As I looked up at the moon last night and reflected on the coming eclipse, I realized how much inspiration I’ve taken from connecting with astrology and observing the movement of the moon, stars, and planets. And that isn’t because I’m certain there’s some cosmic blueprint baked into it all.

It’s more because life has taught me that we need something to believe in. And at this time in our evolution, so many of the things we were told to put our faith and trust in have revealed themselves to be false. Our leaders let us down, our structures crumble around us, our institutions fail to rise to the moment.

And in these times, I’ve found comfort in the ritual of looking up at the full moon, knowing that it has appeared in the sky with silent symmetry each month for more time than I can fathom. I reflect on how the people who lived on this land before me related to the stars. I wonder about my ancestors and their relationship with the cycles of the seasons, when they farmed in the hills of Abruzzo, or set sail from Sicily on ships where the only point to orient them was the sky above.

What I love about astrology is the storytelling. The archetypes it introduces, and the way it asks us to reflect on how they manifest in our worlds. How it challenges us to see ourselves as a complex combination of insights, impulses, and influences. The questions it inspires. For me, astrology has been a portal to slowing down and asking myself who I really am, what resonates with me and what doesn’t, what lights up my path and what shadow there is to explore.

Astrology to me is a language of symbols, written in the stars, connected to the cycles of nature, and forever expanding my sense of belonging to something bigger than myself.

So if you look up at the eclipse tonight, or gaze at the stars on some other evening, a question for you: What if the stars don’t need to determine our lives to help us understand them?

- Written by a Capricorn Sun, Cancer Moon, Scorpio Rising

Riding my bike, the sun browning my skin, waves of heat on the road ahead.

Stopping for lunch at a shack that serves fried clams and icy cold Coca-Cola in a sweaty paper cup.

Soft serve dripping from a cone onto too-thin napkins, making my fingers sticky and sweetening my lips.

Summers were feral growing up in New England of the ‘80s and ‘90s. I was wildly unscheduled: with nowhere to be and often no one to answer to. I stayed up watching the Late Show and music videos, then languished in bed until the sun streaming through the curtains became too glaring to ignore.

I swam in the pool until lunchtime, then retreated to the only cool room in my non-air conditioned house: the basement. I watched reruns of The Monkees and read Anne of Green Gables books and ate tart green apples and daydreamed. As I got to my teenage years, summer nights were for drives to Tower Records and trips to get Italian Ice, or pitching up in someone’s backyard to listen as the boys strummed guitars and the girls sang Indigo Girls songs.

As an adult, whenever June rolls around, my summer fantasies begin. I dream of a sprawling, sun-soaked season like the ones I remember from childhood. It’s a longing less for a place and a time, and more for a feeling: when all things seemed possible; and life was full of mystery and magic.

And every year, I’m disappointed. Something always gets in the way of this elusive summer dream of mine. Maybe it’s a big work project, or a sick family member, or needing to move, or a pandemic. The reasons don’t actually matter when the results are the same. Feeling like summer has passed me by. Feeling like I didn’t get to fully inhabit it. Feeling summer scarcity, like a craving: I didn’t soak up enough sun, or swim enough, or laugh enough, or experience enough wonder.

The summer of 2026 started with so much promise. Alongside my partner, I scaled a hill near to my home, one that not many folks know about, with views stretching over the city and a secret swing that hangs from a tree.

We watched the sun setting over the City of Angels, opened a bottle of wine, and toasted to the season ahead. We watched the light shift from electric orange to deep, dreamy purple. Later at home, I wrote a “Summer Live List” in my journal, naming the events I wanted to attend and experiences I wanted to create in the coming weeks.

And only days later, my dog passed away. And in her passing, all of the energy and excitement and optimism I had for this summer drained from me.

I haven’t made it to the beach, or the mountains. I haven’t danced outside under the stars. I haven’t traveled anywhere. Every week, another milestone passes by on the calendar: something I saved the date in anticipation of, that I find myself with no desire to attend. July slipped past in a blur of sadness.

Now, August is here. In other years, this was the moment I looked at the calendar and realized there were only a few weeks left. Panic would set in. I’d start making frantic lists of everything I still needed to achieve before Labor Day. Just one more beach trip. One more sunset. One more chance to finally feel the way I imagined I would.

This summer, grief has stripped away any energy I’d have to chase an ideal. And it’s made me realize something: all this time, I’ve been asking summer to do something it never can. I’ve asked summer to be a portal that transports me to an entirely different season of my own life. Back to childhood, when time felt elastic, and parents handled the logistics, and my body never ached, and all my friends lived a bike ride away, and I knew that every August would be followed by another just like it.

We do this all the time, don’t we? Or maybe it’s just me? Attaching impossible expectations to places and seasons and milestones, convinced that this is finally going to be the one that makes me feel the way I once felt.

But of course, no season is a time machine. No trip to the beach will make me 8 years old again. This is the summer I am 48. It hasn’t been the summer I planned. But as we ease into the last weeks of it, I’m letting go of the idea that summer owes me anything. That if I don’t swim enough or travel enough or chase enough sunsets, I’ve somehow missed it.

Summer isn’t ticking boxes off of a list. And maybe that’s what I actually loved about those childhood summers. It wasn’t about what I had to do, or feel, or accomplish. It was simply about being there.

Monty, Lola, me, and Alex. The two dogs I’d rescued, the ones who saw me through the dark of the pandemic, the wrenching twist of divorce, the dismantling of a whole chapter of life, and the halting steps into a new one. And Alex, the person who fit like a missing puzzle piece into our little bubble of love.

We settled into a new rhythm; a family of four. There was love and play and joy. Alex making eggs in the wok while the dogs scrounged for scraps. Weekend coffee runs, with treats for the dogs from the jar on the counter. Nights in the kitchen cooking spaghetti. Road trips, and snuggles, and long walks. We moved in this great amorphous rhythm, all together, rarely even going anywhere without the others. Or when we did, rejoicing at our reunion.

And when people asked how it was going, this new life of ours, I would say it was great, but sometimes I’d downplay it. Did I deserve to find love after divorce? Was this happiness too quick? I worried about everyone’s approval, especially the people who knew me for years, sensing that the new life story I was writing might not fit their narrative of how it was supposed to go for me.

Then there was the pressure: the ever present longing to do better, to have more, to achieve something bigger. That thrum of discontentment, with every beat of my heart: I do not not have enough. This moment is good, but how could it be great? Harder, better, faster. More, more, more.

I was so caught up in the future, that I took the present for granted. I said it was good and I knew it was good, but I didn’t stop to truly appreciate how good it was.

And then, in a flash, it was gone. One of us, smoted. We woke up to find sweet Lola, only six years old, passing away in her bed right next to ours. She had been at the vet the previous day with tummy trouble, but they sent her home with canned food and reassurances that all was fine. But it wasn’t. It was far from fine, and as we left the emergency vet in the cool morning light, irrevocably cleaved to a family of three, I realized the moment was gone. In a flash, and forever.

Those sunset walks, those morning coffee strolls, those nights on the couch, those snuggles in bed… never the same again. The family we were, now so different. Her absence continues to be a chasm. And we are so changed by the loss of her. Marked forever by the swiftness, the senselessness, the shock of her death.

It was just over two weeks ago, and grief has taken up residence in my mind, my soul, and my body. It always surprises me when people don’t understand the connection between those places. Grief has made me dazed and dizzy, with a case of vertigo that has the room spinning whenever I lie down. My stomach rejects attempts to feed it, even the food lovingly prepared by Alex, that I usually love so much. When I open my eyes each morning, there’s a crushing weight on my chest.

I have wept, and raged. I have spiraled deep into denial, and berated myself with the worst of ‘what if’s?’ and ‘why didn’t I’s?’. I look at the thousands of photos and videos of Lola I took in our too-short time together, and I cannot fathom that she is now a memory. I’ll never feel her leap into my lap, or snuggle her warm body as she burrows under the covers, or laugh at the adorable way she lifted her paws in celebration when we came home.

All I can hope for now is that this loss teaches me something, and remakes me into something better. In the weeks before Lola passed away, I could have slowed down so many times: To give her an extra belly rub. To be patient when she wanted to stop and sniff the flowers. To put down my phone and be more present.

About a week before Lola passed away, on the night of the summer solstice, Alex and I went out to watch the sunset. We intended to climb a pretty steep hill, to get a gorgeous view over the city, but we headed out a little later than planned, and I felt rushed. Along the way, Alex stopped to point out this one rock in the park. He called it Lola’s rock, because whenever we passed, she had to mark it as her territory. I remember nodding, uh-huhing, and trying to hustle us along.

Who cared about this rock, when there was the amazing sunset to catch?

I didn’t know that only days later, I would appreciate Alex pointing out that rock, of naming it Lola’s, and knowing that every time we passed it, we’d think of her. If I knew that night, I would have stopped, rather than giving in to that endless sense that I was about to miss something. Always rushing to catch the next thing, and in the hustle failing to notice the meaningful moment right there in front of me.

I got so caught up in what came next. Lost in the thing I needed to chase, the lure of my phone, the distraction of documenting that pulls me away from deepening into true presence. I was lost enough in an imagined future that I missed fully inhabiting the perfectly imperfect present.

If Lola’s death means anything, and right now it still feels too senseless, perhaps it will remind me to do better. To savor. To nourish. To appreciate. To rush less, and not shy away from my joy.

Rest in peace, my sweet Lola. You taught me so much in life, and in your death you are still teaching me about sweetness and bravery and toughness and what matters. Your brother and your Dad and I will honor you and your memory forever. And while we try to find our way through this time without you, we won’t give up hoping that the future brings you back in some form for more time with us, perfectly all together.

Things they taught me in school that are indelibly printed on my brain:

• 1588 was the defeat of the Spanish Armada

• How to play Hot Cross Buns on a recorder

• The names of all the capital cities in the United States

Things they didn’t teach me in school that I think about almost every day:

• How to manage my money

• How to save for retirement

• Anything at all about financial literacy; including how to pay taxes, maintain a credit score, invest in the stock market, apply for a mortgage… the list goes on

In middle school, I took a class called “Home Economics”. With “economics” right in the title, you’d guess we covered topics like managing a household budget, or even (in those days) balancing a check book.

Nope! Instead, we learned how to use a sewing machine (I sucked at it), how to make a needlepoint heart (I really sucked at it), and how to bake Pillsbury Crescent Rolls (I excelled at this one: both the baking and the devouring).

I’ve needed to use a sewing machine or make a needlepoint heart precisely zero times as an adult. I’ve never strictly needed to make sugary baked goods, although I have done that quite a few times.

What I have really, really needed to do is think strategically about money. But the American education system clearly didn’t think this was a skill that would be useful for me in life, or in any way important to cover in school.

Not one class, not one day, not one HOUR devoted to financial literacy across my K-12 education, or at my private university education. And with what Boston University charges for tuition and the amount of debt many students took on, we really should have talked about money!

OK… so did they teach me about money at home?

Also no! And I'm not alone.

I posted about this topic on Threads, and was blown away by the literal thousands of people who reacted to it and the hundreds who responded. A handful said they had parents who actively taught them financial literacy. But the majority of us received no information about money from our parents, other than “pay off your credit cards”.

From the comments on Threads, I noticed this theme: if you grew up in a house where money was tight or income fluctuated, your parents were less likely to talk about the subject. This was for sure the case in my household.

My Mother came from a family that was more well-off than my Father’s, so there were disparities between the lifestyles they were used to from the get-go. They married young, and had the setup where the man was the breadwinner and the wife stayed home with the kids. My Father was fired or laid off a few times throughout my childhood. I knew when it happened, but no one talked to me about what it meant.

Often my grandparents stepped in and paid for things, which created tension and control issues between my parents and grandparents, and led to long periods of fighting and even estrangement.

My Mom used money as a way to soothe herself when things were tense in her marriage to my Father (which was frequently). I remember a magnet on our fridge that read: “I don’t like money but it quiets my nerves”.

In my house, money was a topic that hid in the shadows. It carried secrecy and shame. The money lesson my childhood taught me: It was best not to bring up money at all.

Even as I got my first part-time jobs and enrolled in a private university on a partial scholarship, my parents never talked about how to manage money. I began to accumulate my first earnings, along with my first debt, and had no clue how to juggle it all.

What happened next?

I went off into the world with zero financial literacy, no tools with which to manage money, and lots of deeply ingrained associations that money equaled fighting, anger, trauma, fear, and estrangement.

Can you guess that this did not set me up to be the best with money?

If I could define my money philosophy in my 20s it was “a wing and a prayer”. I avoided thinking about money, trusted that it would arrive when needed, panicked when it didn’t, and somehow managed to skate by (often with the help of my grandparents).

In my 30s, I got married and started a business with my husband, so our finances were deeply merged and extremely co-dependent, which I guess is what I knew? We had a busy and successful small business and not enough time, so we tended to divide and conquer based on our strengths. Since money management was my weakness, my partner took over running all the finances. He found my wounding around money incredibly challenging, so he discouraged me from getting more involved with and aware of our money over the years. I believe he was (mostly) trying to protect me, but he actually enabled me to keep my head stuck in the sand.

The turning point

I’d love to tell you that I woke up one day and realized, without any chaos or catastrophe, that I needed to educate myself about my finances and take a more active role in managing my money.

But, of course, that is not the truth. Instead, my marriage and my business partnership crumbled and the jig was well and truly up. There was nowhere to hide. I had to take a cold, hard look at my finances and figure out how to manage them myself.

Oh God.

I felt like such a cliche: the recently divorced 40something who has to figure out her money messes… is that not the entire plot of Troop Beverly Hills? But feeling like a bad stereotype also means that you aren’t alone, and I discovered that there was a proliferation of openly available education about money; a lot specifically by and for women in midlife who realized that putting their trust in someone else to manage their money was a form of giving away power.

So I dove into the journey, alongside many other midlife women on the same path. I attended (and continue to attend) money-focused workshops, I’ve filled my social media feed with money influencers. I’ve journaled extensively on how I grew up interacting with money, and recognized how the avoidant patterns I carried into adulthood were, inadvertently, the ones I learned through observation.

I have forgiven myself for the mistakes with money I made in the past, accepting I did the best I could with the tools I had.

All of this has helped me sow the seeds of a new relationship with money: one that is less complacent and more curious, less avoidant and more aware. Money remains a massive area to develop in my life, but coming at this new lesson in my late 40s allows me to embrace progress over perfection. I have journeyed such a long way and am so much more engaged with and empowered by money than ever before. I trust that this relationship will only deepen and grow in time.

Sharing about this on social media, as I did on Threads last weekend, has shown me I am far from alone on this path, which takes some of the sting and shame out of admitting where I’m at.

The takeaway?

Do you know how many states mandated that students take a personal finance course as a graduation requirement in the 1990s?

One state. That’s right you read correctly… only one state (go, Illinois).

Today, thirty states mandate financial education before graduation, which leads me to believe that Gens Z and Alpha are coming into adulthood with a better foundation for managing their finances than my generation had. I am often grateful I grew up before the proliferation of social media, but I envy that today’s kids can learn from a host of young money influencers who provide accessible and relevant education.

Gen X experienced the last gasp of laissez-faire parenting before the “helicopter parent” became a thing. There are benefits of the Gen X upbringing: our childhoods were less scheduled and more free range, we learned resilience and resourcefulness, and we knew how to take care of ourselves from a young age… to an extent.

Because the down side is: the “figure it out yourself” approach that our parents took meant we learned a lot of lessons the hard way, via a lot of trial and error. I’m guessing I stand alongside many fellow Gen Xers in the feeling that we might have more financial security if we learned a few more practical lessons at a young age.

Still, I think it’s better to be late to the party than to not arrive at all. I’m starting a new chapter of my financial journey in my late 40s, which makes sense as I’m reimagining so much in this era of life.

If you’re a Gen Xer (or any generation) who also made it to adulthood without anyone teaching you about money, drop your experience in the comments… and bonus points if you share how you figured it out. Let’s spread inspiration and reliable financial literacy resources so we can all get smarter together.

For 2026, I chose an uncharacteristically gentle (for me) word: NOURISH.

This came after choosing THRIVE for 2025, which turned out to be a true stretch goal across 12 months. In 2026, I didn’t want to feel my word dragging me along, but rather experience it as a supportive container that could tenderly hold me.

After more than a decade of choosing a word, I know that focusing on it for a year provides an opportunity to confront the shadow as well as the light it holds. So even with NOURISH feeling like a soft, warm blanket, I expected that it could offer some tough lessons.

What Nourish has shown me so far: The light

In many ways, nourish has worked as intended in 2026. It’s been a soft pillow (sometimes literally, see below). The word reminds me to ask a simple question when making decisions: What would feel most nourishing right now?

That’s never been a question I’ve asked in the past, and it’s led me to some of the following nourishing choices:

• Continue my lifelong journey to become a better sleeper, which this year involves a pre-sleep shaking/dancing ritual, taking nightly magnesium supplements (game changer), investing in a soft and squishy pillow that better supports my neck, and using a weighted heating pad to bake myself like a burrito before bedtime.

• For me, learning is a form of nourishment. In May, I started a 6-month course to become an ICF-accredited coach. I took my time researching the options, found the right program, and delayed starting until I had other areas of my life in good shape, so I could be fully present. It’s been a month, and so far I’m nourished by what I’m learning.

• Heading to the desert for a last-minute long weekend with my pups and my partner to swim, stargaze, watch sunsets, and do a whole lot of lounging around.

What Nourish has shown me so far: The shadow

Going deep on nourishment has shown me that I am a chronic under-nourisher. In my younger form, I prided myself on the ability to go without nourishment.

I starved myself of what I needed for years. Food, water, rest, love. I placed immense value on denial, restraint, and control. I took pride in my own starvation.

NOURISH carries associations with food and diet, and deciding to nourish myself more fully this year has given me a chance to reflect on the very real struggles I’ve experienced in this area. I have a disordered relationship with eating. For me, it takes the form of spells of bingeing followed by intense and prolonged periods of calorie restriction and over-exercise. It took many years to admit this problem to myself, even longer to speak about it with those close to me, and writing it here fills me with an immense shame.

I experienced this cycle most intensely in my 20s, during turbulent years in London. As I evolved into my 30s, I started a journey of self-examination and began to achieve some equilibrium in this area. While not perfect, I wasn’t experiencing the same extreme swings.

Then along came the pandemic and the breakdown of my relationship. My struggles with diet, exercise, and body image roared back into my life with shocking ferocity. Triggered by some quarantine weight gain and the end of my marriage, I found myself restricting both my calorie intake, and a huge number of foods. I layered a punishing exercise regime on top of it, sweating my way through advanced hot yoga classes and pushing myself to walk 10,000 steps a day, often more.

I lost a lot of weight, gained those mythical yoga arms, and cried on the couch alone many nights.

Meeting a new partner who is a food lover and amazing cook began to shift my relationship with nourishment. He encouraged me to lift my food restrictions. He made sure I drank enough water. He prepared elaborate morning smoothies packed with protein for energy and collagen for my skin. And he doesn’t shrug it off when I self-flagellate after eating something “bad”, but instead gently points out that it’s ok to have some ice cream or a slice of pizza. He respects and adores my body, and puts no pressure on me to tame or change it in any way.

There is so much beauty in this kind of nourishment. I feel my senses coming alive as I eat foods that I avoided for years (hey bread, hey cheese- missed you!). I allow myself to eat when I feel hungry, and I’m starting to reassess my categorization of foods as “good” and “bad” (any former Noom members out there never get over the idea of red foods?).

I also took a step back from yoga, something that felt hard but also necessary. What started as a practice that connected me to my body more fully had become a place of penance: somewhere to sweat too much and stretch too far.

There is no time when recalibrating my relationship to diet, exercise and weight would be simple. But going through this experience in the age of Ozempic? Well, friends, that has been a journey. It’s hard seeing my body grow a little softer as women all around me morph into hard angles and edges.

I’m triggered by seeing people who are taking pills to starve themselves. I cannot watch the jutting bones of the actresses on Euphoria. I can’t cheer the rapidly disappearing flesh of friends on GLP-1s. As someone who has struggled to nurture a healthy relationship with my body, I know that I am fragile: just one skipped meal can tip me into measuring my worth by how many calories I denied myself.

I won’t lie to you: I’ve thought about going on GLP-1’s this year. And NOURISH has been my safety net.

As I get older, I become conscious of all of the ways society has encouraged me to play small, to shrink, to stay silent and compliant. We don’t want our women nourished, because nourishment implies strength. Better we are weak from hunger, distracted by denial, and consumed by self-control than awake, aware and angry.

It’s no coincidence that the time of perimenopause is marked by women putting on weight. In this season of life, we are called to take up more space. And I must say my shifting hormones do not react well to long stretches of starvation. My body needs fuel to function, and I can no longer coast on fumes the way I once did.

In the next six months with NOURISH, I want to go deeper into my relationship with how and what I feed my body, and discover how to feel “fed” without feeling like a failure.

What Nourish has shown me so far: The in-between

At some point this year something funny occurred to me: You can’t spell nourishment without NO.

At the end of last year, I explored my relationship with the word in the form of something I called NO-vember: a whole month where “no” was my default answer. No to last-minute social plans, no to favor requests, no to time on social media.

It was a powerful experiment for a recovering people-pleaser, and 2026 has, so far, only solidified the importance of the Sacred No. When I’m making my schedule, I often forget that I don’t have the same energy budget at 48 that I did at 38. And in those ten years, I’ve been reshaped by a pandemic, a divorce, multiple moves, the rise of fascism, plus I’m in the midst of one of the biggest hormonal shifts of life.

I don’t have the energy to keep the schedule I kept in 2016.

Nourishing myself has required me to say no, often to things I’d like to do or would have said yes to previously. There has been FOMO. It’s meant disappointing people. It’s frayed the ties of some relationships, because when you put more boundaries around your energy, you start to recognize who drains a lot of it.

Ahead in the next six months on this nourishment journey is using my Sacred No more often, recognizing when I’ve taken on too much before I feel trapped by my own schedule, and coming into a new awareness of my energy budget as it is today.

I’m curious to know: has anyone else done a mid-year check-in on their Word of the Year? How’s it going for you? What light has your word shone on your life, and where has it cast a shadow?

It’s been a reflective period, and I find myself pondering the path I took to arrive here, and what I learned along the way. I’ve been through enough inflection points to recognize that with each new stage, life invites you to circle back to old lessons learned, and explore what new wisdom can be gleaned and carried forward.

I started Long Haul Films in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, a time of economic uncertainty alongside rapid shifts in technology. There was a growing sense that the well-trodden paths our parents had taken were less likely to lead us to where we wanted to be.

My feeling back then: If there was ever a time to make the leap and bet on myself, it was now.

And here I stand all these years later, pondering my next leap and still ready to take the risk and bet that I’ll somehow stick the landing. 15 years down the line, the economy feels even less certain. Technology is changing the landscape faster than ever, and in ever more terrifying ways. Return-to-office policies and corporate downsizing are leading more people to consider making their own leaps.

If that’s you, I say: welcome to the club. Running a small business is a pleasure and a privilege. I’ll also say: buckle up. It’s a career path full of unexpected turns and diversions. I never expected to guide a business through economic turmoil, major socio-political shifts, a pandemic, wildfires, and a cross-country move.

Still, if I could rewind 15 years, I would leap again. But I’d go back in time to tell myself these important lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Love the process more than the product

When we start a business, we imagine what the best days will feel like. I dreamed about screening my films at festivals, participating in artist Q&As, traveling to far flung locations, and getting hired by dream clients to tell dream stories.

All of those things happened, and I feel lucky that they did, but those were small moments along the more extensive timeline of running my business. They’re what people see, and what I post about on social media. But they aren’t the majority of the actual work.

The actual work is non-glamorous. It’s staying up late to finish an edit and waking up early to write a proposal. It’s going out to a networking event, even when it’s been a long day and the last thing you feel like doing is talking to strangers. It’s making sure staff gets paid, that insurance is up to date, that there’s enough money in the bank.

It’s Zoom meetings and responding to emails. It’s attention to detail, it’s listening, it’s checking your ego, it’s compromising.

The end results are never guaranteed. I’ve won projects that I thought would be the making of my company, but ended up feeling more like a breaking point. I’ve made videos that I felt sure would go viral, only to watch them barely clock any views.

In the early days, I chased the buzz, because I thought the awards and accolades and wins and wonder were what it was all about. With time, I learned that those moments are ephemeral. No matter how big the win, the times arrives when life moves on and it’s back to reality.

What’s left is the daily drumbeat of the work. That’s what must drive you. That’s what you must love beyond all measure. That is what running a small business truly is.

Even if you’re a solopreneur, you DO NOT have to do it alone

One of the best things about running your own business is not having a boss, for reasons anyone who ever had a bad boss can understand. It’s also one of the hardest, loneliest things.

When you work for yourself, there isn’t someone to say “great job” when you nail something, or help you zoom out when you make a mistake. There’s no office to walk into for advice when you’re stuck between two difficult decisions. No colleague down the hall to gut check an idea with. No mentor automatically built into the structure of your day.

And then there’s the classic small business trap: convincing yourself you can do absolutely anything and everything on your own. I know this one all too well, having fallen into it more times than I can count.

There’s a certain ultra-DIY mentality that can creep in when you run a business. You start thinking that with enough Googling, enough podcast listens, enough late-night research, you can become an accountant, SEO strategist, social media manager, lawyer, web designer, and marketing consultant. In my experience, this usually happens because you’re being a cheapskate. Also in my experience, this almost always ends the same way: with wasted time, wasted energy, mediocre results, and eventually hiring the expert and spending the money anyway.

One of the most valuable shifts I’ve made over the years– and especially in these last months of fully taking over my business– has been letting go of the idea that working for yourself means going it alone.

Instead, I’ve slowly built a trusted circle of people I can turn to for insight, expertise, perspective, and support. Some know me personally and take those “what the hell am I doing?” calls and help to guide me back to myself and remind me of the life I actually want to build. Others bring specialized skills and expertise that I invest in to make my business stronger and more sustainable.

Whoever they are and whatever you call them, it’s never too early to start assembling the team that will support you and your small business.

Don’t strive for balance, but know your boundaries

When I started my business, it eclipsed my entire existence. Long Haul Films began as a side hustle, which meant its initial energy was about coming home from my day job and working to manifest it from a vision to reality. That late night and weekend work culture became part of the fabric of Long Haul. In the first few years, I worked so much and didn’t have the energy for socializing. I was never around for parties, and I planned my whole life around when clients needed me on set.

My business partner was also my life partner, so it was easy to go from the office to the dining room, and not let go of the work day. Work was there with morning coffee, and sprinkled into dinner conversations. A long car ride was an opportunity to deep dive into business planning. Vacations were tagged on to the end of business trips. Even when on vacation, we couldn’t always delegate. I remember preparing to board a plane to Costa Rice while trying to finish a powerpoint, and walking through a park in Mexico City talking to a client about an upcoming project.

Through the years of running my business, I struggled with work-life balance, but the longer I did the work, the more I understood that balance was not some clean line in the sand: it was an ever-shifting and sometimes blurry state of being that I had to define for myself.

For me, there is no such thing as perfectly neat balance. Striving to keep the work and personal parts of my life in separate boxes caused me to feel more stress, and led to more self-flagellation.

Once I surrendered and stopped pretending I could separate it completely, I felt the most empowered to create boundaries and guideposts that supported me:

• A few years back, I turned off email notifications on my phone. I check my email regularly, but my nervous system needed to stop getting pings while I ate breakfast or took a walk or played with my dogs.

• I committed to not checking email after 8 PM, unless I have a big shoot the next day or am in the middle of navigating something urgent. I have struggled with insomnia throughout my life, and screen time late in the evening never sets me up for successful sleep.

• I protect weekend time as sacred. When I started out, I worked a lot of weddings and events, and that meant so many 14-hour Saturdays. Now that I have weekends back, I embrace them as time to rest, recharge, and pursue other interests beyond my production work.

The problems won’t get easier, but you’ll get better at handling them

When you’re running a small business with multiple clients, employees, equipment, and locations problems will come up. All. The. Time.

As an oldest daughter, a Capricorn and a (recovering) perfectionist, I used to see problems as something to avoid at all costs, which meant driving myself crazy to manage forces beyond my control. When an inevitable problem emerged, even a small one like bad weather or someone running a little late, it triggered me to an extreme level. Everything felt like a catastrophe. The stress worked its way into my body, seeping into my skin and burrowing into my bones. I ached with the weight of it.

This created friction within me, and caused rifts with my partner. Part of facing the end of our relationship was a lot of self-reflection and reckoning with how I dealt with (or more specifically didn’t deal well with) problems.

For me, change came with learning to minimize my tendency to catastrophize, by cultivating resilience, and reframing my whole attitude about problems, mistakes, and setbacks. Rather than wasting energy trying to avoid them, I’ve worked to accept foibles and failures as part of the process: and a rather valuable part at that. Challenges are ripe ground for learning. Fumbling and falling down means that we are stretching into uncharted territory, and that’s vital for a small business’ survival.

I recently made a mistake; the kind that a few years ago would have spun me into hours, if not days, of beating myself up. After an initial, short round of panic, I thought to myself: I’ve stepped up to take on some big new endeavors. There is no way to do this without missteps. The alternative is to stay where I am, and miss out on the opportunity to become better. I shifted from beating myself up about the mistake to patting myself on the back for being brave enough to swing for something bigger.

Change is inevitable: decide if you want to spend your energy fighting it, or finding your way through it

When I started Long Haul Films back in Boston, I got to know other men and women who had been running video production companies for a while. They were the “old guard” at the time. They complained a lot about where the industry was going: how technology was getting cheap and ubiquitous so nobody had real skills, and how new companies (like mine) were undercharging and bringing down the whole industry.

I remember rolling my eyes behind their backs and thinking they were such sticks in the mud and that I’d never, ever be like them. Now, 15 years down the line, I find myself griping about many of the same things.

As humans, we get comfortable with a certain way of doing things. Our brains like consistency, routine, and security. Yet we live in a world that is constantly and rapidly changing. We know clinging to set ways is impossible, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. I’ve resisted almost every big change that came along in my life, white knuckling “the known” far longer than needed.

But today, I embrace that what worked for my business for the last 15 years is not what will work for the next 15 years. So much has changed, from the proliferation of platforms, the rise of influencer culture, and the rapid shifts in technology.

• Do I love and appreciate all of these changes? No.

• Do I sometimes long for the way things used to be? Sure.

• Does that mean it’s going to happen? Absolutely not.

Resisting change is one of the biggest drainers of energy in a small business. It’s hardest when you’ve had some measure of success: when you’ve been the buzzy new girl on the scene, or won awards, or had really big financial years. You get comfortable with the wins, and you can fall into the trap of thinking it will always be a certain way. And while constant, sustained success may happen for some businesses, the ones I’m most familiar with experience ebbs and flows.

Its hard– almost excruciatingly so– to admit that practices which once led to success aren’t cutting it in anymore. But lately, instead of lamenting or resisting or complaining, I’ve let it become a catalyst for evolution.

When things change, sometimes we need to change with them. That doesn’t mean we have to imitate what anyone else is doing or compromise our values. But it does mean experimenting, trying something new, keeping it fresh. It means listening to the people we work with and being open to evolving how we serve them.

It means honoring the work we did to get to where we are today, while also recognizing that what carries us into tomorrow may look and feel different.

Here’s to the next 15 years.

Deciding to make the legal leap took months of soul searching.

• Should I stick with the name that people knew me by: the name featured in movie credits and associated with my business?

• Should I revert to my “maiden” name, or did that feel like going backwards?

• If I chose a completely new name, what should it be?

I knew deep down the first two options weren’t for me. There was no staying stuck, and no going back. So new name it was, and I chose Del Gratta, a family name connected to my Italian ancestry and my great-grandmother and her five sisters, a gaggle of powerhouse divas.

Then the work started. Courts make it easier to return to your “maiden” name, but if you want to change to a new name post divorce, it’s a longer and more expensive endeavor that involves a lot of paperwork, advertising in a newspaper (yup, you read that right) lest anyone wants to protest the name change, attending a court hearing, then going back to court a week later to get physical copies of the decree.

Next, I had to make an in-person visit to the Social Security office. In the waiting room, I was unlucky to sit next to someone with a vicious cold, who coughed and sneezed her germs all over me. I ended up sick for a week.

Then I had to apply for a new passport.

Then, informing the bank and getting new cards, both personal and business. That appointment took more than an hour.

Then off to the DMV for a new license.

Next up: global entry/TSA pre-check, every airline registration, every website I belong to, every subscription service.

The list is not endless, but it often feels like it is. Every institution needs different paperwork in different formats and at different times. The water company requires a confirmation from the credit bureau that your name has changed, the credit bureau requires confirmation from the bank, that can take up to 45 days from updating your bank account.

WHAT IS THIS CRAZY MAKING PROCESS?

And more importantly, why do we as women subject ourselves to it, in the name of love? I got married in the UK and moved to the US, which means I previously did this process twice in two countries. Now that I’m getting towards the end of my third go-round, I’m able to reflect on what I’ve learned, and see how it may help me.

I’m not only changing my name this year: I’m reimagining my life, and I have some big visions for my next era. I was lucky enough to realize major dreams in my last chapter, so I know that it isn’t easy to to set audacious goals and throw yourself at achieving them.

While changing one’s name is not the rarest or scariest thing, there is something brave, bold, and a little delulu about renouncing your name of almost two decades and replacing it with an unusual, old, Italian family name.

And that’s the kind of delulu I want to embody in this next chapter as a woman in midlife. To make the hard-but-right-for-me choices, rather than sticking to the path that feels easy. To know, with certainty, that no matter how wild or difficult or uncertain a goal feels that I can not only achieve it, but that I can do it with joy, wonder, wisdom, and a little bit of weird.

So here’s a video I made, sharing 3 big learnings from the name change process that I (and you) can apply to other life challenges.

And for those of you who don’t like watching videos, here’s a recap:

Choose your own narrative, and make it an empowering one

We can’t control a lot of what happens around us in life. What we can control is how we feel, think, and talk about it. I fell into some victim-y thought patterns about the whole name change, like my trip to the DMV to update my REAL ID.

I was primed and ready for it to be stressful, but I sailed in and out in under 15 minutes with no issues. All the time I spent stressing about it beforehand was wasted energy that could have been spent on something more important.

Break a big task into bite-sized chunks

I’ve talked to many women who say it takes them years to complete their legal name change, and I believe that’s because it’s daunting enough to make people freeze up.

I’m proud of myself for doing the thing, and one of the ways I’ve made it achievable is breaking it down into baby steps. Once I got the court order, I committed to taking either five small steps or one big step a day towards the name change.

This is how you bring a big goal into fruition: break it down into smaller milestones and go at each one for a set amount of time. Then, give yourself a break, focus elsewhere, and come back fresh the next day to tackle the next segment.

Trust the process

If I didn’t change my name when I got married, I would likely still be using my maiden name. Instead, because of this weird and wild journey, I have a chosen last name that feels like mine, and that I love for all of the meaning it carries.

Going after a big goal or facing a challenge usually takes you to unexpected places, which might be better than anywhere your mind even imagined. Allow the process to carry you sometimes, and trust that it’s taking you to where you’re meant to be.

P.S. A little word for women on the topic of changing your name. I’m quoting from my own Substack post here:

But mostly because if I could impart one piece of advice to women, it’s to think long and hard before changing your name for love. It’s an antiquated practice in our society, and one of the many ways that women tacitly give up our power and our agency. I didn’t spend enough time questioning it when I made the decision to go along with my partner’s wishes, and I really didn’t think about the longterm ramifications, now impacting me almost two decades later.

When I found out last year that my former life and (then still) work partner was leaving the business (and the country), I took some time to contemplate my next move. I seriously considered calling it the end of Long Haul Films. There was a lot of grief, for the business Long Haul had been. It started as a dream to co-create something meaningful with someone I loved, and it grew beyond my wildest dreams to become a sustainable production company that employed hundreds of people over the years.

Long Haul Films took me all around the world, from the mountains of Montana to the bustling streets of Paris to the lushness of Singapore. It introduced me to a cavalcade of inspiring people: artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, inventors, business leaders, creators, activists.

I got to do the thing I love the most a thousand times: interview people about what *they* love. I got to help people tell their stories. I got to tell some of my own stories. I got to constantly expand and challenge myself. I won awards and accolades, I saw my name on the front page of newspapers and on television.

And I got to do it with my person, so even the hardest moments never felt insurmountable, because there was someone else to share them with. And the highs, the wins, the moments of triumph? Those were twice as sweet.

If this sounds like a eulogy, that’s because in many ways, it is. Deciding to go forward with Long Haul Films meant letting go of what it had been as a partnership, along with what I thought it would be going forward. I’m not the best at letting go, so this was a process. And throughout, I wondered if it was time to release for good because, honestly, running a busy production company with two people had always been challenging. How on earth would I go it alone?

Still, with lots of trepidation, and no idea what I was really getting into, I started the process of taking over the business around November of 2025. It’s now been 6 months of this journey. I’ve learned so much along the path (often the hard way), and for those of you who might be navigating your own transitions, here are a few big lessons I’ve picked up (or been reminded of) along the way:

Nike was right all along: Just do it!

Having been through a few seismic life shifts in the last few years (divorce, moving, starting a new relationship, moving again), and having made a number of leaps of faith in my personal and professional lives, I knew deep down that there was only one path forward and that was to just do the thing. One small, faltering step at a time.

The Joseph Campbell quote: Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls has been a guiding light for a long time, including when I made the leap from working for others to running my own business. I found myself coming back to the quote in recent months as I made this decision. And when I fully committed to sticking with Long Haul Films and started doing the work, the universe flung its doors open in the form of several big, new projects.

Bringing in a whole bunch of work felt extremely ratifying of my decision, but it also came with the responsibility of delivering said work at the same high standard clients expected, while also figuring out how to do or delegate a myriad of tasks that used to sit with my partner. I’ve likened the experience of the last few months to running while juggling. Lots of balls in the air, everything moving too fast, and me desperately trying to make sure I don’t trip up.

Which leads me to my next big learning…

Embrace (or at least accept) imperfection

If like me, you’re an oldest daughter, or a Capricorn, or just someone raised in the late 20th century before we normalized the concept of learning from mistakes, this is a tough one. I wanted to come out of the gate with everything buttoned up and fully ready to go, but the reality was quite different.

First of all, the whole process of taking over a partnership was confusing, time consuming, an administrative nightmare, and overwhelming. I felt like I’d been dragged back to the early days of my business. I’m talking working some days from 3 or 4 AM until 10 or 11 at night, then struggling to sleep as my mind churned over all the things I still had to deal with the next day.

I had to accept that there was only so much I could do. There were going to be steep, unavoidable learning curves. That, although I have many years of experience behind me, I had lost a big chunk of what made my business work, and that couldn’t be compensated for overnight. I had to try, learn, experiment, and be ok with sometimes fumbling. I had to re-learn my capacity, and recognize that with just one of me, I could not do what I was formerly able to do with two.

It meant I had to take on many roles and responsibilities that I’d avoided over fifteen years of business, because they were skills that came easier to my partner. In some cases, I realized that I could do the tasks I once shied away from. And in other cases, I learned that I am not the person to do those things. That led to an even bigger realization, once that is critical for every small business owner to learn (and sometimes forget, then learn again).

I cannot do it alone.

While I no longer have a business partner, I need many people with different talents to work with me and bring in skills and experience that I don’t have. The feeling of hiring a bookkeeper and a really solid accountant to help me run the financial side more efficiently was like taking a breath of air after being under water for a long time. At first I felt guilty. I should know every shortcut in Quickbooks and understand the nuances of state and national tax code… right?

Um, no. I know how to direct, produce, write, coach, work with clients, win new business, interview anyone from a 5-year old kid to a CEO, put together a compelling edit. That’s a lot of stuff, and plenty for me to focus on. It’s a waste of time to try to be a bookkeeper. There are experts for that. Hiring them frees up my time to do the things I AM good at.

Be open to the idea that change can be GOOD

I mentioned that I’m not the best with change. I resist it, hard, because I convince myself that any change is bound to be bad (hey there, childhood wounding). When in fact, adult experience has shown me time and again that even some of the most unwanted, inconvenient, and downright terrifying change often ends up, in retrospect, being exactly what I needed to guide me to a more aligned place.

I was petrified to collaborate with people in roles that were inhabited by my former partner. He was the main cinematographer I worked with and when I went to one of my first shoots without him, I was a wreck. Talk about wounded child! My 14-year old self was fully activated. On the ride to the location I sobbed, screamed, and blared sad music… all while fighting the urge to turn the car around, run to my bedroom, and slam the door.

But I was working with an awesome female cinematographer who was so positive about the shoot, supportive of me as a Director, and incredibly skilled at her job that I ended the day feeling completely energized and inspired. And while I’m not saying I didn’t get positivity and support from my former partner, there are challenges in working with the man who is your husband and who doesn’t think twice about challenging your opinion or second guessing your ideas.

Where I’m at six months in to this process

Recently, I had to go into the bank to make some updates to my business account. At one point, the agent called in a colleague to ask a question and I heard him say “Melissa owns 100% of the business”.

I felt my heart flutter, but not the way it fluttered when I learned my partner was leaving, and not the way it fluttered when I went to my first shoot alone, and not the way it fluttered when I was trying to untangle old financial messes and figure out editing software.

It fluttered like a butterfly, feeling itself spread its wings and soar.

I’ve chosen a word of the year annually since 2012, and written, posted, and otherwise blabbed extensively about the peculiar power of this practice. It has been one of my biggest tools for growth, expansion, self-examination, and sometimes facing my own shadow.

When you’ve picked a WOTY for as long as I have, you end up with some that are memorable for all the right reasons, some that are memorable for all the wrong reasons, and some that are totally forgettable. By far, my favorite and most life-changing WOTY was in 2014, when I chose the word ADVENTURE, and committed to undertaking one adventure per week, and blogging about the experience. I kicked off that year with a polar plunge in the frigid waters of Boston Harbor, egged on by a cheering crowd of friends in warm coats, and accompanied by the music of drummers and bagpipers.

Then I got my first tattoo, had my nose pierced, took a terrifying air balloon ride, went to trapeze class, commissioned a 3D miniature model of myself from an artist on Coney Island… and a whole host of experiments and activities that took me out of my comfort zone and expanded my horizons.

A few years back, I heard Oprah talking about the practice of choosing a word of the year, and why it’s important to make your selection mindfully. She used COURAGE as an example, explaining that if you chose that as your WOTY, you wouldn’t simply receive a download of courage, but instead find yourself in situations which required you to learn about courage, demonstrate courage, and confront your own shadow around courage. Cowardly lions need not apply!

That idea stuck with me, and when contemplating my WOTY and talking about it with friends, I’ve since cautioned them to think about the shadow side of their intended word. My prime example was the year I chose “unstoppable”; when I had big goals to achieve. I remember feeling like I was being dragged by a pack of wild horses through that year, and while I did make a lot of progress towards my goals, I learned that an unstoppable pace is NOT what I’m seeking in life.

In 2024, I chose STRENGTH as my word, knowing I was ending my marriage, selling my home, and confronting all manner of deepest, darkest fears. Strength as my WOTY was truly a balm for me. That word worked well, perhaps, because I already knew I was confronting my shadow, and so it supported me through many dark nights of the soul, and encouraged me to face up to many ‘I can’t do this’ moments.

When the time came to choose my 2025 word, I struggled. I couldn’t land on anything that seemed right, and I ended up asking ChatPGT for suggestions (I know, I KNOW). I landed on THRIVE, and even though it seemed like a serious stretch goal I thought why not try to thrive in 2025?

In the process of choosing THRIVE, I had a friend who decided to take a year off from choosing a WOTY, because she felt like the shadow side was becoming too much for her. I understood her reasons, and looking back, I wish I had followed her lead down that path. THRIVE ended up being one of those really challenging words, almost serving as a year-long taunt:

See if you can thrive during disasters. See if you can thrive during illness. See if you can thrive as your business struggles. See if you can thrive while the country succumbs to fascism.

Now, I’m not saying there isn’t value in learning through challenge, and it was sometimes helpful to have THRIVE as this shimmering oasis of hope, which I could ocassionally discern through the dissonance and disappointment of the year. But if I’m honest, I’ve been looking forward to moving on from THRIVE for a while, and had a strong idea of what I wanted for my WOTY in 2026 for some time.

Now is the time when I wish I had one of those Substacks where I gave you a blueprint for choosing your own WOTY, based on my own foolproof, 5-point system. But I don’t really work like that. My WOTY comes to me differently each year. Often it lands months before the new year (often a good sign, I think), but sometimes I’m prevaricating on it well into January. I’ve read guides and worksheets with questions to help choose your WOTY, but I’ve often found all the structure and formality stultifying; like it leads me away from my intuition.

My word frequently lands when I’m out of my head and in my body. It will come to me when I’m in downward dog in yoga class, or on a walk looking up at the sky. At least one WOTY arrived during a shower. When a word idea arrives early in the season, I will often start a Notes app where I mark it down, but stay open to other words that could land as the new year gets closer. This year, I had almost a dozen words in my Note. I spent time journaling about their various energies and potential impacts, and what they could mean in my life. Some years, I’ve been sure I had my WOTY only for a new word to land at the last moment. Looking back, I wonder if I may have been better off sticking with my original word idea: like those last-minute WOTY candidates were tricksters, trying to pull me off track.

Trusting the process, and allowing it to be different every year has stood me in good stead. Back in September of 2022, a friend told me over lunch that I needed to SURRENDER and it hit me so hard that I decided to change my WOTY for the rest of that year to surrender, and even carried it through the whole of 2023.

For my 2026 WOTY, I kept coming back to one candidate. And in fact, it was an idea that I might not have had were it not for my horrible struggle to THRIVE. In 2025, I learned that my ideas about what thriving looked like were very dependent on external circumstances. It was an uphill battle to feel like I was truly thriving when fire tore through Los Angeles, ICE raids hit our streets, AI started taking over more jobs in my industry. So I knew I wanted a word this year that felt like something I could, for lack of a better word, control. A bit like adventure, in the way that each week I chose an activity that felt like an adventure for me. It made the WOTY fun, it made it achievable, and it genuinely made my life feel more adventurous.

This year I wanted to take what THRIVE taught me and build on it. If I truly want to thrive, without so much struggle, what is it I need to do? What changes need to happen in my life, how do I need to reposition myself?

And so my word of the year is…

Nourish

Even seeing it written on my screen makes me feel good, like a calm settles over me. Nourish is what a Mother does for its baby. Nourish is sitting outside in the sunshine, eating a delicious, well-rounded meal. Nourish is taking care of your hair, your skin, your body, your soul: not because you feel you have to, but because you want to. Nourish is what we do to our gardens, after we plant seeds, we make sure to support their growth through loving care.

Nourish isn’t something that relies heavily on external factors, and it doesn’t require a lot of investment. Sure, a deluxe facial and spa treatment can be nourishing, but it’s also the little things that don’t cost much money, or are even free. Nourish is the green juice my partner makes for me in the morning with lots of fresh ginger. Nourish is taking a 20-minute walk on a nice work day between conference calls. Nourish is stepping away from screens at 8 PM and curling up with a good book.

“Nourish” has been slowly trying to get my attention over the last couple of years. I feel like a feature of a lot of my adult life was denying myself proper nourishment, whether that took the form of pushing myself with over-exercise, or restricting my calories, or ignoring pain in my body, or taking on too much work and allowing too little time for rest. Those old, damaging patterns have been slowly shifting for me, and committing to the word NOURISH feels like formalizing a secret relationship I’ve been cultivating.

As a Word of the Year, NOURISH feels like a gift to myself, rather than a challenge or a punishment or a hard lesson to learn. And that whole idea of having to experience the shadow side that I heard Oprah talking about? Well, I’ve decided to let that go this year. Choosing a WOTY is about belief, right? We get to to imbue the word with the meaning that we choose. And I’ve decided in 2026, I decide how I interact with my word of the year and I’m saying less shadow, more sunlight.

I even stopped myself when I had the instinct to make a “Nourish List” with weekly nourishing activities to schedule and track. Nourish is not about setting an agenda or making some excel spreadsheet… it’s about a million tiny opportunities to remember it’s my word and make a choice to take care of myself, the best way I can in that moment. I know, for me, it will mean more bike rides, more hot tubs, more Saturday afternoon wanders through art galleries, more rest, more down time.

Here’s to a nourishing new year. And you KNOW I love this, so please, please share your Words of the Year with me in the comments, and let me know why you chose them!

• No adding plans to my schedule.

• No saying yes to requests for help or advice.

• No social media, including my weekly cadence of posting on Substack.

NO-vember was an interesting experiment for a person like me. I have a tendency to believe I can do roughly 5x what I have the capacity to actually do. I also tend to be a people pleaser with a yes, and... attitude. So having “no” as my default answer to requests and invitations felt awkward, uncomfortable, and ultimately… exceptionally liberating.

So what did I do in November? Took a lot of long walks with my dogs, went to the beach, read two books, worked on strengthening my immune system, and gave myself some very focused time to breathe life back into my small business.

The surprises

• I surprised myself with how many times I thought “phew” when I said no to something. With “no” as my default, it rapidly became clear how often I say “yes” to things that I don’t want to do: a yes out of obligation, a yes out of FOMO, a yes out of habit, or a yes because I find it really hard to say that other tiny little word.

• I surprised myself with how luxurious long stretches on weekend afternoons with nothing filling them felt: a situation that was formerly my worst nightmare.

• I was surprised by which people in my life respected and celebrated my “NO-vember” practice, and who struggled with the boundary.

I also found a liberation in stepping back from social media, after several months of posting regularly and spending a lot of time on this platform, Instagram, and Threads. I hadn’t realized the impact that time had on my mental health. How covetous and envious and judgey and preachy it made me. How easily it lured me into spending my resources: money, time, attention. How much it stoked my anger and frustration.

I witnessed how intensely I’ve been conditioned, over the years of living on these platforms, to make my circle aware when I’m having a bad day, or when I’m having a good one, or when I see a beautiful sunset (luckily, so often), or a flock of birds in the sky, or my partner prepares a delicious meal for me (also, luckily, so often). I asked myself questions about my motivations for sharing, what it said about my ego and incessant need for affirmation, how the impulse to document and share could lure me from being present in moments that matter.

It felt so good to step away, that my NO-vember social media break extended into December. I found my way back on to Instagram a bit, but felt no urge to share my end-of-year reflections or 2026 predictions here on Substack.

I love writing, I love sharing, I love documenting, and I love the many connections I’ve made over decades on social media. If I’m honest, I dream of building a bigger network to share my work here. But what it takes to do that? NO-vember taught me that I may not have it.

One of my jobs out in the world is producing video content for brands to post online, so I’m familiar with how the algorithms work. And they reward consistency. That looks like showing up and posting on a regular schedule. That looks like finding a specific niche and creating content that speaks to it. That looks like AI slop with headlines like “10 Hacks to Fight Perimenopause Every Woman Needs to Know.” That looks like “creating engagement” on the platform by commenting on other content.

Last year, when I posted on Substack, I found myself spending hours afterwards “promoting” the posts. This whole process drained my life force. It distracted me. It made the fun of sharing my perspective feel more like a chore. It reminded me that any time I’ve become more deeply engaged with social media, I end up feeling the same way. Burned out, drained, and ultimately needing a break.

This is because, in spite of being someone who loves ritual, I also value the freedom to live in accordance with my own cycles and the cycles of nature. That means periods of rest, retreat, and recovery are a core part of my creative process, and life. Posting every day, or even every week, with rigid consistency, is simply not how I flow.

One of my favorite people to follow on Substack is Miranda July. She’s a director, author, and performance artist whose work I have loved for decades. I’m a paid subscriber, and it never occurred to me that her cadence of posting was irregular, until a recent debate broke out in her comments section, with one paid subscriber complaining that they weren’t receiving value for their subscription, because they couldn’t count on reliable posts. This led to a larger discussion, with Miranda herself weighing in, on whether we ought to judge the value of investing in someone’s Substack purely on how much content we get, and how regularly we get it.

It was interesting to read perspectives on this, and to think about the implications. In many ways, a platform like Substack has taken the place of something like a newspaper column from back in the day, which were always regular, and frequently weekly. Part of the disruptive thrill of the early Internet for someone like me, a late Gen X-er, was the fact that it offered something much more rough and tumble in the form of Live Journals, Tumblrs, and personal blogs.

It was a golden age of unique voices sharing their worlds, their POVs, their quirky fashion sense, their home life; often in the form of long and rambling posts. It felt real, it felt visceral, it felt accessible, and I don’t think it occurred to anyone to count how many posts their fave blogger made in a given week or month.

For sure, building a community, whether online or IRL, has always required showing up with regularity. But as the power dynamics shifted from individuals on their blogs to platforms driven by algorithms, the definition of “regularity” has expanded into something that feels more like an act of endurance.

There is so much content out there. Artists and writers I love have been flocking to Substack, in quantities so vast that I could never keep up with all their musings and reflections and hot takes. And all of these creators are being encouraged to POST, SHARE, COMMENT… some days I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of notes and updates and challenges. Who has the time for this? Where does it end? And with so much noise, what do I have to add to the discourse?

The truth is, I don’t know if I have value to add. But my other truth is this: I’ve been writing since I could get my hands on a pen. I filled the pages of my first journal at 6, wrote a play at 8, and guided the school newspapers and literary magazines throughout my high school and college years. Writing was one of the things in my life that fell away when I became more "adult”, more responsible, more corporate and less creative. Even when I broke away from working for other people and started my own business, I kept my writing on the side: in journals, and my Notes app, and endless unseen Word docs.

After so long writing in the shadows, “coming out” as a writer on Substack in 2025 was a highlight in a year that was short on them. Writing each post was a joyful exercise, and every comment, every (free or paid) subscription, every gentle nod of encouragement was a thrill.

Maybe that joy was a short-lived experience on an Internet that considers its residents to be products: only here to provide our data as a source of revenue for investors.

Maybe success on these platforms, from now on, will mean playing by rules that will always leave me feeling empty.

Or maybe, still, we can write our own rules, no matter what the algorithm says.

My decision coming into 2026 has been to keep writing in the style, on the subjects, and by the schedule that works for me. And I hope you’ll stay with me on this journey.

Today feels like it’s about letting go.

And so it is, with love and gratitude, that I say goodbye to Starla Frequency, the name of my sound healing business and an identity that has carried me through one of the most transformative chapters of my life.

Starla was born in the pandemic out of stillness, out of discomfort, out of my lineage, and out of a deep need to heal. She arrived as a creation and a portal, a way for me to step into something more potent, powerful, and aligned. For my fellow Gen Xers, an analogy that sums it up perfectly: Starla was my Jem to Melissa’s Jerrica: a performer who was a little more wild and free, a lot more colorful and daring. She embodied my Mars in Leo in the 10th house, the part of me that thrives on visibility, expression, and creative courage.

At first, I told myself Starla was a mask that could keep my work in the sound and healing spaces separate from my film and video production world. But the longer I lived as her, the more I realized that the work was never really separate. That I was never separate. Starla helped me remember that everything I do comes from the same impulse: to witness, to document, to transform, and to connect.

As I’ve deepened in this work, I’ve also become more comfortable with the idea of duality: the creative and the contemplative, the mystical and the mundane, the artist and the healer, all coexisting. As Uncle Walt Whitman once said:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

That line has followed me for years, but never has it felt more alive than now.

Because the truth is, I’ve been feeling the itch for a while telling me that I no longer need a separate identity to hold the work I do in the sound bath space. And the visions that have been whispering to me for the next chapter feel different, deeper, and beyond what Starla was ever meant to contain. The name that once felt so expansive now feels like it’s limiting me to an old version of what I thought I could become. These days, my dreams are different.

So, as gently and gratefully as I can, I’m releasing Starla Frequency to make room for what’s coming next.

Coming to this decision has been its own initiation. Close friends and followers know it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I knew the name, I knew the approach, I knew so much about Starla was no longer working for me, but I wasn’t ready to let her go without a glimmer of understanding about what I wanted to do next. These last few weeks have brought much falling away, along with sudden flashes of clarity, and a sense of sturdiness and readiness for what comes next. It feels peaceful, and so I know the time is finally right for the final farewell.

As to what I’m welcoming in, well if Starla has taught me anything, it’s to slow down. To not rush the process, and to let transformation unfold in its own time.

So that’s what I’m doing.

I’m taking November as a month for rest, reflection, and re-rooting, something I’m (only half) jokingly calling NO-vember. I committed to adding no new events on my calendar. After today, I’m stepping away from social media for a few weeks. I’m creating the space for stillness, and tending the soil for what’s to come.

This month will be a cocoon for me: a quiet, restful place of gestation. And in 2026, something new will arrive.

A new name.
A new chapter.
A new way of coming home.

Until then: thank you to everyone who’s been part of Starla’s journey! The friends, clients, collaborators, and community who showed up, listened, and believed in her (and really, in me). I’m sure some of you thought I was a little loopy when I came up with a new name, but you showed up for it and your presence made this work real. And now you’re used to me changing my name every other day (I promise, Melissa Del Gratta is it…)

What’s next for me will take everything Starla taught me about sound, story, and transformation, and root it into something more grounded, collaborative, embodied, and whole. A new arrival in 2026, and until then, I’m tending the space between.

And of course, it’s Scorpio season and Mercury retrograde over the coming weeks: what could be a better time to take a step back and simply be! I’ve been easing in that direction for the last few days and it’s incredible how much is already emerging in the space being created.

If you’ve felt the faint hum of something ending, and something else beginning as this wild, intense, challenging year draws to a close, know that you’re not alone. I see you, and as I told a friend the other day, I am cheering you on! Transformation is some of the hardest work we do as humans, and the most essential. The times we are living in asks it of us. So if you’ve been resisting, perhaps take this as your sign to answer the call of your own soul, put down what is heavy, and let go of what you don’t need to carry forward.

Here’s to Starla Frequency, and all the sound baths and sweetness she brought into my world, and all the ways she helped me become this version of me.

Because they’re a regular client who I’ve worked with for a long time, I talked with my crew, made some adjustments, and said we could make it work for the vastly reduced cost. The job was just a couple of days away, so I got back to them in less than an hour.

In return... crickets….

Eventually, a reply from the client arrived, saying they were hiring another company to do the job for EVEN less money than what I bid.

If this had been a new client and they put me through the ringer only to go with another company that bid lower, I’d shrug. But this is a client I have worked with for a decade, who knows the quality of my company’s output and how reliable and solid we are. A client who I’ve done innumerable freebies and favors for over the years. It stung they would make me jump through hoops, take quite bit of my time, and then give the job to someone else… because they were cheap.

I’ll admit, I spent a fair amount of time feeling sorry for myself, and complaining to anyone who would listen about how hard it is to run a small business nowadays, about the breakdown of loyalty in favor of the bottom line, and how sad I am for the future (in all sorts of ways) but especially sad that I’m wondering how sustainable it will be to continue running my creative business, which has been so successful for so long and which I’ve kept alive through a cross-country move, a global pandemic, and a divorce (from the person I run the business with— yeah!).

And then as I am wont to do, I went for a walk because even if it doesn’t solve all my problems, at least it gives me some perspective. And even if it doesn’t give me perspective, at least it helps me hit my 10k steps which I monitor obsessively in a vain attempt to feel a sense of control in an out-of-control world. While on this walk, I bumped into the neighborhood coyotes, padding their way through the gloaming, off to scavenge the streets in search of supper.

I’ve developed quite a fascination with coyotes since moving to Northeast Los Angeles, where we share our streets with their roaming packs. I see them frequently, at all times of day, and while I’m a little nervous to bump into them when walking my small, snack-sized dogs, they’ve never treated me (or the pups) with anything more than wary courtesy.

I’m enamored with their sleek beauty, the amber flash of their eyes, and the flawless way their fur blends into the colorscape of our surrounding hills. They are such a part of the landscape that they emerge from and disappear back into like apparitions. Some nights when I sit outside on my patio, I hear their cackles and calls in the darkness, a reminder of the wildness always threatening to spill over into this city.

A couple of years back when I was in one of the most difficult and in-denial stages of my marriage breaking down, coyotes began to show up in my dreams, appearing in my awareness to lend me a bit of their wisdom. I’ve read about coyotes many times before, and their spiritual meaning— how they’re tricksters teaching us how to navigate our shifting environment with cunning, and even a dash of humor.

I decided to read up about coyotes again, and this time noticed a new detail about them: coyotes are a type of animal known as opportunistic omnivores. In practical terms, this means that they eat whatever they can find. They love their meat, and so hunt for small vermin, but if that can’t be found, they’ll pivot to chomping on nuts, berries, or plants. When food is scarce, they’ll scavenge for roadkill or dig around in human trash, or hunt down larger prey.

They’re also not stuck on living in one kind of place. You’ll find coyotes thriving in wilder environments as much as you’ll find them skulking around city streets, like the ones in my neighborhood. You’ll see them in the forest, and you’ll catch sight of them in the desert. I read a description that described them as “generalists and not specialists”. Coyotes will make it work, whatever the circumstances.

What does this have to do with my client, and my struggling business, you ask? Well, here comes the connection….

I remember times over the years when my business was flourishing in moments when other businesses around me were struggling. During the pandemic, I was out in the field working on a documentary when many film industry friends were stuck at home waiting for the world to reopen. Even now, when so many folks in the industry are quiet, I know of a lot of people who are still busy, still getting booked, still out there making it happen.

I also think back to starting out in the industry, and hearing folks who had worked in film for a long time complaining about all the ways the business was changing. Back then, I rolled my eyes. Now I realized: I’m becoming one of them!

There’s a concept in healing and wellness spaces called victim consciousness, and it refers to a person who feels they are disempowered in life, and constantly being brought down by circumstances. This can be a controversial idea, especially for people who have experienced big-t Trauma or truly been victims of things like assault, abuse, or neglect.

But what about me and my struggling small business? Am I truly a victim here, as clients slash budgets, AI takes over creative jobs, and shifts in media consumption make the kind of projects I’ve earned money from less common, and more competitive to win? Or is life simply shifting and changing as life always does, and I’m so caught up in why it feels hard and unfair that I’m missing the opportunity to learn from the failures, and take that learning as fodder to grow, adapt, and change?

Or in other words: is it time for me to become more of an opportunistic omnivore, like my coyote friends?

What I’m experiencing running a small business in 2025 is not unlike what coyotes have experienced in recent years, as human development encroaches on their habitats and increases their risk of collision with cars, while climate change impacts their access to water and the abundance of their natural prey.

But coyotes don’t complain, they don’t whine on social media, and they don’t lie around feeling sorry for themselves. No, the coyote adapts, it pivots, it gets out there and finds new ways to survive.

And so perhaps it is time for me to do the same…

Just mine.

I’ve lived in enough homes in enough places to understand that houses carry a powerful energy. My former home, the one I bought and shared with my ex, held a dark heaviness. It had been neglected, and you could feel that its walls had witnessed sadness and suffering. I detected this within the house even before we moved in, but I ignored the instinct that told me (repeatedly!) to run, and convinced myself I could work with the house, improve upon it, and even help it heal.

I did so much to give the house the love and care that it had been missing, and I learned many valuable lessons there, but in the end, the heaviness was too much to contend with. No upgrade, improvement, or redecoration could fully clear it, and the house was a place of many hard times and difficult endings for me.

Looking back, I believe I was called to that house so a part of me could die.

But after that house was sold, it was time to heal and prepare to be reborn. And so entered my sweet little casita. The moment I walked in to view it, I felt goosebumps decorate my skin and I knew it was where I would live, at least for a little while.

It was what they call “small but perfectly formed”, in a gated complex of other sweet, little, white casitas. The house was compact, but it felt fresh, inviting, and full of light, with not a trace of the heaviness of my former home. In the living room, there was a gas-powered fireplace, framed by two wall-length bookshelves, where I delighted in keeping all of my crystals, keepsakes, photos, and magic things.

Every window revealed a verdant view, with plant life surrounding me: bamboo outside the bedroom windows and blooming bougainvillea winking pinkly from outside the patio door. It felt like living in an oversized terrarium. In the big shared courtyard, there were cyprus and olive trees, and one lone palm that stretched its fronds skyward above my roof.

I named the house Casita Bonita, and moved in with my two dogs, Monty and Lola. For a year, it was a place where we healed, and settled in to a new rhythm as a family of just 3, rather than 4.

For me it was the place where I slowly stepped out of the darkness and found my way home to myself.

When you have dogs, you view your neighborhood through the lens of their daily walks, and Monty, Lola and I discovered— much to our delight— that our Casita Bonita was steps away from the campus of Occidental College, a storied old liberal arts school with idyllic, tree-lined grounds. While I’d lived close by for a few years, I had never set foot on the campus, and it was as if this place was waiting to be discovered at exactly the right moment in time.

The dogs and I began walking at Occidental, almost every day, and its grounds became one of the most vital medicines of our healing journey. We entered on the east side of the grounds, via a hidden staircase that wound up through the trees, and emerged on to the main swathe of campus, where a long, sandy path extended outwards from a water fountain. Campus was hilly and high, with lots of pockets to explore, and we had different routes for different days. Sometimes, we’d take the Obama stairs, and my eyes drifted over the segments from a famous speech he gave an undergraduate in the 1980s. It was a balm to read it in this tumultuous political era, a hearkening to a more hopeful time.

Other days, the dogs and I walked through the woodland path, especially when I longed to get my feet free from cement and embedded in the dirt. My dogs loved that, too, scratching their paws in the silty earth, and lunging fruitlessly at squirrels who scampered over the branches and teased us with their chuckles. There were benches inviting us to stop and contemplate, but we liked to move, and often headed up the hill to the outdoor amphitheater. On many early mornings, we found it empty and took our time bounding up the stairs, until we got high enough to look out at the view over the city, one of the first, but not even the best views, of our walk.

The dogs loved to divert to the campus chicken coop, and the truth is so did I, since the move from an owned home to a rented apartment meant I’d had to re-home my sweet flock of three chickens to an urban farm.

The dogs loved the smells in the yard at Occidental where the chickens were kept, and they strained at their leashes to get closer to the coop. The dirt in the area surrounding the chicken coop was the deepest and richest on campus, and the dogs wanted to burrow their noses in it, as if to become part of it. We stood by the coop and greeted the chickens, a flock of more than a dozen designer hens, many with funky coifs and colorful feathers— so much more glamorous than my own standard brood had been.

We spent a few minutes watching them peck at their feed, before bidding them farewell and heading out the gate and back to the path that wound up the hill towards the dormitories, passing my favorite tree on campus, a massive, barrel-trunked birch pocked with marks that resembled evil eyes. The trees on campus were numbered with silver circles, and this one was 263. I felt this tree protected me, and I paused most days to press my palms against its silver-white trunk, and leaned in to notice the ants that darted in diligent formations on its surface, always hard at work.

As we strolled, we were likely to spot a peregrine falcon soaring overhead, or hear the ravens conspiring in the trees. The ravens were the true rulers of campus, and when the students went home for holidays, they overtook the place, allowing me to imagine what the world might feel like if humans were to disappear.

We got to recognize the other locals who loved this campus like we did. There was the older couple, bundled up in warm jackets no matter what the weather, with their walking sticks and ear muffs. There was the other solo woman, with a dog who looked like a bigger version of my Monty. There was the man with a fat Frenchie who only ever waddled on the flat paths at the bottom of campus. And the new Dad with his daughter in a stroller, a Golden Retriever marching dutifully alongside. I often nodded hello to the humans or greeted them with a good morning, while Monty and Lola crossed leashes and traded sniffs with the dogs.

When we weren’t in a rush, which was often enough in those days, we’d take the long way that led us back around to the east side of campus, along a path that emerged to reveal the most glorious view out over the City of Angels. Someone had cleverly installed a bench and some chairs at vantage points that looked over the expanse of the city.

We watched birds darting across the sky here, and so many sunsets. We looked out over this view on the day of the Palisades Fire, when the sky was stained red and smoke choked the horizon. Sometimes I took pictures on my phone, and no two days appeared the same. Other days, I kept my phone in my pocket and allowed the view to be ephemeral, saved only in the memories of those of us who stopped to take it in.

I let the dogs decide if we descended via the staircase, or along the road that wound past the EV charging lot and the soccer field; more vistas and ancient trees along the path for us to delight in. In the concrete expanse of Los Angeles, Occidental’s campus was an oasis of green, of life, of growth.

A year passed quickly living at Casita Bonita, measured out in many campus walks, morning coffee runs, and nights curled up in front of the fireplace. As it came time to decide whether to stay, I felt a nudge telling me that it was ok to move on. It wasn’t a dramatic decision, just a clear one: Casita Bonita had done exactly what I needed it to do. It kept me safe. It gave me quiet. It let me grieve without rushing and gather my strength, slowly and piece by piece. I could feel my life stretching again, and the little house, faithful as ever, seemed to say to me, “It’s ok! Go.”

I think that’s the secret of home: some places are long-term stays, and some are waystations that change you in outsized ways. Casita Bonita taught me how to live alone without being lonely, that I need the daily rhythm of morning walks and evening rituals, and how to hear my own voice again. And even though it’s no longer mine, I’ll carry the memories of the bamboo at the window, the squirrels in the trees, the stairways and sunsets as proof that a small shelter can midwife a huge return.

On my last day there, I left the keys on the counter and closed the door, my heart grateful. The house held me while I remembered myself. And for that, I will never forget my Casita.

Later back at home, I lit candles and began writing in my journal, something I haven’t done in a while. After letting the words pour forth, I stopped, palms resting on my heart, and also for the first time in a while I got still and simply listened. It was like tuning in one of those old-fashioned televisions: the fizz of static gradually resolving into a clear picture. The words landed with me, simple and true:

Your work now is to return to ritual, and from there return to yourself.

These words were the medicine I needed after the last two months; a period in which I had so many external obligations, so many people in my life struggling, international travel, a death in the family, my own sickness, and then, when I was exhausted beyond all reason— a MOVE. As the obligations, the work, the requests to volunteer, the text messages and phone calls, the jet lag, the long drives, the late nights, the U-haul boxes and even the celebrations piled up, I disappeared into the multitude of roles I needed to play and lost connection with my center.

Just when I needed it the most, my yoga practice lapsed, along with my meditation ritual. I went from consciously breathing to holding my breath as I muscled through my to-do list. I cut morning walks short, and tumbled into bed without taking stock.

Then came last month’s equinox and eclipse, my ten year anniversary of moving to Los Angeles, and this week’s Full Supermoon: a trio of significant moments stirring me back into awareness. I began to see that the experience of these last weeks is not a new one, but instead part of a cycle I’ve been working through for years. Memories tugged me back to 2016, my first full year in Los Angeles, and what arose for me then…

In 2016, I was introduced to the idea of cyclical living. It happened at a conference called Amazing Women Entrepreneurs, hosted at (RIP, I still miss you) Wanderlust yoga studio in Hollywood. Author and women’s empowerment speaker Kate Northrup was on stage, talking about the four distinct phases of women’s menstrual cycles, and how it meant that women were built to function at different levels of productivity throughout the month. Once you understood your cycle, she explained, you could craftily plan your life to capitalize on its ebbs and flows.

Got a big pitch and need to be magnetic? Schedule it when you’re ovulating. In your luteal phase, before menstruation? Do more focused, detailed work. Women’s cycles are like the seasons, and thinking cyclically and seasonally can inform all of your work, like this:

• Emergence (Spring): creative ideation, making plans, nurturing visions

• Visibility (Summer): launching, connecting, making public moves

• Culmination (Autumn): details, analytics, wrapping things up

• Fertile Void (Winter): research, reflection, taking stock… and REST

Modern life means many of us skip the last two stages, and get stuck in a constant stage of ideating and launching. It’s like existing in the heat of summer eternally, without the reprieve of autumn’s release and winter’s rest—and it leads to burnout.

I was sitting in the audience at this event in the fall of 2016, as far from cyclical living as I could be, having recently moved cross country, and traveling constantly for my video production business. When not on the road, I worked from home, my desk mere steps from where I was supposed to “relax”, and because I had so many clients on the east coast and in Europe, I often started working before sunrise. Even my laptop case was emblazoned with the word “HUSTLE”.

My move to LA was raising questions. Shortly after relocating, I traveled to Costa Rica to produce a promotional video for a yoga retreat, and at the end of filming, the instructor invited me to stay for a few days, chill out, and practice yoga.

That trip changed the course of my life, providing me with a connection to yoga that I’d never experienced, and leading me to find a studio in Los Angeles (RIP The Springs, still miss you, too!) and begin a dedicated practice that has sustained me for a decade.

Yoga was the “gateway drug” to other spiritual explorations such as sound baths, cacao ceremonies, and meditation circles. These experiences changed how I saw the world, and viewed myself within it. I recognized that I’d been moving through life at warp speed, I was mentally numb, and my body was screaming at me— in the form of insomnia, shoulder pain, vertigo, stomach issues— to make some changes.

So Kate Northrup’s message landed at the right moment, and I came home from the event with a commitment to start re-orienting my life around the cycles of my own body, and of the natural world.

At this point, I was twelve years into using hormonal birth control, so the logical first step was to stop taking the pill and rediscover the rhythm of my actual cycle. I’d been taking birth control for so long, I forgot what not being on it felt like, but once I stopped (and with full acknowledgement and recognition of the many ways access to birth control empowers and emancipates women), I realized that whatever problems I believed the pill was solving for me, it was creating so many others.

I recognized how dull my sex drive had become, and how painful sex was. When I stopped taking the pill, the drive slowly rekindled and the discomfort evaporated. Monthly PMS was minimized on the pill, but in its place were regular, deep bouts of depression that rolled in like storms and lasted from days to weeks. I never connected this symptom with birth control, until I stopped taking it and for the first time in years was able to ask myself: hey, do I have to feel this way anymore?

And in the weirdest and most unexpected development, within days of coming off the pill I noticed how smelly everything was. I caught the waft of a passer-by’s perfume, was overwhelmed by cooking aromas from my neighbors’ apartments, and got heady from the scent of the flowers on the roof of my building. This couldn’t be a side effect of the pill, could it? A quick Google search confirmed: the pill can blunt the increased perception of smell that naturally occurs during a woman’s cycle.

As I think back to 2016, and my wish to live a life more in tune with my natural cycles, I’m not sure I understood the seismic changes I was signing up for. Quitting birth control was only the start. As my senses opened, I began to ask other questions.

I’d been living in downtown LA, but suddenly the concrete jungle felt stultifying, and I traded in the industrial loft and rooftop pool for a rambling house surrounded by trees and a big porch that overlooked the Verdugo Hills, where I could end each day watching the sun set spectacularly in the distance. Once a month, the full moon rose above my porch, and I bathed under its light. The former East Coaster in me cringed at the idea of a moon bath, but the newly empowered cycle-syncer delighted when my menstrual rhythm synced up with the phases of the moon.

I began to look at my calendar not simply as an empty container waiting to be filled to the brim, but instead asked where I needed to leave white space for rest and renewal. I started to observe seasonal milestones like the solstice, and explored how my ancestors marked the changing of the seasons centuries ago, so I could bring those little rituals into my own life.

What I didn’t understand at the start of this journey is that cyclical living isn’t simply a hobby or a new habit; it’s an entirely different way of engaging with life that doesn’t align with how the majority of people in the western world live. It meant fewer flights, fewer projects, and fewer yes’s. And beyond that, it meant letting some relationships and roles move to the back burner for a season... or even longer.

Then came the pandemic and, later, my divorce: two events that ushered me from the summer of life into one of the longest autumns and winters I’ve known: clearing, composting, learning (often the hard way) to let things end without immediately replacing them. It’s been years, and I’m only beginning to feel the first thaw of spring in my body, but it’s a fragile one. But these last weeks reminded this former New Englander how easy it is to tumble back into old weather patterns: go-go-go, overwork and overcommitting, yes’ing my way into depletion.

Add perimenopause and a world that feels heavier than it did in 2016, and I’m still learning lessons as I navigate unfamiliar and erratic new cycles of life. Because that’s the thing about cycles, they don’t necessarily conclude but rather deepen, with each revolution brings more learning, greater understanding, and clearer insight.

What has the most recent turn on the wheel taught me? When life gets loud and starts moving too fast, it’s astonishing how quickly I forget the simple practices that keep me anchored, and the need to let my days, weeks, and months flow like the cycles of sun, moon, stars, and seasons. When I lose this sense, when I abandon ritual, life gets unbalanced quickly. My outlook tilts negative, my fuse shortens, bad habits re-emerge, and I slip into criticism and judgment: of myself, then everyone else.

I start absorbing energy that isn’t mine, saying yes when I mean no, and mistaking busyness for purpose. It’s the surest sign I’ve drifted from myself, and the clearest invitation to come back to what steadies me: yoga, meditation, conscious breathing, long walks, good books, healthy food.

I stood under that bright Aries moon in this Libra season, the time of balance, and heard: return to ritual, return to yourself. That’s my plan. Not to perfect the cycle, but to live inside it, and honor all of it seasons, all of its lessons, and let it be the place I come home to within myself when I wander too far off course.

Los Angeles has certainly delivered on all of those promises, save being unable to completely avoid sports, or at least avoid Dodgers traffic on the 110. But it’s a funny time to reflect on a decade, with so much shifting in the sands of the world around me, and in my own sphere. Life ten years on is not what I expected. In fact, nothing much is what I expected.

When I arrived, Barack Obama was President and I clung to the naive hope that the charlatan running for the Oval Office could never actually be elected. I wore a raven-beaked costume mask for my first Halloween party in LA, little knowing the role that face masks would subsequently play, and that there would come a year when I’d spend Halloween, and all the major holidays, in lockdown. These last months have been some of the hardest I’ve experienced in this city, marked by economic challenges, the ravages of the January wildfires, and the scourge of ICE on our streets.

In my own life, the memories of arriving here are tinged with the melancholy of disappointments and unfulfilled dreams. I came as a 30something with my husband and creative partner, the person I expected to explore LA with for as long as our time here lasted. In 2015, we were finishing our first feature documentary, and dreaming big about the next film we’d make, the house we’d buy somewhere in the city.

Ten years on, our marriage is over. We bought the house, but sold it after going our separate ways. We don’t make feature films together anymore. I’m in the middle of a move, and found myself sorting through boxes from our early days here: pictures from the first months in our downtown loft and notebooks where we fantasized about Sundance screenings.

But in spite of feeling rather down in the dumps and tempted to let this milestone pass unmarked, I couldn’t help but reflect on my topsy-turvy, tumultuous tenure in The City of Angels. My wish came true in that living here has indeed stretched me, in the many ways this city gets under your skin, asking you who you really are and what you’re truly made of. The way it pushes you out into the spotlight and says “Show up”.

So on that note, today I share what a decade in Los Angeles has taught me.

1) LA will deepen your spirit, if you let it.
The city is a masterclass in paradox, where you can go from freeway to foothills in seconds, and something about that friction spoke to my soul. In my first months, I dove deep into my yoga practice, started meditating with a teacher who helped me envision my future self, and attended my first sound bath… then another, and another. Little by little, ordinary life became extraordinary and routine turned to ritual. They say it’s hard to make connections here because many people come to LA on their own quests. I didn’t realize what I was getting into, but this city has taken me on a spiritual journey and the way I see the world is forever changed by living on this land.

2) Latinx culture is the heartbeat.
Yes, it’s true that I’d never really tasted a taco until I tried carne asada from a street vendor in Boyle Heights. But there is so much more than Latinx food infusing the culture here in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula. The murals, the music, the markets, the history are all the ways Los Ángeles earns its name. Once you start paying attention, you realize how much richness you’ve been walking past, and how vibrant the traditions are off the beat of the tourist trail.

3) LA time is elastic.
“Yeah, I want to come!” = maybe.
“We’ll try to stop by” = we will not be there.
“I’ll be there in an hour” = see you next time.
Everyone is simultaneously late and exactly on time for their own life. If you sweat this, Los Angeles will be hellish for you. We don’t get snow here, but you have to embrace the flakes.

4) Choose your neighborhood like a zodiac sign.
Where you live becomes a personality trait, and certainly defines your experience of this almost 500 square mile city. You’ll spend 90% of your time within very few of those miles, so make sure to live in a part of the city you love. For me, it’s Northeast LA, but there are so many micro-cities that make up this sprawling metropolis, from K-Town to Culver, West Adams to Westwood. And don’t forget that the east side and the west side are essentially different countries. If your good friend relocates across the line, you’ll hang with them about as often as you see your European cousins.

5) Waiting in line is our religion.
Pop-ups, bakeries, screenings, soft opens. We queue like it’s church. Did you even get a croissant if you didn’t have to wait in line for at least an hour to procure it? Half the sacrament is chatting with strangers as you wait, who will usually tell you about somewhere else, where they waited in an even longer line to get something even better/tastier/more exclusive.

6) There aren’t four seasons… there are forty.
Santa Ana season. Smelly spring blossoms season (Angelenos, you know the ones and you know what they smell like!). Gloom season. Jacaranda season. Spider season. Citrus season. The calendar here is less about months, more about micro-moments.

7) The beach paradox is real.
When you arrive here, you swear you’ll go every Sunday. After a couple of years, you go precisely never. I have a friend who lives four blocks from the beach in Santa Monica, and swears he barely makes it down to the shore. But on the rare occasions you do brave the traffic and find your way to the ocean, you’ll watch the sunset from a parking lot and somehow it still moves you to tears.

8) Hiking and traffic are not mutually exclusive.
You can be on a ridge in the most glorious of golden light, your breath ragged from the steep climb, a hawk soaring overhead. Then you look out across the glowing vista, and over a river of brake lights on the highway that you simply can’t seem to escape. Yet somehow, you feel completely at peace. It’s the most LA experience there is.

9) The best of LA isn’t on the Walk of Fame.
No, what makes this city so addictive is all of the hidden gems; more than you could discover in a decade. Los Angeles’ best experiences are tucked in the corners: the esoteric mini museums, the downtown warehouse galleries, the invite-only backyard shows, the hidden architectural wonders, the movie screenings in a cemetery with an A-list celeb picnicking on a blanket next to you. It’s those in-the-know moments that don’t make the top of the tourist guides, but make living here feel legendary.

10) You need at least a dozen hacks to survive LAX.
Never get dropped off at Departures. Put your terminal into Google Maps or risk an unexpected 45-minute scenic loop of the horseshoe (in my experience, it can take longer to get around the airport than to drive the 20 miles there). Book parking at one of the hotels because their shuttles come more frequently than the turtle-like Economy Parking bus. Or best hack of all, book your flight out of Burbank.

In ten years, I’ve learned that if you can’t find your thing here in Los Angeles, look closer. There’s every kind of person and every kind of scene, from sunrise drum circles to midnight film clubs to abuelas handing you fruit over a fence. Being happy in LA means loving the mess as much as the magic: the cracked sidewalks, the symphony of smells, the helicoptering hummingbirds and the hovering helicopters. It’s a city that asks you to choose your life, every day and on purpose. It may not even choose you back, but it doesn’t matter. That’s part of loving Los Angeles, too.

Here’s to the next decade, whatever it may bring.

This week, I want to tell you more about how I deepened into a relationship with my ancestors, and how asking for their guidance and wisdom became a regular practice in my day-to-day life.

In my first ancestral encounter, I met an old woman who touched my arms with her palms, and set them alight with an electric current. Though she didn’t speak to me, it came into my awareness that she was someone from my own Italian lineage, letting me know I was meant to do some kind of work with my hands to help others.

It took a while, but I realized that the work I was meant to do was facilitating sound baths, and I began to study the ancient art of sound medicine, and invested in a range of healing instruments. I began to offer sound baths for friends and family, and received positive feedback. That grew to offering private sound baths for small groups, collaborating on larger sound baths with friends, and even facilitating sound baths for creative companies.

As my sound bath business grew, I established a new morning routine, where I’d meditate, and spend 15 or 20 minutes playing my crystal bowls to start each day. In my meditations, I began processing memories of my grandparents and great-grandparents. Quite naturally, the practice of playing my sound healing instruments began to feel very connected to the people who came before me.

This evolved into a ritual where I invoked the names and energy of my ancestors before each sound bath. I began to surround my practice area with photos of relatives, along with their keepsakes. And the more I did this, the more real and present my connection to them began to feel— in many ways, allowing me to communicate with them as we’d never been able to in “real life”.

In one meditation, I experienced a long walk along a river with my Grandfather. In life, he had a whip-sharp sense of humor, an infectious laugh, and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. But he’d also sailed to Japan as a navy cadet in World War II, run a successful fruit and produce business for decades, and been a loyal Father and Husband. I didn’t know as much about these sides of him, but in this meditative walk, I got to ask him questions I’d never gotten around to when he was alive.

He left me with an assurance that I’d see a green heart at some point soon, and know it was him. A few weeks later while strolling down Abbot Kinney Blvd in Venice, I saw a Buick Riviera parked outside of a store.. just like my Grandfather’s old car. I went inside, and the first thing I saw was a bowl of ceramic Christmas decorations. On the top of the bowl: a gorgeous, green heart.

And so began a regular practice of talking with my grandparents, and invoking the wisdom of other ancestors, perhaps not known to me but who I sensed stayed connected with me across the years and the miles. When I needed advice, when I had to make a hard decision, when I was nervous and wanted to feel a sense of protection, I reached out and asked for their support. And I called upon their energy before every sound bath. It became my form of “prayer” and I felt a strong sense that it was a two-way conversation, with my ancestors speaking to me in sudden downloads, symbols, and signs.

In 2022, I got the opportunity to travel to Italy for a birthday celebration, and decided to extend the trip and journey to Abruzzo, a lesser known region west of Rome that is known as Italy’s national park, and where my Grandfather’s relatives descended from. I had traced my family tree, and identified some of the villages where relatives had once lived. I plotted a course to travel into the mountains, to tiny towns and villages far from the Italian tourist trail.

The night before the journey, I was reviewing my family tree, and noticed a branch that jutted off to a town called Civitaquana, and a woman who was my fifth great grandmother, who lived there from 1750-1820. Her name was Annantonia, and she had several daughters and a son. Something pulled me to read more about her, and while information was scant, I did notice something that startled me:

Two of her daughters, Candidarosa and Anna Lorenza, died on the same day in 1814.

I felt a chilling sensation run up and down my spine, and thought to myself: it’s her. I added Civitaquana to the list of villages to visit.

The next day, I drove from the bustling town of Sulmona where I’d been staying, far up into the Pescara hills. The drive was idyllic, with lush greenery whipping by the window and jaw-dropping views of the Maiella mountain range in the distance. My first stop was in a sun-bleached village called Brittoli, which was almost totally abandoned. Windows and doors were sealed, an empty table and some plastic chairs sat outside of a boarded up bar, and only one lone old man waited at the bus stop. I wondered if the bus even came anymore. It was like walking through a ghost town.

From there, I navigated the winding mountain roads on to Carpineto della Nora, the town where my maternal Grandfather’s direct lineage ascended from. As I drove into the village and found a place to park, I was greeted by noses peering curiously over balconies and a scruffy, yapping pup scampering over to greet me. Signs of life!

I meandered through cobbled streets, past a church with a statue of the Virgin flanking the door, and by a monument to veterans of the World Wars. I clocked my Grandfather’s last name etched in the stone, perhaps some cousin of his who had battled in the same war my Grandfather was sent to fight. It was lunchtime, and I found my way to the only restaurant in town: a sweet little space at the front of a house on a hill, with rickety chairs and tables set against faded yellow walls and big windows looking out to the hills.

My Italian was terrible and meager, and the proprietor’s English was no better. He was a lanky, grey-haired man in a t-shirt, jeans, and apron who served as host, waiter, sommelier, and chef. I accidentally ordered two antipasti plates, but no matter as it was the most delicious selection of meats and cheeses I ever tasted (garnished with a tiny, pepper flecked fried egg- yum).

Because I was driving. I didn’t order any wine, but after serving my food, the owner sat down to break bread with his wife and insisted on filling my glass from the wine bottle they shared. It was a dining experience you would never find in a guide book or Google review, and one of the most special meals of my life, looking up at the faded photos on the wall of local residents, and wondering if any of them were my relations.

After lunch, it was on to Civitaquana. I felt tired after the heavy meal, and had a dull ache in my back (what I’d come to discover was an early symptom of my first case of Covid, but which at that point I shrugged off as too much time sitting in the car!). A thick cover of clouds had rolled in, obscuring the sunshine that dappled the leaves and warmed my skin throughout the day.

Civitaquana was busier than Britolli, but not as charming as Carpineto Della Nora. It had a roughness that reminded me of old industrial towns I knew from growing up in Massachusetts; places fallen on hard times, but still clinging to life. I’d read that the 1700s and 1800s had been a time of political instability and hardship for those who lived in Abruzzo villages like this one. Most people had been sheep herders, or farmers. But falling wheat prices and crop diseases made life hard, and Italy’s unification further stratified the divide between landowners and those who tended to that land. This led to widespread poverty, social unrest, and eventual mass migration to the new world.

What had life been like here, I wondered, for Annantonia and her large family? Was she the one I saw in my vision? What happened on that day in September, 1814, when two of her daughters died? And was this why she reached out to me, with her longing to pass on the lost “gift”?

I took a deep breath, and simply listened. After a few moments I felt a call to walk in the direction of the church, a somewhat humble building by Italian standards, with a looming bell tower and a cobbled courtyard facing towards the street. There was an empty bench in the courtyard and, feeling drained, I took a seat. Closing my eyes, and without saying a word, I spoke to her.

Annantonia, if you’re here, give me a sign.

DONG! DONG! Within less than a second, the heavy sound of bells clanged from the tower- one, two… 3 PM. I jolted two feet out of my seat on the bench, before collapsing back on to the worn wooden slats, wincing at the sting of discomfort in my already aching back. My mind was rolling over the details of what happened, trying to make sense. Surely the timing was a coincidence? Or was it possible… Annantonia was communicating with me again?

My heart fluttering, I stood, and simply allowed my mind to stay open to the possibility that my great-great-great-great-great Grandmother was energetically communicating with me.

Guide me, I thought, and allowed myself to meander through the town, not following any maps or with any destination in mind, simply letting my heart lead me through back roads and up to vistas with views over the mountains, then down through the cobbled streets and back to the city center, where I found myself in front of an imposing building with the words Famiglia Faricelli on the facade. It was boarded up and gone to seed, but clearly a former palazzo. Later, on the internet, I learned it was damaged in a 2009 earthquake. Inside, it’s a museum to another time, waiting for someone to restore its former glory.

But there in that moment on the streets of Civitaquana, my heart whispered to me that something had happened here connected to Annantonia and her family. Had she known this household, or worked for them? Were her daughters buried somewhere in the expanse of courtyard spreading out from behind the property? I yearned to get in, but the entrances were boarded and the tall gates locked. It was impenetrable.

So I did the only thing I could: I listened at the threshold and kept the door open inside of me. I understood now that Annantonia and I were in a conversation; one that we could continue anytime I wanted to show up, and open up.

By coming to this land, I began to truly understand how my people lived: the work of their hands, the harsh winters and shaken earth, the way a departure may mean you never return. In Annantonia’s story I could feel a rift: a tearing between mother and daughter. It made me think of my own mother, and her mother before her, and the push and pull of our relationships. We carry the patterns of those who came before us the way a tree carries its rings: invisible from the outside, but unmistakable within.

Standing at that gate, listening, I realized that simply being here and saying yes to my ancestor’s whispers was the first mend. I could name the wound, feel it, and offer forgiveness in both directions. I walked away with Il Regalo burning quietly in my hands: a charge to keep listening, to do the work with these hands I’ve been given, and help others to find the way back home to themselves.

At some point, I became aware of images depicting Italian-Americans in the media, whether in fictional re-creations of gangster life on The Sopranos, or in the wild hyper-reality of MTV’s Jersey Shore. The message was clear: Italians were dirty drunks at best, or cold-blooded gangsters at worst.

I began to feel embarrassed of being Italian-American, and disconnected from my culture. I didn’t bother to ask my Grandmother for lessons on how to cook her “gravy”, and I missed the opportunity to hear the stories she’d been told by her own Grandmother, Elvira, who was born in Pisa and sailed in 1863 with her husband Guiseppe, a marble worker, to make a new life in Boston (See my Grandmother below with Little Me. I love how similar our facial expressions and demeanor were, even when I was a child) .

As I grew older, I adopted the American tendency to pluck from a hodge podge of cultures to shape my identity. I became so obsessed with British music and culture that I ended up living in London for ten years, and got one of those weird, Madonna-in-her-Guy-Ritchie era accents. In my 30s, I became a devoted yogi, which introduced me to Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and practices. I was heavily influenced by African-American music and arts, Asian customs and practices and, when I moved to LA, connected with many Mexican and Latin American cultural touchstones.

At some point, I became conscious of the falsehood of the American “melting pot”, where cultures blended together and everyone contributed… and got a taste. I realized, instead, that I’d been coasting by on the privilege of a colonizer, where I got to take the best parts from people and traditions who enriched America and use them for my own growth and gain.

So I started to ask myself questions: Where do I come from? What rituals and practices are mine? What does being Italian-American mean, beyond the images of gangsters on the movie screen, or the acidic tang of red sauce on my tongue?

A lot of this questioning coincided with the pandemic and lockdown, which meant I had a lot of time on my hands to get curious, and dig in to research about my own family tree, while reading about Italian rituals and traditions that preceded the patriarchal sweep of Roman Catholicism (highly recommend Italian Magic: Secret Lives of Women by Karyn Crisis and Italian Folk Magic by Mary Grace Fahrun if you’re interested to learn more).

I learned that Italy’s spiritual life long predated the rise of Christianity and the Catholic Church. In those times, women played key roles in folk practices, healing, fertility rites, and seasonal ceremonies, and the traditions of La Stregheria originated in the homes of Italian women, who passed their practices down from Grandmother to Mother to Daughter. These women were at the heart of healing in their villages: blending herbal tinctures, protective charms, divination, and lunar rituals using natural elements like rosemary, garlic, and other plants in protective rites.

As Catholicism spread, many of these practices were absorbed and rebranded. Seasonal harvest rituals became tied to feast days of patron saints, and women’s magical practices were increasingly persecuted under the label of “witchcraft”, which is now synonymous with the name La Stregheria.

Through my own research, I traced back my heavily Italian family tree, which stretched from the marble quarries of Carrera to the lush hills of Abruzzo all the way to the buzzing streets of Sicily. During this time of ancestral research, I was doing a lot of personal introspection and inward journeying. I worked closely with a dear friend and powerful healer, who led me on a guided shamanic journey one afternoon.

This experience took place at my home, in the middle of the day. I lay on the couch with my eyes closed, completely sober, and with the guide taking me into a deeply meditative state. When asked what I could see, I strained my inner vision, but all I could make out was a fuzzy dark brown, like my face was covered in a burlap sack that filtered out the light. I sat with the sensations and the colors, and gradually they began to sharpen.

I found myself on a wide stretch of land, the earth flat and bleached out by sun, or perhaps scorched by fire. All around me was emptiness. But gradually, I noticed a woman on the landscape. She was older, and wore a crudely cut dress. She lay on the ground, a sad and solitary figure, but sensing my presence, she stood and walked towards me.

No words were exchanged, but I felt certain that this woman wanted to tell me something. It came into my awareness that she had lost people, through some cruel twist of fate, and that she was waiting in this place for a long time. Waiting for me?

As the old woman got close, our eyes met and she reached out her hands, grasping my forearms in her palms. I felt a shot of heat emanate from her grip and a burning sensation raced through my arms; not only in this liminal dream world where we met, but where I lay on the couch in my living room. I drifted in and out of awareness, the fire from her hands lighting up my physical body with such intensity, I felt beads of perspiration break out on my forehead and trickle down my spine. It felt like we stood there, locked together, for hours. In reality, it may have been a moment.

When I came back to consciousness, my arms had gone numb from the heat, and I was soaked in a cold sweat. I was certain that I had met an ancestor, although I wasn’t sure who she was yet, and I knew that she had shared something with me, a gift that she wanted to pass down, but had been prevented from until this moment.

I knew I had been given guidance, a mandate, that I was meant to do something with my hands, something to help people. I didn’t know exactly what, but I knew it was a gift, what I would come to know as Il Regalo.

A few months later, a friend sent me information about a sound bath facilitation course happening in Los Angeles. I had been attending sound baths for years, and they were an important part of my own healing journey, but the idea of becoming a facilitator never occurred to me. As soon as I began studying the physics of sound, and the history of how it was used by cultures all over the world in rituals and healing, I was fascinated. In 2021, I ordered a set of crystal bowls, and the moment I began to play them I realized: This is it. This is what she gave me. The gift.

Next week, I’ll share more about my experiences with sound baths and a deepening into an understanding of, and connecting to, my Italian lineage, including the pilgrimage I made to visit the villages of my ancestors in Abruzzo, Italy. And in the spirit of this topic, this Friday night, September 12th, I’m hosting a sound bath at The Garibaldina Society in Highland Park, Los Angeles, called Echoes of the Ancestors. In this sound bath, we’ll pay homage to our ancestors, and honor the lineages from which we came.

The Garibaldina Society is the oldest, continuously operating Italian-American Society in the United States and I am a proud member of its community. I’m so excited to share a sound bath there, taking inspiration from the ancestors and relatives who helped me to find this path. DM me to join.

I’m preparing to change my sound bath business name in the coming weeks, and it got me reflecting on the journey I’ve been on with my name. Or rather, with my names.

My Morris Moment

I started life as Melissa Morris (see her below). I was never Mel, or Lissa, although people who knew me in high school called me Morris, and a few still do to this day.

In my late 20s, when I got engaged, I told my fiancé that I wanted to have a conversation about our expectations for marriage. He was British, I was American and we were living in London: was he open to moving to America? Did he want kids? Would we co-mingle our finances? How would we resolve disputes that came up?

The conversation went along fairly easily until we came to one point: when we got married, he wanted me to change my last name to his… Dowler. And this man, who’d shrugged and gone along with most of what I wanted for the wedding and our impending marriage, was firm on this one. He would be very upset if I kept Morris as my last name.

This took me by surprise, but perhaps because he’d gone along with so much, I relented without too much discussion or debate.

The Dowler Decades

I had some misgivings running up to our wedding day, beyond feeling sad about changing my name. I was an extrovert with a demanding job and a busy social life, he was an introvert still figuring out his career path and with a preference for staying in and playing video games. I wondered (worried?) about our differences, but I got good at rationalizing: Opposites attract, right?

At my bachelorette party, a friend decorated the room with big pink balloons in the shape of two M’s, for Melissa Morris, and I remember looking up at them and wanting to cry. After being mellifluous Melissa M for so long, the idea of transitioning to the more dour Dowler felt like a death.

But as with all of the other doubts, I brushed them away and went along for the ride. I said “I do”, and changed my name legally, on both sides of the Atlantic. I stayed “Melissa Morris Dowler” for a while on social media, but eventually gave over completely to the change. I went on to start a business (with my ex-husband) as Melissa Dowler, direct films as Melissa Dowler, win awards as Melissa Dowler, and over time, became used to the name.

The Starla Frequency Switcheroo

I didn’t think much about my name for years, until the pandemic (that time when all the things we hadn’t bothered to think much about for years came up). During the long days of lockdown, I did a lot of work on my mental and spiritual health, including studying sound bath facilitation for personal healing and transformation. This led to me launching a “side hustle” as a sound bath facilitator.

I knew right away that I didn’t want to facilitate sound baths under my name, Melissa Dowler, but wanted to create a new name, almost as a brand. The name I came up with was Starla Frequency, and Starla became like Jem (truly outrageous) to my Jessica. I told myself that I wanted this different name for sound baths to keep it separate from my other client work, but looking back, I wonder if I wanted to keep it divided from my married name. I was at the beginning of the slow deterioration of my relationship, and stepping into “Starla” allowed me to explore facets of my personality that had become lost in my marriage.

Whatever the conscious or unconscious reasons, I created a whole identity around Starla Frequency. People I met through sound bath facilitation began calling me that, and even close friends and family started using Starla interchangeably with Melissa. My Brother even took to asking me “what would Starla do?” as a way to help me get to the heart of a difficult decision.

The Del Gratta Era

In 2023, my husband and I ended our marriage after several years of struggle, and about a year later in the fall of 2024, I was divorced and had a choice: to keep Melissa Dowler, or go back to my maiden name, which is easy to do as part of the divorce process.

I knew right away I didn’t want to keep Dowler. Going through a divorce tends to bring up every resentment you ever repressed, and I started to feel a lot of anger that I’d let myself be pressured into changing my last name. Plus, I was still running a business with my now ex-husband, and fielding questions from potential clients about our shared last name had become supremely awkward.

But reverting to my former name felt wrong, too. I hadn’t been Melissa Morris for close to two decades, and I didn’t feel like her anymore. The name was also associated with my Father, and going back to another patriarchal name felt like the last thing for a newly emancipated woman to do.

So, after a lot of deliberation, I decided to choose a new name: Melissa Del Gratta. Del Gratta is a family name from my Mother’s maternal lineage, that I took to honor a number of strong, independent, and powerful women from my family’s past. It also connects me to my heritage as an Italian American, something that has become increasingly important to me in recent years.

What’s next?

I’ve started using Del Gratta personally and professionally, but I’m still legally Melissa Dowler, mainly because of fears and concerns about being in the middle of a legal name change while the country I live in descends into fascism. I also have the complexity of being a dual citizen of the US and the UK, so whatever I do in one place needs to be handled in the other place. It’s a lot of work, and I don’t relish the idea of the limbo time when I might have two different legal names in two different countries.

Then add in my sound bath name of Starla, and things get more confusing. The desire I once had to “hide” the work I do or my spiritual beliefs is as over as my marriage. In fact, these days I have a desire to more fully embrace every facet of who I am, and hide nothing away. I was very quiet about the end of my marriage, out of a desire to protect the shared business we run together, and also because of the intense shame, sadness, and grief that went along with such a big ending.

Now that the divorce is behind me, radical authenticity is what I want most, and I deeply desire to bring everything I am together under the one name, Melissa Del Gratta, and carry that forward into the next chapter of my life. In the coming weeks, I’ll be rebranding my sound healing business, and letting Starla Frequency go with love. Everything I learned from becoming her is already within me.

Why do I share this?

Because I feel like a weirdo for changing my name so much and want to explain myself.

Because I will be making one more change to my sound bath business name and would love to do some crowd sourcing in the coming days around what resonates with people who follow me.

But mostly because if I could impart one piece of advice to women, it’s to think long and hard before changing your name for love. It’s an antiquated practice in our society, and one of the many ways that women tacitly, quietly give up our power and our agency. I didn’t spend enough time questioning it when I made the decision to go along with my partner’s wishes, and I really didn’t think about the longterm ramifications, now impacting me almost two decades later.

Even after all this time, I still don’t understand why it was so important to my ex-partner, and I’d like to think if I’d taken the time to tell him how much it hurt me to give up my name, he might have reconsidered his stance. Or maybe if he dug in and insisted it was something he wanted, I would have reconsidered if I wanted to be with someone who desired me to change something so fundamental.

As it turns out, I’ve learned, there’s an awful lot in a name.

Last December, after much deliberation, I landed on my word of the year: Thrive (please don’t laugh).

At the time, it felt perfect. After a 2024 filled with divorce, selling my house, and a cascade of associated stress, I was ready for something hopeful, expansive, and aspirational. I was so excited about it, I even convinced my talented photographer friend to do a shoot with me right after New Year to capture that “thriving” energy I was so excited to manifest…

Now, I already knew from experience that a word of the year brings with it both a light side and a shadow side. Years ago, I picked “unstoppable” when I had big career goals. I did achieve them, but other things in my life also felt unstoppable, like burnout, stress, and conflict.

That year taught me to choose carefully, because the word will find unexpected and not always comfortable ways to, well… work on you.

So when I chose thrive, I knew I might brush up against its opposite: survive. I just didn’t expect to feel like I was clinging on for dear life so much of the time.

This year has felt like one long series of gut punches. That photo shoot I booked to celebrate the start of a new year in a new home? I had to evacuate said home a day later when Los Angeles was ravaged by wildfires. Then followed illness after illness, seismic challenges in my career, ICE raids in my neighborhood, and unbearable losses in my family. Every week seemed to bring a new test. Sometimes I felt like the universe was laughing at me for daring to choose a word like thrive.

But maybe, dear readers, that’s the point?

I’ve realized that the definition I carried of what it means to thrive was outdated, to say the least. It belonged to a younger me, the one who believed thriving looked like endless work projects, packed social calendars, fancy restaurants, and big trips. That definition isn’t mine anymore.

It also belonged to a woman who was still struggling with the misconception that she could control the whole world around her, and could rarely find any peace because… obviously, she couldn’t control the whole world.

Now I see that I chose thrive because I desperately needed to rewrite what thriving actually means for me: a woman in her late 40s rebuilding her life post-divorce against the backdrop of a spiraling society, while striving to live consciously, earn a living creatively, and resist plugging into systems that no longer serve me.

As it turns out (and as is usual for me) I’ve had to learn that lesson the hard way. By getting sick because I pushed myself too far. By dragging on with old ways of doing things long past the time when it was clear they weren’t working. By getting knocked down again. And again. Oh yeah, and once more just for the cheap seats.

But it turns out you can sometimes teach an old dog new tricks, and I’m learning lessons like:

• Thriving is my morning walks. If I build a life where I can’t have time for a meandering stroll in nature with my dogs every morning, what’s the point?

• Thriving is smaller footprints. Maybe what used to feel like thriving was actually a vicious cycle of throwing money at problems like burnout, stress, and overwork? And then feeling the need to overwork to buy more stuff. Rinse and repeat.

• Thriving is connection. It’s the luxury of being able to walk to the local hardware store and talk to an actual human, rather than clicking “Buy Now” on Amazon and waiting for someone to chuck a box on my front porch.

• Thriving is nourishment. It’s slowly cooking dinner at home with my man, rather than cramming something wrapped in plastic in my mouth while staring at my phone screen.

Thriving is not bigger, faster, more. It’s rooted, present, and whole, even when life feels hard. Especially when life feels hard.

Because yeah, it’s true that so far 2025 has been brutal. And yet, maybe the universe isn’t laughing at me after all. Maybe it’s teaching me that thrive was never going to be about the absence of external struggle, but about discovering the peace, joy, and gratitude that exists within me, regardless of the outside circumstances.

This pocket of the city has been a special place for me.

Long before I lived here, I became enchanted by its charms. I sipped cocktails on the rooftop of the Ace Hotel, looking out at the sprawling, shimmering dream of the view, wanting so badly for *it* to be *mine*. I strolled down Broadway, taking photos of the worn movie palaces and stretches of pawn shops. I delighted at the poems and patches of art and murals and mess that made the place.

Like so much of LA, downtown felt unapproachable at times, elusive and unpredictable and rough around the edges. After all, it was here that I started taking a series of photos that I posted under the tag #abandonedshoesofdtla, having never seen so much spontaneously discarded footwear in one city.

But regardless of the chaos and concrete, the litter and lawlessness .. I was smitten.

My craving for Los Angeles took root downtown, and all these years later, the irony of how hard it is for life to flourish in its sun-baked streets is not lost on me. But I know from experience that when a city calls to you with its siren song, there is no resisting, even when all common sense tells you it may lure you towards the rocks.

These past few years have been rough on DTLA, and I see the echo in my own life, which much like this neighborhood, was inexorably rising through the 20teens, full of possibility, buzzing with new opportunities, fizzing with creativity. Then came the 2016 presidential election (which I watched, funnily enough, at The Theater at the Ace Hotel Downtown, feeling the mood in the room sour as the results came in); the pandemic and endless months of stay-at-home orders; a spate of protests which promised parity but only seemed to deepen disillusionment; protracted film industry strikes to protect a creative class that was already being eaten alive by artificial intelligence.

So it is with more than a little nostalgia that I look back on the version of myself who first moved to LA, lived in the Arts District, and fell for this neighborhood. I remember her biking down Spring Street through golden hour, coasting through a film set where classic cars lined the sidewalks, transforming the block into 1950s New York. She queued up for the charcoal ice cream at Little Damage, and sat at the bar in Baco Mercat, gossiping with a friend over a shared plate of brussels sprouts. She fell in love with yoga in the light-filled studio at The Springs, and salsa danced on a summer afternoon in Grand Park.

I love DTLA, and I believe in it. I’ve spent a lot of time in cities, not only living in them, but documenting them, and learning about their history. The rise and fall, the cycles of death and rebirth, the tumbles from grace and the glorious comebacks. I believe in downtown LA, and its capacity to rise and rebuild.

I’m living that story, too, as are so many others.

If you live in Los Angeles and haven’t been to DTLA in a while, I encourage you to plan a visit. Take the Metro, and maybe even jump on the funicular at Angel’s Flight and head up to The Broad or MOCA to appreciate some art. Check out a free concert at Grand Performances, or pop into La Cita to dance on a Friday night. Or jump on a Metro bike and ride down the boulevards through a century of Los Angeles history. Spend money with the small businesses, who are part of what make the neighborhood so special.

If you’re lucky like I was a couple of weekends ago, look up and catch the most perfect, pink sunset, or simply soak in the architecture and and remember that beauty, like resilience, never really disappears. It just waits for us to notice.