I was with a man for about two years who moved very differently through the world than I did. He was a surfer, the kind of person you imagine as the physical embodiment of effortlessly cool, collected, slightly untouchable Scorpio energy. Except, of course, it’s me, so he was a cancer. Unless he had been drinking, there wasn’t much dancing. There wasn’t much silliness. There wasn’t much spontaneous movement. And somewhere along the way, I forgot how to have fun. I wanted to be cooler. More composed. Less loud. Less silly. More effortless. More like him. There was nothing wrong with him being the way he was. The problem was that I was slowly editing myself to fit beside him.

And I think that’s something I’ve done more times than I’d like to admit. Become a little quieter. A little cooler. A little more “appropriate.” A little less me. Not because anyone explicitly asked me to. Because somewhere along the way, I decided that being loved meant becoming more like the person I thought someone else would love.

Which is funny, because fun has always been one of the great loves of my life. My ex-husband and I had fun. That was never something we lacked. We laughed, we danced, we were ridiculous together, and we didn’t really care what anyone thought. But after the divorce, somewhere in the years that followed, I lost that spark. I became smaller. I became more careful. I spent a lot of time trying to make everybody happy. And that is a particularly exhausting project when you are a person with a personality. I have thoughts. I have opinions. I laugh loudly. I love people. I love making things. I love being alive. And I am, frankly, not very good at pretending otherwise.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word cringe lately. I have people I love who seem to have an endless supply of it. That’s cringe%. That’s embarrassing. Why would you do that? That’s a little much. And I understand it. We all have different thresholds for what feels ridiculous. But sometimes I want to grab people by the shoulders and say, can we please stop judging everything for five minutes and have some fun?

Because here’s the thing. If someone is dancing alone in the street and they’re genuinely happy, maybe the problem isn’t that they’re cringe. Maybe you’re just uncomfortable watching someone be completely themselves. Maybe, just maybe, you’re a little jealous. Not jealous of their life. Jealous of their freedom. There is something confronting about watching another person move through the world without asking permission. There is something almost indecent about happiness that isn’t seeking approval

I spent the last year learning how to take up space energetically. The three years before that, I was shrinking myself. I was trying to be the least annoying, the least demanding, the easiest to love, the version that wouldn’t make anyone uncomfortable. Which is hard when you’re me. I have a personality. I have a lot to say. I like to build things, dream loudly, laugh, dress up, dance, change my mind, go on spontaneous trips, and wake up and decide that today I’m going to be spontaneous. And that has actually bothered a lot of people.

But lately, in Lisbon, I’ve been letting myself play again. One day I’m giving old money. The next I’m wearing loose pants, a bandana, and leaning heavily into an R&B era. I even bought something low-rise. I’m not convinced it does anything for my body, to be honest, but I admire the girls who pull it off. My friend and I were laughing about it the other day. We collectively decided in the 2000s that low-rise jeans were ugly, and somehow, here we are again. Fashion is ridiculous. Obviously fashion is ridiculous. Life is hilarious. Why not participate? Maybe that is what fashion is for, anyway. Not to become beautiful enough or desirable enough, but to play. To try on a version of yourself and see how she feels. To walk down the street and decide, for absolutely no practical reason, that today you are going to look like someone who has somewhere interesting to be.

The funny thing is that I know more people right now in Lisbon than I know when I walk the streets of Montreal. I’m surrounded by people I can laugh with. I’m writing my book. I’m walking everywhere. I’m running every day. I’m eating food because it nourishes me. I’m not drinking alcohol. I’m not smoking anything. I’m sleeping. I’m creating. I’m moving my body. And I’m happier than I’ve been in years. Healthier, too. Mostly mentally, but physically follows pretty naturally when your brain isn’t fighting your life every second.

Right now, I’m in such a creative flow that eating is almost boringly simple. I eat because my body needs fuel. Then I go make something. And there is something so beautiful about that. My life feels uncomplicated, not because nothing is happening, but because I am finally moving in the same direction as myself.

I also realize that sometimes I do perform. That’s different. I’ve always had some of that in me. My dad is an incredible person, but he’s also a huge people pleaser. My mom can sometimes get stuck wondering whether everyone likes her, whether she said the wrong thing, whether someone secretly hates her. And I understand where I got it from.

But I’m learning something that has taken me a very long time to actually live: not everyone is going to like me. Some people will think I’m hot. Some people will think I’m fucking ugly. Some people will think I’m brilliant. Some people will think I’m completely insane. Some people will think what I’m doing is inspiring. Some people will think it’s cringe. And none of it is really my business.

I read The Four Agreements when I was seventeen, and one of the ideas that stayed with me was this simple truth: what other people think about you is none of your fucking business. I’ve spent years intellectually understanding that sentence. I’m only now starting to actually live it.

And I think that’s something I’ve always loved doing, taking philosophy and smashing it into modern life. You can read an old idea, sit with it for twenty years, and then suddenly understand it because you’re walking around Lisbon in a bandana, drinking a zero-alcohol beer, dancing to Mac Miller and realizing you genuinely don’t care if a stranger thinks you look ridiculous. Maybe that’s what wisdom actually is. Not knowing more things. Just finally being able to live the things you already knew.

Because what a strange way to spend a life, trying to control a movie that is playing inside someone else’s head. You can be the most beautiful person in the room and someone will find you unattractive. You can make something incredible and someone will hate it. You can be kind and someone will decide you’re selfish. You can be yourself and someone will still prefer the version of you they invented in their head. So what? Their perception belongs to them. My life belongs to me.

But what all these people who find it so easy to judge me don’t know is that, underneath all of this, I’ve been living in my own little world. My own little paradise. I’ve been building a life that feels so deeply mine. And maybe from the outside, some of it looks random. Maybe it looks impulsive. Maybe it looks cringe. But they don’t see the four years it took to get here. They don’t see the grief. They don’t see the rebuilding. They don’t see how hard I had to work to become someone who could actually enjoy her own life again.

So yes, judge the dancing. Judge the outfits. Judge the spontaneous flights. Judge the zero-alcohol beer. You can have your opinion. I’m busy living in paradise.

I’ve gotten much further in life by not giving a fuck about criticism than I ever did by listening to it. Some of the best things I’ve done looked ridiculous before they looked smart. Some of the things I was told were unrealistic became real. Some of the things people thought were weird became the exact things that made my life mine.

And there will always be someone who thinks what you’re doing is cringe. Let them. Let them be cringe. You don’t have to defend yourself. You don’t have to convince them. You don’t even have to explain. If you’re dancing in the street and you’re happy, dance. If you want to wear the ridiculous outfit, wear it. If you want to make the weird thing, make it. If you want to start the business, start it. If you want to write the book, write the book. If you want to pet every dog in Lisbon, pet every dog in Lisbon. If you want to laugh too loudly, laugh. If you want to change your life, change it. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, why wouldn’t you?

There is a difference between living in community and living for other people. I believe deeply in community. I believe we need each other. I believe we should encourage one another, make room for one another, and care about how our choices affect the people around us. But caring about people is not the same thing as abandoning yourself for their approval. You can love people without obeying their opinions. You can listen without surrendering your instincts. You can take feedback without making it your identity. And you can let someone think you’re cringe while continuing to have the time of your life.

Because maybe the happiest version of you isn’t the one everyone understands. Maybe she’s the one dancing alone on a burning-hot street in Lisbon, drinking a zero-alcohol beer, listening to Mac Miller, Miley Cyrus, and country music, knowing every word, and laughing because she finally remembers who she is. That’s the version I’m choosing.

This is my third time in Lisbon, and I think that’s part of why this city feels so comforting to me. The first time I came, I barely remember being present. I was 23, had spent most of my life in sports, had just finished my CVA exams, hadn’t really started my career, and barely knew anything about life. I came here with my mom. I was convinced my life was finally going to begin. I was already thinking about the future. Marriage. Building a life. Becoming whoever I was supposed to become. I don’t think I really saw Lisbon then. I was too busy looking ahead.

The second time I came here was different. It was December, with beautiful Christmas lights everywhere. I had come down from the high of Athens, and I felt completely lost and alone. I felt held by the city, but I was also stuck in this deep sadness, the kind of sadness you could paint like a Van Gogh. Thick. Heavy. Almost physical.

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And now I’m here for the third time, and I see the city completely differently. The city doesn’t feel strange to me. It feels comforting. It feels secure. It feels familiar in a way that makes no rational sense. Maybe because I’m a weird mix of sedentary and nomadic. I love being home, but I also love leaving it. I’m exuberant, but I’m surprisingly calm. I love movement, but I almost never go out at night. Somehow Lisbon makes room for all of that.

It feels alive without demanding that I perform aliveness. It feels social without making me feel like I have to be social. There are people everywhere, but I can still walk alone. And the funniest part is that I’m actually rarely alone here. I’m alone, and I’m actually enjoying my time here. I’m enjoying my dates by myself. I’m reading in cafés about how Philippa of Lancaster became the mother of the illustrious generation. I’m walking around. I’m writing. I’m watching people. And somehow, there isn’t a day where I don’t cross someone I know.

I’ll be sitting in a café and suddenly see a familiar face. I’ll be walking down a street and run into someone. I’ll look up and realize that, somehow, I have built a little constellation of people here. Which feels almost absurd considering how far away it is from home. But maybe that’s what happens when you let yourself move through the world. You collect people. You collect places. You collect versions of yourself.

The city was bursting with life when I was here with Dominic on Friday. And now I’m walking through it on a quiet Sunday night, completely tranquil, on my way to get dinner. Same city. Different life.

Last time I was here, I was heartbroken over an affair that had just ended. Plot twist. It was with the man I was actually here with in Lisbon this time. Which is possibly the funniest proof that you genuinely never know what’s coming. You can be heartbroken somewhere and come back later feeling completely different. You can think a chapter is over and then find yourself walking through the same streets with a different life. You can lose something and still end up somewhere beautiful.

And as I changed out of my exuberant day clothes, an outfit that probably would have made my former fashion self very proud, I put on a cap and some loose clothes, and suddenly I felt wonderfully held by the lack of eyes on me. It’s funny how easily I can make myself invisible just by changing the way I dress. During the day, I can dress exuberantly and feel the eyes on me. I can play with being visible, with fashion, with movement, with the little energy I put out into the world. And then I can put on a cap, some loose clothes, and disappear into the city.

Today, I felt held by the plenitude of eyes I attracted to myself. Tonight, I feel held by the absence of them. And somehow, both feel like freedom.

I think about this sometimes when I look back at the different versions of myself. I was content at seventeen, which is funny, because at seventeen I was mostly living for a boyfriend. But I would still go to the movies by myself. I remember doing the same thing later in Buenos Aires. Going to the movies alone. Sitting there. Completely safe. Completely secure. Content. And I think I’ve been trying to find that feeling again for years.

Because being content is not the same thing as being in love. It’s not the same thing as being successful. It’s not the same thing as being admired. It’s this quiet feeling of being okay inside your own life. And my God, does it feel good right now. Not to be in love. Not to be chasing love. Not to be waiting for someone to choose me. Just to be completely, deliciously in love with myself.

So while I danced with myself during the day, I quietly dreamed with myself at night. I walked through the old, paved streets of Lisbon, the kind of streets that make you slow down without realizing it.

Someone taught me that Lisbon was bombed during the Second World War, which is why so much of its old architecture is still here in all its glory. Although, of course, Lisbon has already been through its own apocalypse. The 1755 earthquake destroyed much of the city. And somehow, centuries later, here it is. Still standing. Still beautiful. Still full of people walking around, falling in love, breaking up, starting businesses, writing books, drinking wine, drinking zero-alcohol beer, and figuring out what the hell they’re doing with their lives.

I think I might come back next summer. Maybe for a month. Maybe two. I like it here. It’s warm without being the particular kind of hot that made me question every decision I made during my time in France.

Tonight, the streets are very quiet. It’s Sunday. I’m going back on Friday. And after the absolute effervescence of this week, I’m actually looking forward to it. I always love movement. I get bored when I don’t move. I need new places, new ideas, new people, new projects. But tonight I’m not dancing. I’m walking my 10,000 steps through the quiet streets and dreaming. I’m dreaming about coming back here. About reading my epic novel in some little café. Drinking my non-alcoholic beer. Eating the best salad I can find. Writing. Watching people.

And I realize that right now, I’m not longing for very much. Which is new for me. If you asked me today, I might even enter an arranged marriage. I’m saying that with a little laugh, because love has heard enough complaints from me lately and I don’t want it getting too comfortable.

But maybe that’s the point. Everything ebbs and flows in life. Some days you dance. Some nights you dream. Some seasons you want everything. Some seasons you want a quiet table, a good book, a beautiful city, and a really excellent salad.

There is no right way to do it. There is no correct timeline for becoming yourself again. There is no perfect version of a life. There is just this strange, beautiful, ridiculous thing where you get to decide what makes you feel alive.

So yes, this is a manifesto for reclaiming yourself. But it’s also a manifesto against the idea that there is one right way to live. Be cringe. Be cool. Be loud. Be quiet. Fall in love. Don’t fall in love. Build an empire. Read a book in a café. Dance in the street. Stay home. Change your mind. Wear low-rise jeans. Or absolutely don’t. Just make sure you are deliciously happy with yourself.

Because other people’s opinions belong to them.

Your life belongs to you.

And I’m finally on my own way.

So I think I’ll keep dancing.

I don’t really write drafts anymore.

At least, not the way I was taught to.

I don’t sit down at my desk, open a blank Google Doc, stare at the cursor blinking at me like it’s personally disappointed in my life choices, and think: okay, Myriam. Be creative now.

Absolutely not.

I talk. A lot.

I talk on walks. I talk when I’m thinking through a business idea. I talk when something pisses me off. I talk when I suddenly understand something about my life. I talk when I have a story I don’t know what to do with yet.

And incre

asingly, I talk directly into my AI project.

Not my Notes app. My project. Because I don’t want a graveyard of beautiful thoughts buried under 4,000 other notes called “IDEA!!!!”, “SUBSTACK THOUGHT,” “CONTENT,” “THIS IS GOOD,” “DO SOMETHING WITH THIS” — never to be seen again.

I want my thoughts to accumulate somewhere that can actually help me make sense of them.

That is the foundation of what I call the Spoken Draft Method.

• • •

A quick confession before we go further.

I read Big Magic on a plane to London.

I was working as a fashion buyer at the time, sitting between two of my favorite colleagues, somewhere over the Atlantic, completely absorbed. I remember exactly where I was. I remember underlining the parts about ideas being living things, circling the earth, looking for a human willing to bring them into the world. It was one of the good stretches of life — new city, good company, a book that felt like it was speaking directly to me.

I closed it thinking: I’m going to write mine.

Gilbert gave me an enormous amount of energy. I felt lit up for weeks. I had a whole book in me, I could feel it sitting there.

What she didn’t give me was anywhere to start.

Because we can’t all be Elizabeth Gilbert, sitting down and simply producing beautiful, structured prose on command. Most of us don’t work that way. I certainly don’t.

But we can all talk.

So I did what most people do with a beautiful, terrifying idea. I put it down gently, told myself I’d get to it, and didn’t. Five years passed. The book stayed exactly where I’d left it — fully formed in my head, entirely absent from the page.

This isn’t theoretical for me. Everything below is the system I built because Gilbert was right about the magic, but nobody ever told me what to actually do with it, out loud, on a Tuesday, with no cursor blinking at me. This is that part.

• • •

First, stop thinking AI is the enemy.

There’s a strange conversation happening right now about AI and creativity. People are scared it’s going to make everyone less creative.

I think we have the opposite opportunity.

AI is a tool. Like the internet. Like a camera. Like a library. Like a very fast research assistant who’s available at 2 a.m. and doesn’t mind when you change your mind halfway through a sentence.

The problem isn’t using AI.

The problem is asking AI to come up with your soul.

Don’t do that.

Your ideas should come from you. Your experiences should come from you. Your opinions, your stories, your weird little observations — all of it, from you.

Then let AI help you organize the mess.

That’s the philosophy behind the personal-brand system I use. It starts with questions, moves into your own voice memo, then uses AI to organize that raw thinking before shaping it into a newsletter and eventually something larger.

You are the source. AI is the container.

Gilbert called ideas restless, disembodied energy, circling the planet, looking for a willing human collaborator. I believe that. I just don’t think the collaboration has to end with you alone in a room, hoping the idea shows up on schedule.

• • •

Your brain is already full of material.

This is the part I really want you to understand.

You do not have a blank page problem.

You have a capture problem.

Your brain is full of the story about your first heartbreak. The thing your mother used to say. The friend you lost. The person you still don’t understand why you loved. The business mistake you made at 27. The weird conversation you had with a stranger yesterday. The idea you had in the shower. The thing you suddenly realized about money. The opinion you’ve been too afraid to say out loud. The story you tell at every dinner party. The thing that keeps happening in your life that you still haven’t figured out.

All of it is material. All of it.

Then you sit in front of a blank page and expect yourself to magically summon something profound.

Of course your brain freezes. You’re asking it to remember, invent, organize, structure, and perform, all at once, on command.

Stop doing that to yourself.

• • •

THE SPOKEN DRAFT METHOD

Step 1. Create one dedicated AI project.

Pick your AI of choice. I don’t really care which one.

Create one project that becomes your creative brain archive. Mine is where I put my thoughts — not polished, not finished. Raw. The things I haven’t figured out yet. The stories I want to remember. The questions I’m asking myself. The ideas that might become something later.

Think of it as a room where you’re constantly leaving little pieces of yourself.

Over time, the room gets very interesting.

Step 2. For the next two weeks, speak instead of writing.

This is your experiment. Two weeks.

Every time you have an interesting thought about your world, record it. I mean every time.

You’re on a walk? Record. You’re driving? Record — hands-free, obviously; I’m not trying to turn your creative practice into a traffic accident. You’re making coffee and suddenly realize why your last relationship failed? Record. You have an idea for your business? Record. You see something that makes you furious? Record. You remember something from childhood? Record. You think of a sentence you love? Record.

Speak it. Don’t wait until you have the whole thought.

The whole point is to catch the thought while it’s still alive.

• • •

I know — that’s a lot to take in from one Substack post.

The book breaks all of it down, step by step, so you’re not piecing it together from memory.

And the people who pick it up get something extra: access to the community once it opens.

Get the book here.

• • •

Step 3. Record directly into your project.

This is my little rule. I record myself constantly on walks. But I don’t put the recordings in my Notes app. I don’t create another digital junk drawer.

I put them directly into my project.

Because now the thought isn’t just captured. It’s connected to everything else I’ve already been thinking about. That’s when things get interesting.

You might have a voice memo about money from Monday. A story about your childhood from Wednesday. A thought about creativity from Friday. And suddenly AI can say: “Hey, you seem to keep coming back to this idea.”

Oh. I do?

That’s useful. The machine isn’t telling me what I think. It’s helping me notice what I keep thinking.

Step 4. Don’t edit yourself while you’re speaking.

This is crucial. You are allowed to ramble. Actually, I encourage it.

Say: “Okay, wait, that’s not actually what I mean.” Say: “I don’t know why this is bothering me, but—” Say: “There’s something here and I can’t quite figure it out.” Say: “Okay, this is probably stupid, but—”

Keep going.

The messy parts are often where the interesting thinking lives. If you stop every thirty seconds to make yourself sound intelligent, you’ll erase the very thing we’re trying to capture: your actual voice.

Step 5. Give yourself questions before you give yourself a blank page.

This is the part of the system I love most.

Instead of “write an essay about your thoughts,” give yourself questions. What have I been thinking about lately? What happened? Why did it affect me? What do I think it means? What do I believe now that I didn’t believe before? What am I still confused about? What would I tell someone going through the same thing?

Then talk through the answers.

The guide’s message-development workflow uses a series of questions as its starting point, then moves into a voice memo before AI helps shape the material.

This is so much easier than “okay, write something good.”

Ask yourself a question. Answer it out loud. Then ask another.

You’re having a conversation with your own brain.

Step 6. Ask AI to find the ideas hiding inside your voice memo.

This is where your AI project becomes your cofounder. Not your ghostwriter. Your cofounder.

Give it the transcript and ask: What are the strongest ideas in this? What am I actually trying to say? What themes are emerging? What is my angle? What stories am I telling? What do I seem to believe? What’s surprising here? What could become an essay? What should I explore further?

Now you have something more valuable than a draft.

You have a map of your own thinking.

Step 7. Find your angle.

This is where you become a writer. Not when you type. When you decide what you actually think.

“I went through a breakup” isn’t an angle. “Why do strangers have the power to hurt us more than people who actually know us?” is an angle.

“I started a business” isn’t an angle. “What happens when you build a successful business and realize you don’t actually want the life it created?” That’s an angle.

“I moved abroad” isn’t an angle. “What if running away is sometimes how you finally find yourself?” That’s an angle.

Your experience gives you the material. Your perspective turns it into a story.

Ask: what is my take on this? How do I usually feel about things? What patterns do I notice? What do I believe? What am I curious about? What do I disagree with? What do I keep coming back to?

That’s your voice.

Step 8. Let the AI organize. Don’t let it sterilize.

This distinction is everything.

You can ask AI to organize your ideas, identify themes, suggest structures, remove repetition, find the strongest argument, turn a voice memo into a draft, repurpose it into different formats.

But be careful with the “make this better” button. Sometimes “better” means more generic. More polished. More corporate. More predictable.

Less you.

I don’t want AI to make you sound like everyone else. I want it to make it easier for you to sound like yourself.

Step 9. Turn the voice memo into one piece of real work.

One voice memo might become a Substack essay. A newsletter. A TikTok. An Instagram Reel. A carousel. A podcast episode. A conversation. A chapter. A business idea.

The personal-brand guide calls this a content waterfall — one core idea, distributed across formats and platforms.

This changes the question. You’re no longer asking, “what should I post today?” You’re asking, “what am I thinking about?” Then: “how many ways can I express this one idea?”

That’s a much more sustainable creative practice.

Step 10. Do this for 14 days.

Don’t judge the method after one voice memo. Give it two weeks.

For two weeks: notice, speak, capture, organize, write, repeat.

Something is going to happen. You’re going to realize you have way more to say than you thought.

The blank page starts disappearing. Because the page isn’t blank anymore. You’ve been filling it for two weeks without even realizing it.

Okay. Is this a lot to hold in one Substack article? Probably.

This is genuinely the entire method, and I just handed it to you for free, in one sitting — which is either very generous of me or slightly chaotic, depending on how you look at it.

If you want the fuller version — the book, the worksheets, the actual step-by-step I use myself — it’s coming September 1st: get the book here.

And once it’s out, I’m opening a small community for the people who pick it up, so nobody has to run this experiment alone. Not open yet. Coming soon.

For now, everything above is enough to start. Truly.

• • •

And this works for fiction too.

Maybe you’re thinking: okay, but I’m not trying to build a personal brand. I want to write a novel.

Fine. Write the novel.

Talk about your characters. Talk about the world. Talk about the scene you’re stuck on. Talk about what your character wants. Talk about what they’re afraid of. Talk about why you can’t stop thinking about them.

Tell yourself the story before you try to write the story.

Your voice already exists. Even if you’re writing someone else’s voice, the character’s voice is somewhere in your imagination. Get it out.

Then let the blank page become the place where you assemble it, rather than the place where you have to invent everything from scratch.

This, by the way, is exactly where I got stuck in 2019. I had the whole novel-shaped feeling, and nowhere to put it that didn’t feel like performing. If I’d known then that talking counted as writing, I think I’d have a finished manuscript by now instead of a very old Notes app entry titled “book???”

• • •

Your brain is the asset.

I want you to think about this differently.

There’s a beautiful amount of knowledge that never becomes anything. Ideas that never get written. Stories that never get told. People who had incredible perspectives but never believed they were worth sharing.

That’s a genuine tragedy.

Think about all the oral histories humans have carried across generations — stories held in people’s memories, knowledge passed from one person to another, entire worlds existing inside someone’s voice. Then imagine how much of it disappeared simply because it was never captured.

Your stories matter too. Maybe not because they’re going to become famous. Maybe because they’re yours, and maybe someone else needs to hear them.

AI is getting better every day at generating words. So stop competing with it at generating words.

Bring it something it can’t generate: your memories, your lived experience, your taste, your worldview, your weirdness, your contradictions, your humor, your heartbreak, your joy, your particular way of seeing the world.

That’s the raw material. And the more you capture it, the more valuable it becomes.

You’re building a library of you.

Eventually, that library becomes your writing. Your content. Your business. Your book. Your ideas. Your intellectual property. Your personal brand. Your body of work.

The guide describes the destination as content becoming IP — ideas becoming recognizable frameworks, work that keeps creating value long after the original post.

But it starts much earlier than that.

It starts with: I had a thought.

And instead of letting it disappear, you catch it.

• • •

YOUR 14-DAY SPOKEN DRAFT CHALLENGE

For the next two weeks, every day:

☐ Have at least one conversation with yourself.

☐ Record it as a voice memo.

☐ Do it on your walk, if that’s when your brain works best.

☐ Put it directly into your AI project.

☐ Don’t polish it.

☐ Don’t ask whether it’s good.

☐ Let yourself ramble.

☐ Ask AI to identify the ideas, themes, and questions inside it.

☐ Save the ideas that make you go “ohhhh.”

☐ Turn one of them into something.

That’s it.

No blank page. No waiting for inspiration. No trying to become a writer before you write.

Just listen to yourself.

• • •

Because here’s what I actually believe.

I think your brain is full of beautiful things. I think there are ideas in there that have been waiting years to come out. I think there are stories you’ve dismissed because you assumed everyone already knew them.

They don’t.

There is no one else who experienced your life from inside your body. No one else who noticed exactly what you noticed. No one else who will tell that story exactly the way you would.

That is your voice. And the world needs more people willing to use theirs.

Gilbert was right — the ideas really are out there, circling, looking for someone. I just spent five years waiting for mine to find me in silence.

Turns out it had been talking the whole time. I just wasn’t listening.

So don’t open a blank page tomorrow.

Go for a walk. Put your headphones in. Open your project. And start talking.

We’ll figure out what you’re trying to say together.

One friend doesn’t even have a website. She makes millions as an agent in Italy. No funnel, no personal brand, no 47-step strategy. She just got exceptionally good at her job and built a business around that.

Another was making $50K a month, got divorced, realized she was burnt out, and scrapped the whole thing to start over. Not because the business wasn’t working. Because she wasn’t. I watched her go from 2K followers to 50K this year. From $0 to $30K a month.

Another told me to stop growing my Instagram and just sell from ads instead. She makes $500K a year doing exactly that. One was a fractional CFO in high finance who woke up one day and said, “actually, I want to make clothes,” and quit to start a clothing brand. Others through photography, through community alone, through a single book funnel.

Different industries. Different personalities. Different business models. All under 35. All somehow in the same room.

What gets me most isn’t even the numbers. It’s that these are the same women who text me their insecurities at midnight, heartbroken over a breakup on Tuesday, casually mentioning a seven-figure deal on Wednesday, like both are just true at once. Nobody performs “girlboss” in that group chat. The business talk and the actual mess of being a person were never separate conversations.

What is even happening, I remember thinking, looking around. Maybe there isn’t one way to do this.

Before I met these people, I believed there was a specific formula for becoming successful. Website. Funnel. Post daily. Personal brand. Raise money. Work 80 hours. Look like a Founder™ on LinkedIn. Then I met people making millions doing things I didn’t even know could be businesses.

That’s what community gave me. Not a strategy. Exposure. Exposure to possibilities I could never have invented alone with my laptop and my assumptions about how things were supposed to work. You really are the ten people you spend the most time with

.

I spent a year completely lost. Then I got into Art of Monday. It didn’t hand me a business. It handed me something bigger. It showed me what was possible. Once you’ve seen enough people build lives that don’t fit the conventional blueprint, you start questioning whether the blueprint was ever real.

But here’s the thing. A lot of these rooms require you to already be there. The business, the revenue, the audience, the track record. And I understand why. But I keep thinking about the women who are before that stage. Building their first thing. Rebuilding after something didn’t work. Growing an audience from 500 people. Making their first $10K. Or just thinking, I know I could build something bigger, I just don’t know what it looks like yet.

This is for you. Not a room you need to already be successful enough to enter. A room for women who are ready to build together, before they’ve made it, not after. I want to see what happens when a woman with 2K followers sits next to a woman with 50K. When one woman’s experiment becomes another woman’s shortcut, and one woman’s failure saves another woman six months.

Which brings me to the experiment. Starting September 1st, we’re going to yap our way to 1M followers. Together. I’ve seen so many men do this, building audiences together, sharing each other’s work, pushing one another to publish, making the whole thing feel like a game instead of a lonely little battle against an algorithm. Why not us.

I’m starting at 32,645 followers, and I’m building from there, with you. The revenue, the audience, the experiments, the flops, the weird ideas that somehow work, especially those, we build and share all of it together.

I took the method I used to build Bloire, a community I grew to 150K followers and a seven-figure business, and refined it into what I now call the Spoken Draft Method. I’ve used it to build entire worlds in 30 days, write a book, grow separate accounts. It works. But it works so much better when you’re surrounded by people doing it too. You can have the best method in the world and still talk yourself out of using it if everyone around you thinks it’s a little unhinged. Or you can be surrounded by women doing it messily, publicly, in real time, right next to you, and suddenly it doesn’t feel like a leap. It feels like Tuesday.

Because maybe you don’t need to become someone else to build a successful business. Maybe you need to become more yourself. Your actual voice, the way you already think, the things you notice that other people don’t, isn’t the obstacle between you and your personal brand. That’s the brand.

If you know me in real life, you know I almost never talk business. Between dating stories and art, I’ll slip a tip in sideways, never a lecture. That’s the energy I want here too. A group chat that happens to be extremely good for your bank account. A lot of, “wait, you did WHAT?” “Yes.” “And it worked?” “Yes.” “Okay, maybe I can do something weird too.”

Because sometimes the most powerful business education isn’t another strategy. It’s meeting someone whose life proves the rules were never rules to begin with. Maybe the rule that says you have to sound like everyone else was never a rule either.

So. If you’re using the Spoken Draft Method, we’re doing this together. 32,645 to 1,000,000. One yap at a time.

Let’s go.

[Apply to join the community →]

I mean something far more fundamental.

You need to become comfortable exchanging money for value.

This sounds almost embarrassingly simple. Money is an exchange. You give someone something they value. They give you money. That’s the entire mechanism.

And yet, for some reason, this is one of the things women seem to have the hardest time getting comfortable with. I know, because I’ve struggled with it too. I come from a fairly leftist country — I did not grow up steeped in some deeply capitalist philosophy about the beauty of money. Quite the opposite.

But the older I get, the more I understand that money isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s a tool. And if you want to build something, you need tools.

Read more

I had been talking about doing this for a while. I’d spent the previous year thinking about starting a women-only AI community. I knew I wanted to teach business. I knew I had six years of experience I could actually turn into something useful. I knew I wanted a voice in the world.

But I was still circling it.

Then I went to Camp Monday. It was a retreat with around a hundred creative founders under 35, and it was one of those experiences that makes you come home and suddenly feel like, okay. Enough thinking. It’s time.

I had built a brand before. A few years ago, I built EchoCat from basically nothing into a seven-figure business and a community of hundreds of thousands of people. I learned everything by doing it. I also did almost all of it alone. And honestly, it was brutal. I learned how to build an audience, create a brand, sell, grow a community, make money, make mistakes, recover from mistakes, and somehow keep going while my personal life was occasionally on fire.

Eventually, I went through a divorce, burned out, and quit. I let the business ride. It was fine.

But when I finally came out of that period and felt ready to build again, I knew I wanted to do it differently. I didn’t want to build another business in a vacuum. I wanted a personal brand. I wanted to teach what I’d learned. I wanted to build a community of women who were creative, ambitious, slightly chaotic, and very serious about making a living from what they actually wanted to create.

And this time, I had six years of hindsight. I had founder friends. I had a network. I had been inside rooms I never had access to the first time.

So I came home from Camp Monday around July 19th, dealt with a water leak because apparently the universe enjoys a little comedic timing, and started. I posted. I experimented. I made things. I learned. I didn’t wait until I had the perfect funnel, the perfect offer, the perfect website, or the perfect content strategy. I just started.

And then, very quickly, something happened. I went viral. Not “oh cute, this post did well.” Viral. And suddenly, the thing I’d been planning to build was happening in real time.

There was just one tiny problem. I wasn’t ready for the volume.

Well.. Eventually arrived much sooner than expected. I opened my inbox and saw an invoice for around $1,000. My first thought was, what is this?

Then I realized what was actually happening. People were coming in. A lot of people. And I was losing leads because I couldn’t physically respond to everyone. My assistant basically looked at the incoming DMs and said, in the nicest possible way, there is absolutely no way I am answering all of these.

She was right.

This is one of the weird things nobody tells you about going viral. Virality is not the business. Virality is traffic. And traffic without infrastructure is just a very exciting traffic jam.

I had been wanting to build this community for a year. Now thousands of people were raising their hands and saying, essentially, I’m interested. I couldn’t just let them disappear into the internet.

So I did what I have learned to do much better over the last six years. I asked for help. I posted in my founder community. SOS. I need help now.

Within 24 hours, I had four people reach out. Some weren’t the right fit. Some were. And then I spoke to Luis. I had met him at Camp Monday. We’d played Werewolf together. We sang together. We hung out. We had fun. There was already trust there.

He told me he wanted to use me as a case study and build the automation behind the scenes. I said yes immediately. I gave him access to what he needed and basically said, please save me.

And he did. Within days, the whole thing was being built. The automation went live. The flood of new DMs stopped being a crisis. Now, when someone is genuinely interested, they can move through the system and get the information they need. If they really need me, I can step in.

My assistant still has thousands of messages to work through. But she’s not standing underneath a waterfall anymore.

And that entire system exists because I acted quickly. Not because I had everything figured out. Because I didn’t.

This is something I have become increasingly convinced of: acting quickly is not a cute founder personality trait. It is a business skill.

There is a difference between moving recklessly and moving quickly. Reckless is refusing to think. Quick is refusing to stay stuck. Quick means you make the best decision you can with the information you have, you put something into the world, and then you let reality give you the next piece of information.

That’s how I built EchoCat. And ironically, that’s also how I’m building this next thing. The difference is that now I understand what I’m doing. Or, more accurately, I understand that I don’t need to understand everything before I begin.

You learn by moving. You discover what people want by putting something in front of them. You discover what breaks by letting people use it. You discover who you need by asking for help. You discover what the business actually is by building it. And sometimes the fastest way to find your business model is to accidentally go viral before you’re ready for it.

There is another part of this story that matters even more to me. My business community saved me. I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

Last week, I had some personal stuff happening at the same time all of this was going on. I was overwhelmed. I was in Portugal, trying to build a new company, managing a viral moment, dealing with thousands of messages, figuring out automation, and also being a human being with a life that occasionally refuses to respect my content calendar.

And the people around me showed up.

That’s what I had been missing the first time I built a business. I had built a huge community. But I hadn’t necessarily built one for myself. This time, I have founders around me. People I can text when something breaks. People who understand what it feels like to have 47 things happening at once. People who can say, oh, that’s actually an easy problem, here’s how we fix it.

Sometimes the most valuable thing your network can give you isn’t an introduction. It’s five minutes of someone else’s experience. That’s worth a fortune when you’re in the middle of a fire.

What I actually learned

• Speed is a skill, not a personality trait. Moving quickly isn’t the same as moving recklessly. Reckless is refusing to think. Quick is refusing to stay stuck, making the best call you can with what you know, and letting reality hand you the next piece of information.

• Virality is traffic, not a business. Without infrastructure to catch it, going viral just means a very exciting traffic jam. The system has to exist before the moment does, or you build it at a sprint while the moment is happening.

• Ask for help the day you need it, not the month you finally admit you need it. I posted an SOS in my founder community and had the right person, someone I trusted from one weekend at Camp Monday, building automation within 24 hours.

• A real network isn’t for introductions. It’s for triage. Five minutes of someone else’s experience, someone who’s already solved the exact problem you’re panicking about, is worth more than almost anything else you can ask for.

• You don’t need the whole map before you move. You find the business model, the audience, and the offer by building the thing, putting it in front of people, and adjusting from there. Not by waiting until you’ve planned it perfectly.

And this is why I am building this community now. Not because I think women need another place to consume business advice. God knows the internet has enough PDFs. I want to build a place where creative women can actually build. Where you can show up with the messy idea that’s been living in your head for six months. Where you can talk through it. Where you can build an audience. Where you can learn to monetize it. Where you can ask for help when something suddenly takes off. Where you don’t have to spend six years figuring everything out alone.

Because I know what happens when you do. I did it. And I also know what happens when you start moving faster, asking for help sooner, and surrounding yourself with people who have already figured out the thing you’re currently panicking about.

Everything gets lighter. Not easier. Lighter. And that distinction matters.

I’m not interested in teaching people how to build businesses without problems. I’m interested in teaching people how to move through the problems quickly enough that they don’t become the thing that stops them.

That’s the philosophy behind the Spoken Draft Method I’m building. Start before it’s perfect. Get the idea out of your head. Turn the mess into something real. Put it in front of people. Listen. Adjust. Build. Sell. Repeat.

You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going. You need to be willing to take the next step before you have the whole map. Because sometimes the thing you’ve been waiting to be ready for is already happening. And when it does, you want to be the person who says, okay, let’s figure this out. Not the person who says, I knew this would happen eventually, I just wasn’t ready.

I don’t want you to be ready. I want you to be moving.

If you’re a creative woman who wants to grow an audience, monetize your ideas, and actually build a business around the thing you love doing, I’m building the community for you.

The link is in my bio. Come build with us.

If you’re here because of the personalized voice memo I sent you, I already know something about you.

You want to be seen.

Not necessarily famous. Not necessarily rich. Not necessarily internet-famous enough that a stranger recognizes you at Whole Foods and starts crying into the frozen aisle.

You just want someone to get it.

You want to make things and have them land somewhere. You want to write the weird thought that’s been circling your brain for three years and discover someone else has been thinking the exact same thing. You want to make people laugh. You want to build something that actually feels like you. A little more freedom. A little more money. A little more room to breathe.

And maybe, somewhere along the way, you started wondering if you were being ridiculous for wanting all of it.

I don’t think you are.

In fact, I think this might be the moment to take yourself much more seriously.

Not in the “I am a serious entrepreneur and here are my five morning routines” way. God, no. I mean seriously enough to finally give your own life a real chance.

So. Welcome. Here’s the checklist.

THE 6-MONTH UPGRADE

I’m doing this myself, in real time, mistakes and all.

I’m 31. I’ve built a six-figure business. I’ve spent roughly $200K on business education over the years, on top of an MBA and a CPA — which is a genuinely unhinged amount of money to spend learning things, in retrospect. I’ve been the operator. I’ve built the systems. I’ve made the money.

I also recently came out of burnout and depression.

Which has a way of making you ask a rather inconvenient question: what if I don’t actually want to spend the next decade getting better at things that make me miserable?

What if I want to build differently?

For the last two months, I’ve been rebuilding my personal brand from scratch. I’m at around 14K on Instagram and 8K on TikTok — numbers small enough that my mother has asked, more than once, if this is “still just a hobby.”

This year, I’m building a new seven-figure business.

But here’s the part that actually matters: I’m building it through my voice. Through writing. Through creativity. Through stories, through humor, through the strange little things that make me, me.

And I’m documenting the entire experiment here.

So if you’re willing to play along, here’s your assignment.

1. Decide what you want to be known for.

This sounds simple. It is not.

Because most of us have spent our entire lives collecting identities like little souvenirs. I’m a designer. I’m a mother. I’m a consultant. I’m a writer. I’m a photographer. I’m interested in wellness. I also like AI. And interior design. And travel. And maybe I should start a podcast.

And suddenly your personal brand is a garage sale.

You don’t need to know what you’ll be known for forever. You just need to decide what you’re going to explore for the next six months.

The playbook I’m working from calls this the journey from Dreamer to Tinkerer to Operator, then eventually toward a Personal Media Company CEO and an Iconic Founder-Led Brand — very official-sounding titles for what is, at its core, a very simple instruction.

Pick a door. Walk through it.

Write this down: for the next six months, I am going to become known for __________.

Then let yourself be boring. Consistency is wildly underrated, and also deeply unsexy, which is probably why nobody talks about it at dinner parties.

2. Pick ONE platform.

Please. I am begging you.

You do not need to become a full-time content factory with fourteen browser tabs open and a ring light you resent. Pick one place where you’ll build your home. Substack. Instagram. TikTok. YouTube. LinkedIn, if that’s truly your calling and I won’t judge you, much.

Then show up there. You can distribute elsewhere later. But right now, you need somewhere to practice becoming recognizable — because your audience cannot fall in love with a person they’ve never seen twice.

3. Choose 10 people to follow.

Ten. Not 1,847. Ten.

Choose people who make you feel creatively awake. People who make you think, oh, I want to make things like that.

Then study them. Not to copy them — to notice what makes your own taste come alive. What do you love about their work? Their honesty? Their humor? Their visual world? Their courage? Their simplicity?

Pay attention. Your taste is trying to tell you something, and it’s ruder than you think if you keep ignoring it.

4. Block the people who make you afraid to post.

This one is going to sound slightly unhinged. Good.

If every time you post something, you think: what will Sarah think? My old boss is going to see this. My ex is going to think I’m ridiculous. My cousin is going to send this straight to my mother —

Block them.

You don’t need to make an announcement. You don’t need to send a farewell card. Just quietly remove yourself from the imaginary courtroom you’ve been standing trial in for years.

Because you cannot make honest work while constantly imagining the jury.

There is a particular kind of freedom that arrives the moment you realize: nobody is actually thinking about you as much as you think they are. They’re too busy imagining their own jury.

Go make the thing.

• • •

Okay. Is this too much? Is this too much for a Substack article?

I get it. I wouldn’t want to do this alone either. I have my communities — the people I text at midnight, the people who tell me when an idea is actually good versus when I’m just excited. And I’m offering you one too.

It’s not open yet. It’ll only be open to the people who pick up the book. You need to invest in yourself first. More on that at the end.

• • •

5. Publish before you feel ready.

Your Notes app is full of things you’ve never posted. I know. I’ve seen this movie, I’ve starred in this movie.

Your bio is half-written. Your website is “almost done.” You have a folder called FINAL_FINAL_CONTENT_v7. You’re waiting for better lighting, a better camera, a better niche, a better body, a better apartment, a better version of yourself.

Meanwhile, your actual life is happening, right now, entirely without your permission.

The source playbook describes the Dreamer level almost exactly this way: the ideas exist, but the work never actually ships.

So here’s the rule: ship it. The imperfect post. The awkward video. The essay you’re not sure anyone will read.

You need evidence that you’re a person who makes things. Not a person who thinks, endlessly, beautifully, about making things.

☐ 6. Find your voice before you build the machine.

This is where I think we’re entering a genuinely interesting era.

AI can help you write. It can help you brainstorm, turn one idea into twenty pieces of content, organize your scattered thoughts, help you build systems. Wonderful. Use it.

But please don’t use it to become indistinguishable from everybody else.

Because the more AI-generated the internet becomes, the more valuable an actual human voice becomes. Your strange metaphor. Your laugh. Your unpopular opinion. The story from your childhood that somehow explains your entire worldview. The phrase you always use without noticing. The thing you believe that you can’t quite prove but keep coming back to anyway.

That’s your gold.

The machine comes later. First, find the gold.

This, if I’m honest, is the entire reason I built the Spoken Draft Method — more on that at the end.

☐ 7. Make your “I could talk about this for three hours” list.

Get a piece of paper. Actual paper. We’re going analog for five minutes, try to contain your excitement.

Write down everything you can’t shut up about. What do your friends always ask you? What makes you angry? What makes you laugh? What have you learned the hard way? What do you wish someone had told you at 22? What do you secretly know a lot about? What could you talk about while walking home at midnight and not notice the time passing? What are you currently, embarrassingly obsessed with?

There. That’s your content.

Stop asking the internet what you should say. Ask yourself what you’ve been trying to say for years.

☐ 8. Create a rhythm you can actually survive.

Not your fantasy self’s schedule. Your real one.

If you can make three good pieces of content a week, make three. If you can write one beautiful essay every Sunday, write one. If you can make a daily 60-second video without wanting to throw your phone into the ocean, do that.

The playbook eventually builds a content waterfall, where one core idea becomes multiple pieces across platforms. Beautiful. But don’t start there.

Start with: can I actually keep doing this? Because the internet rewards consistency, but your nervous system also gets a vote, and it will not be quiet about it.

☐ 9. Start an email list.

This is where your little corner of the internet finally becomes yours.

Followers are lovely. Followers are also rented. Your email list is a relationship you actually own.

So start collecting the people who want more of what you’re making. And please don’t immediately turn it into a sales funnel with seventeen buttons and a webinar called The Ultimate Freedom Method.

Just write. Send something worth opening. Tell the truth. Make them laugh. Teach them something. Give them a reason to stay.

Build a little room on the internet, and leave the door open.

☐ 10. Figure out how your creativity can make money.

Okay. Here’s where I ruin the beautiful spiritual moment we were having.

Money matters. I know. We were having such a lovely time talking about creativity and courage and finding your gold.

But here’s the truth: we’re not doing this for the money. We’re doing it so we have the money. There’s a difference.

I don’t want money to become the point of my life. I want it to become a means to an end. I want money so I can travel. So I can create. So I can take a month to write something without panicking. So I can help people. So I can say no. So I can take a random Tuesday afternoon off. So I can follow a strange idea just because it feels interesting. So I can build something nobody asked me to build.

Money buys space. Space gives you choice. Choice gives you freedom. And freedom gives you room to become more of yourself.

Not a seven-figure business so I can stare at a seven-figure dashboard.

A seven-figure business so I can have a seven-figure amount of options.

Well. Maybe not literally. You know what I mean.

☐ 11. Make something people can actually buy.

Now that we’ve established money isn’t the point, let’s go make some.

Your voice can lead to a service. A product. A workshop. A consulting offer. A book. A course. A membership. A weird little digital thing you invented at 1 a.m. and are slightly embarrassed by.

You don’t need to know which one forever. You need to experiment, because eventually attention needs somewhere to go.

The broader playbook moves from message and content into trust, an irresistible offer, closing, delivery, and eventually a rhythm that lets the business run without consuming you whole.

That’s the beautiful part. The goal isn’t to sell harder. The goal is to become so clear about what you can help with that the right people recognize themselves in your work.

☐ 12. Give yourself six months.

This is the big one.

Six months. Not six days. Not three viral posts. Not until your first awkward Reel gets 17 views, most of them from your mom.

For six months: write, post, learn, experiment, talk to people, listen, improve, make offers, make mistakes, keep going.

You’re allowed to change your tactics. You are not allowed to change your entire dream every time something feels uncomfortable. There’s a difference between pivoting and escaping. Learn to tell them apart.

☐ 13. Stop trying to become someone else.

This one isn’t in the business playbook. It’s in the life playbook, and I think it’s the most important one on this whole list.

You don’t need to become more polished. You don’t need to become more masculine or feminine or serious or strategic or mysterious or optimized. You don’t need to become the woman on your For You page.

You need to become more yourself, which is, infuriatingly, the harder assignment.

Because becoming yourself requires letting go of all the people you thought you were supposed to be. And that can be genuinely terrifying.

But here’s the funny thing that happens when you finally stop trying to manufacture a self: you discover there was already one there.

Waiting.

☐ 14. Build a business that gives your life back to you.

This is where I’m personally drawing the line.

I’ve been the operator. I’ve built businesses where, if I stopped working, everything stopped with me.

The source playbook calls this the “beautiful prison” of the Operator level — you’re making money, but the business still needs you, hourly, like a small demanding houseplant.

I don’t want that anymore.

I want systems. I want leverage. I want a team eventually. I want content that keeps working while I’m asleep. I want ideas that compound. I want a business that can breathe while I go live my actual life.

Because the business is supposed to serve the life. Not the other way around.

☐ 15. Come back here every week.

This is the last assignment. Stay.

I’m going to show you what I’m building — the business model, the content experiments, the things that work, the things that spectacularly don’t, the money, the mistakes, the weird ideas, the yaps.

Especially the yaps.

Because somewhere between sending you all those voice memos and talking to you about your work, I realized something. You don’t just want to consume. You want to interact. You want to be seen. You want to know other people are out here trying to figure this whole thing out too.

And, frankly? So am I.

So let’s make this our little corner of the internet. You bring your questions. I’ll bring what I’ve learned. I’ll show you my playbook. You run the experiments. We’ll compare notes.

And maybe, six months from now, we’ll look back and realize we became completely different people — not because we manufactured ourselves into better versions, but because we finally gave ourselves enough space to become the people we already were.

One last thing.

I don’t want you to leave this article thinking, okay, great, I need to build a personal brand.

No.

I want you to leave thinking: what could my life look like if money stopped being the thing that kept me small?

What would you make? Where would you go? Who would you help? What would you say? What would you finally admit you wanted? What would you do if you knew nobody was laughing? What would you build if you knew you were allowed to change your mind later?

Because that’s what I’m doing. I’m not building this so I can spend my life chasing numbers. I’m building it because I want the freedom to be fully, gloriously, inconveniently myself.

And if I can make money doing that? Well. That’s a pretty good deal.

So. Your checklist starts now.

Pick your thing. Pick your platform. Pick your ten people. Block Karen. Make the thing. Post it. Build the list. Give yourself six months.

And for the love of God, stop waiting to become someone worth seeing.

You already are.

A quick note before you go.

Everything on this checklist — the voice, the rhythm, the actual writing part — is what I built the Spoken Draft Method to solve. I talk, it becomes drafts, and my actual life stops getting interrupted by my own creativity.

The book comes out September 1st. And when it does, I’m opening a small community for the people who pick it up — a place to run this checklist together instead of alone, which is a much better way to do it.

If you want in, the book is out September 1st. These people will have access to the community and to work with me directly. I’ll let you know the second the doors open.

The first time, I was completely clueless. I was just doing it. Figuring things out as I went. Making things, trying things, getting things wrong, learning, trying again. I loved that brand. I still do. I still work in it.

But I remember what it felt like at the start. I had so many thoughts in my head that I couldn’t figure out how to get them out. I’d have an idea, try to organize it, try to write it down, question whether it was good, try to make it clearer, then have another idea. And another. Eventually I had a giant pile of thoughts and a lot of anxiety.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was missing a system for getting ideas out of my head. Years later, I realized I’d actually developed one. When I started building my new personal brand, I decided to use it from the beginning.

I called it the Spoken Draft Method. It worked so well that I want to tell you exactly what I did.

My Yaps came first. My Yaps is my personal brand. The Spoken Draft Method is what I teach. They’re related, but they’re not the same thing.

I didn’t want a polished business persona. I wanted the real thing, and I wanted it useful. Raw, but not rambling. Personal, but not self-absorbed. Unpolished, but still valuable.

So I didn’t sit down and “build my personal brand.” I spoke it into existence.

If I had an idea for something to teach, I talked. If I had a story, I told it. If a book had influenced me, I talked about it. If I had a belief about entrepreneurship, I talked about it. If I had a stupid joke, I talked about that too. I didn’t wait for a two-hour session in front of a blank document. I just started talking. Walking my dog. Biking. Sitting somewhere. The thought didn’t need to be finished. I just needed to catch it.

I made videos that got three views.

This is important, because I wasn’t trying to make every piece of content good. I was trying to learn. I’d think of something, make a video, and it might get three views. And I’d genuinely think: I don’t care, I’m learning. Then I’d make another one. And another.

I was learning how I wanted to speak. What stories felt natural. What people responded to. What didn’t work. How to be myself on camera. Most importantly, I was removing perfectionism from the process. If you believe every post needs to perform, you become terrified of making the next one. But if a post can simply be a rep, everything changes. Three views? Fine. Seven views? Fine. A hundred thousand? Also fine. All information. I’m learning.

You already know how to think. You already have the ideas. What you don’t have yet is the transfer, the bridge between what’s in your head and what exists in the world. That’s not an idea problem. That’s a transfer problem. And it’s a completely different thing to fix.

That became my operating system. I work from momentum, not from figuring things out first. One thought creates another. One video gives me an idea for another. A comment reveals a deeper question. A story reminds me of another story.

Think, speak, make, publish, learn, keep going. The goal isn’t to get everything right. The goal is to stay in motion long enough for the good stuff to emerge.

This is exactly why I built the community around it. Not for people who don’t know what they want to make. For people who already do, and have twelve versions of it sitting in their Notes app right now.

If that’s you, the Spoken Draft community is open, and the first four chapters of the book are free for subscribers. Come talk your idea into existence with the rest of us.

[Apply to join the Spoken Draft community →]

My Yaps shape-shifted as I built it, because that’s what happens when you’re actually making something instead of planning it. Certain ideas kept coming back. Certain stories mattered more than I expected. The community showed me what was resonating, and the brand got bigger, not because I added more content pillars, but because I discovered what was actually there. You don’t always know what something is before you make it. Sometimes you have to make it for a while before it tells you what it wants to become.

I used to have to correct my writing. Now I have to do the opposite. I have to stop correcting it. The next ten years are going to look very different from everything you've known in the world, don’t get left behind.

I was doing most of this alone, so I brought all of it into ChatGPT and Claude. The ideas. The conversations. The drafts. The things I’d already said out loud. Instead of asking AI to invent my brand, I gave it the raw material of my own thinking, and asked: what patterns do you see? What am I actually trying to say? Where’s the stronger idea underneath this?

That shortened the distance between “I think there’s something here” and “okay, here’s the thing.” I wasn’t starting from nothing. I was starting from my own experience.

And that’s when I noticed I’d been using a method for years. I just hadn’t named it. It worked for a social post. It worked for a business idea. It worked for my book. Now it was working for my personal brand.

The irony is the method was already working before I wrote about it. I didn’t invent it and then go find proof. I used it for years, then noticed what I was doing, refined it, named it, wrote it down. Now I’m teaching it. Which means this brand became an experiment in the very thing I’m teaching.

So what actually grew the 25,000-person community?

Not one viral video. Not a secret algorithm hack. Not a perfectly engineered content calendar. It was momentum. Volume without attachment. Speaking instead of waiting to write. Using AI to move faster. Paying attention to what resonated without letting the audience decide who I should become. And letting the brand evolve while I was building it.

I already knew how to build an audience. What I wanted to learn was whether I could build one without losing the creative part of myself in the process.

It worked.

I think that’s the bigger opportunity with AI. Not using it to pump out more content, but using it to capture more of what’s already inside you. Your best idea might not arrive at your computer. It might arrive while you’re walking your dog, biking, talking to someone, having a completely unhinged thought that seems ridiculous at first. You don’t always need to schedule a creative session. Sometimes you just need to talk. Then come back to it. Shape it. Build it. Make it real.

I’m still figuring it out. That’s the point. The method has changed as I’ve used it. My Yaps has changed as I’ve built it. I expect both to keep changing, because I’m not interested in teaching people how to make perfect things. I’m interested in helping people make things real.

I’ve written an entire book about the Spoken Draft Method, the exact process I use to go from a thought in my head to something that exists in the world. I’m giving the first chapters away to subscribers.

If you’ve been carrying around an idea for a book, business, brand, or project, and keep telling yourself you’ll get to it eventually: start there. The idea might already be at the tip of your tongue. You just need a way to get it out.

So, naturally, I booked a flight to Lisbon.

A five-hour flight to Lisbon is less than the drive to my cottage. Booking it felt almost too easy.

There are moments in life when you can either accept the inconvenience or take it as a very obvious invitation to change scenery. My apartment would be uninhabitable for the next month and a half anyway. I figured I might as well go somewhere I love.

And now I’m sitting in Lisbon, eating a marble chocolate cake at a café in Cais do Sodré, the wind blowing against my face, running my fingers through my short hair, feeling vaguely like I’ve been dropped into a summer version of Bali.

Except this isn’t Bali. It’s Lisbon in August. And I don’t quite know how to describe what’s happening here.

The city feels like a hub I accidentally cracked the code to. I keep walking down the street and running into people from the strange, beautiful ecosystem of entrepreneurs, creatives, founders and internet people that I somehow belong to now.

This doesn’t happen to me in Montreal. I can spend days there without seeing a single person I know.

Here, I walk outside and someone I met in France is getting ice cream. Someone I mt in Bali is locking in next to me introducing me ot another creative mind. Someone from my community is building something two streets away. Someone I haven’t seen in months is suddenly sitting at the same table.

It’s beginning to feel less like coincidence and more like being woven into something. There’s something profoundly comforting about that.

Lisbon has always been close to my heart. I first came here with my mother about eight years ago. I came back two years ago for my yoga teacher training. And now I’m here again, at a completely different point in my life, and it feels like the city has been waiting for me to arrive as this version of myself.

It reminds me, strangely, of how I imagine Paris during the Belle Époque. Not literally, obviously. But socially.

People are flirting. People are dressed beautifully for no particular reason. There’s an ease to lingering. You can switch from old-money dressing to French provincial to streetwear and somehow none of it feels out of place. You can spend an afternoon talking about a business idea over coffee and an evening climbing a hill to watch the sunset. You can meet someone by the river and end up somewhere completely different than you expected.

The city seems to encourage a certain kind of life. A life where things happen because you were there.

Yesterday, I was out with a very special friend I seem to find in almost every European city. Athens, Madrid, Chania, now Lisbon. We have this strange little tradition of meeting wherever we happen to be. We explore. We laugh. We switch between German, French, Spanish and English without really noticing. He likes embarrassing me in front of people. I find this deeply annoying in the cutest way, which is probably why I keep coming back.

But something interesting happens when I’m with him. I become incredibly feminine. I don’t bring my phone. I don’t plan the route. I don’t need to know where we’re going. I just let myself be led. And suddenly I’m walking around Lisbon feeling held.

Yesterday we watched one of the most incredible sunsets, reminisced about our time together in Athens, went down to get ice cream, and ended up face to face with founders I had originally met at an airport in France. They run communities around UGC and creators. We’d met because of Art of Monday in the past.

And there we were. In Lisbon. Talking about where we’d travelled, how the businesses were going, what we’d learned, where we’d be next. A joke. Then a piece of business advice. Then another joke. Then, without either of us quite noticing the turn, we’re already talking about seeing each other in Bali this winter.

This is the strange thing about being here. My life doesn’t feel compartmentalized. Love and friendship and business and travel and creativity and community all seem to be happening in the same conversation.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been craving. Not more productivity. Not even more people. Just more interconnection.

During the day, I sit in cafés and work on my book, which comes out on Septemebr 1st - Shameless plug, here is the link if you want a preview.

I speak ideas out loud. I finish things. I have deep conversations with founders and creatives who tell me that the advice I’m giving them is actually helping. I connect people. I hear someone’s idea and immediately think of the three people they should meet. Someone tells me about a project and I start thinking about how it could grow.

I’ve realized that this is one of the things I love most about being alive. Not just creating things. Connecting things. Watching one idea meet another person and suddenly become bigger than either of them could have made alone.

And then, at night, I stop. I leave my phone. I get dressed. I go somewhere without needing to know exactly where. I watch the sun disappear over the river. I eat ice cream. I laugh. I flirt. I let the city carry me somewhere.

My little apartment has become its own tiny poet’s den. Marble everywhere. Low lighting. The kind of place that makes you want to write something dramatic at 2 a.m.

And maybe that’s why I needed to write this. Or, more accurately, speak it out. Because I have a habit of moving so quickly through my own life that I sometimes forget to notice when I’m actually living something beautiful.

The water leak was supposed to be an inconvenience. Instead, it sent me here.

And here I am, finishing my book in cafés and century-old libraries, meeting people I love by accident, helping strangers turn their ideas into businesses, reconnecting with old friends, making new ones, watching sunsets, switching languages mid-sentence, and feeling more connected to the world than I have in a long time.

I think I’ve finally understood something about serendipity. It isn’t always magic. Sometimes it’s just what happens when you put yourself in the right place and become available for things you couldn’t have planned.

A friend I met in Porto ends up helping another friend find an apartment. People I’ve met in completely different countries keep appearing on the same streets. Business ideas cross paths. Friendships travel. People introduce people. And suddenly the world feels very small.

Not small in a suffocating way. Small in the most comforting, secure way possible. Like everyone is connected. Like there’s always someone around the corner. Like your next idea, your next friendship, your next adventure might already be moving toward you.

Maybe this is what I mean when I say I’ve cracked the code. Not that I found the perfect city. But that, for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

The right time. The right place. The right people.

During the day, I lock in. At night, I let go. I get to build my life and let my life surprise me at the same time.

And honestly? Maybe that is the dream. Not a perfectly optimized life. A deeply interconnected one. One where you can eat marble chocolate cake by the river in Lisbon, finish the book you’ve been trying to finish for months, accidentally run into someone who changes your evening, leave your phone at home, and still make it back before midnight.

A little bit Belle Époque. A little bit Bali. A little bit chaos.

And, for now, exactly where I want to be.

Last week I went to dinner with a friend.

At some point, I looked around the restaurant and noticed something faintly absurd. At almost every table, someone was looking at their phone.

Mine wasn’t even in the room. I’d left it in the car, on purpose. I work on that machine all day. I needed a break, people. One meal where nothing was glowing at me.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you about putting the phone away.

The flutter doesn’t happen when I’m with someone. It happens when I’m alone.

As soon as I’m actually with a person, I’m fully there. Fully connected. My brain is a flutter of ideas, constantly, but that flutter runs in the background of my own solitude, not in the middle of a conversation I care about.

I once tried to get an ex-boyfriend to agree to a no-phones rule in the bedroom, just so we’d get more talking in, more actual connection time.

Plot twist: he never wanted to.

We broke up.

• • •

People assume I’m always on my phone. They’re not entirely wrong. I’m a founder. I write on the internet for a living. Most of my closest friends found me because, one day, we happened to follow each other. My entire career exists because of that small glowing rectangle.

But the moment I’m sitting across from someone I love, something shifts.

My phone disappears. That night, it wasn’t even in the building.

Not because I’m especially disciplined. Because I’ve built my life so that it can.

That wasn’t always true.

Ironically, work was never the problem. Love was.

• • •

I remember dating someone once and feeling this low-grade anxiety running underneath everything. Not because I wanted to check Instagram. Because ideas kept arriving — a sentence, a headline, a joke, a business idea — while I was supposed to be somewhere else entirely.

I wasn’t addicted to scrolling.

I was terrified of forgetting.

There’s a real difference.

Then, one day, it occurred to me. The people I loved were never competing with Instagram. They were competing with my own unfinished thoughts. My attention wasn’t being stolen by my phone.

It was being held hostage by my own brain.

Which is, admittedly, a much harder problem to solve.

• • •

I notice it everywhere now. When I visit my brother, he’ll sometimes be halfway through a chess move while we’re mid-conversation. He’s not trying to ignore me. He’s simply doing what all of us have quietly learned to do — splitting our attention into smaller and smaller pieces until we’ve become experts at being only partially wherever we are.

I don’t think we’re addicted to our phones, exactly.

I think we’re addicted to the fear of missing something. A message. An idea. A move in a chess game. A notification. Somewhere along the way, attention itself became the most expensive thing any of us own, and none of us noticed the price go up.

• • •

So I stopped trying to use my phone less. That particular advice never once worked for me. Instead, I asked a different question.

How could my phone make me more present, instead of less?

That question changed everything.

I also learned something about myself along the way. I’m not someone who thinks by writing. I think by talking. Give me a friend, a walk, a coffee, and I know exactly what I think, almost instantly. Give me a blinking cursor, and somehow I’ve forgotten my own name.

If Lorelai Gilmore had to write essays, she wouldn’t lock herself away in some cabin. She’d pace her kitchen, talking to herself, for forty-five straight minutes.

That’s me. For years I treated it as a flaw.

Now it’s my entire creative process.

• • •

Over the last two years, I’ve slowly built what I now call the Spoken Draft Method. Not because I wanted to produce more content. Because I wanted my own creativity to stop interrupting my life.

I spent hours teaching a tool how my brain actually works. Not to replace my voice — to protect it. The rhythm of my sentences. The particular questions that unlock a story for me. The edits I always make, the words I always avoid. Eventually it stopped feeling like software altogether. It started feeling more like an extraordinarily patient creative partner, one that never once forgot a thought I’d handed it.

Now, whenever an idea arrives, I don’t panic.

I talk. While biking. Walking. Putting on mascara. Waiting for a coffee. Driving.

By the time I actually sit down to write, the first draft is already there, waiting for me.

The computer isn’t where I create anymore.

It’s where I polish.

• • •

Here’s the part that surprised even me. The productivity experts will tell you a system like this is about output — more essays, more content, a faster pipeline from idea to published post. And sure, it is that too.

But the real return on investment was never volume. It was attention itself, redirected back to where it actually belonged.

I’d rather spend thirty seconds talking to my phone while I’m alone than thirty minutes checking it while I’m with someone I love.

That’s the entire philosophy, really.

• • •

Elizabeth Gilbert writes, in Big Magic, that ideas are out looking for people willing to bring them into the world. Whether that’s literally true hardly matters.

What matters is this: ideas deserve somewhere to land.

But they don’t deserve your whole evening.

Your friendships deserve that. Your family deserves that. The person sitting across from you, mid-sentence, deserves that.

• • •

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to teach the Spoken Draft Method.

Not because the world needs another course.

Because I think more of us deserve to feel fully present again — in the room we’re actually in, with the people who are actually there.

If you’re someone whose brain never quite stops talking, who’s always wanted to write, or who has spent years believing creativity only happens at a desk, chained to a cursor —

I think you’re going to love what’s coming.

• • •

What if you didn’t have to choose between having a life and making something meaningful out of it?

That’s what I’ve spent the last two years figuring out.

The Spoken Draft Method is my system for turning the thoughts, ideas, stories, and half-formed brilliance that happen while you’re living into finished work.

You speak first. You capture the idea while it’s alive. Then you refine it later.

No waiting for the perfect desk. No staring at a blank page. No letting the idea disappear because you were busy being a human.

It’s the method that helped me write the book I’ve wanted to write, build my personal brand, launch businesses, and create more without spending my entire life sitting at a computer.

And now I’m putting the whole thing into a book.

The Spoken Draft Method launches September 1.

The first Founding Members get the book for $20, ever.

The community is coming next.

If you’ve got more ideas than you have time to write down, come build with us.

I arrived at this retreat with one mission. Scale the business. Get into rooms with people building million-dollar companies. Surround myself with freedom founders. Spend ten consecutive days in my masculine energy. Forget the emotional whiplash I’d been living through for the past year and a half. Become the kind of woman who looked at spreadsheets instead of situationships.

It was, objectively, an excellent plan.

Unfortunately, there were abs.

Nobody tells you this about founder retreats. You think you’re signing up for strategy sessions and networking. Instead, you end up doing breathwork, meditating, and sitting in circles where wildly successful founders casually unpack childhood trauma before breakfast. Which, it turns out, is incredibly inconvenient if you’re trying not to fall in love.

And I’m sorry, but a high-achieving man discussing his attachment wounds with actual emotional vocabulary should come with a warning label. It’s attractive. Vulnerability is attractive. I don’t make the rules.

To make matters worse, I happened to be in my follicular phase. Ladies, you know. Gentlemen, Google it.

My hormones took one look around the room and said, “We’re absolutely not focusing on the P&L today.”

The quarterly planning could wait.

The annoying thing about healing is that the moment your life starts becoming your own again, men feel it. Not because the universe rewards healing. Because you’ve become magnetic again. You stop chasing. You’re building. You’re laughing. You’re sleeping. You’re generating your own energy instead of borrowing it from someone else’s attention.

If you move through the world with your heart slightly more exposed than everyone else’s, you’ll eventually learn something uncomfortable: authenticity doesn’t repel the wrong people. Sometimes it attracts them faster.

At first, the people it draws in all look the same. It’s only later you find out who came to build beside you, and who just came to stand in the light for a while.

That’s usually where things turn. The same light that first pulled them in becomes a reminder of the distance between who they are and who they wish they were. Instead of growing toward it, they start pushing against it. Not always on purpose. Not always unkindly.

But the things they once admired become the things they criticize.

You’re “too much.” Too optimistic. Too emotional. Too ambitious. Too expressive. Too bright.

Nothing about you changed. Only their relationship to your light did. And by then, you’ve already let them close enough for their opinion to actually matter.

At thirty-one, learning the difference has probably delivered a higher ROI than any business course I’ve ever paid for.

My brother has a theory about me. Actually, my whole family has a habit of saying the quiet part out loud.

“You’re nineteen when it comes to dating.”

Which felt deeply offensive. Until I realized it was completely accurate.

I’ve spent almost my entire adult life in relationships. I know how to build a marriage. I now know how to survive a divorce. I know how to negotiate significant contracts. I know how to rebuild a career from scratch. I know how to scale businesses.

But modern dating? Imagine handing Bambi a Hinge account. That’s me. Hopeful. Underqualified. One loud noise away from sprinting into the woods.

Then I met him.

Let’s just say being attractive had never been one of his life’s major challenges.

He started flirting. Mechanically, I started flirting back. Apparently I have the romantic self-control of a Labrador retriever.

Then I learned something completely useless. He had the same birthday as my ex-boyfriend. The man I’d spent the last year trying very hard to stop crying over.

And he was a Cancer.

Listen. I know. You don’t have to say anything. I have a weakness for Cancers. Soft little men hiding inside emotional shells. Apparently that’s my type. Unfortunately, it’s also been my villain origin story.

This wasn’t astrology. This wasn't astrology. This was unresolved grief with a different passport and the same birthday. Astrology was simply the paperwork.

My brain immediately opened a file labelled: Maybe the universe is trying again.

Looking back, it wasn’t intuition. It was projection in a fake moustache.

My girlfriends warned me. Apparently he had a bit of a reputation.

I smiled. Nodded. Thought to myself, “No, no. I’m different.”

Ladies. Respectfully. We’re not.

If three women you trust tell you a man is emotionally unavailable, they’re probably conducting peer-reviewed research.

Camp ended. We kept talking. Canada came up. Bali came up. Future plans came up.

And because I’m a writer, I took three breadcrumbs and baked an entire wedding cake.

Then one morning.

Poof. Gone.

No dramatic betrayal. No explosive fight. Just one of those modern dating endings where someone quietly exits stage left.

Eventually, I found out why.

He’d met a blonde in Bali. Fair enough. I wasn’t blonde.

Somewhere in the conversation, I had my own Legally Blonde moment.

"If I'm going to find my life partner, I need a Marilyn Monroe, not a Rita Hayworth."

“Wait...”

“You’re breaking up with me because I’m too... red?”

Turns out I’d made it all the way to the final interview. I cleared every round. Culture fit. Chemistry. Shared values. Banter.

Unfortunately, the role required blonde highlights.

Apparently I’d failed the visual branding guidelines. Somewhere during due diligence, they discovered I’d shipped in red instead of blonde.

The acquisition was cancelled. Legal cited brand misalignment.

Feedback received:

Decision: Not Moving Forward

✔ Strong culture fit ✔ Excellent communication skills ✔ High emotional intelligence ✔Good Chemistry

✘ Off-brand

I wasn’t rejected. I just didn’t fit the mood board.

Which, looking back, says considerably more about the mood board than it ever did about me.

For a long time, I thought this story was about a man who preferred blondes.

It isn’t.

It’s about a woman who had just started preferring herself.

That’s the most vulnerable version of a woman. Not because she’s weak. Because she’s finally open again. She’s laughing again. She’s sleeping again. She’s dreaming again. She’s building something she’s proud of. She’s becoming herself again.

And that’s exactly when she has to become ruthlessly discerning about who she lets into her life.

We spend so much time talking about protecting our businesses. We protect our calendars. We protect our equity. We protect our margins. We protect our runway.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I needed to protect the founder just as fiercely. Because not everyone who’s attracted to your light is meant to build beside you. Some people simply enjoy standing in it for a while.

Looking back, I wasn’t dating a blind man. He had perfect eyesight. He just had terrible vision.

Although, in fairness, so did I.

He was filtering women by hair colour. I was filtering men by birthdays, zodiac signs, and unresolved grief. Neither of us was making particularly evidence-based decisions.

The older I get, the less impressed I am by chemistry. Chemistry is everywhere. Attention is everywhere. Potential is everywhere.

Peace is rare. And peace is worth protecting.

So yes. I kept the hair. I lost the fantasy.

And somewhere in the process, I found discernment.

Turns out that was the real love story all along.

Read more

I won’t write it here. Some words don’t need repeating for you to know exactly what they do.

It cut through me like a blade, and by the time I felt it land, my heart was already breaking.

I had to ask my mother to leave my house today.

I’m still shaking as I write this.

I don’t understand how things can escalate so quickly. Sometimes I don’t think I ever will.

But I am starting to understand this much: love and boundaries were never supposed to be opposites. I just didn’t know that yet, back when I needed to.

We talk about divorce through the lens of the grief it brings. What we don’t talk about is the other thing it does: it can alter your relationship with your parents forever.

When I got divorced, I lost almost 90 percent of my circle.

People picked sides.

People disappeared.

Some relationships simply faded because my life no longer looked the same.

Nobody brings you a casserole for this kind of grief. There’s no ritual for it, no card, no line of people showing up at your door. You just carry it quietly, and keep going.

For my parents, it was different. In their eyes, they’d lost a child too.

My ex-husband had been in their life since he was eighteen. He was closer to my own father than my father was to his own father. He was my dad’s best friend.

My mother lost ten pounds the year I left him. She wouldn’t hear why for months. She hoped we’d get back together until the divorce papers were signed, sealed, and delivered.

Their grief made my pain, and my guilt, feel a hundred times worse.

I’m still not ready to go into details. People tend to see a story as good or bad, and the truth is messier than that. Sometimes good people do bad things. Sometimes bad people do good things. In this, I hadn’t only hurt myself. I had hurt the people I loved most in the world.

My parents were incredible when I was growing up. They put everything down for their children. I know they love me profoundly.

But as I grew more independent, learning to hold my own boundaries was hard. Still is.

My mother has one demon. When she gets mad, she word-vomits insults. It’s like something else takes over.

My parents’ kryptonite is their heated blood. When things get heated, it’s like they can see red.

When I did the work on myself, I set a hard boundary, with myself and with everyone else.

Nobody gets to talk to me a certain way. Not anymore.

For a long time I thought love meant tolerating anything. Staying no matter what it cost me. I am only now learning that the truest love protects itself too. That the boundary and the love are not in competition. The boundary is just what the love looks like once it grows up.

If you did something like this today, and you’re still shaking too, I want you to know the shaking doesn’t mean you were wrong.

I don’t think the rest of the details are necessary. Everyone has their triggers. Mine are verbal, especially after a marriage that ended in verbal abuse, and in moments that came close to something physical. It wasn’t one-sided, not at first. By the end, it was.

That word from the beginning is one of them. It always has been. It’s the one that cuts straight through whatever I’ve built that day to protect myself.

These things are never black and white. People say things they regret. People do things they regret. The hard part is knowing when it’s time to leave.

This Christmas, I, a girl who never touches drugs, was stoned for three days straight.

Here’s the part that still gets me: I still deeply admire my parents. Their marriage. Their loyalty. Everything they gave us. The hard part about becoming an adult is realizing your parents are carrying their own inner children, and their own scars, the whole time they’re raising you.

People always talk about how divorce breaks your heart.

Nobody talks about how it can break your parents’ too.

Last year, I went to therapy with my mom and my dad, because my divorce had hit them almost as hard as it hit me. My ex-husband hadn’t just been my husband. He’d been my father’s best friend.

If you want a sense of how close we all were: I’d never once put windshield washer fluid in my own car until my divorce.

My dad was always the super dad. The one who would just do it. Then I got married, and my husband did it too. Which, if you live in Canada, is saying something.

Then I was standing in a Canadian Tire parking lot, googling where the blue liquid goes.

Character development.

The funny thing is, I never understood how loved I was until I had to start doing the small things myself. Not because I couldn’t. Because I never had to.

That’s a kind of privilege I didn’t recognize until it was gone.

My parents hadn’t just lost a son-in-law. They’d lost someone they loved just as much as I did. Watching them grieve him taught me something about how deeply my family loves.

It made the divorce harder. I’d choose that kind of love again anyway.

These days I fill my own windshield washer fluid. I assemble my own IKEA furniture. I call my own plumber. I do the annoying adult things myself.

But I also know exactly what it feels like to be looked after. That’s a gift, even now.

So when people ask what kind of man I want to marry, the bar is simple. He doesn’t have to compete with my dad. But he should understand the standard my dad set. If our kids ever look at him the way I look at mine, I’ll know I chose well.

In the last few years, I’ve been at my parents’ mercy more than I’d like to admit, and we fought often. It’s what used to push me to call my ex-boyfriend, the one who always knew how to hold me gently, even after we’d broken up. A pattern that ended up hurting me in its own way. I needed to learn how to hold myself.

I still don’t know how this story ends.

Somewhere underneath everything, I know things will be okay. I love my family deeply, and I know it’s mutual. And yet, even after therapy, even after all of it, we still ended up here. At each other’s throats.

For the past three years, I made myself small. The cottage was my refuge while I was nomading through the world, the one fixed place in a life that had none, and some quiet part of me understood that if I took up too much space in it, I might lose it too.

Then I bought my own house. And slowly, I’m remembering I don’t have to make myself small anymore. I have my own refuge now.

This Christmas, my mother came to help me settle in. We ended up fighting, the way we do. And the creature that sometimes comes out of her when we fight, the tongue of a viper, came out too.

I assessed the boundary. We made up. But I told her, plainly, that I would never again accept being called names.

Fast forward to July 2026.

Since I bought my condo, I’ve climbed out of depression. I’ve gotten stronger inside myself. But nothing cuts like having to ask your mother to leave your own house, because she crossed a line you’d already drawn many, many times. Which is exactly what happened today.

That same week, one of my oldest friends told me her father, a man I’ve known since I was twelve, has only a few months left.

I felt ungrateful, hurting my parents again so soon after. But just like with my divorce, I couldn’t undo it. I had to make the boundary clear.

Here is what I am learning, slowly, and mostly against my will. That you can love people with your whole heart and still have to leave the room. That protecting yourself from the people who made you does not make you disloyal. It makes you someone who has finally decided you are worth protecting too.

I don’t know yet how this story ends. But I would rather be the woman who set the boundary than the girl who never learned how.

There was no doubt in me, not for one second, that I had to hold it. This wasn’t about cutting her out of my life. It was about this one moment, this one line, that had to be held even if it broke my heart to hold it. So I let her leave.

I paid a very high cost to hold that first boundary. It cost me my marriage. Continuing to hold it has cost me even more since. I don’t regret it.

Teaching people how to treat you has a cost. Nobody tells you that part.

I just deeply hope it doesn’t cost me my relationship with my parents too. Life is too short for that.

The grief of learning to hold your boundaries is a price paid at a very high cost.

If you’re in the middle of this too: you are allowed to love someone and still need them to leave the room. Loving them was never the part in question.

Do I love them less? No. My parents have my golden star forever.

Do I regret holding the boundary? No. I just wish I never had to.

At least my parents have each other.

And I have my healthy self. For now.

And my dog. Let’s not forget Cleo.

My assistant was building our UGC program from nothing. Messaging creators. Following up. Building the spreadsheets and systems we’d never had to build before.

As much as I love AI, I don’t think the first version of anything should be automated. The first version should be built by a human who actually cares. Automation comes later, once there’s something worth automating.

Which brings me to one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Business decision, technically. Really, a human one.

Exhibit A: pool lounge mixed with business talk with my AOM bestie

I met her almost two years ago, back when I still had a corporate job. (Yes, I built my business while working full-time for six years. No, I don’t regret it. I like entrepreneurship. I also like getting my lashes done, taking five trips a year, flying business class, and buying an absolutely irresponsible amount of clothes. Occupational hazard of being a former fashion buyer.)

On paper, she wasn’t the obvious hire. Thin résumé, little experience, nothing that would’ve made it past most people’s first cut.

But entrepreneurs aren’t paid to evaluate who someone is on paper. We’re paid to see who they could become.

Call it feminine intuition, if you want. There was no spreadsheet, no data, no ROI model telling me to choose her — I wasn’t even paying her a salary yet, so there was nothing to lose. Just a quiet certainty: she’s going to figure it out.

Exhibit B: the cow shoes that got more compliments than I did. I'll never get over dressing well. Just never take me inside a mall though, the vibes are so off.

Everyone talks about hiring A players. Not enough people talk about hiring the ones who are desperate to become one. Skills are teachable, especially now, when the entire internet is a classroom. Curiosity is harder to teach. Integrity, almost impossible.

Those first few weeks, she asked more questions than any new hire I’d had. She wanted reassurance. She wanted feedback on everything. Some managers would’ve found it draining. I found it energizing — I love teaching, and I love watching someone realize, in real time, that they’re capable of more than they assumed.

So we built the confidence first. The performance followed.

Funny enough, we’ve probably met in person three or four times, total. We talk almost every day anyway — work calls, cat launches, life updates, and my consistently questionable dating history. Somewhere in there, she became one of my closest friends.

She knows every guy I’ve dated. She gives them nicknames. She’s brutally, gloriously honest — according to her, my problem was never dating, it’s that I keep choosing men beneath my own standard. Rude. Accurate.

But what I love most isn’t the dating commentary. It’s that she’s never once made me feel judged. I can tell her everything — the embarrassing stories, the wins, the mistakes, the heartbreaks, the moments I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing — and she never makes me feel small for any of it. The only two things she’s ever asked of me are honesty and loyalty. That’s the whole contract.

So when I finally left corporate, there was one thing I already knew: I wasn’t leaving her behind. You don’t find people like this twice. She joined the company. She has three cats, which feels like the universe being unsubtle on purpose.

Over the last year, the relationship has shifted again. She isn’t just someone who helps run the business anymore. She’s family.

Recently, I doubled her salary. Not because she asked. Not because she threatened to leave. Because appreciation has to live in your actions, not just your head.

I asked her once, how did I get so lucky?

She said, “Because you care more about people than you care about the business.”

I’ve been turning that sentence over ever since.

Conventional wisdom says don’t mix business with pleasure. Don’t get close to your employees. Keep the professional distance intact. Maybe, for most people, that’s the right call.

But look around, and some of the strongest companies ever built resemble families more than org charts. Not because everyone’s related, because everyone actually trusts each other. Some cultures build entire business customs around a long dinner or a drink before any deal gets discussed. Not to negotiate. To see who someone really is once their guard is down.

Eventually, business stops being a strategy problem and becomes a character problem.

Would I hire every friend? No. Would I become friends with every employee? Also no. But when I find someone kind, someone curious, someone loyal, someone who genuinely wants to build something bigger than herself — I invest in that person every time.

Software gets replaced. Processes get rebuilt. Strategy expires on a shelf life. People don’t.

Maybe that’s why entrepreneurship has never felt like a game about the most money. It’s felt more like a game of collecting extraordinary humans.

Turns out, that’s also just good business.

So yes, this is my case for mixing business with pleasure. Not because every employee should become your best friend. But because leading with intuition instead of a checklist, choosing character over credentials, and caring about people as much as you care about the company doesn’t just build a business.

It builds a life you can’t imagine doing without.

Found this interesting ? Follow me on Substack, I mix business and pleasure in all my posts https://substack.com/@myriamisabelleleblanc

Exhibit C: I am never serious, life is way too short for that.

Exhibit A. Still one of the best days of my life.

I know. Late to the party, glass of wine in hand.

Never really my thing. Then a wedding scene stopped me mid-scroll.

The bride was gorgeous. Golden skin, sleek black hair catching the light exactly on cue, the kind of striking, delicate features that read unmistakably Korean. Eyes that looked like they were keeping a secret from the entire congregation.

I sat there admiring her the way you admire a good coat in a shop window. Then I clocked it.

She looked exactly like my ex’s new girlfriend.

I waited for the sting. It never showed up for the appointment.

Instead I kept watching her the way I’d watch a sunset, or a well-run company, or anyone I was never actually competing with: how beautiful.

I don’t believe beauty is a zero-sum game. Never have. I think it compounds, like interest, like good real estate, like reputation. I see it in old gardens, crumbling façades, women who look nothing alike, the specific gold-hour light that makes everyone look like they’re in on something.

Exhibit B. 45 years and counting. Proof it runs in the family.

It’s the same math I use for money, for opportunity, for a seat at any table. Scarcity is a story people tell themselves, not a balance sheet. There’s enough of everything: attention, beauty, success, love, for everyone who’s stopped auditing the competition.

Watching her, I felt no smaller. No replaced. What I actually felt was closer to gratitude.

He’s with someone beautiful. Good for him. Good for her. Good, honestly, for me.

That thought arrived on its own. Quiet, uninvited, the way good ideas do once you’ve stopped bracing for the bad ones.

Somewhere between the vows and the first dance, I cried. Not the mascara-ruining kind. The quiet kind. The kind that shows up when something in you finishes healing without asking your permission first.

It had nothing to do with missing him. It was clocking, watching two fictional people swear forever to each other, that I still buy it. Completely.

My own wedding remains one of the best days of my life. Full stop. No asterisk. The people, the place, the version of me who meant every single word. I don’t revise that memory to make the ending make more sense.

That day was real. That love was real. Leaving was also correct.

I used to think those two facts couldn’t share a sentence. Turns out they share a life.

I’ll miss him in some back room of my heart for the rest of my life. I will also never go back. Both are true, and I’ve stopped needing them to fight it out.

There’s a version of freedom that only exists on the other side of loving someone all the way and still knowing your address isn’t with them anymore.

Love doesn’t die when a relationship ends. It just changes its job title.

The goal was never to stop loving my past. It was to stop mistaking it for the ceiling.

I used to think my story picked back up the day someone chose me again. Now I know it kept moving the day I chose myself. And the love came back first. Not from someone new. From me.

Here’s the part no one puts in the group chat: one day you stop keeping score against the woman who came after you. You stop wondering if she won. You stop replaying old conversations in the shower like they’re evidence. You hear his name at a dinner party and your face doesn’t even do the thing anymore.

Exhibit D. His future wedding, someday. I’ll be first to like the post.

It doesn’t arrive with fireworks. It shows up during a TV show. On a dog walk. Over a Tuesday coffee you didn’t even think to notice.

One day you clock that you’ve been living, not recovering. That’s the tell. Not that you forgot him. That you found yourself, in his absence, more interesting than you left off.

The same nerve that stopped flinching at his name is the one you walk into a negotiation with, a stage with, a first date with. Same muscle. Different room.

Here’s what I actually want: to get married again. Not to prove a point, not to outrun one. Because I remember exactly what it felt like to stand in front of everyone I love and mean it, and I am not finished feeling that.

I don’t know who. I don’t know when. I do know I’m not afraid of the question anymore.

I can watch a stranger’s wedding, clock my ex’s girlfriend in the bride’s face, and feel nothing but peace. I can miss what was without wanting it delivered back to me. I can still believe in marriage. Not despite mine, but because of it. It didn’t fail. It just ended, the way good things sometimes do, on schedule and on their own terms.

If you’re rebuilding right now: the woman on the other side of this isn’t just someone who survived it. She’s someone who will love better-informed. Freer. Without handing herself over as a deposit.

Your story didn’t end. You just turned the page everyone skips ahead to read.

Exhibit D. Same wedding. My hair looked too good not to post again

South of France. Bastille Day.

The kind of heat my Australian friend insists isn’t Australian heat. “It’s sweaty sun,” he keeps saying, and everyone knows exactly what he means.

Old stone villas. Weeping willows. French, Polish, Dutch, Italian and English blending into one long conversation. A hundred people at long tables.

Everyone is sweating. Women fanning themselves between courses. Legs sticking to chairs. Nobody looks their best tonight. Which is saying something, for a crowd this gorgeous.

Then dinner is served, and nobody reaches for their phone.

Nobody starts eating.

Someone asks for silence.

You reach for the hands on either side of you. Palm up on the right, palm down on the left.

Tonight I’m between two men. I know the one on my right. The one on my left, not yet.

Their palms are hot. Everything is hot.

Someone gives thanks.

To the people who cooked. To the farmers. To the land that’s hosting us. To the conversations we’ve shared. To another day together.

Birds chirping. The heat of the setting sun on my shoulders.

I catch someone’s eyes across the table and smile. Sometimes shy, sometimes so real it surprises me.

And somewhere in those thirty seconds, I notice I’m not holding anyone up.

I’m being held.

It brings me into my feminine. The softest version of me. The one that doesn’t have to carry anything.

It’s thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds that slow a hundred people down.

The strange part is, I’ve never been religious. Neither is this crowd, as far as I can tell. Founders, designers, engineers, writers, creatives. People who believe more in experiments than miracles.

Ask anyone here what they’re up to, and you’ll hear the same word: building.

A company.

A book.

A movement.

A family.

Or just a life that actually feels like theirs.

The energy is contagious. Not frantic or performative. Just alive.

You’d expect a hundred ambitious people to need more. More noise, more stimulation, more proof that it’s all happening.

They don’t.

No alcohol.

No drugs.

Barely any time on their phones. These are people with lives worthy of documentaries, never mind Instagram. And I’ve seen fewer screens here than on a packed terrasse in Montreal in July.

Just conversations.

How peptides actually work. Which ones are FDA approved, and how you can sell the ones that aren’t, but the how gets tricky. Whether Perth is amazing or the worst place on earth. Two Australians, still unresolved. Why there are cops at DJ parties now. A girl whose Italian grandfather was royalty, turned communist, and gave all the land away.

Me, half-pitching my detox café idea to a coffee guy, both of us laughing. I don’t even drink coffee. I have too many ideas in my head.

Philosophy over breakfast. Business strategy over dinner.

And thirty seconds of thanks before every meal.

I’ve started looking forward to it. My own little eat, pray, love moment. Minus the religion, plus a hundred founders.

I’ll be honest, though. I’m tired here.

A hundred people is a lot of people. Too many conversations, too many names, too much of everything. Some days I feel overstimulated by noon.

I stay anyway. Because everyone here is overstimulated, and nobody is pretending otherwise.

I feel bare. We all do.

Some couples are here too.

I watch them experience all of this together and feel an envy I don’t usually admit to. Secret. Deep. Specific.

I am so single right now.

And I’ve done my share of swiping. Hundreds of strangers, hoping one might turn into the person across the table.

Three months ago, I built a different kind of life. Long dinners with my family, bike rides with my nieces, walks with my dog, in bed by nine, Baja midnight. For the first time in years, I stopped chasing the next country and started enjoying the one place I already called home.

I didn’t call it gratitude at the time. But that’s what it was.

Leaving that cocoon was harder than I want to admit. I used to feel at home in airports. This time I could barely keep my eyes open. Every delay, every line, every obstacle whispered the same thing: turn around. France felt impossibly far, and another trip alone felt like more than I could carry.

I felt lonelier than I had in all my months at home. The kind of lonely I remembered from the peak of my depression.

Then I sat down at this table. Two warm hands found mine.

And I remembered there are infinite ways to live intentionally.

What strikes me about these people isn’t the ambition. It’s the intention. They know what they’re thankful for before they chase more.

We spend our lives optimizing without ever asking what for.

We scroll through strangers’ mornings.

Their relationships.

Their careers.

Their holidays.

Their houses.

Until we quietly inherit dreams we never chose.

And I couldn’t help but wonder if we’re not just scrolling past love.

Maybe we’re scrolling past life.

Maybe that’s why those thirty seconds stay with me.

For thirty seconds, nobody is consuming.

Nobody is performing.

Nobody is comparing.

Everyone is just grateful to be exactly where they are.

Maybe that’s the opposite of scrolling.

Not deleting Instagram.

Just remembering to look up.

Because the life we want just isn’t on the next swipe.

It might already be sitting across the table.

Sweat on its brow. A real smile. A hand held out, waiting for yours.

.The funny thing is, I haven’t had a single situationship. Which, honestly, feels like progress. I no longer entertain men who make me spin on my head just to figure out if they even like me.

What I do seem to be excellent at, though?

International complications.

We do love a man who lives on another continent.

Apparently, I still haven’t gotten over that one.

Turns out I’m pretty good at leaving after a few weeks. The little sting is real, but it usually fades somewhere between ten minutes and a couple of days. Then life goes on.

The last breakup wasn’t funny. It was ironic. I was more afraid of the hurt than the hurt actually ended up hurting.

For a few minutes, I felt my heart squeeze. Then came the familiar dread. Not because I missed him that deeply, but because my body remembered what heartbreak feels like. It remembered the ripping from two years ago. The kind that rearranges your nervous system for a while.

This wasn’t that.

Two hours later, I was drinking wine on a terrace with an absurdly handsome Swiss man.

That’s the strange thing. I don’t have trouble meeting interesting men. They seem to appear wherever I go. The hardest part is finding someone I can actually stand — and who’s willing to stick around once the ice cream melts. When I get hangry, anxious, scared. The parts of love that aren’t shiny.

People always tell me, “You’ll be fine on your own.”

And they’re right.

Life without romantic love is still a beautiful life. Friends. Family. Purpose. Travel. Long hikes with my dog. Iced cafés.

But to me, it’s a little like choosing to live in a perpetual Montreal February.

People do it every year. They even build beautiful lives there.

It just wouldn’t be my first choice.

So every time something ends, I find myself asking the same question.

Am I really going to become someone who stops believing in love just because it’s become the popular thing to do?

That has never really been me.

Maybe it’s because I’ve already lived enough life to know that intimacy isn’t made of endless sparks. It’s made of ordinary Tuesdays, awkward conversations, choosing to stay curious about another person when it would be easier to retreat into yourself.

Then again, I’m new here. I left my marriage at 29 and walked into modern dating like a tourist who missed the last decade of customs.

And maybe that’s the thing about outsiders. We notice what the locals have stopped seeing.

Because from where I stand, it looks like we’ve started treating love the way we treat our feeds.

The excitement hits.

We feel seen.

We get the butterflies.

Then the feeling settles into something quieter — the ice cream starts to melt — and before we even ask what it could become, we swipe.

On to the next person.

The next possibility.

The next story, the one we hope will entertain us more and ask even less of us.

Am I a little bit of a symptom too? Probably. You don’t accidentally host a festival of short-term dating without catching something.

But here’s the part of me the algorithm hasn’t gotten to yet. I don’t panic when things become imperfect.

Where some people see friction, I wonder what could be learned there.

Where some people see compromise, I see two lives slowly figuring out how to fit together without either one disappearing.

Where some people see being tied down, I see the quiet comfort of having somewhere, and someone, to return to.

Of course, not every relationship deserves to be saved. Some endings are necessary. Some people are simply not your person.

But I do wonder if we’ve become so afraid of discomfort that we’ve started mistaking it for incompatibility.

Sometimes I feel like I was born with the heart of a Jane Austen heroine, the curiosity of Freya Stark, and the very ordinary dream of building a beautiful life with one person.

I still want adventure.

I still want a life that surprises me.

I just hope that when the exploring is done, someone’s waiting to hear the stories.

Ideally someone who likes his ice cream a little melted.

Late afternoon, gorgeous light, the kind of golden hour this neighbourhood was designed for. Girls walking their perfectly matched dogs. Men wearing the current half-mullet and mustache, quiet-luxury t-shirts made to look just perfectly disheveled. Everyone laughing on cue.

At twenty, this was the dream. I know, because I built it.

I could snap my fingers and transfigure into any world. High fashion one week, a billionaire’s philanthropy party the next, the perfectly cultural evening in between. Paris, London, LA. Nobody warns you that one day you’ll sit down in the middle of your perfect life and wonder whose it is.

Because here I am, sunsetting my twenties in the neighbourhood I once dreamed of, and all I want is to dip my toes in the sand, touch grass, wear a man’s t-shirt over a swimsuit, and listen to Hermanos Gutiérrez.

Upper class, I did it. Every class, actually. The right air, the right political talk, the right volume, the right relevance. The question was never whether I could glide through a room. The question is what you do when you get everything you dreamed at twenty, and your twenties set just in time for you to notice everything.

Maybe your everything looked different. A ring, a title, a down payment on the right street. The noticing, I suspect, feels the same.

And him? On paper, we’d make a good pairing. But lately I suspect the best pairing I could make is with a man of half the thoughts and the hands of a god, making love to me every night by the sea. Or maybe just spooning with my Mexican dog.

I still love an aesthetic café. Maybe it just needs to be in a beach town, remote. A quiet oasis among the wild.

What happens when you get your first true heartbreak at 27?

What if the life you thought you’d live just fell apart? What if everything you thought you wanted stopped mattering — all at once? That’s what happened to me this year.

How does a straight-A student from a ski town in French Canada — who married at 24 to a future doctor, bought a small house, and lived the American dream — end up in a dust-and-wind village on the Sea of Cortez, where the land only exists, it seems, to funnel the wind, falling for a man who lives by it?

Some years flow past you gently. You barely see them go — they sail smoothly, with a beautiful, forgettable ease. And some years get branded onto your skin. This was my fateful 28th year.

They say nothing cuts like the first. I’d have to disagree. Nothing cuts quite like the first wind that blows through you — and doesn’t leave.

It’s time to let the story unfold.