looked around. The sea was doing what the sea always does. People were drinking coffee. Dogs were dragging their owners in every possible direction. Nothing remarkable was happening. And yet, I couldn’t help myself but cry.

Isn’t this what you were yearning for?

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To have the time to pursue what it is you find meaningful? To use all of your different and somewhat polarizing talents?

Enough to wonder whether my definition of ordinary had been wrong all along.

Because perhaps ordinary isn’t a type of life. Perhaps ordinary is what happens when familiarity erases wonder.

Around the same time I found myself trying to explain something to my therapist. Or rather, failing to do so. There is a particular feeling that visits me whenever things are going well. You would think dissatisfaction would have the decency to appear before the achievement.

Instead it arrives afterwards. After the thing. After the milestone. After the accomplishment.

It arrives quietly and asks:

Is that all there is?

I spent an entire session trying to explain this feeling and failed completely.

Later that evening I sent him a Peggy Lee song.

Sometimes another person can articulate a feeling before you can. The question haunted me because it felt familiar. Not disappointment. Not cynicism.

Restlessness. The suspicion that life is happening somewhere else. That the real thing hasn’t started yet.

A few days later, my brother published a scientific paper.

My brother is a chemist and I am not, but I can usually put two and two together. As far as I understood it, they were trying to find a better way to produce ammonia. In the process, they discovered that one material helped another do something it was already capable of through a phenomenon called surface activation. This is the point where an actual chemist would probably be horrified by my summary. But stay with me.

The potential was already there.

The material didn’t need to become something else. It needed contact. It needed activation. A catalyst, if you will. Because maybe we don’t become through doing something.

Maybe we become through being in friendship. Being in heartbreak. Being in cities. Being in conversations. Answering the phone. Being in life while it is happening. Moment to moment to moment.

I took my shoes off and ran towards the water, mt feet curling up in the sand. And jumped up on my back and attempted to float. The water insists it can hold me. I remain unconvinced.

Every instinct tells me to help. I can feel my body starting to tense. To interfere. To participate in my own rescue.

But wait a damn minute, what if I’m not in trouble?

I stop and soften my shoulders. My neck lets go. The water holds me. And suddenly my world is quiet. And then it’s loud. I can hear the wooosh wooosh of the water. The clouds above me are no clouds anymore. They are a family of bunny rabbits frolicking around. Then they are trains going to the North Pole. Later, they are specks of sunshine.

Maybe ordinary was never the person who stayed, or the person who left. Never the person who built something, or the person who didn’t. Maybe ordinary has nothing to do with the shape of a life and everything to do with the way we meet it. Maybe ordinary is what happens when familiarity dulls our sense of astonishment. When we stop noticing. When we stop allowing ourselves to be fascinated. Children understand this instinctively. Give them a cloud, and they’ll find rabbits, trains, and entire worlds hidden inside it. The cloud doesn’t change. Their relationship to it does. Somewhere along the way, we become convinced that life is happening later, somewhere beyond the next achievement, the next milestone, the next version of ourselves.

Meanwhile, life keeps arriving exactly where it always has: in conversations, in beaches, in mothers, in scientific papers about ammonia, in the strange and miraculous fact of being here at all. Maybe the secret is learning to notice yourself noticing yourself. To stay in contact with your life long enough for it to come alive again. And perhaps that’s what stayed with me about my brother’s paper. The potential was already there. What was needed wasn’t more. It was contact.

Now, I invite YOU to the Surface of activation. Not to become something else, but to remain close enough to your own life for it to activate you.

The water insists it can hold me. Lately, I’ve been helping a little less.

Until next time,

Be Magnificent,

Alex

❤️

The older I get, the younger I feel.
That was what I said to a girl I’m used to seeing every Saturday morning at my favorite coffee shop, where I go to write my morning pages and read. I was telling her that, partially excusing the fact that I should probably start strength training sooner rather than later, since I’m 32.

When my mom was 32, she had an 11-year-old daughter. I was her, and she was me.
But I’m the only woman in my lineage living alone and left to my own devices.

I feel this responsibility weighing on my shoulders. All this freedom and possibility. And all these choices.

When you’re little, you wish to grow up. And release yourself from the prison of other people always making decisions for you. By the time you grow up, you realize that now, you have to make all those decisions on your own. And nobody taught you how to do so.

All this freedom feels heavy with possibility, and you now, as a free woman, should know how to make up your own mind.

It’s not easy being a pioneer.

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No obvious shape to step into.
So everything opens.

And opening is not always a pleasant feeling.
It stretches you. It asks more of you than you feel ready for.

When I’m not sure what to do, I do nothing.

Or at least it looks like nothing. Don’t be so naive to believe it. I open something. Close it. Write a line I don’t trust. Leave it there anyway.

It makes it easier to listen to the inner knowing that comes from your heart. And the thing about the heart is - it’s a very precise instrument. But it doesn’t speak loudly. And it doesn’t rush.

It requires a certain kind of balance to even hear it.
And it’s easily hijacked by other forces. We call them fear.

In a time of so-called efficiency and speed, we glorify being decisive. Having strong opinions that later become identities.

But does anyone ever teach you how to actually arrive at an opinion?

When we’re not sure what to do we call it hesitation, indecision, being torn—it all sounds like something is missing. But from the inside, it doesn’t feel wrong. It feels like being with something before it’s formed.

There is actually no word in English for the active form of weighing your options. Being with it. Letting it form.

And maybe the problem is that when we don’t have a word for something, we lack the tolerance for what it is. Because it holds tension. And most of us have learned to resolve tension as fast as possible. To choose, to move, to decide-just to get out of it. Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers… Sounds familiar?

This is your addiction to certainty. To predictability. To fucking answers. This addiction runs so strongly, probably for generations. So you choose, and you speak loudly about your opinions, but are they actually your own when all you did was pick from a catalogue?

There is always a third option. You just don’t see it from the outside.

Once you’re able to take the unpaved road, the one that vanishes as you walk it, the one that throws at you all the boogeymen from your past, all the shadows of your parents that were mistakenly passed on to you from when you were a whimsical little child.

Then, in what at first feels like a coincidence - or maybe even a miracle…

There comes a secret door. Number 3. Under the heavy, velvety burgundy wine-coloured curtain. One that you can call your own. The one you customize only by going to the unknown. Through trial and error. And the ability to withstand the mighty contrast.

The only antidote is to learn how to play.

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But what I’m starting to see is that this space, this uncomfortable, unclear, slightly stretched place, filled with murky waters, is that it’s not where you drown. It’s where you learn how to swim.

One of the most radical things you can do is to be brave enough to explore your ideas to the end of your own curiosity. With an open mind and an open heart.
Not because you know where it’s going, but because something in you is alive there. Without expectations. Without already deciding what it should become. Just to see what happens.

That is what you used to do growing up.

It’s called: PLAY.

And love, in this version of things, is not the answer.

It’s in the act of loving, the ability to stay open long enough for something real to form. Not something you picked from a catalogue.

Something you forged by meeting your soul along your travels.

Until next time,

Be Magnificent,

Alex

❤️

We were sitting around the table at my aunt’s house for my uncle’s one-year memorial. We were never close, yet I always felt like we were somehow twin spirits. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when I saw a book I had been meaning to read for months but couldn’t get my hands on, sitting quietly on the shelf in what once was his living room. When I asked my aunt if I could borrow it, she said she had never seen the book in her life and had no idea how it got there.

Two days later, at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, I was woken up by national bombing sirens, and my neighbors and I ran to the community shelter down the street. All in our pajamas. For the next five days, bombings were non-stop. All hours of the day and night. I didn’t want to wake up to sirens in the middle of the night by myself, so my neighbour Sasi and I slept on Matan’s (my other neighbour, see October Love Letter) couch together. Smoking weed and cooking in the in between.

But then, about a week later, the haze of the smoke cleared, and so did my feelings of rage and impatience toward everything and all of it, and most importantly, toward the people at the community shelter. Each of them had a different idea of personal space than I did. Too many dogs. Too many fluorescent lights all the time, even at 3 a.m. One too many parrots. Too little oxygen, three floors underground in this fucking war bunker. I needed space, so I started sleeping alone at my place again. Still being woken up in the middle of the night by bombing sirens.

Work wasn’t the same. But when war becomes part of your day-to-day, you find yourself running to the shelter in between Zoom meetings. Some people like to call this resilience. But the more I think about it, the more it looks like internal gaslighting.

“I refuse to get used to this.”
“I refuse to get used to this.”
“I refuse to get used to this.”

I was mumbling it repeatedly under my breath while pacing around my living room.

We were two weeks into this, exhausted, when Gillian messaged in the group chat that we should leave Tel Aviv and go to Eilat. There were very few bombings there. Like all other ideas, this one was not original. Everyone was going to Eilat, away from the bombings. So naturally, the next day we spent hours looking for a villa that could accommodate ten people, refreshing the page as places disappeared and prices kept climbing. It was expensive, but staying was too.

“I shouldn’t go,” I thought. My clinic days had been cancelled. And I had a big trip to New York planned in April. “It’s irresponsible,” I thought. As I was contemplating whether I should go or not, the crippling sound of another siren pierced the air, my heart almost jumped out of my chest when it skipped a beat for one second there.

On the way out the door to the community shelter, I saw a note I wrote to myself that said:

When you look for reasons not to do something, do it.

When you’re looking for reasons to do something, don’t.

So I went, of course.

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***

We drove for about five hours before reaching the depths of the desert. When we were entering the city, I was holding the book that I got from my uncle’s house, trying to hold back tears from trying too hard to keep it together. Like a kid bursting into tears when they finally see their parent coming to pick them up from kindergarten.

We spent our days lying by the pool, doing yoga, and reading. In the evenings, the boys grilled outside while the rest of us sat around the table sipping on wine. Someone always telling a story, someone always laughing too loudly. Life looked almost strangely normal in the middle of a war.

“You know, there’s this movie called Before Sunrise that I really love,” I said to Mia when we were sitting at the table just the two of us. Nothing left on it but tissues, half-empty glasses of wine and an overfilled ashtray.

“It’s actually a trilogy. There are two other films, Before Sunset and Before Midnight.”

“What’s it about?” she asked.

“So,” I said, moving my chair closer to her. “It’s about this American guy, Ethan Hawke plays him, you know him?”

Mia shrugged.

“Never mind,” I shook my head. “He’s on a train to Vienna and he meets this French chick who’s on her way to Paris to see her grandmother. Or maybe coming back from visiting her. I don’t actually remember. Anyway, he convinces her to get off the train with him in Vienna. His flight is the next morning, so they spend the whole night walking around the city, talking, and falling in love.”

“Ugh… that’s lovely,” Mia said, her eyes smiling. “So in the end, they’re together?”

“Well… in the second film they meet again in Paris. He has a wife and a kid. But when he sees her they again spend the day walking and talking before his evening flight, and he ends up staying.”

“What about the third?” she asked.

“In the third one they’re in Greece,” I said. “They’re on vacation with friends. Staying in a villa. Long dinners. Wine. Conversations that stretch into the night.”

Seven years ago I used to watch that movie and imagine that scene. Friends sitting around a dinner table somewhere on holiday. The night stretching slowly. Talking. Laughing. I remember thinking how beautiful that looked. Like they were inside something I didn’t know how to enter.

“Kind of like us right now,” Mia said.

I paused and looked around the table. “Yes,” I said. “Kind of like us”.

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A funny little thing happens when you start paying attention. When you learn to notice yourself noticing yourself. It could have been just dinner, just friends hanging around. It could have been victims of war running away from bombings, a destabilized life, a big interruption to your business, a real threat to your life…

It was all true.

But there was also a little miracle. A moment. A little dream coming true. And the funny thing about dreams, desires, hopes and aspirations, is that they tend to creep up on you. Beautiful in its ordinary nature, something once perceived as extraordinary. Like the blood pumping in your veins, like how you wake up each morning, and how the little belly you have works its magic, digesting all you decide to put in there.

So, maybe getting your dreams is sometimes much simpler than we think. When you finally start to pay attention. When you allow yourself to experience the things you once believed were meant for someone else. When you believe you are worthy of them. When you’re able to notice the ones happening right now.

When you allow yourself to drive all the way to Eilat in the middle of a war.

Until Next Time,

Be Magnificient,

Alex

❤️

To:
Maia, Mia, Gillian, Rownky, and Ron.

For a long time, I used to pray for one very specific thing.

That it would be harder for me not to write than to actually be writing. Back when the words felt like something I had to extract from myself, when writing was discipline and identity in ambition, but not yet just me. Something that I naturally do. Lately I catch myself moving through the day with sentences forming before I even sit down. They follow me into the shower, through the day, into the quiet minutes between sessions at the clinic. I taste them the way I used to taste new cities, turning them slowly in my mouth, “slightly”, “tenacious”, “sublime”, amazed at how a single word can hold the exact temperature of a feeling and give structure to an otherwise chaotic world. Now it is easier to write rather than not to be writing. Sharing no longer feels like exposure but as circulation.

A year and a half ago I was back in my childhood room, the same uneven piles of books, the same window, the same streetlight that never fully turns off at night. I had just returned from Berlin, the city where I allowed myself to rebel against the straight line of ten years of psychology, where I built a home out of people who spoke in poems and unfinished manuscripts and accents from everywhere. I created a community for writers and poets there, designing programs at my kitchen table with no training other than my own obsession. Over a hundred creatives passed through those rooms. It was the best of times and the worst of times. Sorry, I had to. But seriously, it was the most alive I had ever felt and the most unstable I had ever been.

As the daughter of immigrants, and an immigrant child myself, survival has always felt like the only responsible state of being. Even while doing something beautiful, meaningful, or dare I say - fun, there was a voice in the background counting, calculating, wondering how long this could last. Chaos felt familiar in the way home sometimes does. So when that life could no longer hold me, I returned to my oldest lover, psychology. Where I sit across from people with questions that never have quick answers.

Coming back to live with my parents after years of independence while reentering the therapy space, felt like being asked to stand on two moving floors at once. I had no apartment of my own, no partner, an exhausted bank account after two and a half years of almost no income, and friends who were now continents away. There were days I cried so hard I scared myself, the kind of crying that makes you speak out loud to no one, pleading - How did I get here? What is wrong with me? Will this keep happening again and again? There is a very specific exhaustion that comes from being good at rebuilding, from watching a life you built dissolve more than once.

And yet, in between the breakdowns, there were these visions. My own place filled with plants and books and that very specific afternoon light, a private practice with my name on the door, friendships that feel like chosen family, a relationship with my mother in which I can safely be myself, loving myself in a way that is not dependent on achievement, productivity, or someone choosing me romantically. They felt real but fragile, like glass objects I was not yet allowed to touch.

So I disappeared into what I called hermit mode. Morning pages every day, meditation even when my mind screamed, EFT tapping before coffee, working out not to change my body but to return to it, long stretches of silence. I even stopped listening to music with words because I didn’t want a single sentence in my head that I hadn’t grown there myself. At the time I thought I was fixing myself. Only now do I understand that I was becoming someone capable of recognizing her own answered prayers.

Because the question that finally broke something open was disarmingly simple.

What if I didn’t do everything wrong?

In the spring of last year I suddenly felt like I had to go to Thailand. It made no sense. I was deep in my hermit mode, healing, getting my financial suicide from a few years back in order, focusing on my career. It wasn’t the right time to go on vacation. But there was this voice inside that told me I have to go. Figure it out, Alex. I was sitting in front of my computer, bawling my eyes out while getting the tickets. I wasn’t used to treating myself before reaching a great milestone or suffering enough to justify it. I didn’t deserve it. But the I I was becoming did. And both of these versions, in that transition, were holding the tension of polarities. People tend to speak a lot about the before and after, but no one speaks enough about how yucky the in between feels in that cocoon. How wrong it feels to listen to your gut feeling. How irresponsible it feels to spend money on yourself without negotiating it with anyone. So I didn’t tell anyone and I did it. I went. And it changed my life. Not because of something specific that happened there, but because, for the first time, I was acting as the person I was becoming instead of waiting for her to arrive.

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When I came back, things started falling into place in little ways that were hard to notice at first. I stopped biting my nails. I found my little piece of heaven, my place with a sunny garden. Soon after I met my neighbor who became one of my closest friends, who is always there for support, to cook for me and give me random presents. Just because.

For years I prayed to feel loved in a way that didn’t need to be negotiated. I wanted to stop translating myself so I could be received. I wanted to ask without the familiar contraction in my stomach while waiting for the answer. Now the people in my life say I love you out loud, easily, at the end of phone calls and in the middle of messages, as if love has become a language we all remember how to speak. When I need help, the answer is immediate, almost joyful, always a resounding - yes. There is a softness in the way the world meets me. The right rooms tend to become available, the right conversation happens on the right day between two sessions, and when I deal with electricity bills and broken shelves I suddenly realize I am doing it in my own home, my own life.

None of these things is dramatic. That’s the point. They are gentle, consistent, almost easy. They all carry the same feeling: I am no longer trying to extract love from life. I am meeting it from a place that is already overflowing with it.

The answered prayer was never the apartment, or the writing, that Thailand retreat, or the love that now comes easily. It was becoming someone who allows themselves to experience it.

Someone who can recognize her own life as it is happening.

Acting as the person you are becoming is not a strategy. It is the way you treat yourself when there is nothing to prove and no one to impress. Learning to spoil yourself, to become your own sugar mama, is not indulgence. It is the moment your life stops being a project and starts being a home.

It’s funny how gently sometimes your wishes come true, your mind doesn’t even notice if you’re not paying enough attention.

Be Magnificent,

Alex

❤️

The first time I attempted to tell myself “I love you” while staring at my own reflection was in the winter of 2024. I burst into tears. I couldn’t even finish the sentence. That summer, I had managed to claw myself out of an abusive relationship.

Now, it was a Tuesday morning, winter of 2026, and I was standing in front of the mirror, saying the magic words once more. This time, with spirit.

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I went about my day: meetings, therapy cases presentations, lots of thinking and talking (my favorite). Then I got a message from Julia, my best friend, whom I had last seen in that summer of 2024.

We met when we were both living in Berlin. She’s from California and now lives in New York. I’m in Tel Aviv. Still, somehow, we talk almost every day. It truly feels like she is with me in every step of my journey.

A week earlier, it had been Hanukkah, and in the holiday spirit, celebrating miracles, I put a picture with the words “Expect a miracle” as my phone wallpaper.

I wasn’t thinking much about it. It just made me smile.

Until that cold Tuesday morning.

Julia was in South Africa on a work trip. After her colleagues left, she decided to stay and explore. But as Christmas and New Year’s approached, the idea of traveling alone across Africa started to feel more like loneliness than adventure. She was venting to me in long voice notes that I listened to between meetings.

At some point, I said,
“Julia, come here.”

Half jokingly. I always told her to come visit me.

We laughed about it.

On Wednesday morning, I woke up to a message from her saying she was coming.

On Thursday at noon, we were hugging and bawling our eyes out in the middle of my street.

Neither of us could believe it was actually happening. Not seeing your best friend for a year and a half, while both of you go through major life transitions, is not just missing someone, it feels like phantom pain. Like an amputated limb that still aches. All of the time.

She landed in the Holy Land on Christmas morning.

She stayed for a week. I took her everywhere. Suddenly, the stories I had been telling her became shared memories. She slept in my bed. We shared our mornings. She met all the friends who had only existed for her through my voice notes, photos, and messages, including my neighbour (see October Love Letter). And now they were real. She was here with me.

But what made it feel like a miracle wasn’t just that she came.
It was that none of us had planned it.

A week earlier, she thought she would still be in Africa for Christmas and New Year’s. She never imagined she would find herself in the Middle East. And I never imagined that something I said half-jokingly in a voice note would turn into her standing in front of me forty-eight hours later.

There was no planning.
No coordination.
No “let’s book something.”

On Tuesday, we were on two different continents.
On Thursday, we were walking around my neighbourhood and having drinks.

It felt surreal. Like a dream. Like geography had briefly lost its authority.

That’s when I understood something about the sentence I say to myself in the mirror.

“Expect a miracle” doesn’t mean wait for something mystical.

It means stay open to things rearranging themselves in ways you couldn’t think of or organize.

Sometimes a miracle isn’t healing or insight or transformation.
Sometimes it’s your best friend crossing continents because the moment suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously, feels right.

And now, when I look at myself in the mirror and say,
“Good morning, beautiful. I love you. I wish you a great day. Expect a miracle,”
I don’t mean it poetically.

I keep my heart open for some REAL miracles.

And you should, too.

I love you,

Alex.

❤️

A magical encounter that taught me something

I hate my mattress.
The girl who used to live in my apartment left hers behind, and I just… kept it. It was uncomfortable, lumpy, and old. I kept planning to replace it, but somehow this task kept getting buried under my ever-changing, always-full to-do list.

So when my neighbour mentioned he was getting a new mattress and asked if I knew anyone who needed one, I said, “I know exactly the right person.”

Weeks passed, and he messaged me that it was ready. He offered to help me bring it over, so naturally, I decided to move my old mattress out by myself.

It was heavy and uncooperative, and at some point ended up wedged perfectly into the stair railing, halfway down, right before my doorway. I called my neighbour - no answer. I called my other neighbour, the girl across the hall, and sent her a photo of my situation. Just when I was certain it was me, myself, and I against the mattress, I heard her footsteps outside my window.

We pushed. We pulled. And somehow, it only got more stuck with every attempt. Right then, my mom texted that she was on her way, reminding me we had plans for coffee. And my mom is not someone you keep waiting.

Somehow, on the count of three, we managed to rotate it just right and pull it through the doorway, across the garden, all the way to the street. We left it beside the big green community trash bin, making sure it wasn’t blocking anything.
Phase one: complete.

Just as my mom and I stepped out for coffee, I saw the city's trash truck lift the mattress and carry it away. Perfect timing. A little wink from the universe.

We went to a cute spot nearby, came back, and chatted for another hour and a half. I knew phase two, getting the new mattress into my place, would have to wait until she left. I needed something to sleep on that night.

Right as she was heading out, my friend called:
He’d just finished tattooing at the studio. “Want to grab a spontaneous coffee?”
“Sure,” I said, because of course.

He arrived exactly two minutes after my mom left. He and my neighbour carried the new mattress in, placed it exactly where it needed to be, and solved the entire situation in under ten minutes.
Me? I didn’t lift a single finger.
I was already drinking my afternoon tea.

Bottom line:

Don’t worry about the HOW.
Focus on the WHAT, and let it go. Trust it will be signed, sealed, and delivered. And most importantly: chill the fuck out.

When you obsess over the how, you narrow the number of possible solutions.
When you anchor into the what, you zoom in on what truly matters.

That’s what creates the opening for things to unfold in the most effortless way.

How are YOU narrowing down your paths to getting what you say you want?

Or better yet - how is your DOING, getting you away from BEING the thing you want?

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A quote I’m pondering

“Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect, and that is meaningful to the observer. It is a principle that regulates relationships between events which lack a causal connection, yet are connected through their meaning. To the degree that we notice and receive these events, the world becomes transparent to the psyche.”

— Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Share in the comments about a time things magically fell into place for YOU!

Until next time,

Be Magnificent,

Alex

❤️

Love,

Alex

❤️

I grew up in one of those “ingredients” households, meaning we rarely had prepackaged food around. If there was a bag of chips, it was a special occasion. So I was never much of what some people would call a “foodie.” I do enjoy a nice restaurant from time to time, and I can cook pretty well. Still, honestly, most days I wish I could skip the whole go-to-the-store, get-the-food, prepare-the-food, eat-the-food, wash-the-dishes, and repeat three times a day routine (can’t believe some people still follow this made-up rule) and just take a pill. Easy. The truth is, I never really cared about food.

One day, on my way home from work, I was trying to get myself excited about the idea of nourishing myself. I decided not to buy groceries until I came up with something that actually felt exciting to eat. I had some crackers and went about my day.

I was lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, when it came to me: smoked mackerel, boiled potatoes with tons of butter, and a purple onion. Obviously. A true Eastern European craving. The thought of going all the way to the Russian store didn’t exactly fill me with motivation, but the inner calling persisted. Naturally, the first Instagram story I saw was of someone raving about that exact store, swearing he needed to stay away because that’s where you go overboard.

When I walked in, something playful took over me. I was chatting up the sales lady in Russian, and helping a guy pick the right mayonnaise (the Slav eggs kind, of course) from an entire wall of them. On my way home, I realized I’d forgotten the red onions. I almost let it go, but somehow missed the turn to my street and ended up taking a longer route. It led me straight to a small fruit and veggie shop glowing under its yellow lights. I laughed to myself walking up the street, thinking how you really can’t miss what’s meant for you when I saw her.

She was winking at me from across the road.

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It took me a moment, but then I recognized her, a friend of the guy I was seeing a while back. Back then, we had this strange push-and-pull between us. I never quite put a finger on what it was.

Back then in Berlin, while I was still trying to twist myself into someone else’s story, knee-deep in an abusive relationship, orbiting a man who couldn’t even hold me, she was already living completely outside that gravity. She didn’t shrink herself to fit a man’s world. As if she’d never learned the rule that a woman’s life must organize itself around someone else’s demands.

I remember watching her from a distance back then and feeling that tension between us, that little spark of irritation I couldn’t name. Only now do I see what it really was. She embodied something I couldn’t yet touch, the exact thing my soul was begging me to reclaim. No wonder it stung.

So when she told me she’d been impressed with how I moved to Berlin with nothing, built a community, a life, a sense of belonging out of thin air, I just stood there holding my bag of smoked fish, feeling both exposed and seen. Because while she was admiring the part of me I kept forgetting existed, I was admiring the part of her I had buried under the weight of that relationship. We were both mirroring each other’s lost pieces without even knowing it.

And the funny thing is, it all started with a craving. A quiet nudge toward smoked mackerel. As simple as walking into the Russian store. As ordinary as missing a turn and ending up exactly where I needed to be. Sometimes intuition isn’t a grand revelation. Sometimes it’s just a fish. A tug in your chest that makes no sense until it suddenly makes all the sense.

Because if I hadn’t followed that tiny instinct…

That “of course you need mackerel right now” instinct, I wouldn’t have run into her. I wouldn’t have gotten this strange little mirror held up to my face. I wouldn’t have seen what that old friction between us was really made of.

Isn’t it funny how that works?
How the person we feel friction with often the one carrying the exact thing our soul is starving for?

Nothing like turning a typical Wednesday into a small adventure.

Bottom line:

When you’re not sure what to do, do nothing.
When you get that quiet nudge, follow it. Without hesitation.
That’s how you start hearing yourself again.

And the real question remains:
The person who pisses you off the most - what are they mirroring to you?
What part of yourself are they pointing you back toward?

What is your soul begging you to bring alive, using them as nothing more than a symbol?

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Embracing existential dread AKA this month’s mission

In my search for aliveness and while wrestling with the big existential questions, I ended up creating a list of 300 things I want to experience in this lifetime. I realized that when you name the things that genuinely make you feel alive, you create a kind of inner compass. It’s harder to drift into someone else’s expectations, and easier to stay oriented toward a life that actually feels like yours.

Last weekend I got to scratch off two things (!) of my list.

Publish a piece of my writing in a magazine and read it out loud at a poetry reading.

Here’s the template to create your own list.

(Make sure you press “duplicate” to edit and add the things YOU care about.)

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Quote I’m pondering

“When you’re looking for a spiritual teacher, don’t look for a holy person in robes. Instead, find the person who annoys you the most. Because that’s the costume they will arrive in. “

- Laura Matsue

I’d like to invite you to explore the ideas I shared in this email, not all at once, take your time with it.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts. Any thoughts. :)

Until next time,

Be Magnificent,

Alex

October is a special month of transition and activation. I’m sure you’re going through some transitions this month, and if you ask your friends, they will tell you about theirs. October sits between the harvest energy of late summer and the deep introspection of winter, a fruitful soil for realignment and setting things in motion.

I have some juicy stories for you this time.

Let’s dive in…

A magical encounter that taught me something

I have a new neighbor. Matan.

I was sitting in the garden, writing my morning pages and sipping coffee, when he yelled, “Hello!” and waved. He was on the phone saying, “You would never believe what a beautiful neighbor I have.” Then he quickly lowered the phone, added, “I’m gay,” and smiled, like he wanted to reassure me he wasn’t a straight man about to disturb my peace. Since then, we’ve talked and hung out almost every day.

One day, I told him about a woman I met in Thailand six months ago, Kineret, who said her dream growing up was to have a house in Kohav Yair, one of those neat little rich towns. When I visited her, I was fairly unimpressed by the big house. Not because it wasn’t impressive, but because it wasn’t my dream house.

It made me wonder - what was my own Kohav Yair?

“So what is it?” he asked, puffing on a joint.

“Jaffa penthouse,” I said, raising my hands like I was holding a banner. He laughed, the way most people do when they hear about my aspirations. “There’ll be a conversation pit, incense, jazz, brutalist sculptures…”

The next day, he took me to the Ilana Goor Museum, her home perched above the ancient stones of Old Jaffa, radiating exactly the energy I’d been imagining.

When I complained about bird poop on the garden tiles, he showed up the next day with a power hose. When I said I wanted to hang some plants, he gave me crocheted planters. After I brought him dinner, he handed me a bag of twenty pitas. When I mentioned wanting more greenery, he gifted me a plant. Then came a toaster.

The list goes on. And on. And on. Every time I left his place, I was carrying something.

And then, my Soviet suspicion kicked in.
That inner voice that whispers, “Why is he giving me all this? What does he want?”
I felt a flicker of discomfort.

But then I asked myself: was it really his giving that made me uneasy, or my receiving? Or maybe it was what life taught me: that when you receive something, there’s always an open tab. That generosity must be repaid. That balance must be restored. No wonder it created tension.

Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was my vessel of receiving that was too small.

The past few years, I’ve been on a journey of allowing myself more.
More love, more money, more adventure, more fun, more ease — all the mores.
And I thought I’d been doing a pretty damn good job expanding my capacity.

Then along comes Matan, no pun intended, whose name in Hebrew literally means “giving.”

And once again, I’m being asked:

What is my inner thermostat saying? What’s the temperature I’m allowing?

Bottom line:
There is no open tab.
And if there is one, leave it to God, the spirits, the universe, whatever you believe in, to even out the score. That is not your job. Your job is to enjoy. Always. And be grateful.

Because just like a light bulb will explode if it can’t hold the electricity running through it, we, too, short-circuit when we’re not yet wired for the abundance we say we want.

So the real question becomes:

What am I pushing away simply because I can’t yet hold it?

And how can I turn up my inner receiving thermostat?

Start small. Say thank you when someone gives you something, or even just a compliment.

I fucking love this dude.

You want to be ready to receive everything you say you want when it comes.
Because, baby... It’s coming.

What I’m reading

An Experimental Model of Giftedness - a research paper on how a genius is engineered through curiosity, challenge, and the right environment. This is the link to it :)

A playlist for identity shifters

In the summer of 2024, a grieving process sent me into a deep depression. Suicidal. Even the closest people to me who are on this mailing list don’t know I had a somewhat clear exit plan. Which makes sense cause I’m the happiest person I know. Yin and yang. Only great pain and darkness create the capacity to hold great light and beauty. The tipping point was when a close call helped me decide to switch the narrative, which led to a long monk-like journey.

One of my ways to practice celibacy was NO MUSIC. Or to listen to music without words. I was very particular about the input I allowed from the outside to come in. I didn’t want anyone or anything telling me what to think or feel.

So if you’re ready for a rebrand, try to eliminate outside input. And meditate already, damn it. Here is the playlist with no words (one song has a few), all I was listening to for around nine months when silence was becoming overbearing.

Quotes I’m pondering (again)

“The spirit of evil is the negation of the life force by fear. Only boldness can deliver us from fear, and if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated”.

— My boiii Carl Jung

“Play implies a positive attitude to the unknown and pleasure in an activity for its own sake”.

— Jay B. Frankel

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I’d like to invite you to explore the ideas I shared in this email, not all at once, take your time with it.

Please respond to this email with your thoughts. Any thoughts. :)

Until next time,

Be Magnificent,

Alex

Happy Rosh Hashanah!

First off, don’t worry, I’m not going fully digital with my letters. But I thought it could be fun and mind-expansive to share a monthly round-up of the things that made me think and feel.

I’ll keep it short and sweet, promise.

A magical encounter that taught me something

Last Thursday, I needed to travel to the East side of TLV to get some party favours (you know which ones I’m talking about). I was a bit annoyed by the fact that, usually, it runs smoothly, and this time it was full of setbacks and delays. And I had to go all the way to a corporate area, which you all probably know I dislike.

On my way to the platform of the light rail, I saw my train pass right in front of my eyes. Annoyance. Then my mom called to tell me she’s moving Rosh Hashana dinner to Tuesday instead of Monday. Another annoyance. I could feel it gathering in my chest as I repeatedly told her I’d call back later, needing some space to understand why these little things were bothering me so much. Then, I reminded myself not to meddle in divine timing.

When I got off at Yehudit Boulevard station, the one I never go to, especially not in the middle of the day, I wasn’t sure which exit to take, it being under a high intersection. Just as I was about to head out, I spotted an old friend. He lives in Lisbon and wasn’t supposed to be there that afternoon either.

We ended up standing there talking for about twenty-five minutes. He told me he’s getting married next week, but no one knows he’s in the country yet, so it felt like divine timing that we bumped into each other. When he spoke of the wedding, though, he said he just couldn’t wait to get it over with. That it’s annoying and stressful. I tried to remind him how magical it can also be, and that hopefully it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

But when he spoke, I felt sadness. It made me think about how sometimes we invest so much into something that we become afraid to let it go, even when it doesn’t feel right anymore. In the world of investing, this is called the sunk cost fallacy, holding on just because we’ve already put so much in, rather than asking if it still serves us.

And in that moment, I realised: all those little delays that annoyed me, all the detours, I needed them to land me in this exact place, at this exact time, to hear what I needed to hear.

Buttom line:

The real magic isn’t just in getting yourself INTO the right rooms or opportunities. It’s in having the courage to get yourself OUT.

NEVER to settle and to walk away when something no longer aligns, and trusting life and yourself to guide you toward the gifts you’re meant to receive.

What was a time you got yourself out of the wrong situation?

A journaling prompt I came back to

“What I know for sure...”

A YouTube video I found interesting

You probably know I’m no stranger to meditation, and it’s been a long-time daily practice of mine. In this video, David Lynch shares about Transcendental meditation. Since watching this video a couple of days ago, I tried it yesterday, and it had a different effect than other meditation practices I’ve tried in the past. The best way I could put it: it was a broad experience rather than long mind travel into the front (it’s hard to explain the movement of the mind). In this video, a sweet boy explains practically how to try it. The word I picked for myself is: Lumi :)

A poem that made me feel

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. A woman who always reminds me of the magic in self-compassion. A link to the Queen herself reading.

Quote I’m pondering

“You’re never so centered on yourself as when you’re depressed. You’re never so ready to forget yourself as when you are happy. Happiness releases you from self. It is suffering and pain and misery and depression that tie you to the self. Look how conscious you are of your tooth when you have a toothache. When you don’t have a toothache, you’re not even aware you have a tooth, or that you have a head, for that matter, when you don’t have a headache.”
— Anthony De Mello


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I wish you all a happy and creative Jewish New Year. May we all be the fish’s head rather than its tail. And always have the capacity to view ourselves and others with generosity.

Be magnificent,

Alex

I’ll go first.

When I was finishing my one year Praktikum as a psychologist at the child development institute in Tel Aviv, the head psychologist gave me a book as a going away present. It was about this writer who was leading writing workshops.

“This is a lovely way to spend the day,” I thought.

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Two weeks before I moved to Berlin in the summer of 2022, the crypto market crashed, and I lost my job as a content writer for this shady crypto company.

I found myself in a new city with no friends, no job, and no Anmeldung.

Life truly got me on my knees. And when you’re on your knees, there’s truly one thing you can do. Not that, you pervert. I mean, that too… But that’s not where I’m getting at. There was nothing left to do but to find a pleasant way to spend my days.

A month after moving to Berlin, I had my first writing workshop. And this is how the Writers Guild of Berlin was born. I had no idea what I was doing. I remember walking the foreign streets of Berlin looking for someone to let me rent out a room and cold emailing a bunch of places the names of I couldn’t pronounce. Only to get an automated email to speak to them again around September. Since no one works in Europe during the summer.

But the funny thing about the universe, not funny, haha, but still amusing, is that things tend to work in your favour when you truly dare to want something.

So, in 18 months, I worked with over 120 people and had over 20 workshops that got so good that one of my students published a Haiku poetry book after writing his first Haiku in class. Others kept on coming for another round and another and another. I had events, was interviewed, and the most important thing… I had so much fun!

And let me tell you, there is a special kind of magic in contributing to the sparkle in other people’s eyes. And there is a special kind of magic about doing the things you say you want, even when you have no fucking idea what you’re doing.

You shouldn’t wait for life to get you on your knees to dare do the things you want.

No matter how silly they sound. After all, there is no right time like right now.

BEING COOL = doing the thing you say you want to do.

Extra points if you have no idea where to start.

Now, because I know we all like a little step-by-step summary, let’s break this down:

Write down what you always say you want to do once you have the time (starting a creative community, a book club, a podcast, becoming the next boxing champion… whatever comes to mind).

1. If you’re not sure what you want…

A good place to start is to ask yourself:

How can I find a way to connect with others in a way that I enjoy?

Start curiously looking into it.

2. Curiously, the important part here… you want to get yourself EXCITED.

   Excitement is your fuel. Many times, when starting something new, the fear of losing momentum can lead to a paradoxical effect: putting too much pressure on yourself and on things to happen in a certain way or timing.

   That way, you narrow down the area of possibilities! While all we want is to create a larger port of entry, the key is to be excited about being open to ideas and solutions that come in many different shapes, forms, and sometimes people!

Take action!

Remember that while you are curiously investigating it, start taking little steps towards your goal. After all, passion comes from action.

Creating a list of what you’ll need or a game plan could also be helpful, but be open to the reality that it will be dynamic and change tomorrow.

Ask yourself: what would the person who wants to do the thing I want to do do?

If you’re a writer who wants to write a book, you would most likely:

1. Start listening to podcasts about writing books.

2. You would research different outlining techniques online by other authors.

3. You would join a writing workshop.

4. You would start thinking of your story and crafting scenes or breaking down the general idea behind the characters.

That’s it for this one. Now go BE COOL!

Love,

Alex.