Hi, from New York. I was here two weeks ago and had this very strong feeling, move to New York. Shocking really. No part of me ever thought I’d have said desire, I was simply on a girls trip with my mom, but it felt different. I felt different, here, for the first time in six years, something changed. There was a hum in me, a buzz in me, I was buzzing.

Not to mention two psychics mentioned it. One before said trip, and one after, who also mentioned so much more. Mind blowing, really. But I don’t believe in moving because a psychic tells you to. I think it’s wise to go check out the feeling.

So I’m back. And it feels very different this time. Not good or bad. Just different. Less awe. Less impulse. More presence.

I’m moving slower. Not on my phone. Taking in the sights, smells, emotions. Paying attention to how I actually feel before deciding if I want to return. Return feels like a stranger word, because I was such a different person when I lived here. Everything in my life feels new.

I lived in New York for eleven years, and although I accomplished a lot, I was very dissociated. I was desperate to feel worthy, so I defined myself by work or by relationship, all in the search of finding what I eventually had to learn was inside of me. It wasn’t until I left that I learned why … and learned how to truly trust myself for the first time.

New York schooled me. I moved here at twenty three, bright eyed with big dreams. I quickly learned how to walk fast, talk fast, get what I wanted, quickly. I also learned that to succeed you had to work, tirelessly all whilst I moved, dated, drank, proved, tried to be seen — regardless of my deep desire of simply wanting my own self worth, and sovereignty.

Although I’ve evolved, I love that version of me. She will always be a part of me. The hustle, the bustle, the little girl that did what she had to, to survive. Without her, I wouldn’t be me, here, now.

But I had to leave New York to learn how to be with myself. To learn to love myself, I needed to learn all the reasons I didn’t. It took time. And now I love myself feverishly.

And now the question becomes:

Can I maintain softness in the city where I learned I could only survive by being hard?

New York couldn’t be more opposite from what I’ve become used to. The city feels different even from two weeks ago, rainy, quiet. New York is heavy. The streets are dirty, tired, struggling, surviving. Trying. People are trying to make ends meet, many are fighting to survive. There is hard work here. People choose to live in small spaces to walk at fast paces. To grind.

Leaving my hotel in Chelsea, I crossed the street four times to avoid something or someone I didn’t feel comfortable walking past. I zig zagged between talkative to themselves homeless men, and then to avoid a man with his hands down his pants, which unfortunately is nothing new to me in New York. Funny how you never see a woman on the corner touching herself.

Or not funny at all.

In Aspen, I only cross to the opposite side if I see someone who grew up with Miami Beach that I don’t really want to say hi to.

New York streets smell like urine, garbage and the occasional street meat, which all I’ve learned not to mind, because I consider myself lucky if I don’t see a man urinating. You really have to be present here, aware of what’s around you.

As someone who has a history of CPTSD, living here, I would get triggered very easily without knowing why. And still, although I feel much more grounded now in my body, I still feel on guard at all times, which perhaps is a part of life. Aspen is a fairy land, one I could live in forever I suppose, but the real world asks more of my nervous system as a whole.

New York offers access; anything you want, whenever you want it. The best sushi delivered to your door at all hours. The hottest fitness class. The matcha place every influencer is talking about. A blowout in Chinatown for $25. Zara. A fresh juice from the bodega. Three pieces of licorice from the Swedish candy store. Matzo ball soup because you decided at 9 p.m. that matzo ball soup is exactly what you need.

Although none of those things matter to me anymore. Sure I love black licorice, and I did, in fact, order sushi delivery to my gorgeous hotel. If I had more time, I’d get a blowout, because in Aspen they are few and far between. But my hair always looks good in no humidity. Jacks Wife Freda Matzoh ball soup is hard to beat, but I’ve lived without it for six years. I’ll be fine.

I do love the hotel I stay at. The spa downstairs. The gym, the sauna, the steam. And I am a sucker for luxury, comfort, safety, especially in the city. And I love that I’ve created my own structure in my routine, discipline is self respect. Not only did I own fitness studios, I relied on classes for a start and end time. Now I workout daily, my non-negotiable, but I do it regardless, and on my own time. Although I did sign up for Tracy Anderson, because I want to do the things I can’t do in Aspen.

Not because I need them, because I appreciate them — Aspen taught me that distinction. I used to rely on daily yoga class, now I am my yoga class, not because I practice daily, because I live my yoga off the mat. When I go to class, it’s a privilege.

Aspen, whilst known for its luxe and chic, has echoed the opposite for me. Access isn't easy to come by, and I've come to appreciate that.

There is no Amazon Prime in Aspen. You wait four days to get anything. The town is walkable, Ubers charge a premium, and aren’t readily available at later hours when you’d actually need them, simply to avoid bears in the dark, walking home a few blocks. Blowouts are likely overpriced, as is sushi, but who wants sushi in the mountains? There is no overnight shipping, no Target for a quick errand, no big supermarket. And that’s all quite alright. And yet Aspen is inherently luxurious, in the ways I’ve come to value highest: The freshest air. The cleanest tap water. Mountains outside my door. Space. Nature. Time.

Aspen offers wellness you don’t have to pay for, except perhaps in the cost of travel and the taxes, but such is Aspen life.

In New York, people either walk fast, on their phones to get to their next meeting, or walk hovered over without shoes to get their next fix. In Aspen, people look like they’re walking on air, even when they’re climbing a mountain. There’s a lightness. A buoyancy. An 80-year-old can pass for 60, which is perhaps why they’re dating 35 year olds.

In Aspen, I only cross the street for a bear sighting. I climb without entertainment because I prefer the sweet hum of mother nature and I do stay away for big bad bears in the event they also happen to be on the trails I climb. But they are more likely in town, enjoying Aspen’s finest dining.

And yes, Aspen is known for its flash and its wealth. And as such, I can wear diamonds and feel safe because mine are mini compared to others. My yoga teacher jokes that he’s cut his foot on the rocks women wear on their fingers while navigating downward dogs in a busy yoga class. Everyone carries a Birkin, wears a $1500 Kemosabe hat. And so no one really cares what you’re wearing because everyone’s wearing it. Except me perhaps. I’ve never been one to try and keep up with the costumes.

Sure, there is economic inequality everywhere. But when extreme wealth is commonplace, wealth doesn’t confer the same sense of distinction. The jewelry, the costumes, the bag, the reservation. None of it makes you particularly special there.

And ironically, my spending in Aspen is almost nonexistent, except for housing. Because my luxuries are free. I walk. I hike. I cook all of my meals because I love to cook. I spend time in nature. I have the occasional beer, which I rarely buy, because men are men and so I just say thank you.

As a reformed consumer, I’ve become comfortable self-sourcing. Maybe that’s what living there has changed in me.I haven’t stopped liking beautiful things. I haven’t stopped loving luxury. I haven’t stopped wanting to experience things.

I’ve just stopped confusing access with abundance.

I can love sushi delivered to my hotel but not need it to be happy. Same can be said for a Tracy Anderson class, fun because it’s fun to do something I can’t do at home, not because I need the hottest fitness class to feel good in my body. I can love a beautiful hotel and also know that luxury can be clean air, clean water, silence and a mountain outside my door.

I don’t need less because I’ve become less interested in life. I need less because I’ve learned what actually makes me feel alive. And that’s what makes returning to New York so interesting. I’m not coming back because I need what New York can give me, rather what I have to give.

But there are things here that I want to experience. I’ve spent the past six years going inside, re inhabiting myself. What matters most to me now is peace: regulation, love, home, family, deep sleep, safety. Aspen makes those things easier for me to access because my nervous system isn't constantly being asked to respond to what's around me. So I return to my initial self inqury, can I maintain softness in an environment that is inherently harsh? Where there is friction. Difference of opinion. Hustle culture. Aggression. Where people mask their faces, no longer for Covid-19, but to hide their identities. Where you have to stay present because safety is a consideration. Where there is lack, theft, crime.

I walked into Life Time Market to grab a celery juice. I didn’t find one, but I did find some all-natural licorice and sparkling water. And at the exact moment I was checking out, the cashier happened to say to another patron:

“And he’s a Zionist.”

That’s something I don’t hear in Aspen either. Different opinions. Which isn’t a bad thing. Call it what you will but antisemitism is a sensitive issue for me. I’m Jewish and proud to be. Aspen allows me to live in a bubble where no one cares what you believe. New York doesn’t.

When I shared that I was thinking about coming back, people messaged that New York isn’t the same. They told me their political beliefs, that they don’t feel safe. After living here for eleven years and taking a six-year break, it seems the same to me.

That isn’t necessarily a good thing. It’s just a choice.

But there is another side of New York that I feel in my bones. A sense of awe I have here as a business owner who knows how hard it is to own a business in New York City. One business next to another business. Mom-and-pop restaurants. A threading studio. A nail salon. A cute little store. A cheese wheels pasta shop. Someone with a dream took a risk, signed a lease and made it happen.

I know what that takes. That’s the New York energy I’m drawn to. Not Zara. Or CVS.
Creation.

I have a book in me that’s ready for its agent. A story worthy of publishing. A voice that is ready to speak beyond Instagram stories to live audiences. I have a business in me that is ready for partnership, for opportunity, for the right structure, scaling, and team. I have a product in me that helped heal my body, that will help millions of others if produced and marketed properly. I have dreams that never died. They just needed to be put on the shelf for a little while so I could rebuild the dreamer in me. To bring myself back to life and build a vessel that could carry the expansiveness of my purpose and desire.

Why New York? Well, I think I’ve told you all the reasons why not. Why I feel safer and softer in the mountains. Why no matter where I am, outside of Miami Beach, I will long to be with my family far more than once in a while. Even typing those words makes me cry. My heart is my family, and yet, part of me knows that my soul was put on this planet with a purpose I cannot hide or shy away from any longer. I need to be in an environment where I can support that evolution. But for that to happen, I need the right home to retreat to, feel safe in, sleep deeply. My creation requires regulation.

I looked at a bunch of apartments right when I landed Wednesday and all day today. And then I found myself back in bed writing. I haven’t really felt called to the page for a while. And I love that my creative juices are flowing here. Writing has always helped me process, so I’m allowing myself to sit with the process.

That’s what New York has for me now. The energy. The opportunity. The creativity. The things that mean the most to me are health, wellness, home and purpose. Home is so important to me. Within me, yes. And also the place where I rest my head. I love clarity. I love peace. I’ve learned that I can be home wherever I am. But that doesn’t mean place doesn’t matter.

You can carry home within yourself and still honor that your physical surroundings affect your nervous system, creativity, energy and quality of life.

Being my own home doesn’t mean I should be able to live anywhere and feel the same. It doesn’t mean my environment doesn’t affect me. It means I’m no longer asking my environment to create something inside me that isn’t already there. So if I’m going to live in such a chaotic environment, finding a place that feels like home is really important to me. A place I can retreat to. Return to.

I walked the streets patiently, praying, God, Please show me. Because he always has. He brought me to New York to build.
He took me to Texas to heal and hide.
He brought me to Aspen to regulate, integrate and be reborn.
And now I surrender my need to know and instead I trust his timeline.

I have a feeling I’m not going to find what I’m looking for on this trip, which means I’m not supposed to. I’ve planted seeds, researched, and gathered information, all whilst being present, feeling instead of deciding. Flow instead of fight.

It’s not about a place, rather the energy you bring to a place and managing your expectations of what that place is supposed to give you. I used to need New York to give me things I didn’t know how to give myself. Worth. Identity. Validation. Something to chase.

Until I remembered, I have everything I need inside.
I know I can live in New York. I’ve already done that.
The question is whether I can live like myself here.

Maybe I’m pressing send too soon. But I like to write in real time, while I’m still inside the question instead of after I’ve found the answer. So, you’ll have to stay tuned.

Love you,
Olivia
more in video below,
and here.

After flying to MIA for my Dad’s birthday last week, my Mom and I flew into LGA and stayed at the new Faena on 18th Street. The rooms were gorgeous, and I arrived to lots of little surprises in mine, decorated mine with birthday balloons, cake, champagne. It felt like a celebration, but less birthday, more revelation … which I’d soon realize.

Day one, hot and tired after travel didn’t stop us from walking uptown to Saks and Bloomingdale’s, before landing at my favorite, Jack’s Wife Freda, for matzoh ball soup in ninety degrees. Peak romance is summer souping in full sweat, happy as a clam. Jacks Wife Freda always felt like my dining room — the one in Soho mostly, next to my second studio, but the one in Chelsea served up the same yum and whimsy. Extra green sauce. It was perfect.

Walking back to the hotel, there were three men in uniform with a dog in front of us which naturally sparked my curiosity, so I picked up my pace and got to the elevator just as the doors were closing. Their shirts read NYC Bomb Squad. Honey, we’re not in Aspen anymore.

“All good?” we inquired.
“Yes,” they said. Unconvincing.

I went back to the front desk. Little information was offered there, but the valet said, “They’re just checking a room of a VIP. Safety measures before arrival.”

Gosh, I love New York, honestly, and knowing I could now sleep soundly.

A fabulous shower, a fluffy robe, and a raspberry chocolate mousse cake before lights out. Gosh, I love New York, I thought — the place I lived and loved for eleven years. I never thought I would leave. But leaving was exactly what was needed. Even if I’ve moved six times in six years … and found myself back in the city that sparked so much life in me, and needed to leave to truly return to me.

After Box + Flow shut down mid covid, and I began re-living all of the painful memories of sexual assault fro my past I’d repressed, I realized I couldn’t stay and heal in a place that shaped me to base my worth on doing. I had to learn how to be with myself. I had to learn to be — void of doing, proving, chasing, bypassing. Sometimes you have to shift your outer environment so you can work on your inner one.

But changing your location doesn’t change everything. You take yourself with you.

In the six years since, first Austin, then Aspen, returning to New York City, even the thought of it, even for a few days, carried shame. Shame that I closed the business I defined myself by. Shame in having told everyone what happened to me, how my life was imploding. Shame that I’d given up. But I didn’t give up. Giving up was a story I created in my head. I never give up.

After years of committing to me, sitting with the shame, the anger, the unworthy, she didn’t rear her head. Instead, I brought my full integrated self to the big city and being there was a reflection of all the work I’ve done. Being anywhere, really. In Miami with family, in Aspen … I’ve become the version of myself who has made peace with the past and can live in the present.

Just because pain chose you in the past, doesn’t mean you have to keep choosing pain. You can heal, shift, change, grow, integrate and learn to live and love again. I know because I did.

When I mentioned the trip to my mom, “Lets go to New York,” it was void of agenda. No show tickets, no dinner reservations. Just the possibility that we’d make plans once we got there. I just wanted to wander the streets I spent years running through. I ran from place to place, always with agenda, on schedule, with intention. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I never slowed down enough to let myself feel any of it — I was always running to the next thing, afraid of the now, afraid of just being. Stillness scared me, with reason. In stillness, I’d feel all of the fear, shame, self hate, I worked so hard to run from. I left to tolerate my own stillness.

This visit was different. I walked 30,000 steps a day because I wanted to see everything, to feel every neighborhood, to feel New York again. Chelsea to Midtown, Hell’s Kitchen, down Park Avenue through Union Square, SoHo, Tribeca, FiDi.

The first morning, I woke up early and for a run on the West Side Highway with what seemed like all of the teens. My competitive nature kept up: if they run fast, I speed up. I don’t coffee, though holding one is practically part of the outfit here. Worse, I love an energy drink — the kind so filled with poison it’s likely involved in some class action suit. She claims she’s into health and wellness, and she drinks chemicals. Oops. We all have to have a vice. Suffice it to say, mine is an energy drink. To be honest, I’m thinking about having more vices, because my life’s a little tame right now.

Nearly every corner provided memory.

My apartment on Mulberry between Prince and Spring, the first I moved to for culinary school. Bryant Park, where I worked at Food & Wine. Barrow Street, which reminded me of the ex-boyfriend I thought I’d just marry and not start Box + Flow. Then Crosby Street, the space I was negotiating, a lease I almost signed on the wrong space, the same ex who called in the ninth hour and said “walk out,” and so I did. The corner store on Prince Street where I stopped when I took an Uber back from Boston, his Mom’s 80th birthday, “I love you but I’m not in love with you,” and came back to NYC to look at 55 Bond Street, which would become my first location. I broke up with him and pursued my dream. We are a combination of our experiences, and mine are extensive.

I walked past Kosaka in the West Village — a guy who took me to a different omakase place every date, years ago. Didn’t work out between us, but I was well-fed.

I walked past Cafe Habana, where my mom and I once sat eating elote corn the week I moved here for culinary school, and a very famous actor at the next table overheard us talking about apartments and offered his. We followed him to Gay Street up dark windy stairs, brick walls aligned with portraits of naked women. I said, “I don’t think this is my bag, but nice to meet you.” New York, what a ride.

I walked past the Chelsea Hotel, where six years earlier I smoked 5-MeO-DMT without ever having done a recreational drug before. Twenty minutes that changed the trajectory of my life. They say the medicine calls when you’re ready. I didn’t know what I was ready for. I just was.

I walked past Balthazar, where I stood the morning after my next psychedelic assisted therapy, the one where I remembered being assaulted at 17. Denial overcame me but my body knew. Sunday morning, September 13, 2020, I dragged myself to my studio to glove up and get the energy out of me, to flow through the fight. I looked at the sun, and thought, please god, help me. As I rounded the bend, the healer from the night prior tapped me on the shoulder. I fell into his arms in disbelief. God answered my prayer almost immediately. When I arrived at my studio, I was yet again greeted by the same message I’d seen for years written on the doors, “Everything You Need is Inside.” Amen.

Later, I walked past the psychic on 7th Avenue, the one I saw when I was first starting Box + Flow. I stumbled in her space with my then business partner. I was afraid to start and afraid to walk away. “Do you want readings separate or together?” she asked. She told me to keep doing what I was doing. She told my then and soon to be ex-business partner that she would soon be moving west. Both things came true.

A three day visit was filled with presence, no plans, just presence. I wasn’t present when I lived here. I was working, grinding, trying, achieving, dating to get married, working to feel worthy. So detached from myself. That’s not living. It’s existing. I was creating from need. I needed to be seen. I needed to feel loved. I needed to feel worthy.

I didn’t realize I had what I needed. I taught others’ to flow through the fight, to face themselves, to trust themselves — we teach what we need to learn.

I met a dear friend and her beautiful adopted daughter, a manifestation of hers, in real time, proof yet again that magic is real. “I’ve never felt happy in my whole life,” I said. “And now, with nothing to show for it, I’ve never been happier.”

This time, I was here. Not just in New York. Here.

After the first day, I’d quickly decided I was done with this place. Too much. Too loud. Too stimulating. Honey, we’re definitely not in Aspen anymore. But I checked in with myself. And I changed my mind.

I fucking love New York. And maybe that’s what I was feeling. I’ve spent years doing the internal work, and I’m ready to emerge. I want to date. I want a fuller social life. I want to double down on my writing. I want to be more external. I want to share the gifts I’ve learned — wellness, mind, body, soul. I want to speak. I want to work with aligned brands. I want to be in the mix. The cocoon has shed. I’m ready to share all I’ve learned, everything I know, knowing the effect it can have on others’ because I’ve brought myself back to life. Not because something is missing, because I crave even more aliveness. And for the first time, I know, I have what I need.

The opposite of trauma isn’t healing. It’s learning how to live again.

For the first time I’m happy. I just turned 40, in every sense of what society tells you should upset you about that. And yet I’ve never been happier. Not because I was in New York. Because I’ve returned home to me, and that is the greatest gift. I healed myself. I healed my relationships. My heart is so full.

My life feels so precious. Interestingly enough, for the first time, too, I’m feeling very anxious to fly. Another friend said, “I’m sensing that life feels so precious to you,” and she’s right. I used to do reckless things, I didn’t care what happened to me, I’d willingly walk into dangerous experiences almost manifesting negativity. And now, I want to savor everything. Life does feel precious, in the most beautiful sense.

July was the best July I’ve ever had, spent with my family in Aspen. My parents, my brothers, my nieces and nephew. For the first time, they came to me.

Aspen gives me this incredible sense of peace and connection to Mother Nature. New York is electric. It pulls me outward, makes me want to participate. Neither is better. And neither is the source.

Yesterday, just back from the city, I hiked up my favorite mountain and realized: for as long as I can remember Aspen has been my happy place. For years, every time I came here, I met the version of myself I wanted to be, and every time I left, I felt like I was leaving her here.

But this time, climbing that mountain, I realized: Aspen isn’t my happy place. I’m my happy place. I feel that sense of safety and self no matter where I am. It doesn’t mean I won’t get triggered, I’m human. It means I’ve built safety, self-worth, love within me. I don’t need to leave my life to go to a happy place, because I’ve become my happy place.

Maybe that’s why New York felt so different this time.
The city hadn’t changed.
I had.
I’ve never felt happy in my whole life.
And I’m happy.

I feel love. I feel belonging. I feel worthy. I feel home. Everywhere I am, I feel home.
What a blessing.
xx
Olivia

for more stories IRL, here.

Hi. Missed you.

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve written and today happens to be my birthday. Every year, I write myself a note, and share it. A few years ago, Good Morning America shared it too. Six years later, I’m still writing them.

They’ve all felt different. I tracked each year with my mountain, returning to Ajax peak almost every year except 2023, to celebrate with the wild things. My happy place, the only place I wanted to be on my birthday, yearly. And this year, I live here.

I attempted to plan a trip, something luxurious, special, but was forcing it. So much so that the airfare was booked, and one email away from a hotel booking, only to discover that my passport expired in March. Whoops. We make plans and God laughs. Perhaps I was meant to be on my mountain after all.

July was chock full of love, the best July I’ve ever had, I think. Present, not living through story, healing past or future planning, just here. In my happy place, home in my heart, my body, and the people I love most and love me.

My family came to Aspen for 29 days. My parents, three brothers rotating, my nephew and nieces and sister-in-law. All in our own spaces because that’s a life hack for keeping the peace. The one day everyone came to play at my place, I felt like a tornado took over my sacred space followed by a tsunami to finish, and then all was calm again hours later, and nothing a very strong and lengthy course of ceremonial sage burning couldn’t fix.

We played in the park, my parents took long naps in matching chairs side by side. We cooked dinners, ate at great and not so great restaurants, became regulars, or never returned. We spent time together, walked, hiked, talked, rested.

I held my baby niece, Summer. Baby skin. Baby smell. Baby giggles. Baby jiggles. Cuddling. Hugs. So many hugs. So many babies. We picnicked and played, beaded and painted, unicorns, princesses, baked cookies, had pizza parties in the park. I chased the kids in the playground and when the day ended, I left. To my own space, my own place.

Granted, I moved away, the only girl and the only one that didn’t stay, but I visit often, and leave. And this summer, home came to me. Lately, life is life-ing. Love is love-ly. I dreamed of all of this, simplicity. Love, peace, health, nourishment, family. The easy things never felt easy for me. Until they did. My favorite place, my favorite people, my favorite activities.

I played tennis with my mom and dad and big brother, something I never thought we’d do again. I committed to my daily practices, didn’t lose sight of what matters to me, climbed up and down Aspen mountain, practiced yoga. We celebrated shabbat, my nieces reciting the prayers after me and then singing happy birthday so they could blow out the candles. I watched my dad eat his favorite foods, witnessed my mom hike everyday, so excited to share her time as it got faster and faster. I watched my brothers “dad,” which is perhaps the most beautiful thing, my youngest brother love his girlfriend so beautifully.

Simplicity.

And I felt God in everything, the mountains, the nature, the wild things, my deep sleep. I wouldn’t change a thing, except that they wouldn’t leave. I cried so hard when they left. To love people so much. And realize how quickly time passes. I squeezed my last hugs, wiped my tears, then climbed up my mountain. Movement has always been my best medicine.

It was a month to remember. And a testament to my prayers, for decades I prayed for this, for peace, love, togetherness. To feel like I was a part of it, the desire to belong, the desire to fit. For the first time, I felt it. This love. This is it.

I spoke to a psychic Sunday, I was called to her, intuitively, was curious. When I get curious, I let it simmer, bubble up and reveal itself. It did. I was scrolling through TikTok and never worked with one, just a medium who told me five years ago, you can see through walls, you know that right. I did. And I knew that when Maria and I got on the phone she would tell me I was psychic too.

“You know you’re psychic, right?” Maria said.

“I knew you were going to say that,” I replied.

“Advanced, very advanced.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never worked with a psychic before.

“How long have you been an actress?”

I got emotional. My dream was to be an actress, but life had different plans for me. I went to performing arts camp, dreamed of being on Broadway. Early middle school I was the lead in the plays, but sexual assault, prior and then present, led me astray. Into deep self hate, eating disorder, no longer on the path towards purpose but instead towards pain.

But I believe in God’s plans.

She went into detail about family and other things, told me that for the past few years I’d been waking up every morning wondering when all of the bad dreams would stop. And now they are over and happiness and love and success is on the way.

“You have to keep writing,” she said. “Writing and speaking.”

Those are my dreams, I confirmed.

“Gosh you’ve been through a lot of shit,” she said.

Ain’t that the truth.

She told me the astrology of my husband, that I need to live in New York or LA for work. That Aspen is nice for now but I can’t live in a small town. She told me about two baby souls from past … Before we got off, she said, “Have you done anything to your nose?”

I was shocked. “No,” but just two days earlier, I’d begun researching nose jobs, booking consultations, looking for doctors, asking for recommendations. I’d never looked before.

“Don’t touch your nose,” she said.

She spent a lot of time talking about herself but besides that, nearly everything she said checked out. But now I gotta move to New York or LA. Trust that my husband is on the way, and get this book published because I know it is meant to be in this world. No question.

The significance of my birthday isn’t lost on me. I’ve returned to this mountain every year except one for the past six years, and so many summers prior, with my mom. Every year when I think about my birthday, I’ve always wanted to be here. And this year, I’m just happy to be.

When I look back at all of the years passed, the power of writing, I can see how much I’ve changed, grown, evolved, and also how perfectly painful it’s been. And this year, this decade, after the fog, the smoke, the sadness has lifted, the dreams arrive, right on time. You are what you believe. I walk by faith, not by sight. And I’ll never stop believing.

It was all an act of magic.

After years of healing, and waking up desperate for the nightmares that were true to pass, I’m here. Alive. Full. I’ve done ayahuasca multiple times. I’ve smoked 5-MeO-DMT, without ever having done a recreational drug before. I’ve done psychedelic-assisted therapy, multiple rounds of MDMA, psilocybin. I’ve done somatic therapy. I’ve used vibration on all of my seven chakras to release repressed memories from decades past, from my fascia, my bones, my throat, my root. I’ve done years of breath work, daily meditation, prayer. I’m Jewish, I went to church. I’ve done every single healing modality under the sun, the normal, EMDR, IFS, and the extreme.

And the number one thing that helped me heal wasn’t a molecule or a therapy session. It wasn’t in the space of another. It was learning to sit with myself. Without anything. It was learning to stay with myself when everyone I loved left. It was learning to redefine myself when all of the external definitions fell away, when the business I poured my heart, soul, and savings into was shut down overnight, when the career I built shifted and changed, when the life I knew was no longer, when everything I thought I knew about myself wasn’t true.

All of the tools I used were incredible. They brought me here. But there was a point when I became reliant on the tools to give me answers that only I could come to myself. Just by learning to sit in the quiet and listen, to my heart, to my intuition, to my knowing.

Healing can and does happen with tools. But the most powerful healing I’ve experienced was when I let all the tools go, and I learned how to self-source. When I learned to trust the wisdom, the safety, the love, the self-worth that was always within. I just had to sit with it long enough to listen.

Because at some point, the medicine becomes you. And you remember that it was never outside of you. The tools help you access it, but you are the medicine.

And at some point, you remember, just like I did, that everything you need is inside. And that is magic.

Last night, magic night as my family calls it, the night before my birthday, I lit candles, said, intentions after a perfect day climbing my favorite mountain, a yummy lunch, drinks with friends, writing. Came home to my pajamas, my favorite chocolate truffles, and celebrated how much I have.

I’ve never been this happy before.

Sitting on my couch in the home that I love, in the town that I moved to. With the people, not with me physically, but so filled with love. Sure, there are dreams on my heart. My book published, meeting my husband. Those are things that I desire, not need.

I feel so full.

And it is the best feeling. It is the best wish come true.

And it is something I wish for everyone to feel so alive, so blessed, so grateful, so filled with love, without needing to show anything for it.

And today marks both a new year and a new decade for me. The happiest, hottest, healthiest yet. I feel it. Although in every sense of scale of judgment or by society, I shouldn’t be happy. I should feel lack, that I am 40 and not married. That I don’t have children yet.

That my career has shifted, changed, failed. Didn’t work out. Shape shifted, that I’ve been plugging it away at a book, at a dream for years, while also plugging away at myself.

But in my metrics, I have won in every sense. I have learned to sit with myself in my own quiet, to love my own company, learn to hold compassion for myself while also holding boundaries. Reclaim my self respect, own my no.

And found love within, without needing anything else. And from that love, I can hold love for others. I can have compassion, empathy for other people’s shortcomings and downfalls and sensitivities and desires. I can be both strong and soft. So, while the external might see me as less, I see myself as full, complete. And so, on this birthday, there is nothing that I want. Only celebration of what I have, knowing that I have everything that I need. And that is the best wish come true.

So, here is to endless blessings. Here is to love. And my hope and wish that we could all feel a sentience of what I’ve learned to feel. From within myself.

This year, my prayer is simple, not asking for, simply acknowledging.
Connected to something so much greater, led, held, perfectly timed.

Thank you, God, for bringing me here.
Happy birthday to me.

Love to you,
Olivia

Chapter 4

May 2019
I was in bed, scrolling through messages when his text lit up my screen. “I love watching you. You’re vulnerability, raising the vibration of all those around you. I’m flying in for dinner this week. I’ve got a reservation at Atomix. Be my date?” I rolled over, giddy. I had just come out of a failed relationship with a guy I’d pegged as a snack: the typical narcissist I seemed to attract, younger than me. But exhilarating, second date in Austin, my first time there, I was teaching a pop up for SXSW, he was doing something with movies. Our third date was a moment in San Francisco followed by a long weekend stay in a mansion on a hill in Sonoma, galavanting through vineyards, playing make pretend. He’d ghosted following. So I made myself feel better by compartmentalizing, if I was his weekend snack, he was mine, Pirate’s Booty, like the puffy cheddar popcorn that’s not bad for you, but not great either. The kind of snack that just fills space. Served me right.

Just before self-loathing took over and my ego spiraled out, the hot Aussie chef DM’d me. I needed that validation. I craved being seen so badly, so I let them see me, or the parts I was comfortable showing, at least. The parts they wanted to see. I had met Chef only briefly in a business setting. We’d exchanged pleasantries and emails, always a little flirty. Always off limits. As my Dad said, “You don’t shit where you eat.” But it wasn’t like I worked for him and when life got monotonous, not that I wasn’t running a fitness studio and a consultancy, the desire for mischeif for more got to me. There was chemistry, no doubt. He had to be 15, probably 20 years older, never in town for more than a day or two, barreling in like a tsunami, there to stir up magic or trouble, then on his way. His message seven years later was forward…but I’d been living for years on what I called my “startup diet,” all things under $10 in the throes of building my business: eggs, avocado, sweet potatoes, sardines, beer. And suddenly this appealing man wanted to take me to a 10-course Korean omakase. I blushed behind my screen. Not a snack. And I was hungry. Sign me up.

Hi! Flattered. Nice to hear from you. Sounds fun. What time?

Chef’s reply: 9 pm, Wednesday. I’m usually in bed by 9, so I lied: Ahhh, I teach super early the next morning.

He willingly moved the reservation to 7 PM. I got my hair blown out, threw on a black silk dress and a pair of Louboutin’s, and hailed a cab. Picture perfect. On my way to a dream meal. With Honey’s whisper in my ear, “Olivia, there is no such thing as a free lunch.” She might have been right, but I wasn’t worried.

I wasn’t looking for intimacy, and the rumbles in my belly were both hunger and nerves over what his expectations might be. I convinced myself it was just dinner. I owed him nothing. Still, I knew all too well how alcohol blurs things, especially my boundaries. The little girl in me desperately wanted to be seen, pick me, choose me, and so I showed up pretty, post blow out, potentially giving off mixed signals. Or I was just being me.

I pulled up to the restaurant in the pouring rain, nervous to dine with a celebrity chef I barely knew. I scanned the beautiful, serene feng shui bar area, but no sign of Chef. I felt fancy. I loved feeling fancy. I am fancy, well, a chameleon. Half hippie, half high-maintenance, I liked to think.

I ordered the house cocktail to calm my nerves: a White Kimchi Gibson, made with Letherbee Gin, cilantro-infused vermouth, and white kimchi juice. I took a sip, my matte crimson lipstick marking the rim, and felt the cool, potent concoction line the internal sleeve of my being. My head buzzed slightly as my phone pinged. Chef was just wrapping up filming and would be there shortly.

Funny. I’d spent hours getting ready, rushing to not be late, and he was rolling in from whatever he’d been doing. He sauntered in 15 minutes later, sweaty, sexy, messy, full of energy. He seemed excited to see me, perhaps a little too friendly. We might both have been role-playing. I didn’t care. I was hungry.

We connected energetically, the hug that lasts just a little too long, full of life. I felt him, smelled him, as he kissed me on the cheek with his strong, older, slightly weathered hands. His eyes were curious, lined with crow’s feet. A little tired. But this attraction felt like a wound from daddy, wanting to be acknowledged, even though my dad always loved me. Just not emotionally attuned. And Chef wasn’t looking to love me. Maybe for the night.

We carried our drinks down the winding flight of stairs to a small room with twelve seats around a chef’s counter. Benihana-esque, but $300 a person before beverage pairings. Of course, we went for all of it, the full tasting menu and pairings. The open kitchen took center stage. The chef was the performer, and the meal a symphony. I loved this type of theatre, art, performance, edible poetry. Watching how ingredients transform. Being wined and dined made me feel like royalty. I was more attracted to the ambiance than to him, but it was fun to be admired.

He sat beside me and ordered the same Letherbee gin and lychee. It seemed we both needed liquid courage He felt off limits, and I wasn’t all that interested, but I didn’t do a great job setting that boundary. The hair, the heels, the dress, I was playing a role in a movie I was watching from outside myself. I liked the attention. I craved his desire for me. I’d struggled with self-love, though you’d never have known it. I believed in myself just enough to fool everyone but me. I’d been a fighter, my harshest critic and biggest fan. I thought no one could hurt me but me. I ascended to cloud nine as the sake hit and the food began to arrive like a perfectly rehearsed performance, even better than mine.

As much as I enjoy canned sardines over butter lettuce, nothing compared to the art that appeared before us: bluefin tuna with caviar and edamame, arctic char with white asparagus and yuzu, king crab with some doughnut thing and strawberry jam. Between courses, we flirted. He said he was divorced, and I didn’t pry. The couples across from us pretended not to watch, but our overt tonsil hockey was probably hard to ignore.

“Have you gotten into the psychedelic world at all?” he asked.

“Nah, I know of it lightly,” I said. “But I like it here. I mean…”

“Toad medicine. I licked the toad,” he said.

I snickered. I knew nothing about what he was telling me. The drink made me feel airy, detached.

“There’s a specific toad found in the Sonoran Desert, Bufo Alvarius, it produces a venom known as 5-MeO-DMT. They crystalize the sap and smoke it. It basically kills your ego.”

“Cool,” I replied, vaguely intrigued, vaguely judgmental. It might be a thing? I wasn’t for or against it, just uninterested. Too far out for me.

We finished mains, made out more, ate dessert, and stepped into the rain. I had no intention of going home with him. Dinner and conversation were the perfect distraction from the snack in Sonoma, a clean palate cleanser.

He kissed me in the rain, and I felt all of him growing against my thigh. The kissing became more animated. I wasn’t sure if I was turned on or scared. Both, possibly. I had no intention of taking it further. The people-pleaser in me flinched, but I held my boundary, even if it was dressed in a little white lie. I said I had to teach early and asked for a cab.

“Meet me in LA next week,” he said. “I have a reservation at Vespertine.”

I smiled. I loved being pursued, loved 5-star meals, but I loved my own bed more. My integrity. My body. My choice.

“We’ll see,” I replied, coyly. Another white lie. One dinner kept me full, two felt more committed, more time together likely meant like I’d owe him something.

August 2020

A year and a half later, after a summer back in Miami with my parents, finding new respect for their love in the time of Corona, I was finally back in New York. All I craved was a colonic to cleanse the heaviness in my body and heart. Colonics were a new thing, but if the gut is the second brain, I wanted it scrubbed clean so I could think clearly. So I could trust myself again.

I’d held tension in my belly for as long as I could remember. Unsettled. Anxious. Tight. Separate from my gut, and yet the thing I longed for most was to trust myself fully, love myself unconditionally, and be loved. But I’d never felt the love I longed for purely. I’d felt separate from myself, my body, those closest to me my whole life. How do you love yourself when you feel separate? When emptiness wraps around your ribs and you fill it with sugar? A few pieces of corner store candy. Or a head of iceberg lettuce with honey mustard and sea salt, just filling space in my body, not nourishing it. Filling instead of fueling.

Chopped veggies, too many miles the next morning. I’d stopped binging and purging a decade prior, but the habits lingered. Eating was emotional, like fitness, just another way to soothe the ache I couldn’t name. I’d never known what it meant to live in my body. I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t know it. And yet I preached, Everything You Need is Inside, with no access.

Cassie, the colon therapist, was my age, mid-thirties. I made an appointment. She told me she loved three things: cleaning people’s colons, plant medicine, and vegetables. I lay on my side, socks and bra still on, front draped in a white sheet. Water rushed into my belly. The pressure built. Like a kettle before it boils. She pressed gently and said, “You’re holding on. Your belly is abnormally tight.”

Was I holding on to everything? Controlling it all?

A good therapist, she said, creates a space where people can let go. I took a deep breath, and tried. As the water filled my body, and I let the process do its processing, we began talking psychedelics.

I’d recently listened to Joe Rogan interview Tony Robbins and Mike Tyson about DMT. Robbins said it brought him closest to understanding death. Tyson described it like “freebase jumping into the heart of God and coming back, in just 20 minutes.” That interview had stuck with me.

“Bufo is my thing,” Cassie said. “5-MeO-DMT.”

Where had I heard that before?

Then I remembered hot Aussie Chef, nearly two years earlier, over omakase and flirtation, talking about toad medicine. At the time, I thought it was weird. “Cool, dude, you licked a toad.” But now, mid-colonic, it clicked. They say when the medicine calls, you answer.

I felt called.

“There’s a presence hovering for me,” I told her. “Something I need to face.” I mentioned the guy I was dating, who’d recently brought up MDMA therapy, and Kristin’s psilocybin journey. The tools were all around me. I just hadn’t tried them. I was scared, or waiting for the right door to open.

Cassie’s eyes lit up. “I can’t explain what 5-MeO does,” she said. “It changed my life.”

“You’ve done ayahuasca too?”

“Yep,” she said. “But I’m still trying to find an assisted MDMA guide. They’re hard to come by.”

Funny, I knew someone. I offered to connect her. And while she held a tube inside my body, I asked, “Where do I find this toad thing?” She hesitated. “It’s not for everyone. And John, the Shaman, is barely in town. But… I can give you his number.”

New York was a ghost town. Shut down. Looted. Quiet. But I wasn’t leaving without that number. She gave me his business card and I walked the 30 blocks home.

At home, I set it on my coffee table and Googled “DMT,” Forbes called it “The 20-Minute Psychoactive That’s Transforming People’s Lives.” I didn’t need convincing. If I linger with big decisions, overthinking paralyzed me. And I didn’t want to miss whatever this was. So I texted John.

He replied immediately: Hi! Just back from an 8-month sabbatical. I’m in town this weekend. Does that work? I said yes. Hoping he’d offer more detail. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

The next day came and went. Nothing. I waited. Anxious. Annoyed. I’d just decided to smoke crystallized venom, to meet God or die, who knows, and now he ghosted me? I resisted texting again. Surrender, I reminded myself. If it’s meant to be, it will be.

Two days later, he wrote back. I was elated. It was happening.

We got on the phone. His voice was calm. Grounded. I asked him a million questions. “You’ve done this a lot, right?”

“Hundreds of times,” he said. “I used to be a psychiatrist. This work saves lives.”

I didn’t think I needed saving. But I was open. “Come with an empty belly so the medicine absorbs quickest,” he told me. “Text if you have questions. I’ll see you soon.”

“Ready,” I replied, and hung up.

I inhaled some sense of freedom and exhaled my anxiety. It felt right, even though I had no idea what I would experience. I trusted that it was time. Ah, the trust piece. Divine alignment, perhaps. After all, when I made the decision with Cassie, my gut was clear.

I’d heard that smoking the toad promotes “ego death.” I thought my nearly half-life of practicing yoga had softened my ego, but as much as I believed I was open and loving, I felt guarded and closed off, without any knowledge of why. What was I protecting?

I’d also read that 5-MeO-DMT could be used to treat anxiety and depression. I struggled with suicidal thoughts in my teens, though I never seriously considered ending my life. It seemed to be silly things that prompted those thoughts, like when, after college, I kissed an ex-boyfriend who left me with a cold sore and convinced myself the only options were marrying him or ending my life. The scenarios never added up to the reactions, as if I was triggered by something I couldn't see, reacting to a past in the present.

They say you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, maybe I just needed to smoke some toad venom to find myself. I craved answers. 5-MeO-DMT might reveal them. Something deep inside felt stuck, like Cassie said. In my gut. I felt exhausted, choosing hard instead of easy. Challenge instead of choosing me. Why was I fighting? Why does love feel so scary? Why do I pick the hardest person, the hardest path? Why am I trying to prove I’m worthy? Why have I felt so lonely? Why do I hate myself?

Apparently, 5-MeO-DMT was the “most extreme,” which is why people called it scary. But I lived in extremes. Worked in extremes. After all, how scary could a 20-minute trip be? It felt more manageable than flying to the jungle for a week-long retreat. I convinced myself I was ready. I didn’t believe in coincidence. Divine timing, divine choreography. Most people walk before they run. I sprint. I launched Box + Flow before I’d ever taught a class. Signed up for the New York City Half Marathon the week before the race. I’d barely smoked two cigarettes in my life, never touched any “hard” drug, and now I was about to smoke the death molecule. But I felt called. I was ready to answer.

I texted two friends before heading out, giving them the shaman’s number: If you don’t hear from me by 6pm, call this number.

I showered. Blew out my hair. Wore comfy clothes, but presentable. If I was asking the toad to show up for me, I had to show up for it. I arrived with an empty stomach as instructed. Walking up 7th Avenue toward the Chelsea Hotel, I ran into Michael, the guy I ghosted after date three. I’d lost my keys the night we last saw each other. He’d texted a month ago to reconnect. I never responded. What were the odds? On the day I planned to smoke the toad and let my ego die. I said hi, smiled, and kept moving. No time for distractions. Patterns repeating. This might be the beginning of the unlocking.

The Chelsea Hotel towered above the street like a ghost. Covered in scaffolding. Still under construction. Homeless people hovered by the entrance. Years ago, a bomb had exploded on that same block. I used to avoid it. But today, I was met by a blonde, tattooed woman. She smiled. Her warmth helped me breathe deeper.

“I’m safe, right? John knows what he’s doing?” I asked.

The lobby looked like a Wes Anderson film. A concierge in a dusty cap stood behind a cracked wooden desk. Blush marble walls. Gold trim. An elevator that creaked and groaned. Patrick, John’s assistant, greeted me. Young, kind, confident. Cassie was right about his vibe. He ran out for bottled water. John was running late. I sat down on the cold floor of the cold, white tarped hallway, anxious, but calm enough to stay. The guy before me exited the session, dazed but walking. That helped. A sign that I too, wouldn’t need carrying out.

I climbed the stairs, slow, winding, covered in tarp. A scene from Dexter. I wanted to run. But I didn’t. Running was my default. This time, I’d stay.

The elevator opened onto the sixth floor, Janis Joplin’s old apartment. The energy shifted. I softened. I was clear on why I was here, even if I didn’t know what I’d find. Something greater was guiding me. I let go. Let God. Funny thing: for 24 hours prior, I kept seeing Joaquin Phoenix in my mind. And then John walked in, a near match. But softer. Kinder eyes.

The room was womb-like. Persian rug. Velvet pillows. Feathers. Drums. Sunlight pouring through giant windows. A huge brown dog nearly tackled me. I wasn’t a dog person, but I didn’t mind. Everything about the space said: stay.

John, Patrick, and I sat cross-legged on the rug. John explained the process. “You’ll take three puffs. Inhale deeply. You’ll be on your knees so you can fall back safely. Let the medicine do its thing. Don’t fight it.”

“Is the pillowcase clean?” I asked. Ever my mother’s daughter.

They exchanged a look, changed the case. I smiled. Then: intention. “To reconnect with my body. To open my heart. To face the truth. To see what’s blocking me. To surrender my ego.” Vague, but it was all I knew.

John handed me a prayer. I cried before I read it. “I am love. I am health. I am peace. I deserve to be loved. I deserve to be happy. I deserve to be healthy...” My voice cracked. But I said the words. I meant them. And then, a flash: my bat mitzvah.

John held the pipe to my lips. “I don’t smoke. I might cough,” I warned.

First puff. Second. Halfway through the third, I coughed. And then, I fell back.

to be continued…

The most important scene in Amazon’s runaway hit Off Campus isn’t a sex scene. It’s a conversation between a daughter and her mother years after a sexual assault one night when Hannah, the daughter is biking home in the rain after breaking up with her boyfriend.

She falls off her bike and calls her mom hysterically crying. Her mom listens to what’s not being said, and replies simply, “You did nothing wrong. You were a teenager, you went to a party.”

For so many people who have lived through sexual assault, those six words land deeply. “You did nothing wrong.”

OFF CAMPUS
I started hearing buzz about Amazon’s new show Off Campus, so I gave it a try, and quickly pivoted. It felt young — the cast, the story line, maybe perhaps because I had such a different college experience, or so I thought. And then a TikTok popped on my feed, a singer I’d heard of once or thrice, Kid Laroi singing his song “Girls,” with a very attractive man dancing. The way he moved his body, my gosh, embodied. And then the video on repeat. I realized shortly thereafter the hot man with abs and moves was named Belmont Cameli, the star of Off Campus. Ok, I’ll try it again.

Unlike the majority of the obsessed, I was not hooked immediately, it still wasn’t that interesting, but I held out and found out that it was much more than a college romance, just like Heated Rivalry was much deeper than two dudes doing each other off the ice. I wrote more about that here.

Off Campus’s, like Heated Rivalry’s, incredible success speaks to the cultural desire for empathy. Both shows shift the conversation around real life experience. Sure, it’s a love story too, and who doesn’t love a good love story, but with nuance, less Hallmark more truth. One of the main characters’, college-aged Hannah, is falling in love and also experiencing PTSD as a result of a sexual assault in high school. As she steps into a new relationship she is presented with past memories, as she’s learning to reinhabit her body particularly in the context of intimacy, learning to stay present, to trust a man in a safe container, to allow herself to experience pleasure again. The script treats this gingerly, but shows the effects of sexual assault — not just the wound but the result.

The character of Garrett, the lead, albeit from a tricky upbringing, becomes a safe place for Hannah — someone who sticks up for her, defends her, fights back, the fight she didn’t fight herself. He moves slowly with her to reinhabit her body. Not the typical “jock” prototype caricature. He exemplifies a strong and healthy masculine in a college-aged show, profound, actually.

Both are dealing with their past in the present, reacting to what they learned, protecting themselves from true vulnerability, as we do, until we change the narrative.

If you want to heal, look at what hurts.
If you want to love, learn all the reasons you don’t.

Hannah is confronted by her attacker who reappears in the storyline and further contributes to her flashbacks.

The writers of this show handled these dynamics with TLC. This scene shows the capacity for her to heal when she’s held by safety — both in an intimate container with her boyfriend and in an emotional container with her parents. Because healing can only be done so much in isolation. What struck me most wasn’t that the show portrayed trauma. It was that it portrayed the response. For so long, our culture has focused on what happened to people. We’re only beginning to show what helps them heal.

Sure the sex scenes are hot, the cast is attractive, and the romance is heartwarming, but it’s the tenderness that hooked me — the moments of pain portrayed so reasonably, not dramatized, real experience, real emotion, and real care in the writing, as if showing the audience how it “should be done.” It uses real life examples and teaches real lessons on life, love, healing. Similar to Heated Rivalry but different subject matter.

PTSD: My body was reacting long before I remembered why. And as I read on my door everyday before I entered my box + flow studios, Everything I needed was inside.

NEW YORK CITY
January 2020

In December 2019, one afternoon, I was curled in fetal position on the floor of my Bond Street studio. Hollow. Gloves by my face. I think I was fighting to live. Eventually, I pulled myself off the floor, ran home, and got dressed. I was good at masking my feelings — especially for dates I didn’t want to go on but used as distractions.

This was a man I dated casually, prior to catalyst who asked me, “Did something happen to you?” This guy, early in the game, not sex, but the dance beforehand, I remember his big body bowling over me. Yale Swimmer. Six-seven. Every moment felt heavy. Was I breathing? I wasn’t breathing. I left the room. I blacked out. I went somewhere else. I didn’t know what was happening, but my body checked out. Everything was in slow motion, I wasn’t in my body. I escaped into my brain.

I remember telling a friend about it after. We were having lunch and I said, “I don’t know, it was just like...his body, on top of me.” She said, “Oh wow. I think that’s so hot.” And I felt like there was something wrong with me. Like, do I not like guys? I was trying to talk myself into feeling normal. Into not feeling weird. But the truth was — I was scared.

Looking back, what trauma left me with wasn't just fear. It was confusion. The primary wound of abuse isn't the harm. It's the confusion. Was it intentional? Was it abuse? Should I feel this way? Those questions outlast the experience itself. And if confusion is the primary wound, then maybe self-trust is the primary medicine. Trauma taught me to react. I didn’t yet know how to respond.

When he and I got together the next time there was a snowstorm. We went to the Tak Room in Hudson Yards. Women spend so much time wondering, “Does he like me?” We forget to ask, “Do I like him?” I didn’t ask. And I didn’t like him. I liked his resume, the idea of him, the idea that he could remedy my lonely. And so I went.

As we were leaving dinner, he said to me, “Are you going home? Or are you coming home with me?” Before he could even finish his sentence, I had hailed a cab, home, alone. Running again.

In my head I was set on “is the third date rule a thing?” That I’d have to sleep with him. Because I didn’t have sovereignty. I didn’t have my “no,” and I didn’t know why. And he gave me an option. He gave me an out. I didn’t have the power or the use of the word no, and I didn’t know that had been taken from me long ago. I didn’t know how to speak boundaries, so I disappeared instead. Leaving was my safety strategy.

I didn’t know it then, but that was PTSD. If you’d have told me then, I’d never have believed it, except there was nothing more true.

MIAMI BEACH, FL
October 2020

Soon after I dodged that third date dance, the world shut down, and I spent Covid trying to keep Box + Flow afloat. In September 2020, when I began putting together the pieces, I experienced my first memory, explaining my behaviors. The PTSD. The first, 17, left in a shower for dead at a high school party at the hands of my best friend’s father. I flew home to tell my parents. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. A therapist at the time advised me not to rush, to integrate it myself but I had to tell them, someone. I’d always been close with my family. I couldn’t keep it from them. I’d been home a few days before I found the courage, the anxiety bubbling, they knew something was wrong.

My mom wanted to go look at furniture in Boca Raton, and I was frozen in fear. I was still uncovering this memory, and she wanted to go to Boca, where I’d heard this person moved. I was so afraid. What if he’s at Restoration Hardware? What if the man that assaulted me at 17 is in Boca at Restoration Hardware? What if I see him?

I pretended to be strong. I stayed quiet to keep the peace. I just went, so afraid, so silent. I pretended to care about a new couch, took a photo of crystals on display, walked around shattered. I didn’t have the courage to tell my parents yet, not until the next day. Instead I just froze and I went and I prayed, and I cried in the car on the way there that he wouldn’t be there. Because I didn’t have the tools. And neither did they.

In 2020, no one was talking about SA on TikTok, naming people. My entire identity was wrapped up in my business which I’d devoted my life to and closed months prior. Nothing was safe. No one was safe. So I just went furniture shopping.

Instead of speaking, we just fought, like we always did. The communication mechanism was fighting, anger, unfelt feelings, unsaid words, years of it. We got in a fight, my mom and I. She knew something was going on. But I just wasn’t ready to say anything. Unsaid words. Unfelt feelings. So much pain.

When I finally told them, my mom said to me, “No wonder why you hated me your whole life. I couldn’t protect you.” A lifetime of it — pushing away the people I loved because they couldn’t protect me. Not having the language to explain just the shrapnel, the suffering.

There’s a Noah Kahan song called Doors that I keep coming back to. The idea of hurting everyone who gets too close.

When you don’t feel safe, you can’t distinguish who is. No boundaries.No discernment. I let the wrong ones in. And pushed the right ones away.
Because I decided decades prior that I was unlovable, so I proved my decision true.

TURKS & CAICOS
October 2020

I left Miami Beach back to New York City after a weekend of pain, of truth, when reality sets in. On the plane, the man I was dating, who'd asked, "Did something happen to you?" invited me to Amanyara in Turks & Caicos the next weekend.

I wasn't interested in him at first, but he knew exactly where my wound was, "Why can't you admit you are afraid of love, that you just wanted to be taken care of?" I was. And I did. But we defined that differently. And yet, I let him in. My life was blowing up as I knew it and I was desperate for safe haven, and that’s what he said he was doing, "holding me," showing up as savior, safety, I believed him. He even paid for my first 1:1 psychedelic assisted therapy, my third officially, but on his terms, in his home. After 6 hours of sitting with memories of sexual assault at every age, when the therapists left, he asked if he could sleep with me. I said yes, because I didn't understand that I could have boundaries, that it was my body. Retraumatized. Freeze takes your voice, your body, your sovereignty. I never lived in mine.

AUSTIN, TX
January 2021

Three months later, mid Covid, I moved to Austin, and was living in the LINE Hotel before my apartment was ready. I watched a Netflix show and there was a rape scene. For days following, I had nightmares and couldn’t sleep.

I lived there for ten days. And in those ten days, as afraid as I was, I was still on dating apps. Looking for a man. To be saved. Old coping mechanisms die hard.

My mom called early the next day, “Did you close the Box+Flow account, did you...” all procedural questions, check list items from a lawyer. Process. That was the language she knew. I got angry. I didn’t have language either to say: Mom, I was up all night thinking about what I watched last night. Frozen in my own memory. Frozen in my own body. She was trying to help. I just needed something different and something I didn’t know how to ask for or how to receive.

ASPEN, CO
June 2026

Five years later, the other week I hiked up Aspen mountain and rode the gondola down the first time this season. It was very windy. I called my Mom immediately. Anxious. “Hi, Mom, can you please just talk to me?” She didn’t ask questions, she just did — told me about her day, held me even thousands of miles away as I was hanging in the sky, hanging on by my own thread. And I let her. Same as I let her while I was driving in dead zones of New Mexico highways on my recent Santa Fe trip. This is new. Not her finally listening, or me setting her up to fail by expecting something without vocalizing. This was me asking for what I needed and opening to receive. Both of us responding instead of reacting. Holding space for one another.

When you change, the people around you change with you. Or they don’t. But those who love you want to grow too. When I remembered, none of us had the tools. Not me. Not them. We were all drowning. Six years later, we are all different. That’s evolution.

SANTA FE, NM
June 2026

On my recent pilgrimage to Santa Fe I shared last week, I set myself up for success. I booked the hotel that felt the safest, instead of arriving and convincing myself I was safe, and still old ghosts crept in. I don’t ask for help from random hotel workers to find my room. I don’t charge my room on the check. I’m cautious. When I arrived to my casita my brain immediately slingshot back to 2020, to Amanyara. To the room, the white linen curtains, the villa there reminiscent in nearly every way to my villa there, down to the lychees on the fruit plate, although in Amanyara they were rambutans. There I stayed up all night afraid, having just retrieved the memory from 17, alone in a villa, the guy I was dating in his own across the pool, his kids and their nanny in the two others’ adjacent, I waited up all night, petrified the rapist at 17 would find me.

Six years later, fear still alive in me, now I have the tools to self regulate, it still took time, but I fell asleep. I could separate past from present. I could acknowledge the feeling, the PTSD and remind myself that I’m safe, in the present. For the first time, I wasn't reacting to 2020. I was responding to June 15, 2026.

I spent most of my life not being able to be where I was. Always arriving. Already planning on leaving. On this trip, and some before it, after years of healing, I was present enough to stay. Stay later. Stay longer. That’s healing.

Someone recently reached out to share their experience at a very young age, and how they became angry after abuse, fighting with their siblings, and then years later directed that anger inward toward their body, violently. An eating disorder that morphed from restriction to movement, control, punishment, self-hate, landing them in hospitalization for her eating disorder, not her trauma.

We are treating the symptom, not the cause.
This is hundreds of millions of cases, but the epidemic isn’t just the abuse,
It’s the vacancy that results, and the dis-ease that occurs concurrently.

I‘ve shared so many personal stories. These are the hardest. To talk about lost time, stolen time, time that I was fueled by anger — taken out on the people I love and love me, the space I wedged between family, friendships, relationships, me. But it has to be brought to light. The result of trauma. And the suffering.

The man I dated for 18 months, lived with — from the beginning I knew he wasn’t it. I called an astrologer, a medium. “You need to feel safe with a man and he needs to feel needed. When you no longer feel safe, it will break.” And it did. I had to build my own safety within.

I didn’t move to Aspen for Matsuhisa and Kemosabe. I moved to Aspen because it’s the first place I feel safe to sleep through the night, there’s no crime. And I’m a different version of me.

Healing takes time.
I outsourced my safety for years.
And then became it.

We need safe people.
We need healthy responses.
We need support.

But eventually...the voice we trust most becomes our own. The sovereignty and self love we reclaim, was there along. Everything we need is inside.

This is how you move through PTSD. You separate past from present.
You respond instead of react.
You can’t change the past. But you can change the way you see the past.
You don’t make up for lost time. You start living.

And in Off Campus, Hannah does. And her and Garrett fall in love.
Until next season …

Love,
Olivia
If you need someone to talk to, reach out.
My inbox is always open.

The strongest people I know aren’t the ones who never break. They’re ….
Cooking is a love note to the body.

The most important scene in Amazon’s runaway hit Off Campus isn’t a sex scene. It’s a conversation between a daughter and her mother years after a sexual assault one night when Hannah, the daughter is biking home in the rain after breaking up with her boyfriend.

She falls off her bike and calls her mom hysterically crying. Her mom listens to what’s not being said, and replies simply, “You did nothing wrong. You were a teenager, you went to a party.”

For so many people who have lived through sexual assault, those six words land deeply. “You did nothing wrong.”

OFF CAMPUS
I started hearing buzz about Amazon’s new show Off Campus, so I gave it a try, and quickly pivoted. It felt young — the cast, the story line, maybe perhaps because I had such a different college experience, or so I thought. And then a TikTok popped on my feed, a singer I’d heard of once or thrice, Kid Laroi singing his song “Girls,” with a very attractive man dancing very attractively. The way he moved his body, my gosh, embodied. And then the video on repeat. I realized shortly thereafter the hot man with abs and moves was named Belmont Cameli, the star of Off Campus. Ok, I’ll try it again.

Unlike the majority of the obsessed, I was not hooked immediately, it still wasn’t that interesting, but I held out and found out that it was much more than a college romance, just like Heated Rivalry was much deeper than two dudes doing each other off the ice. I wrote more about that here.

Off Campus’s, like Heated Rivalry’s, incredible success speaks to the cultural desire for empathy. Both shows shift the conversation around real life experience. Sure, it’s a love story too, and who doesn’t love a good love story, but with nuance, less Hallmark more truth. One of the main characters’, college-aged Hannah, is falling in love and also experiencing PTSD as a result of a sexual assault in high school. As she steps into a new relationship she is presented with past memories, as she’s learning to reinhabit her body particularly in the context of intimacy, learning to stay present, to trust a man in a safe container, to allow herself to experience pleasure again. The script treats this gingerly, but shows the effects of sexual assault — not just the wound but the result.

The character of Garrett, the lead, albeit from a tricky upbringing, becomes a safe place for Hannah — someone who sticks up for her, defends her, fights back, the fight she didn’t fight herself. He moves slowly with her to reinhabit her body. Not the typical “jock” prototype caricature. He exemplifies a strong and healthy masculine in a college-aged show, profound, actually.

Both are dealing with their past in the present, reacting to what they learned, protecting themselves from true vulnerability, as we do, until we change the narrative.

If you want to heal, look at what hurts.
If you want to love, learn all the reasons you don’t.

Hannah is confronted by her attacker who reappears in the storyline and further contributes to her flashbacks.

The writers of this show handled these dynamics with TLC. This scene shows the capacity for her to heal when she’s held by safety — both in an intimate container with her boyfriend and in an emotional container with her parents. Because healing can only be done so much in isolation. What struck me most wasn’t that the show portrayed trauma. It was that it portrayed the response. For so long, our culture has focused on what happened to people. We’re only beginning to show what helps them heal.

Sure the sex scenes are hot, the cast is attractive, and the romance is heartwarming, but it’s the tenderness that hooked me — the moments of pain portrayed so reasonably, not dramatized, real experience, real emotion, and real care in the writing, as if showing the audience how it “should be done.” It uses real life examples and teaches real lessons on life, love, healing. Similar to Heated Rivalry but different subject matter.

PTSD: My body was reacting long before I remembered why. And as I read on my door everyday before I entered my box + flow studios, Everything I needed was inside.

NEW YORK CITY
January 2020

In December 2019, one afternoon, I was curled in fetal position on the floor of my Bond Street studio. Hollow. Gloves by my face. I think I was fighting to live. Eventually, I pulled myself off the floor, ran home, and got dressed. I was good at masking my feelings — especially for dates I didn’t want to go on but used as distractions.

This was a man I dated casually, prior to catalyst who asked me, “Did something happen to you?” This guy, early in the game, not sex, but the dance beforehand, I remember his big body bowling over me. Yale Swimmer. Six-seven. Every moment felt heavy. Was I breathing? I wasn’t breathing. I left the room. I blacked out. I went somewhere else. I didn’t know what was happening, but my body checked out. Everything was in slow motion, I wasn’t in my body. I escaped into my brain.

I remember telling a friend about it after. We were having lunch and I said, “I don’t know, it was just like...his body, on top of me.” She said, “Oh wow. I think that’s so hot.” And I felt like there was something wrong with me. Like, do I not like guys? I was trying to talk myself into feeling normal. Into not feeling weird. But the truth was — I was scared.

Looking back, what trauma left me with wasn't just fear. It was confusion. The primary wound of abuse isn't the harm. It's the confusion. Was it intentional? Was it abuse? Should I feel this way? Those questions outlast the experience itself. And if confusion is the primary wound, then maybe self-trust is the primary medicine. Trauma taught me to react. I didn’t yet know how to respond.

When he and I got together the next time there was a snowstorm. We went to the Tak Room in Hudson Yards. Women spend so much time wondering, “Does he like me?” We forget to ask, “Do I like him?” I didn’t ask. And I didn’t like him. I liked his resume, the idea of him, the idea that he could remedy my lonely. And so I went.

As we were leaving dinner, he said to me, “Are you going home? Or are you coming home with me?” Before he could even finish his sentence, I had hailed a cab, home, alone. Running again.

In my head I was set on “is the third date rule a thing?” That I’d have to sleep with him. Because I didn’t have sovereignty. I didn’t have my “no,” and I didn’t know why. And he gave me an option. He gave me an out. I didn’t have the power or the use of the word no, and I didn’t know that had been taken from me long ago. I didn’t know how to speak boundaries, so I disappeared instead. Leaving was my safety strategy.

I didn’t know it then, but that was PTSD. If you’d have told me then, I’d never have believed it, except there was nothing more true.

MIAMI BEACH, FL
October 2020

Soon after I dodged that third date dance, the world shut down, and I spent Covid trying to keep Box + Flow afloat. In September 2020, when I began putting together the pieces, I experienced my first memory, explaining my behaviors. The PTSD. The first, 17, left in a shower for dead at a high school party at the hands of my best friend’s father. I flew home to tell my parents. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. A therapist at the time advised me not to rush, to integrate it myself but I had to tell them, someone. I’d always been close with my family. I couldn’t keep it from them. I’d been home a few days before I found the courage, the anxiety bubbling, they knew something was wrong.

My mom wanted to go look at furniture in Boca Raton, and I was frozen in fear. I was still uncovering this memory, and she wanted to go to Boca, where I’d heard this person moved. I was so afraid. What if he’s at Restoration Hardware? What if the man that assaulted me at 17 is in Boca at Restoration Hardware? What if I see him?

I pretended to be strong. I stayed quiet to keep the peace. I just went, so afraid, so silent. I pretended to care about a new couch, took a photo of crystals on display, walked around shattered. I didn’t have the courage to tell my parents yet, not until the next day. Instead I just froze and I went and I prayed, and I cried in the car on the way there that he wouldn’t be there. Because I didn’t have the tools. And neither did they.

In 2020, no one was talking about SA on TikTok, naming people. My entire identity was wrapped up in my business which I’d devoted my life to and closed months prior. Nothing was safe. No one was safe. So I just went furniture shopping.

Instead of speaking, we just fought, like we always did. The communication mechanism was fighting, anger, unfelt feelings, unsaid words, years of it. We got in a fight, my mom and I. She knew something was going on. But I just wasn’t ready to say anything. Unsaid words. Unfelt feelings. So much pain.

When I finally told them, my mom said to me, “No wonder why you hated me your whole life. I couldn’t protect you.” A lifetime of it — pushing away the people I loved because they couldn’t protect me. Not having the language to explain just the shrapnel, the suffering.

There’s a Noah Kahan song called Doors that I keep coming back to. The idea of hurting everyone who gets too close.

When you don’t feel safe, you can’t distinguish who is.
No boundaries.No discernment.

I let the wrong ones in. And pushed the right ones away.
Because I decided decades prior that I was unlovable, so I proved my decision true.

TURKS & CAICOS
October 2020

I left Miami Beach back to New York City after a weekend of pain, of truth, when reality sets in. On the plane, the man I was dating, who'd asked, "Did something happen to you?" invited me to Amanyara in Turks & Caicos the next weekend.

I wasn't interested in him at first, but he knew exactly where my wound was, "Why can't you admit you are afraid of love, that you just wanted to be taken care of?" I was. And I did. But we defined that differently. And yet, I let him in. My life was blowing up as I knew it and I was desperate for safe haven, and that’s what he said he was doing, "holding me," showing up as savior, safety, I believed him. He even paid for my first 1:1 psychedelic assisted therapy, my third officially, but on his terms, in his home. After 6 hours of sitting with memories of sexual assault at every age, when the therapists left, he asked if he could sleep with me. I said yes, because I didn't understand that I could have boundaries, that it was my body. Retraumatized. Freeze takes your voice, your body, your sovereignty. I never lived in mine.

AUSTIN, TX
January 2021

Three months later, mid Covid, I moved to Austin, and was living in the LINE Hotel before my apartment was ready. I watched a Netflix show and there was a rape scene. For days following, I had nightmares and couldn’t sleep.

I lived there for ten days. And in those ten days, as afraid as I was, I was still on dating apps. Looking for a man. To be saved. Old coping mechanisms die hard.

My mom called early the next day, “Did you close the Box+Flow account, did you...” all procedural questions, check list items from a lawyer. Process. That was the language she knew. I got angry. I didn’t have language either to say: Mom, I was up all night thinking about what I watched last night. Frozen in my own memory. Frozen in my own body. She was trying to help. I just needed something different and something I didn’t know how to ask for or how to receive.

ASPEN, CO
June 2026

Five years later, the other week I hiked up Aspen mountain and rode the gondola down the first time this season. It was very windy. I called my Mom immediately. Anxious. “Hi, Mom, can you please just talk to me?” She didn’t ask questions, she just did — told me about her day, held me even thousands of miles away as I was hanging in the sky, hanging on by my own thread. And I let her. Same as I let her while I was driving in dead zones of New Mexico highways on my recent Santa Fe trip. This is new. Not her finally listening, or me setting her up to fail by expecting something without vocalizing. This was me asking for what I needed and opening to receive. Both of us responding instead of reacting. Holding space for one another.

When you change, the people around you change with you. Or they don’t. But those who love you want to grow too. When I remembered, none of us had the tools. Not me. Not them. We were all drowning. Six years later, we are all different. That’s evolution.

SANTA FE, NM
June 2026

On my recent pilgrimage to Santa Fe I shared last week, I set myself up for success. I booked the hotel that felt the safest, instead of arriving and convincing myself I was safe, and still old ghosts crept in. I don’t ask for help from random hotel workers to find my room. I don’t charge my room on the check. I’m cautious. When I arrived to my casita my brain immediately slingshot back to 2020, to Amanyara. To the room, the white linen curtains, the villa there reminiscent in nearly every way to my villa there, down to the lychees on the fruit plate, although in Amanyara they were rambutans. There I stayed up all night afraid, having just retrieved the memory from 17, alone in a villa, the guy I was dating in his own across the pool, his kids and their nanny in the two others’ adjacent, I waited up all night, petrified the rapist at 17 would find me.

Six years later, fear still alive in me, now I have the tools to self regulate, it still took time, but I fell asleep. I could separate past from present. I could acknowledge the feeling, the PTSD and remind myself that I’m safe, in the present. For the first time, I wasn't reacting to 2020. I was responding to June 15, 2026.

I spent most of my life not being able to be where I was. Always arriving. Already planning on leaving. On this trip, and some before it, after years of healing, I was present enough to stay. Stay later. Stay longer. That’s healing.

Someone recently reached out to share their experience at a very young age, and how they became angry after abuse, fighting with their siblings, and then years later directed that anger inward toward their body, violently. An eating disorder that morphed from restriction to movement, control, punishment, self-hate, landing them in hospitalization for her eating disorder, not her trauma.

We are treating the symptom, not the cause.
This is hundreds of millions of cases, but the epidemic isn’t just the abuse,
It’s the vacancy that results, and the dis-ease that occurs concurrently.

I‘ve shared so many personal stories. These are the hardest. To talk about lost time, stolen time, time that I was fueled by anger — taken out on the people I love and love me, the space I wedged between family, friendships, relationships, me. But it has to be brought to light. The result of trauma. And the suffering.

The man I dated for 18 months, lived with — from the beginning I knew he wasn’t it. I called an astrologer, a medium. “You need to feel safe with a man and he needs to feel needed. When you no longer feel safe, it will break.”

And it did.

I didn’t move to Aspen for Matsuhisa and Kemosabe. I moved to Aspen because it’s the first place I feel safe to sleep through the night, there’s no crime. And I’m a different version of me.

Healing takes time.
I outsourced my safety for years.
And then became it.

We need safe people.
We need healthy responses.
We need support.

But eventually...the voice we trust most becomes our own. The sovereignty and self love we reclaim, was there along. Everything we need is inside.

This is how you move through PTSD. You separate past from present.
You respond instead of react.

You can’t change the past. But you can change the way you see the past.
You don’t make up for lost time. You start living.

And in Off Campus, Hannah does. And her and Garrett fall in love.
Until next season …

Love,
Olivia
If you need someone to talk to, reach out.
My inbox is always open.

The strongest people I know aren’t the ones who never break. They’re ….
Cooking is a love note to the body.

Monday, I set off on a pilgrimage, with little context. A friend mentioned a healer she’d found via podcast. I listened and was immediately drawn into her grounded feminine energy. I booked a session. All of the people I’ve worked with have come through a ping, my intuition, and me trusting. She mentioned her 3-day immersion, something she saves for those she’s worked for years with prior, but she sensed I was ready.

I was feeling called to adventure and had Santa Fe on my list, and now with purpose. I booked a hotel, little did I know June was high season in New Mexico. Sunday morning, I woke up with another ping, my highest self stays at the four seasons. And if I was going to meet that more integrated, aligned, version of me, I wanted to be in a place that felt right.

I need to feel safe to sleep. I am very attune to energy, a highly sensitive person — to everything, people, places, things.

With a deep knowing that something was waiting to be discovered, I switched my booking, packed my things and said yes. I was off to see the Wizard.

August 2020 was my first solo trip, my Surrender Experiment, just before my 34th birthday to Aspen, to climb my magic mountain, while listening to Michael Singer’s Surrender Experiment. I had no idea that one month later, I would surrender my identity — and soon leave New York to Austin after 11 years. In April 2022, I went on my next solo trip to Civana in Carefree, Arizona. I wanted so badly to be Carefree, but you can’t do your way into it. Trust me, I tried.

At the time, I was desperate for truth. In a codependent cohabitation relationship which muddied the waters of my healing and self discovery, all whilst trying to be ok, normal, in the “world,” and move ahead on some invisible timeline, thinking that would make it all fine. I had recently come out of Ayahuasca, was doing plant medicine, colonics, breath work, anything that might help me understand myself. But I was trying to force my way into freedom. Through achievement. Through understanding. Through becoming. If I could just heal enough, understand enough, accomplish enough, maybe I’d finally arrive somewhere. Maybe I’d finally feel worthy. Maybe I’d finally feel free. A “doer,” doing all the right things —like my entire healing journey, masculine, productive, heavy handed, more. More digging. More purging. More fixing. Trying to eject the pain from my body. I didn’t have proper guides, guidance, or support. It was painful. Violent. Almost masochistic. But I was desperate to feel something different. I just didn’t know how to create space for it. How to let it move through me without forcing or fighting. I knew the idea of surrender, but I wanted to “do” surrender, which is counterproductive.

My intuition was saying the same things then, "Why are you still running?”

This trip to Santa Fe felt like the exact opposite. Nothing was forced or ejected harmfully. I wasn’t trying to get somewhere or become someone. I wasn’t looking for another ceremony, another breakthrough, another answer. I was emptying what wasn’t mine. Thirty years of grief. Anger. Sadness. Proving. Loneliness. Creating more space for love.

Monday rolled in and I took myself on a quick run up and down the mountain, rinsed off, and hopped into the car. Movement is necessary for me to shake off anxiety, especially before sitting in a 6 hour drive. This was my first time driving to Santa Fe, and my first time over Independence Pass behind the wheel, I’ve been many times prior as a child with my mother at the helm.

In recent months, I’ve found myself anxious in situations that feel sticky: planes, gondolas, driving on a cliff. A friend said, ”Driving how you drive? You’ll be fine.” I am no longer speed racer, more like senior citizen snail you pass by, honk at, and the selective California howdy. I strapped in, and headed East, got $6.50/gallon gas because I was on empty. My phone went no service quickly for the next hour. When I felt scared, I prayed audibly, like I did when I moved from Austin, “God, please keep me safe,” and kept driving. Once I found flat land, it was smooth sailing. One stop at Loves, halfway, for a bag of skinny pop, a perrier and a pee. I’m wary of where I stop, too.

I was excited for the unknown, void of expectation, just open in trust that I was called for a reason and was answering.

I drove out of Aspen just before 9A, with my first session in Santa Fe at 4, giving me six hours and change to arrive at the hotel, check in and make my way to see Chloé. I landed at the Four Seasons just in time to do just that, sort of. Problem was, I couldn’t find my room. Cue my spidey senses or PTSD, or latent fear in my body. Normally, someone would just ask a hotel worker where the room is. I don’t want anyone to know where I’m staying. I did a few laps, got back in the car, back to front desk, and asked them to show me the way.

One day, I won’t live with this fear in my body. But as a solo woman traveler, with a history of violence, I’m cautious.

When I finally made it to my beautiful casita, without much time to dilly dally, I dropped my bag, checked out the swag, fruit platters with fresh lychee, a gorgeous bed with the added nicety of a local artisan crafted dream catcher on the pillow, indoor and outdoor fireplace, a quiet place to rest my head for the next few days. I splashed some water on my face, put Chloé’s address into maps, 18 minutes away. No time to spare, I jumped back in the car and headed on my way.

I arrived to a beautiful Southwestern chic home pueblo style, a long winding driveway down to the base of the guest house, off of the main house, for which I’d have missed if Chloé hadn’t stepped outside. There was a warm familiarity to her grounded, feminine energy. Less force, more feel, no more ejected from my vessel, or ingesting substances to alter my brain chemistry. This felt like softer, big sister energy. Only after I had an initial zoom session did I learn that she had Jewish heritage, lived for years in New York City.

Chloé looks the part, Frida Kahlo with New York edge, a French Mexican accent, well travelled in luxury and style. I didn’t question what or how to prepare, I just arrived, in trust that she would lead me there. All I knew was that there was something with an egg. I didn’t come to do, I came to receive, to clean and clear the vessel blocked with energy that was put in and on me that was never mine — physically, energetically, spiritually. Chloé had enough context from our first call to invite me to make the trip, for which I trusted she would be guided to offer me what I needed. And she did.

We connected on the couch briefly, in a colorful kitchen filled with fresh flowers and goodies, windows open, birds chirping, nature sharing indoor and outdoor space. After getting grounded we moved to the healing room, “You’ll start in the chair and then I’ll move you to the table. Many of the prayers I use invoke spirit guides from other religions, it isn’t about religion, but energy, try not to get caught up on names. And much of my speaking will be done in different languages.” She mentioned archangel Michael, and immediately my heart knew we’d also call Raphael in. We did. Mary Magdalene too. I welcomed all of them. But first, “Can I remove my necklaces?” I didn’t want anyone elses energy in or on me — my grandmother’s jewelry, a gift from my mom, a gold Leo coin and a Buddha. She helped me remove them.

I sat on the chair facing one of her many altars, and closed my eyes. As she began with the ritual, I drifted off into another place, lucid, awake, but in liminal space, similar to plant medicine, but without the use of any substance, gentler. There was an egg cracked in water. Rose oils, petals, a beautiful bath, showered atop my head, down my neck, and as she prayed over me, I couldn’t stop yawning. More than once she asked, “Are you okay?” Yes. I replied. Later she’d tell me she asked because the amount of energy I was yawning, exhaling, or rather the intensity of the negative spirits that I’d absorbed, coming out of me, oftentimes results in passing out. It felt that intense, but I held my composure.

Strange feelings moved through me, not mine. Darkness. Shame. All the feelings that trauma imprints on body and brain coming to the surface. “Was it my fault? Did I ask for this — these things to happen to me? Was this what I wanted?” As if the blame and shame, never mine, were bubbling and boiling out of me as I was rinsing, wringing out like a towel.

“I usually keep you sitting much longer but you need to lay down.” I didn’t question, I let her lead the way. She placed rose quartz crystals in each hand and I laid down. On a massage table fully clothed, I felt the bath continue to rinse me, I smelled fresh mint and orange essence. She massaged oil softly on my face, my tear ducts, my cheekbones, my temples, my crown. She pressed gently on pressure points at my heart chakra and solar plexus, the confidence center. She covered my feet with herbs, and I felt the clenching in my body release like a very long exhale, one that had been caught in my cells, for decades. As she prayed over me, the sensations ranged from sadness, to anger, to grief. I felt shooting pins through my abs and liver. My heart skipped a beat, there but not here. Between two worlds. After about ninety minutes, the ceremony ending, she urged me to take a few breaths and when I was ready to open my eyes. I sat up slowly, wiped the remnants of a tear or two that came through, and came back to lucidity.

The first thing I mentioned when I sat up was my grandmother. Necklace or not, she was with me. “Did you notice how much you yawned?” She asked. “I thought that was just me tapping into a higher power.” “That’s dark energy, trauma, leaving your body,” she said. “Your body is so tired,” she said. “I know.” “Your brain has worked to compensate for all of your systems that have been offline for so long. Your body is trying to catch its breath.” The egg cracked in the glass, the white dripping in the water, in tandem with my release, dropping simultaneously. “Do you see how many spirits were emptied?” I looked at the egg drop, the pattern, to be honest, it was scary. “There’s a lot,” she said. “You need rest.”

I felt as if I’d transcended between worlds, life and death, but also felt a lightness, a beauty, bathed in rose petals, dripped with fresh herbs, oils, the soft touch, the sweet scents. I’d not questioned it prior, not once, but now it was affirmed, I was called here with reason, and I was exactly where I was meant to be, and all I needed to do now was receive.

I drove back to the property, a bit stunned,”What just happened?” But with no desire to understand or analyze. Just hungry. I dropped my car to catch golden hour at the restaurant, sparkling water, perhaps a salad, or some chicken wings. But the sun was hot, I asked for the order to go. Waiting, I saw some sad blonde onion rings whisk by. That’s when I knew that the food would too be a bit tired. And my Flintstone sized wings looked like they came off a dinosaur. Not for me. Hot shower, comfy robe, thermostat down to sixty seven, I was ready for bed but it took a while. The fear still lives in me, solo in a new environment, desiring safety. A memory surfaced, and I held myself in it, and eventually fell asleep only to wake up, as Chloé said, with shooting pains in my abdomen. She was right.

I sleep and rise with the sun. Room service robed breakfast excites me, mostly because eggs and ketchup are my favorite food groups, only made better by the arrival of Polly Pocket sized ketchup bottles.

Body full, the hours disappeared as I emptied my brain on the page for a while. Day two, second session, was at 3P, giving me ample time, or so I thought for a good workout, and a list of local vintage stores I wanted to check out. But, if you leave me in a gym unattended, I’ll stay and play with all of the toys for hours. I purposefully packed with trinkets that matter to me, a Nirvana tee shirt, my grandmothers rings. Nirvana, death and rebirth, fitting. En route to my first store, just ahead of me, a Honey factory. Honey was my grandmother’s name, I knew she was with me. Most of the stores were closed, but one, where I combed through colorful racks of vintage tees, stopped at baby pink, just to pull the one that read, “Best Grandmother in Florida.” That was Honey again.

I had 30 minutes before the next session and a Trader Joes to my right. When you move to Aspen, Trader Joes becomes a religious experience. I walked in, bright eyed, bushy tailed, and with a canvas bag big enough to hold all the treasures I’ve missed over these past eight months.

When I arrived for day two, Chloé advised that this session would be more intense. No sitting this time, just directly on the table. It took me a while to settle. Eventually, I did. She rubbed ceremonial clay from Chimayo all over my abdomen, called in aligned spirits, and said prayers over my womb and reproductive systems. It wasn’t long before I started crying. My belly gurgled, growled, grief, anger, resentment in my liver. She used feathers, rattles, and sound. When she rattled over my belly, out of body, I saw myself sit up, and purge repeatedly, energetically releasing all of the poison, the pain, the violent imprints and memories out of me.

My throat, my womb, my stomach, my heart. After ninety minutes, I slowly returned back to conciousness, sat up and reconnected. “The entire time it felt like you were bracing to be punched— your life, you’ve been bracing, almost expecting, since you were six, to be hurt again. You shut off, you shut down, you left your body. Your digestive system needs to heal. Your reproductive system needs to heal. Your nervous system too. You’ve just lived in your brain— doing.” She was right, again.

Before I left, I noticed all the turtles. I love turtles, I told her. “I’m a turtle lady,” she said. Of course you are. I showed her a photo of my altar, with my turtles too.

I left slowly, grateful again. Tired. So tired. Hungry. But this time prepared with provisions. Back at the casita, I prepared my sardine bag salad, which I’ve eaten it picnic style on hotel floors for years. I lounged on the patio outside, sun on my face, and let my energy settle. With a visit from a hummingbird, that which drinks the nectar of the gods, a sign, of course.

I planned to check out and drive back to Aspen after my 11A session day three but woke up realizing that driving 6.5 hours back after two hours of deep energy work, through Independence Pass might be unnecessary. I populated my search bar with “Rosewood Santa Fe,” and immediately the booking page popped up, with the proper date and the locals rate. Magic. One more night.

PTSD results in past memory or future anxiety — you can’t ever be present, so the anxiety carries and drives. You want to leave sooner instead of staying longer. I’ve lived most of my life arriving somewhere, never really arriving, always ready to leave. But healing has taught me presence, living, not existing. Feeling safe here and now allows for less rushing.

Driving to my final session, I smiled, thinking about turtles again, searched in my phone for a photo, and simultaneously questioning my decision. I was hyper, big energy, I could just get in the car after and get home, like I’ve done many things, on autopilot. It was possible. And perfectly timed, a photo popped up in my search, of a turtle, and one of my favorite livism quotes, “Pace over race.” The photo wasn’t for Chloé it was a reminder for me.

When I arrived, I told her the story and that I was going to stay another night. We both smiled. “I didn’t want to tell you what to do, but after this you’ll be cooked.” Today is the rebirth, she informed me. I laid down, crystals in each hand, and dropped in immediately. Into sadness, body covered in roses, smells of bergamot and cinnamon, prayers over me, sweetness around me, and cried the entire time. More than once she said, “You can open your eyes if it’s too intense.” I felt heat, my body, on fire. I felt pains in my heart. She prayed over me. Energy moving, grieving. I cried picturing my older brother and I once best friends, who is all but a ghost in my life. Towards the end, the thought of mothering a child crossed my mind, I fought it. I’ve fought that desire, “God’s plan,” I say over and again. But for someone who believes in life, a large part of me also believes that the full spectrum includes birthing another life. I cried for not knowing.

Her prayers, and my cries were met with birds — all of the birds arrived, singing and chirping around me. As if to remind me that I was held by mother earth.

“You were supposed to be dead,” she said. Those words, I knew, were still jarring. “Everything you’ve survived, and also everything you’ve shared with the world, have affected others’ too, you had a lot of energy around you, directed at you, others’ who wished harm upon you. Most with your experience do not survive. But you are alive. And I want you to live without fear — unafraid to ask for help finding your hotel room.”

”Unafraid to drive through some small New Mexican town and get pulled over by a policeman with bad intentions,” I echoed. “Or to charge my room at the hotel restaurant in fear the waiter will know where I’m staying.” Your fears are warranted, she said, but they don’t have to live in you any longer. This will help.”

I pray for that day.
I’m getting closer.

“There was so much fragmentation in your system, not just from the trauma, but from every healer, guide or otherwise you trusted, people you dated, energy you took on. When you left your body at six, and lived in your mind, you opened to any and everything, you are sensitive, can be a superpower but must be protected. Protect yourself.”

“Your partner is coming in, don’t worry, but you are still healing your sexual energy — your creativity — to hold all that which you desire. You never need to do plant medicine again, those fragmented you too, not that they weren’t helpful, but they were forceful. Now is time for softness, for sweetness, be gentle.”

“Twenty five years of work, and I’ve never seen anything like this.” I heard her, echoing a sentiment I both know and am tired of hearing. But perhaps it’s given me more space to grow and live, fully. Freedom.

I thanked her and left.

Santa Fe isn’t really my flavor. The gas stations are all equipped with an armed guard, which was surprising when I popped in to grab some bubbilicious. An older woman in dark sunglasses stood behind me in line. “Do you mind if I grab something quick?” I asked. “Of course.” When I returned she said, “Each man that walked in, did the up and down and head whirled around, it’s sort of irritating to watch.” “And be watched,” I replied.” I didn’t even notice. Perhaps better that way. Hypervigilance is already part of my design. And as Chloé said, I don’t want more fear. I want more life. The key is self sourcing my safety.

Driving back to the hotel, from Chloé’s, from bubble gum, and the next day, more than once, out loud I spoke to my highest self and my inner child, “You made the right decision, baby girl. I’m so proud of you. You got here safe. You listened to your intuition. You trusted yourself.”

I roamed around the city for a few hours then returned to the hotel, curled into a corner booth with my computer at the Michelin chefed restaurant downstairs. I ordered tuna carpaccio, with fried lotus chips, thinly sliced avocado and black sesame and savored it slowly while I tip tapped on my keyboard, zoned out but tuned in. Except for the sweet couple next to me from South Carolina, married 57 years, playing footsies.

For years I thought freedom lived on the other side of another healing experience. I thought completion meant getting married, and that self worth lived within being seen. But what if it was here all along, waiting for me to stop gripping long enough to receive it? The goal isn’t to be published, understood, or even liked,
the goal is to be happy.

The last night, I slept the soundest I slept all trip. Safe in my room, safe in my body, safe in my own energy. Woke up at 5A from the strangest dream. Anthony Bourdain and me overlooking tennis courts. I was filming something for Tracy Anderson as a stand in because I was pregnant. Between shots, I sat my head resting on his shoulder as he gua sha’d his face. “My dad died today,” he said, nonchalantly. “What? That’s so sad. Why didn’t you say anything?” He looked at me and replied, “It’s okay. Without him I wouldn’t have lived this full life.”

I packed my things quickly and waved goodbye to Santa Fe before 7A, the journey full of love and blessings as I headed back home. The drive over the pass was less scary on the way back. And this time, my prayer was different, fear present, but overcome with gratitude. “God, thank you for keeping me safe.” Back to the wonderland that is Aspen. And it welcomed me with open arms, as it does, every time.

Take yourself on a journey. Expand the way you see the world,
You see yourself. You see life. Not what it’s taken but given—
Pain, pleasure, lessons, blessings.
Surrender, forgive, heal.
Answer what calls you forward Love the ones you’re with. It’s your life.

Love,
Olivia

Last post, here
Context, here.
More of me, here.
Driving playlist, here and here.

a slideshow summary, here.

Hi. My name is Olivia. You know that, you’re reading my Substack. And many of you have been with me for years, what feels like lifetimes, as I’ve shared different versions of me.

Maybe you knew me from New York City, the culinary world, my OG blog Chef Olivia, where I reviewed restaurants and shared recipes, a new resident in the big apple, doe-eyed, fragile but heavily armored, fighter, hard shell, soft insides. A tootsie pop. Maybe you followed my journey to culinary school, then to Food & Wine magazine, to my dream job, Brand Director of Altamarea Group, cooking at the White House, filming with Bourdain in Italy, opening a restaurant in China and London, seeing the world. Maybe you read my dating diaries, my voracious adventures of seeking him to complete me while silently judging. Dating a resume, and then pointing at them for failing me, men who play games, whilst I was doing the same, focused on winning, end game— marriage, babies. I thought the destination would bring meaning.

I was desperate for meaning, tired of late nights of whiskey and dry-aged meat, my highly sensitive body needing 8-10 hours of sleep, and never metabolized alcohol well. I’d wake up at 5 A.M. and quell the hangover with a double Nespresso to fuel my run over the Williamsburg Bridge before boxing and yoga. There was a billboard I’d run past that said something about following your dreams. One morning, it hit me, I couldn’t keep phoning it in, I had to commit to building something.

I wanted to contribute, to move others as I’d been moved, to inspire. The knowing popped in like a lightning bolt, Box + Flow. Maybe that’s where you met me, after I left hospitality. Movement: boxing gave me confidence, yoga allowed me to slow down and feel. Duality, strong and soft, fight and flow, dark and light, a microcosm of life. I needed to package it, to bottle it, not fitness, a feeling. Energy, swagger, grit, head high, heart open, breath, life. Words on paper.

At 29, I sold off an e-trade account my mom invested for me decades prior and signed my first lease at 55 Bond Street, before ever teaching a class. Learned by teaching, just as I learned to cook by cooking. Lessons no school can teach. Real life. There were long stretches of doubt in between. Of depression, desperation, and sadness. Of feeling so separate. Of convincing myself I’d just marry Steve and not follow a dream. My mind was so binary. Isolated in my own unexplainable grief.

I was filled with fire, grit, tenacity, scared out of my mind, but determined to prove to the world I could be someone, do something. To show others how to find more ease, teaching what I needed to learn, self-trust, compassion, self-love, and empathy. “Everything you need is inside.”

Fitness became fashionable. Rumble opened with big budgets and hot model teachers. I was the underdog, the little engine that could. The competition fueled and angered me. I was desperate to be seen. Fueled by unconscious patterns. Desperately wanting my entrepreneur father’s attention and my mom to understand me. Desperate to feel like I mattered.

I built a team but didn’t understand I was the boss. Stuck in people pleasing with a fear of abandonment sprinkled on top.

Simultaneously, I was beating the shit out of my body. Up at 5, pound caffeine, run 5 miles on the west side highway before teaching, before yoga. La Colombe decaf Americano on a very empty stomach. Nervous system reeling. I didn’t know any different. Sardines, sweet potato, dijon delicious, but never enough for the amount I moved my body. Shower, change into a colorful ensemble, and heels for meetings. Happy hour, glass of wine, bowls of bar nuts, make a playlist for class, back into a black leotard, teach, home, or a date perhaps. Chasing attention, chasing love, chasing distraction, so distracted from me....

Three years in, a dream, or so I thought, my mentor wanted to invest in me?! A new space, different from the second-floor dungeon I’d spent my savings on. Bigger, better, more. Maybe 3000 square feet would lead me to loving me. I said yes. The train was moving, but I was stuck at the station, on autopilot. A ghost to my own life.

In January 2020, the flu got me, I went for a run anyway, and walked back after a block or two. My doorman was concerned; he’d never seen me give up. I didn’t; my body literally wouldn’t move. Weeks later, I was back in Miami Beach, and my grandmother was dying. I went to a friend’s wedding, just after they said “I do,” down the aisle to “doing it all for us.” I called my mom, two tequilas deep. She was dead, I knew it. I went to sit with her at her bedside. Hollow. Lifeless. Her soul left her body.

I was still breathing, alive, but felt hollow. I flew back to New York right after the funeral to open the new studio the next day. New, but different. Pretty but lacked grit. We weren’t open long enough to remove the kinks of a brand-new business. Three weeks in, global shutdown, Covid 19.

I flew to Miami Beach reluctantly, carry-on only, black leotard, a few things. I refused to unpack. Two weeks turned into four months. I laid off my staff, and I taught on Zoom. I used my tools, resilience, ease, and flow through the fight. I’d trained for this. I thrived in chaos. Where others melted, I revived. And I lived at home with my parents for the first time since high school. Love in the time of corona. There was magic in the simplicity.

And for the first time in my life, slowing down, I felt tired. I felt how loudly my body was screaming, but I’d been too busy doing, I didn’t hear its suffering.

I was ready to go home, to keep trying, fighting, forcing. NYC was closed. Nothing was working. I said yes to the matchmaker’s inquiry, 20 years older, divorced. He felt old, but his background, business, and spirituality were appealing. I gussied up, met him at Cipriani. Ran into an ex-boyfriend, who asked coyly, “Who’s the old man?” I didn’t disagree. But the setup called my bluff and challenged me.“Why don’t you admit you’re afraid of love? That you wanted to be taken care of?”I said yes because I’d swallowed my no decades ago.

After the first time we were intimate, even though I’d said I wasn’t ready, he asked, “Did something happen to you?” That question cracked decades of silence open. But at first, I denied it, excused it, “So many women feel pressure…” His whisper became a scream I couldn’t ignore.

Did something happen to me?

And then the rabbit hole. The descent, the reckoning, the return. It’s likely you know this whole thing. I started sharing my journey in real time in 2020, remembering the multiple sexual assaults I experienced from ages six through my early twenties.

I was warned against that. You don’t write about trauma while you’re healing.

But I’m a truth teller and truth seeker. Silence felt disingenuous to me. Writing helped me make sense of it all, and sharing helped get it out of my body. I needed to be heard. Once I pressed send, it felt less mine. Healing needs integration. You become the observer of your life to realize you’re not your story.

The full descent — the gore, a cautionary tale — is here, few details spared.

What I long knew as trauma doesn’t feel that way now. It feels like the truth. Uncharged. Weightless. Truth. The truth heals. Part of me. But doesn’t define me. I am who I am because of what I’ve survived.

Sexual assault is a global epidemic that affects hundreds of millions. After years of boxing, I realized I wasn’t just fighting for me. I was fighting for all those suffering. And speaking for all those silenced. There is no worse feeling than feeling so alone in something so painful, so shameful, so silenced — that it takes your voice, your body, your will to live. I’ve been there. I lived there for years. I chose a different path. To heal. To live.

When I moved to Aspen in October, everything changed. I slept through the night. Felt home in my den. Hibernation. Winter, skiing, met new friends and went deeper within.

The end of the year came, which demanded a sturdier version of me, and firmer boundaries with people I was still placating. Those are the hardest, the longest-living patterns to change. Saying no to the people you’ve known your whole life. “This doesn’t work for me. No more.” That cut deep. Dark. I cried the whole month of December. But didn’t abandon myself once. I sat with the pain and let it go. I didn’t become it. New wiring.

2026 rolled in. Ready. More skiing, different friends, saying yes. Winter ends, spring has sprung. Found my footing. New energy. Rooted. Aspen, me.

Physicality. Wellness. A body that lived in survival. More rewiring — bloodwork, doctors, hormones, testing. Inhabiting. No more searching, explaining, justifying. Arrival. Here. Living.

I didn’t just heal. I brought myself back to life. I left my body at six years old, before my brain had fully developed. I lived in chronic fight-or-flight for decades. That’s not living. That’s surviving. And now? I get to live.

So who am I now?
What do I wear?
How do I move? Eat? Connect? Relate? Share?

I’m still me. The most me I’ve ever been — no posturing, performing, trying, fighting, forcing. I don’t choose things that don’t choose me. I just love. And what I do reflects that, because that love begins with me.

A BBQ, Friday. Watch the World Cup. Excited. What to wear? What to bring? Even if it’s just eight people, new friends, nothing fancy. I put on something that made me feel good. Cute new shoes, t-shirt, silk shorts. Very Olivia. I made a flourless chocolate cake my way.

I arrived on time. No rushing. I popped open an N/A IPA and some sparkling water. I stayed, six guys and I, sat cross-legged on the couch, watched the game, laughed deeply. Left when I was ready, with the last piece of my cake.

The next day, tired from less sleep than usual, I decided to climb my favorite mountain for the first time this season. Impromptu. 3,200 feet to the top of Ajax. No water, no snacks, no music, no friends. Just me and the terrain that has held me since 2020, every year besides one, through all of it.

The cake wasn’t about cake. The outfit wasn’t about clothes. The barbecue wasn’t about the World Cup. For most of my life, I wasn’t asking myself what I wanted. I was asking different questions. Will they choose me? Will they leave me? Will they approve of me? Will I be safe? What do they need?

Survival asks different questions than living.
So when I found myself excited about what to wear to a friend’s barbecue,
it wasn’t because the outfit mattered. It was because I did.
When I baked a chocolate cake, my way, it wasn’t because I needed to, but I wanted to.
When I stayed longer than planned, laughing couchside, watching soccer with six guys, it wasn’t because I had my eye on any. It was because I was having fun in real time.
And for someone who spent decades dissociated, that is priceless.

Reflecting, I realized that everything I’d devoted my life to was connected. Nothing accidental. No thing wasted. LIVYOUNG. Live Young. Love Yourself. I thought I was building a brand. I was building a roadmap home.
My background in food was never just about cooking. It was about nourishment. Movement was never about fitness. It was about coming back to my body.
Spirituality was never about religion. It was about learning to trust myself.
Embodiment was never about appearance. It was about feeling safe enough to be fully alive. Pleasure was never about desire. It was about feeling safe enough to receive.

The toolkit had been there all along. I just didn’t understand why I needed it. First, I thought the destination was marriage. Or success. Being known. Being seen. Being someone. Then I thought it was healing. To fix myself, to heal enough, to understand enough, to matter enough. But it was all a bridge.

The point was always life.

I feel reborn. But not just with fresh eyes, the awe and wonder of a child, and the wisdom of a million-year crone.
The baby who is born that feels everything, untainted, unvarnished.
And the woman who needs nothing and has everything.
That knows safety because she’s built it from within.
That knows courage because she’s stared evil in the eyes.
That knows truth because she’s unafraid of the darkness.
That knows love because she never lost it.
That finally trusts that everything she needs is inside.

The chances you’re even born are nearly one in 400 trillion. This life, this specific one, is a miracle by the math alone.

So what will you do with it?
Me? I’m going to live.

Love you,
Olivia

Flourless chocolate cake, adapted from Richard Sachs’ recipe, my changes, below.
-1/2 cup monkfruit sugar instead of 1C of sugar
-salted butter
-vanilla extract (no cognac)

Favorite Sézane Shoes
Reformation Silk shorts

2:45P, not my usual time, but something called me to climb. So I did.

I passed a woman on the trail, smiled hi, and kept moving. At the top, I sat on the rocks. A few minutes later, she arrived. We began chatting. Or she questioned. I answered.

There is a kind of woman who feels entitled to answers, which I observed without judgment and answered only what felt aligned to me. Do you live here full time? Do you have a roommate? What do you do? What does your family do? Last name? I brushed it off.

A few days later, another climb. Same trail. Same lady. She didn’t seem to want me to pass, but trail etiquette overrode her lack thereof.

When I reached the top, her son was already there, sitting on the ground. Likely in his thirties. Strong. Fast. Capable. Disabled. A few minutes later she arrived. My sentiment shifted immediately. I felt compassion for her. That can’t be easy, I thought. Until she spoke.

“You can’t have any more water. I need mine.” Then she turned to me and the other strangers perched nearby. “He’s like a human garbage waste. If you give him water, he chugs the whole thing.” She was speaking about him, to us, while he sat right there. “I can give you a sip, but you can’t have it all, I need my water,” she said again.

I get it. We all have needs. Maybe I was just lucky that my mom put her kids’ first.

The sweet boy looked at his mom and asked the only thing he seemed to care about. “Happy?” She told him she was fine. She was happy. A few minutes later he asked again. “Happy?”

He wasn’t concerned with where anyone lived. He wasn’t asking what they did for work. He wasn’t interested in their last name or their story.

He wanted water. He wanted lunch. And more than anything, he wanted his mom to be happy.

I’m still thinking about it. The simplicity of his desires stayed with me.

Somewhere along the way life becomes so complicated. We accumulate stories, identities, opinions, expectations, and endless things to worry about. Yet sitting on that mountain, listening to him ask the same question over and over, I couldn’t help but wonder if what we are all looking for is much simpler than we make it.

Don’t we all just want to be happy?
And don’t we all want the people we love to be happy too?

Nothing makes me happier than being in nature, surrounded by the wild things, needing nothing, having everything, at peace, with peace. Being. And I have no plan to bottle that feeling, just radiate it, energetically. In the mean time, here’s’ what I’m loving lately.

what i’m loving lately

fashion

silk shorts & mini skirts: i love these from negative underwear with a vintage tee and cute kitten heal

Kitten heels: Long are the days when I walk 50 blocks in Stilettos in New York Summer. Aspen cobblestone isn’t super conducive to anything high healed. I’m loving the lower vibe. I also love anything woven. These are en route from sezane. Simon Miller has a great mule too. And I’m eyeing these like its no ones business.

Zara: i bought this cute beaded bag and have worn it a handful of times already. perfect for summer and to throw around.

beauty

Eyebrow peptide: i have no idea what they put in this but all I keep thinking about is that TV add from the 90’s, ch ch ch chia … like my eyebrows are fuller and getting bushy and I am loving the fuller brow moment. This stuff is magic.

Face oil: I was on the market for a dupe of the $400 face oil that I ran out of samples of. This Pai oil came across my screen. And I’m loving it. Hydrating, juicy, glowy.

Watching

Disclaimer: Cate Blanchett on Apple TV. This was hard to watch.
Office Romance: JLo & Brett Goldstein. I hope they’re sleeping together.
Noah Kahan doc on Netflix. I started listening to his music and then needed to learn more. I love learning the story behind the star.

listening
Noah Kahan I cannot stop. His voice, his lyrics. I was new to him, until I. wasn’t. He is brilliant. And humble. And the song Orbiter, he wrote about his mom, and it’s just beautiful.

Cooking
I air fry my filets. Sue me. Health has me needing to eat more red meat. And I’m not big on my house smelling like it. Air fry 18 minutes on roast. Crunchy crust, juicy interior. Yum. Oh and seaweed. If you have low iodine, start eating the beach. I’ve been steaming mine in the steamer with miso sticky rice and kabocha squash. MMM.

what i’m loving

Guy friends. I grew up with three brothers and have always gotten along easier with guys than girls — the humor is a little silly, a little juvenile, a little dirty — and I wouldn’t have it any other way. What’s different now is the charge is gone. No wondering if they’re attracted to me, no wondering if I’m attracted to them. Just easy.
”Hey, I rented a ball machine, come play.”
”My racket is in the mail,”
”Use mine.”
Easy. I hope when my husband and I meet it will be this easy too, and he’ll love activities, on the court, a climb, fun, free …. i’m not worried.

when I rise & when I sleep
gratitude prayer which is sometimes as simple as “Thank you God for another day …”
and sometimes goes into “for my health, family, strength, journey.”

food & drink
Scoops PB: I’ve been making sugar free fluffernutter marshmallows (sometimes with banana too) and using this elite powdered peanut butter, female founded, fab macros.
0 sugar, 9g protein, 2g fat, now avail at target. The marshmallows have become my nightly ritual. I’ll share the recipe soon.

Ryze coffee: Mushrooms are The superfood. GF, Vegan. This is a caffeine alternative with so many health benefits, 48g caffeine, good for focus, gut health, stamina. I love to make mine with almond milk, syrup & collagen.

Fly By Jing: Sweet + Spicy Sichuan Chili Sauce
I don’t know why this is so good, but it just is. It’s 10$ on amazon and tastes good on everything.

local adventures

True Nature Healing Arts: I stumbled across this store in Carbondale pre a three hour doctor appointment. And it was the most welcome surprise — walls lined with Harry Potter esque treasures and tinctures in an otherwise pretty flat town (no disrespect). The farmers market felt so sad, walking there, I turned around, but I found this magical place instead!

Tennis is such a great sport. Social and active. And it’s in my genes. My mom and dad met on the courts, and have since started playing again bi-weekly. I was on the varsity tennis team. Playing the other day Imet the owners of Brisas (a club in East Hampton and LIC) who recently took over the lease at Aspen Meadows, which is a different vibe, but should be fun and sceney for 2027 season.

What’s been making you happy these days? I would love to hear. Send me a note. Happy June. xo
Olivia

I wrote this yesterday but didn’t share it immediately because I thought maybe it felt dark compared to how I feel inside, for the first time.

Alive.

I look forward to getting out of bed in the morning. I go to sleep in gratitude and wake up the same. I’m excited to wake up at 5am and see the sun already rising. I can’t wait to pop my head out the door and see what’s waiting for me. To hike. To move. To breathe. To live.

I prayed for this.
For joy.

Five years ago, I wouldn’t have recognized this version of myself. For most of my life, I lived in my head because my body wasn’t a safe place to be.

After years of thinking I was normal, or knowing I wasn’t, but without the memory to explain why. After decades of moving, doing, proving. You can run. But you can’t hide. It all surfaces. And when it does, when the body finally comes back online, what should feel like relief feels completely foreign. Like inheriting a house you’ve never lived in. You don’t know where anything is. You don’t know what’s yours.

That was me. Thirty-nine years old. Meeting my body for the first time.

For decades, I lived like a machine. A deeply feeling but even deeper dissociated machine. I knew how to do, not be. Building. Working. Proving. Performing. The recurring nightmares. The internal purgatory. The feeling of being haunted by something I couldn’t name because I couldn’t remember it. The high-functioning dissociative learns to function as a trauma response. As protection. I didn’t know my why.

In 2020 the world shut down. And for the first time, so did I. Not by choice. Because there was nowhere left to run. The studios closed. The movement stopped. The distractions dried up. And I was left alone with the one thing I’d been outrunning my entire life: myself. The doors of my studio said Everything You Need Is Inside.

It wasn’t until everything shut down that I finally slowed down and looked. MacGyver style. Surgical. Procedural. No prisoners. Psychedelics first. I started with the most extreme one imaginable: 5-MeO-DMT, the same molecule the brain secretes before you die. I had to kill the ego. Get out of my head. My intention: reconnect with my body and open my heart. You can’t heal if you don’t know what hurt you. To love yourself, you have to learn all the reasons you don’t. I just wanted love, which I’ve since remembered comes from the inside.

I’ve written about what happened, What the files don’t show, The pattern that started at six and continued for decades while the woman looked completely fine, or so she thought. Every time I thought the memory was the last, there were more. After they began surfacing, there was no turning back. I went deeper. I wanted to understand the why beneath the why. What drove me. What I was repeating. What I was avoiding. What I was protecting.

I left New York to heal. After five years in Austin healing, I moved to Aspen to live. Built boundaries for the first time. Stopped outsourcing love and safety. Held my truth fully, with everyone.

Once the anger, sadness, shame, blame, grief, and disbelief moved out, it made room for the love that always lived underneath. My heart expanded even bigger than it was because I found empathy and compassion for me. Me at all ages. Sad. Lonely. Angry. The parts of me I had spent decades trying to outrun. Each one lit up like a Christmas tree. My emotional centers came back online. I came home to me. I’m here. Present. Feeling. I cry. I laugh. I’m open, like a baby. I didn’t change. I remembered. I returned. To my body. To my brain. To my breath. To my heart.

For the first time in my life I sleep through the night. Only wake up to pee. Not out of fright that someone will hurt me. And the past two months, I’ve focused on repairing the physical body, fine tuning. The body I spent a lifetime defining myself by. That has held all of the emotion, energy put in and on me, finally learning it’s safe enough to let go. Primal, protective, and the last to get the memo.

THE BODY KNOWS The body shows.

After an assault at thirteen, I went home and threw up for the first time. My period, which had just started, stopped. My body froze in time. I stopped developing. I went offline.

I’d get a cycle once in a while. Almost never. Every doctor treated it as a hormonal problem. Thyroid. Cortisol. Estrogen. Protocol after protocol. The best functional medicine doctors in New York. One of Gwyneth’s male doctors told me to get acupuncture and have more sex. In Austin, another male doctor replied, “So what you don’t get your period?” Do you know how many people pay for birth control?”

A period is a moniker of a woman’s health. A signal. A report card from the body. Mine went silent at decades prior. No one asked why. Too much stress, working, exercise. But even if they’d asked, I wouldn’t have known tt wasn’t just a hormonal problem. It was a safety problem.

And it’s biology. A body only ovulates when it feels safe, toreproduce, to carry life. Mine never felt safe enough to do either. My hormones never came online, because at 13, I froze.

When I moved in with an ex-boyfriend, my period stopped again. My sleep stopped. My body knew before my mind did, “You will not have his baby.” When I moved out, it came back. The body knows.

October 15th, 2025. The day I left Austin for Aspen, my period came back. And every month since. Consecutively. Not Aspen, internal safety.

RECALIBRATION Nobody told me what happens when a body that has lived in survival mode for decades starts functioning normally. I didn’t know what the hell was happening.

Why do my boobs feel like they’re going to fall off my body? Can I even do a handstand now that they’re more than a handful? Why am I waking up hungry in the middle of the night? Why are my glucose levels dipping so low? Why don’t my pants fit? Pants I’ve worn for decades. Hunger is primal. It’s my body back online. Not muted. Alive. For decades I overrode it. Ran through it. Worked through it. Distracted through it. And now my body was waking me up in the middle of the night asking to be fed.

A baby is born and cries. It’s hungry. The body asking for what it needs is not the problem. That desire should never be silenced or ignored for the sake of aesthetics, approval, control, or shrinking.

Part of me was fascinated. Part of me was terrified. Part of me was grateful. Part of me was grieving the time, not the trauma. I’ve done that for years. But the experience. The hormones most women got at fifteen. The puberty I never had. The body sensations that were supposed to be normal that felt completely foreign to me at thirty-nine. I spent decades believing something was wrong with me. And now I was sitting with the possibility that nothing was ever wrong. My body was just waitinguntil it was safe enough to function properly.

And then something shifted. I felt alive. A body that desires. That bleeds. That feels. That speaks. I thought my body would exhale and get smaller. Instead it got safer. My body softened. I started speaking to myself differently, and listening. I felt sensations it never had, hormones it never developed. Because it froze at thirteen, to protect me. And now finally, thawing.

And then my lizard brain panicked.

I’m 5’3”. Five pounds on a small frame might not look like a lot. But it feels like a lot. Especially after wearing the same size pants since highschool. I’d grown accustomed to my boy figure. Never wanted hips. Never had them. That narrow, androgynous frame that GLP-1 takers are now paying for, I had it au natural.

It didn’t suffer from food noise, but a limiting belief that still wanted me smaller. Wanted. Past tense. So I bought new pants.

But, I had to understand what was happening. Not guess. Not assume. So I went looking. Twelve vials of blood every six weeks. Stool tests. Urine tests. Saliva tests. DEXA scan. Carotid imaging. VO2 max. No stone unturned. I didn’t find a broken body. I found evidence of a body that had spent decades protecting me.

RECEIPTS The DEXA scan showed lumbar spine bone density below range for my age. Carotid imaging, vascular age forty-seven. Early carotid plaque in both bulbs. VO2 Max, 99th percentile: I’ve trained for war. Body fat, 18%. Low for a menstruating woman. Receipts of three decades of elevated cortisol. And hormones spent decade asleep. Running at 5am in the dark. Sleeping with the door bolted. Nightmares of my attackers finding me. A body that never fully believed the war was over. It shows up in bone, in arterial walls, in the tissue before the body catches up.

I wanted to argue with the results. I don’t just do the work. I live the work: I move every day. I sleep eight to ten hours a night. I settled my nervous system. I cut my cortisol in half. I cook every meal. I rarely drink. I moved to the Mountains, where the wild things are. My biggest vice? My daily blow pop post hike.

And then I realized: What I do today cannot undo what happened then. You can do everything right today and it won’t erase the decades my body spent protecting me.

The body clocks everything. Healing is acknowledging the past and finally understanding the cost. And not letting any of it win. This is what the files don’t show. The shrapnel. Not what happened. What it leaves behind on the inside.

OLD HABITS DIE HARD I committed to this next project the same way I’ve committed to everything. Two weeks ago, another blood draw, tracking results after six weeks of supplements. I drove an hour from home, twelve vials, difficult nurse, stayed inside myself, didn’t pass out. Progress.

Then the results came back. My liver was on fire. Of course it was. I’d started eight new supplements in a body that doesn’t take any drugs, even Advil! Because that’s what I’ve always done. Full commitment. Maximum effort. Controlling the outcome. I survived through control. Then I tried to heal through control. The irony wasn’t lost on me, but after years of forcing and overriding my body, healing became into another thing to optimize.

My liver had notes. One week off the supplements and the levels normalized. The body responds fast when you actually listen.

BIG PICTURE We live in a culture that wants relief faster than understanding. Ozempic. Beta blockers. Antidepressants. Peptides. Everything numbed or shrunken. Optimized on the outside. Vacant on the inside.

Complex PTSD. I was likely the ideal candidate for anti-depressants. Anxiety. Depression. Disordered eating. Undiagnosed for decades because I had no memory of what caused it and no language for what I was carrying. I just lived in it. It felt normal. So I numbed differently. Achievement. Constant movement. A beer every night when I got home.

The toolkit I built intuitively helped. Psychedelic-assisted therapy. IFS. Breath work. Somatics. Every modality. Psychedelics are still entirely misunderstood. They don’t numb anything; they take you directly to the wound and hold you there until you can feel it. There is no distracting. No escaping. That’s why they’re not for everyone and not forever. I don’t do psychedelics anymore and haven’t in years. I can barely drink one beer. Numb is not my thing. And of all the work I’ve done, the most profound? Learning to sit with the feelings, learning that I’m not my story, letting myself grieve, and becoming the observer of my own experience rather than held hostage by it.

You can’t do that medicated into numbness. Ozempic removes food noise. The antidepressant flattens the signal. The beta blocker quiets the alarm. But the alarm is information. The hunger is information. The anxiety is information. You need to be present enough to hear it. Face it. Feel it. Free it. Integrate it. That’s the whole answer. And it cannot be bought.

The guy I wrote about recently, who sent flowers before even meeting, who idealized me. “I want to live like Im on psychedelics all the time,” he said, “like you do.” True. I do. Stone cold sober. Life through clear eyes. Renewed after years of committing to a different life.

Maybe you’re not addicted to work. Maybe you’re productively dissociated. Maybe your body isn’t broken. Maybe it’s protecting you. Your symptoms aren’t random. Your body whispers before it screams. And the whisper is always the same question: Are we safe yet?

Your biography becomes your biology. What happened to you lives in your tissue. In your cortisol. In your bone density. In the nervous system that protects you before it learns it can soften. I thought my body was working against me, now I know it’s brilliance. A body that adapted. That survived. That did exactly what it was designed to do to keep me safe.

Slowly the nervous system is rewiring, hormones firing, last crumbs settling. God sewing me back together with a gold thread, to the Harry Potter soundtrack, one layer at a time. The whole journey an act of magic. Embodying myself. For the first time.

The miracle? My body never gave up on me. After everything, it kept waiting for safety, for me to trust enough to let go of control and come home.

When I started remembering in 2020, I was in shock. When I started sharing in 2021, I was desperately seeking. But I never asked “why me?” Because we are all given a path. His will has always been greater than mine. The same way I didn’t question the Knicks winning last night. Not because they’re the better team. The only way I can describe the final minute of Game 2 is: God did.

Thy will be done.
Some things cannot be explained.

I know the resolution isn’t a diagnosis, protocol, toolkit, or pair of pants. It’s acceptance. Trust. Love. Not controlling what’s next or being afraid of what’s now.

It’s here. In a body that breathes. Alive. I wish this knowing for everyone. With a promise that this feeling is accessible to everyone, in time.

Love always, Olivia

*if my work resonates, please share it.
Follow me, here.
Referenced:
What the Files Don’t Show
What is Nothing Wrong with Your Body?
It was All an Act of Magic
Flowers from a Stranger

I got home from dinner with friends a few weeks ago to a handful of DMs, one of which said, “He’s the one.” From someone who knows me from way back when, but doesn’t know me. Setups are flattering, always. Kind-gestured, good-hearted. I love when people think of me.

I welcome them. Know anyone? I believe in putting it out there and being open to receive. But there are lines in the sand with such things. I’m an odd duck, in the best way. And I’m not my resume. When you pitch someone like me, it often goes like: “She’s Jewish, Miami Beach, good family. Worked with celebrity chefs, food in New York, culinary school, started a fitness concept, lives in Aspen.”

All true. All beautiful things. But none of those define me. None of them speak to my character, my heart, the depth of work I’ve done to understand the human experience — not just my own history, but how I can now hold compassion and empathy.

And so, the setups are often quite surface too. Good guy, good family, good job.

What moves me? Confidence, curiosity, joie de vivre, presence, depth, vitality. A hunger for life. Oh, and laughter, lust, trust — I believe that’s an answer to one of my prompts on the dating apps I no longer use.

The man and I DM’d briefly. I replied in voice messages because the voice speaks far deeper than a few taps on a keyboard. “What do you know about me?” I asked. His first response was, “That you want children.” Funny, too. I replied, “I am quite mothering, have mothered many, but that desire is no longer something I hold onto. I trust that what God wants for me, he will provide. I’ve surrendered that desire and trust that what’s meant for me will find me.” He asked for my phone number. I asked him a few more questions before I obliged. We texted briefly and arranged a phone call for the following week. But I clocked his replies early, “You’ll love our trip to St. Moritz” — future plans, faraway places, “you and me” … those don’t land in my system delicately. And still, no judgement, I was just gathering information, less my brain, more my body. The body always signals first.

And my body clocked, “Big plans with a stranger who doesn’t even know me, but has likely created an idea of me that he wants to make plans with.” Red flag.

The next day I received a call from a local flower place with a delivery. My first thought, “But how did he get my address?” I called my Mom. Apparently my address wasn’t shared — but was given through the friend who set me up. And then a very large flower and chocolate arrangement arrived at my home. Beautiful, truly, a nice gesture.

A former version of me would have gotten all gushy. This version of me who loves herself and knows her worth received it gracefully, and with discernment. Flowers are lovely. As we continued talking, I listened from my intuition — not from the part of me that wants marriage or babies, because that part of me no longer lives in need. I mother many, including myself.

Something very similar happened two years ago. Another setup. Another man who moved quickly. At the time, urgency still registered in me as desire. Especially after spending nearly every day speaking to someone else who wanted to text, talk, more pen pal less “meet.” What man wants to just chat? Next.

Presence is my love language. Effort mattered to me. And so when someone came in wanting to book flights and make plans immediately, part of me felt chosen. There were signs from the start. The urgency. The future planning from a stranger before even meeting. I set a boundary: “You’re welcome to come, we can grab a drink, but I’m not available for a whole weekend. Why don’t we just see if we like each other first?” He didn’t honor it. He wanted to FaceTime constantly, play house, rush intimacy. “Can we walk around town and hold hands?” Barf. My body knew. I lost sleep. And I ignored my boundaries in the name of people pleasing, not discernment and said yes, anyway.

The morning he was meant to arrive, that same summer, I was running the Rio Grande trail. Feeling free. Billy Joel’s Vienna in my ears: slow down, you crazy child… My mom texted me a photo of my dad, as a child. With his father, who died young. I had never seen my father as a child before.

I stopped in my tracks. That photo cracked something open. I saw him, not as the man I once felt so distant from, but as a little boy who lost his father too soon. Who never really got to be a child himself. Who did everything he could to provide safety the only way he knew how, which wasn’t necessarily what I thought I needed. I cried, experiencing his humanness for the first time. He gave what he had. It just wasn’t what I understood, until then.

Standing on that trail, I felt my father’s love. Wholly. Maybe for the first time. And then I understood what I was doing. There was no more empty to fill. No absence left to outsource. The love, the safety, the belonging I’d once so desired from my father — I always had it. And what I desired in a partner, I had to find from the inside. I knew it. I felt it. But that guy was already on the plane. I didn’t have it in me to say, sorry, I’m going to trust myself this time. He arrived anyway. I was angry, not at his face, at myself, for having known and overriding it. One meal too many. “This doesn’t work. We’re done here,” declared under 24 hours. Lesson received. Partially. Lessons need time to land.

Last summer, still searching, I went to the Rabbi. I knew I was going to move to Aspen, the timeline just hadn’t revealed itself yet. I was planting seeds. He asked me, “Do you think you’re intense?” “No, I’m intentional.,” I replied.

The romantic in me loves to see through another’s eyes. Movies hit different when you have someone to share them with. Same as travel. Or deliciousness.

But the difference between her and me? Now I see movies, I adventure, I cook myself delicious food and I enjoy them regardless. No part of me “needs.” Desire yes, but I have what I need. I have me.

Back to the present. Back to the flowers. The lessons have landed and been imprinted in me: mind, soul, body, fully.

The new setup and I had our phone call followed by too many inappropriate things to share over the course of the next twenty four hours. Presumptuous texts. Nearly shocking. No malice, but certainly not aligned. Not because he did something wrong. Because I spent years digging into myself to understand my habits and patterns which has given me the ability to do my work with others. And the relationship I’m calling in, I’m not looking to be the healer, the saver, the coach.

I let him know I wouldn’t be meeting him for our first date at the NBA Finals game. (Even if I f’cking LOVE basketball, especially SGA of OKC, IYKYK.) And told him it was nice to connect with him, but nada mas, gracias, ciao.

The next morning, I posted one of my favorite “livism” quotes on Instagram: You can have both a soft heart and strong boundaries. I was going to delete it. But didn’t. An hour later, as soon as I reached my hike’s summit, I received another phone call, local 970 number, same florist. “Hi, we have a delivery for you today.” He sent me another bouquet. I was shook.

No card attached, but a phone call, a text, a desire to explain himself further, But he didn’t owe me an explanation, and nor did I.

No is a complete sentence. And sometimes the most loving thing you can do for yourself is use it. He used his free will to send me gifts that I neither asked for nor expected. That was his decision. And mine was, hello and goodbye.

I used to turn anger inward after moments like this, but I didn’t bypass my intuition. I honored my knowing this time. Clear heart, open eyes.
And my heart honors his kind heart too.

Last week, before all of this occurred, a friend told me recently she felt guilty for not wanting to spend time with certain people anymore. She was judging herself for being judgmental. You’re not judging them, I said. You’re being discerning about how you spend your time and your energy. Because discernment isn’t judgment, it’s self respect.

Your body speaks first. And if you don’t listen, the whispers become screams. The anger you feel afterward isn’t at them. It’s at yourself, for not listening. You’re not here to be nice, quiet, accommodating. You’re here to live fully, in truth, in peace with yourself, which requires boundaries.

Funny enough, this whole thing was happening simultaneously while I was writing last week’s post, “Remember When You Prayed For This.” While I was sitting at the dinner table bowing my head in gratitude. While I was praying to stay aligned.

I didn’t mention him. Because he wasn’t the story. I was. Two years ago, I stood on a trail in Aspen and finally understood why urgency used to work on me. What it was filling. I became aware, but I didn’t yet have enough self respect to utilize discernment. Flimsy boundaries.

This time, the same pattern arrived. Same energy. Same shape. But my nervous system did not activate, or mistake attention for alignment. I stayed inside myself, with integrity. She who knows.

Patterns repeat until we grasp the teaching.
Soft heart. Strong boundaries.

Love to you,
x
Olivia

What losing everything taught me about love, here,
Discernment as self respect, below.

The Dinner Party

Thursday morning, I got a text from a friend, free for dinner? I’m going to make a roast, from a friend, with other friends.’ No part of me had to reach into my brain to organize or compromise or decide — if I was tired or another night or. Just a big yes.

When I got the invite, I was post blood draw (see below), and adventuring an hour or so away from home, at a natural food store. Excited, especially to decide what to bring for a host who loves food, I opted out of wine and perused the produce aisles to find him something he might not see often. Purple tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, and a variety of cheeses. He’d like these.

Later that evening, I picked up another friend and drove him with me. Casual, homie, laughter, play, exactly where I was meant to be. I didn’t think about what to wear, when I arrived, I was there — not scanning, managing, planning my exit. Living. My friend Mawk loves to cook and loves to eat. He prepared a beautiful tenderloin with an Aussie flair, atop pea and mint puree, with a red chimichurri, roast potatoes, white and sweet. For dessert, a traditional Aussie jello square, vibrant pink layered atop something creamy and shortbread crust. Wine was served, I had a sip, that hit me quick, and so I moved to sparkling water.

And somewhere between when the meat was served and a handful of bites, I paused, and the conversation became muted around me, the smile became so wide on my face, I bowed my head and closed my eyes just to take in the moment, perfectly. With reverence.

I prayed for this.

I prayed to live mountain side, to be invited to dinner parties. To have plans that make my heart feel alive. I prayed for a nervous system that felt safe, for mornings I wake up and want to be awake, to pop my head outside for fresh air and the reminder that I did it, I live here. I prayed for the version of me that could open to receive it all, that could pause in the moment and not take one single moment for granted. To be present for it all.

I used to dream about a life that felt like this, for relationships that felt like this, for friends, with family. And somewhere along the way — without a ceremony, without a finish line — in the middle of a bite of steak with red chimmichurri, I realized I’m living it.

This is what slowing down looks like. Taking it all in. Without a grand finale — a book deal, a boyfriend, a blah blah blah. Those aren’t the manifestations, this is. I am. Not the end game, the process, the living it part.

And after the jelly squares were served, and the clock struck after nine, I announced that I was leaving, that after 12 vials of blood drawn that morning, a belly almost as full as my heart, that I was turning into a pumpkin. My body falls asleep with the sun and rises the same, and I know what my body needs to feel good. Not too much, too little, just right. Bedtime.

The Blood Draw

That morning, I went in for a blood draw. I’ve mentioned I’m deep in the functional medicine, hormonal reset, diving into all things inside. I want to know everything. And I’m a nervous poke, have a history of passing out (I’ve shared why, prior), but haven’t in some time. I drove an hour from my home to get to the Quest Diagnostics when they opened 8A that morning.

The waiting room was full but it moved quickly, except, I was the only one left after about 45 minutes, and then they began taking walk ins in front of me.

“Excuse me?” I asked politely. “Is there something wrong?”

“Your doctor’s script is very complicated, we have to input every code by hand,” she replied.

My calm disposition became a bit fried. Finally, she led me to the back, a bit roughly, not very nice and began pulling vials out of each bin, one, two became five became twelve.

“Do you think we can go in the back? I’d like to lay down.”

“Ok. These are all the vials, 12 of them, are you sure you want to continue?” she asked, rudely again.

“I’m here,” I said. “Yes.”

I could feel my anxiety starting to climb.

“You are strong, you are brave, you are safe,” I quietly repeated in my head.

And then I paused.
What is this here to teach me?

The wait, the negative nurse, the reactive energy, the nasty bedside manner, in a situation that is already triggering for me.(More from 2023 here.) My knowing came fast: Regardless of what’s happening outside of me — the wait, the energy in the room, the fear — I have to become the calm. The eye of the storm.

I didn’t react. I responded, softly.

“Thank you so much for being patient with me. Do you mind just talking to me?”

Something shifted. She softened too. I stayed inside myself instead of letting the circumstances pull me out.

“Oh, you’re from here?”

“Yes, from a town called Rival, no one really knows about Rival, blah blah …”

I knew I had twelve vials to be filled and needed to make the conversation last.

“Wow. So if you had one day in Glenwood Springs, what would you do? Design my itinerary.”

She was so in the convo, I felt her looking at me instead of the blood, and each time that happened, I took a long slow inhale and exhale which snapped her back.

“Are you ok? We’re almost there.”

And then we were through.

I didn’t pass out. Everything was fine.

Not because she changed first. Because I did.

One day. Two moments. A dinner table, a medical chair. Both asked me the same thing:

Can you stay inside yourself no matter what’s happening around you?

Joy and fear. To notice it and choose to take it in or change it. That’s the practice of living fully. Not being the byproduct but the conductor of your own energy.

Rumi & The Practice

Speaking of peace, I’ve been returning to Rumi for years. Rumi is a Sufi poet, a divine channel, and also a nightclub that lived on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach when I was a kid.

In 2022, in the depth of my spiritual journey, I would find myself in chair pose in yoga class in Austin and continue to hear the whisper, “Rumi.” I had no context. What did it mean? I was uncovering and integrating memories of sexual assault when I was younger and immediately thought, “Did something happen to me? At the nightclub Rumi?”

I created space for the answer to come naturally and thankfully, no. Rather, it was Rumi, one of my spirit guides, whose famous for quotes like this, “’Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Not dissimilar from one of my deepest truths, “If you want to love yousrelf, you have to learn all of the reasons you don’t.”

Or “What you seek is seeking you.” — Rumi
Mine: Face yourself to free yourself, Everything You Need is Inside.

So Rumi was whispering to me while in chair pose. I finally figured it out and started listening. And then began writing poems in response to his quotes, for which I have a pile of and will share eventually.

And one of my favorite poems, is the daily mediation I listen to before I get out of bed every morning. And what I live by.

I prayed for change,
so, I changed my mind.

I prayed for guidance
and learned to trust myself.

I prayed for happiness
and realized I am not my ego.

I prayed for peace
and learned to accept others unconditionally.

I prayed for abundance
and realized my doubt kept it out.

I prayed for wealth
and realized it is my health.

I prayed for a miracle
and realized I am the miracle.

I prayed for a soul mate
and realized I am with the One.

I prayed for love
and realized it is always knocking,
but I have to allow it in.

The recorded meditation is repeated twice with time between for contemplation. It is exactly six minutes and eight seconds long. 608 is my angel number, it appears when I’m on the right path — on receipts, timestamps, license plates, the exact moment I look up at a clock. That’s not coincidence, it’s alignment, presence, a knowing.

Rumi. 608. Signs from the divine as reminders to trust yourself, to keep going. I imagine you have signs too, little nods from God. We all do. Presence is how we receive the signs that are always there. A reminder to slow down and receive what is meant for you. And everything else Rumi reminds, above.

Things I’m Loving

Speaking of presence, the simple things I’m currently loving. Because presence lives here too.

What I’m cooking: Shrimp Caesar salad, the best alternative to hillstone’s crispy fries, easy breezy short ribs, dragon fruit

What I’m reading: this substack

What I’m watching: Nemesis on Netflix *ehh

What I’m listening to: June 2026 Playlist, TBM, Theo Von x Mike Tyson

What I bought that I love:
Chloé jellies: I fell for the high end jelly trap and I’m so glad I did
Adidas hiking shoes: Salomon’s are all the rage but I am ride or die for these Adidas. They run large. Size down one full size"
Tevas! Never thought I’d return to these post summer camp but LOVE the platform.

What I’m grateful for this week: everything

Look around right now. The coffee. The city or the mountain outside your window. The person sleeping next to you or the quiet of being alone. The babies, the children, the grandchildren. The body that carried you here. The heart that kept beating even when you asked it to stop. The trauma that shaped you. That gave you gifts of discernment, of grit, tenacity, resilience, compassion, empathy and grace.

You prayed for some version of this. Maybe not this exactly. Maybe the answer came in a shape you didn’t recognize at first. Maybe it’s still arriving. But something you once begged for — something you once couldn’t imagine surviving without — is already in your life right now.

Become present enough to realize the miracles you’ve created. Not the “thing,” the feeling. The love, the safety, the calm, the belonging. The true gifts, when you stop seeking.

Romanticize your life. Live in devotion. Ritualize everything. You only have one.

Last night, on a drive home, windows down, a family of deer to the right of me. My phone pinged. An email. A literary agent, responding to my book query. “I’m intrigued by your query. Are you available for a zoom this week to discuss?”

Alone in my car, I smiled so big, the tears leapt out of my eyes.
Remember when you prayed for this.

Love to you,
Olivia

PS. Two prayers I return to

1. To be shown (if seeking more clarity, purpose)

God, show me. Show me what you want of me.

Instead of telling God what YOU want — ask to be shown, to be led. And then open to receive it.

2. For higher alignment

Please God, align me to my highest timeline. Match my soul to my personality and my personality to my soul.

The soul knows. The personality can get caught up from time to time in ego or externality. Return to the soul’s knowing.

**care to share? send me a note. xx

Last week I went somewhere deep. Thank you for joining me. This week I'm coming up for air. Gosh, how often we forget to breathe! But it’s spring. New life. New energy.

There’s a sign when you drive into Aspen: The bears are hungry. Please lock your garbage.
I always dreamed of living where the wild things are. And now I do.

Off-season Aspen means fewer than 6,000 full-time residents. Most restaurants closed. Hotels too. Even the airport shuts down for a month. The yoga studio I love shuttered for a week. It’s quiet and near-empty and I mean this with love: I think it is the most magical time to be here, but don’t come, because you’ll likely find it boring, Hardly. It’s just peaceful in all of its natural beauty, calm energy and simplicity.

Spring arrived with a plot twist. It didn’t snow all winter, and then, of course, over the past week, it hasn’t stopped. Not enough to stick. Just enough to keep the bears in their dens and me in mine. There’s no resistance in me. I like it. And like all that there is to learn from a season that gives little option other than to just be with it. Nature doesn’t rush. Why should I?

Sweaty

As a fitness founder, and a lifetime attendee of every class and modality in New York City and beyond, I’ve found freedom in discipline, which sounds ironic. Younger version of me needed a start and an end. A schedule to follow, routine, someplace to be. Now, I like to incorporate movement more seamlessly. I love at home workouts, heated by my fire. I’ve been a Tracy Anderson devotee for years. Her routines are wacky, lots of acrobatics, backbends, rolling around on the floor with light weights and finesse. My vibe.

I’ve recently also found Kristina Girod on youtube. Great energy. My body no longer wants to run long distance. I’m craving less resistance be it on the mat or in the great outdoors. Hikes that feel like wandering. And sometimes an added 12-pound weighted vest on the trails for better bone density. Jesus. My legs were not consulted, but they showed up. Movement has become less about output lately and more about conversation. My body telling me things. Me, finally listening. How are you moving this Spring? Or rather, are you moving with your body — or against it? Something worth considering.

Delicious

After a lifetime of disconnection from my body, feeding her well is one of the greatest love letters I can write to myself. Living it, one meal at a time.

One small thing that’s been making me unreasonably happy: before I make my egg whites every morning, I melt butter in the pan and dust the bottom with parmesan. It makes a frico — a crispy, cheesy, crust underneath. Ridiculously good. The simple things. Try it. Speaking of mornings, Sunday at 6A I woke up and decided to experiment with chickpea pancakes, more here.

Skin food: I’ve been building lunch bowls around sardines, salmon, or trout with alternative grains — buckwheat, savory oats, chickpea pancakes. Carbs for energy, fish for Omega 3’s, something fermented like Beet Cabbage from Cleaveland kitchen, carrots, a green, fresh herbs for hydration and circulation. Everything with meaning.

Edible botox: my favorite treat is jello jigglers made with bovine gelatin. I stopped buying supplements and started making them instead. Yummy, all natural and good for you! I make these with tea. Gelatin builds collagen from inside. Great for hair, skin, nails, gut lining. Oranges for vitamin C, I even use the peel. Raspberries for fiber and anti-aging. Blueberries for antioxidants and cinnamon to regulate blood sugar. More details, here.

The easiest way to cook steak, here.

If you’re like me and love bread but prefer it void of additives. I’ve been baking a chickpea flax bread that is gluten-free, high fiber, high protein, and delicious. Next batch I’m adding egg whites for lift and baking powder for less density. Want the recipe? Comment below and I’ll send.

One of my favorite anti-bloats is licorice or dandelion tea after meals.

Body Love

I love experimenting with different modalities to move energy through the body.
I recently experienced a session which combined cupping with acupuncture, Chinese medicine focused. The first forty minutes were deeply therapeutic, almost meditative, after I was poked, and let the needles stew, on a warmed bed, as rain drops fell into the river melodically outside. I fell asleep. And then, holy suction. Glass cups placed up and down my hips and back. Ninety minutes of sucking and poking. Exhausting in the best possible way. Before we started, my practitioner looked at my tongue and told me to eat more land animals. Noted.

I’ve also been working a fascia ball along my jawline. If you haven’t tried this — the jaw is where we store the words we haven’t said. You lay on the floor, belly down, and place the ball on the sides of the face. It hurts. That’s how you know it’s working. Then switch sides.

The other night, I woke up at 3am with a ping that my legs and feet needed some TLC. I lit a candle in my living room, sat on the floor with a tub of coconut oil and massaged my legs. In the early morning hours, I spoke quietly to them — these legs I spent years wishing were longer, faster, different. Our bodies hear everything we say. I’m learning to say kinder things. I fell back asleep deeply and woke with very soft skin in cold sheets.

Reading / Watching / Listening

Last month, I read Strangers and recently finished Lena Dunham’s new memoir. Like most who read it, I have lots of feelings. Dark, deep, honest. I’m currently trying to get into Yesteryear on audio — I’m an auditory learner and the narrator isn’t landing for me yet nor is Maria Semple’s new work, but I feel some connection to her. In September, her nephew, who works at the hotel I used to stay at, stopped me. "Thanks for the shoutout." I thought he meant my DM to his famous aunt. I admitted I name dropped him — he laughed and clarified: "The hotel google review." Then grinned: "My aunt always taught me — loud mouths get fed.” He's right.

On screen: Paradise has become my most unexpectedly favorite show. I’m not typically a sci-fi person. But Thomas Doherty and Sterling K. Brown. Yes. Please. I miss Landman and am not particularly grabbed by anything else at the moment. Tell me what I’m missing?

In the theaters: I saw Michael. I was resistant — the subject matter made me uncomfortable going in, and that discomfort didn’t fully leave. But his nephew’s performance is genuinely impressive, and I walked out with unexpected compassion for a boy who was always different, always extraordinarily talented, who manifested his entire career through sheer belief. Devil Wears Prada 2 — entertaining, Meryl always, Stanley Tucci forever. I was lightly bored until the last act. And then I left happy. The movie theater in Aspen is the buzziest place during off season.

Driving through the mountains, I listened to Cathy Heller’s podcast this week with Dr. Lisa Miller whose recent book is called “The Psychology of Spirituality,” totally my vibe. In it, Miller mentions Matthew’s 6:10, "Thy will be done." When I got home, I googled it: A submission to something greater than yourself. And then took out my colored markers and drew it as I usually do when words speak to me, multicolored, and placed it on my altar “to soak.” There’s something in it about surrender that isn’t passive, but also isn’t active, it’s simply knowing, believing, trusting. Releasing the grip without releasing the belief. Letting what’s meant arrive instead of forcing your way to it.

About an hour later, I got a reply to one of my many book queries.
“This sounds very intriguing. Please send me a full proposal.”

Thy will be done. This Spring, I’m believing.
With love from my den,
Olivia

PS — There are many more dating diaries in the archives. Tell me in the comments what you want to read more of — the stories, the patterns, the before and after. And I’ll keep sharing.

PPS — When I find myself gripping, I repeat some of my favorite mantras for surrender below. More here.

My history of sexual trauma, from a young age, outside my home created even more confusion internally. Because when you experience violation like I did, you are chosen — but for the wrong reasons, by the wrong people. You forfeit your sovereignty. You know it’s wrong, and yet it happens. You are likely silenced. And then chosen again, sexualized and traumatized, by the same type of perpetrator. I didn’t know it then, but I kept finding versions of what I’d already lived.

It feels strange then to share sprinklings of past dating diaries that were highly sexualized, but that shows the pattern. That energy got me picked. And in those dynamics, I never dated to date, I was husband hunting, not hobby, another business I committed to, with stealth like precision. Another distraction I dissociated into.

I never asked myself if I liked them, I only wanted them to like me. I gave all of me — my heart, my longing, my body. Performing, playing a role. Sometimes sweet, sometimes unavailable, sometimes the vixen, hoping they would choose me. And the moment they did, the moment I let them in, everything changed. No more cat and mouse play, no more chasing, end of pretending.

I’d blacked out the memories of any trauma consciously. Choosing the patterns unknowingly. Until the world shut down. Until I dated a guy who I wasn’t interested in but insisted, after reading my blog “Love over Fear,” Why can’t you just admit you’re afraid of love? That you want to be taken care of? He challenged me. I submitted. That same guy was the one who insisted on intimacy before I was ready. But unbeknownst to me, my NO was taken decades prior. Afterwards was the question, “Did something happen to you?’ My body answered before I did. That pattern led me to the truth.

50 First Dates was the series I wrote for a while. No filter. We date mirrors, reflections into ourselves. But there was sadness in the space between. The words. The thoughts. The emotions. The empty. Longing. Reading them back now, it’s wild on how much emphasis I put on how I looked, the outfit, the destination, without ever having asked the most important question, “Do I even like him?

This was me in New York City, before I had any memories. How I used to write, chase, live, fall in love — or the idea of it. Below are two moments in time.

Stan 2015

I was trying to take care of him while also desperate to be taken care of. We were both living in the grey. Mirroring each other’s unworthiness. Eight months in I wrote him a letter. Or wrote myself one and sent it to him. I told him I was bored of the grey area he kept me in. What I didn’t say, what I couldn’t see yet, was that I’d chosen it too.

We met in 2015. Setup by a then mentor. Someone I looked up to, revered, admired. He was a former employee for her husband. Big wigs in the tech biz. I trusted the reference. We met and dated at a strange time, both transitioning or thinking about it. Dreaming of something different, perhaps. Daydreaming. Him from his C-Suite big job that IPO’d down the road. Me from corporate hospitality, writing words on napkins of duality, which later became Box + Flow. He was an integral part, actually, but in my mind it was more of a fantasy. Maybe he could be the yin to my yang, my CEO to his CFO, like the ladies from SoulCycle. Maybe he would leave his big job and build a big business with me.

We dated for 10 months, congregated on Fridays over roast chicken. I’d never seen anyone eat a chicken like him or like me for that matter. Our Friday nights were spent silently fighting over the neck and tailbone, after knowingly sizing each other up before taking the thigh or the wing. This guy cleaned breast bones with his teeth, like a savage. Our chicken eating abilities kept us together for some time, a weekly ritual that was rarely interrupted, until it was, which was when I finally knew our (desperate for) love story was coming to an end.

The first chicken I roasted him was delicately stuffed with black truffles and served alongside shaved vegetable salad, sauteed brussels sprouts and wild mushrooms. We lit Shabbat candles, I chugged half a glass of red wine, and asked, “Am I your girlfriend?” He nervously answered, “I guess so,” and then went after the bird. A roast chicken is intimate. Eat with your hands kind of aggressive, savagely sexual lick-your-fingers-clean kind of intense. Carnal. And carnivorous. And simultaneously communal, a gathering. And gathered we did, for just shy of a year.

Somewhere in between I demanded date nights. I wanted to feel sexy, beyond tending house and stuffing chickens near Charlton street. He obliged. I had my hair blown, white patent louboutins on, and a long silk dress. He was late to pick me up in a taxi on Spring and surprised me for shots and beers at Extra Fancy in Brooklyn, to let me know I was Extra Fancy.

I went to get an IUD for “us.” I didn’t want hormones or metal in my body. And he didn’t want to use protection. Why did “his” wants always outweigh mine? At the doctor’s office, I passed out. The pain, the discomfort of someone inserting something in me. My body rejected what I knew I didn’t want. When I came back to life, pale as a ghost, I hopped off the table, sans IUD and ran to meet him and my then business partner at a potential Box + Flow location. Dissociated from my body and heart, desperate to be someone. To build something. To matter.

Feelings dwindled as time passed. Our roast chicken Fridays evolved into movie theatre Sundays, followed by roast carrots and cocktails at Maialino with less conversation, less connection, and even less intimacy, except for the sex in the Gramercy Park Hotel bathroom after. Desperate to hold us together, I did what I knew to do, and led with my body. Even if I disappeared during. Giving him what I thought he wanted. Maybe what he always wanted. A body. And I wasn’t in mine, so it didn’t matter. I didn’t know this until years after.

He’d moved into a new place when we met. Hadn’t unpacked. Lived off coffee cups from local coffee shops. Paper cups. Empty whiskey bottles. Takeout. Before we broke up, I bought him a set of pots and pans. Home. To build a home. He never opened them. Until I left. He showed up at my office and left a gift. Bought me a dress. Sent me a note that he’d unpacked the pans. I’d already moved on.

Stan was the guy who called me just before I signed my first Box + Flow lease. I’d gone to the landlord’s office without a lawyer, frozen, crying, but convinced myself I could push through. He called right before I signed, “My lawyer just redlined your lease. Leave. Now.” Right on time. I left. And then stopped looking for sometime. Decided that I could be Stan’s ride or die. That I couldn’t have it all, couldn’t start a business and have love at the same time. Until I realized that if I had to choose, I had to choose me. “I love you but this isn’t working,” I said to him at his Mom’s 80th in Cambridge. And ubered back to New York City to see another space, the following morning. And weeks later, signed my first lease at 55 Bond Street.

“He” 2018

There was a spark. But no slow burn. The fire wasn’t even lit, not really. A lot of ego, hope, desperate to be chosen, when everything about him spelled out, not ready to choose anyone, really. Playboy energy. But I liked that. I looked for unavailable to mirror my emotional unavailability. A game. Him vs me. Until I liked him. Maybe. The idea of him. Even if he wasn’t all that nice to me, when I look back. Maybe he was as nice as he could be. Maybe that’s why I liked him.

He slid into my DMs on my birthday and asked me to dine in 10 days. It felt sexy until he suggested we meet in the park, to which i replied, “not today.” My outfit did not bode well for park benches, nor my shoes for long walks. I sauntered towards him in a sheer slip and strappy shoes to our shifted destination i Sodi, revealing a sophisticated palette for a man in pink suede slippers. Within 45 minutes he told me he could love me, his bold footwear matching his expressive tongue. I laughed, but loved it and swallowed every syllable, while swallowing his impressive order pour deux: mache salad with parmigiano, spicy rigatoni, bone in fiorentina, mezcal negronis and amaro to end. He didn’t live in NYC but kept a place to keep him company. First date ended with running in the rain and happy birthday songs over vanilla Haagen Dazs and amaro while staring out at the summer streets through the Dutch Soho windows. Date one turned into four consecutively, a magnetic pull I hadn’t felt in a while. I leaned in.

He invited me to a party, he was cooking for friends. I spontaneously floated into his flat in neon blue Jimmy Choo and silk dress showing just enough skin. I said hello as he seared steak from the Japanese butcher on Great Jones and before long one drink turned into four hours later. As he played host, I watched coyly from the corner of my eye. Friends joined me to get lit, laugh and leave before midnight. On my way out, he excused himself from his harem of low level catalogue models moonlighting as massage therapists to ask why so soon. Beauty rest, I replied and confidently grabbed him to mark my territory with my tongue in his mouth as said onlookers looked. Exit stage right.

He phoned energetically the next morning and asked to join me for yoga. Sundays are for solitude, but I was drawn to his darkness and 90 minutes of heated flow side by side. An environment I was confident in. A challenge for him. Third date at Jacks Wife Freda led to our intro to intimacy. Lets just say he took care of me. And then I took myself home.

Monday arrived with revived energy, multiple meetings, and no time to daydream. Between teaching class and taking calls, he called to meet for coffee. Not in my working agenda but he was leaving town for 10 days, so I dragged my home office to his place while he packed. There was a strange comfort in shared silence as I voraciously took charge of my to do list, typing away on my laptop as he tidied house, with sporadic communication and no need to communicate at all. Solace in silence with a stranger is rare. Before leaving he swooped me onto his bed where black mascara lined his white pillowcases. Red flag. My lashes are much longer, I declared, and kissed him goodbye, until we meet again.

Two weeks later, we did. He flew me to his city where I arrived with an open mind and only 4 pairs of shoes. I slipped on a short dress to slurp spicy thai noodles as electric energy consumed me, controversial conversation confused me and copious cocktails lubricated any first night nerves. Back at his house, I cozied up on the living room floor, enveloped in the rug as he enveloped me. Uncovered floor-to-ceiling windows did not distract my desire. I demanded he f*ck me for the first time. It was cathartic and fulfilling enough to do it again and again the next morning. Afterwards he made me breakfast fresh from his garden, sweet peaches and cucumber with hunks of white cheddar topped with fresh basil, olive oil, turmeric and cayenne. We ate with our hands before setting out to sight see. Deep talks held us over til lunch. We ate ice cream that melted almost as fast as we could eat it and went lake swimming before devouring each other again. That evening I flew back to reality but it wasn’t long before text messages poured in of pictures of peaches asking when I’d return. I found cans of canned fish in my purse as a sweet gesture of some of my favorite things stashed away from him. I melt anchovies religiously, and he was simultaneously melting my heart.

I felt it. Something deeper than what it was. Fantasy. Possibility. I softened, let him see me. More than a weekend. I didn’t question it. I leaned in. Opened up in ways I hadn’t in a while. And attached, anxiously. Not to who he was, but who I wanted us to be.

The following weekend he flew in, but something changed. His stories felt like half truths. It was all on his terms. I sweat it out at Higher Dose, threw on something sexy underneath something sexy and headed to his place. We got high on his couch and held each other before heading to Augustine. The chef cooked us a dry aged ribeye and sent over champagne. We overzealously ordered mezcal negronis and amaro with dessert. The gratis cocktails turned a few into five, four more than my alotted limit and we stumbled home to drunk sex and more the next morning. Grey skies, light rain, and heavy energy penetrated his hollow walls, heavy on my heart as my gut brought clarity to my head. And as Madonna’s melancholic Power of Goodbye hollered from his Sonos speakers, I knew this short lived love affair was coming to an end. The lyrics “your heart is not open so I must go“ prompted my departure and echoed in my ears as I walked home in the rain, finding small celebration in the self provided sweet nothing in my purse. A mini banana laffy taffy for breakfast, to fill the emptiness in my belly as I tried to make sense of it all. I pulled myself together to teach 10:45am class and manage teacher auditions after, but my emotional lethargy hung heavy as my hangover seeped in. Mid mock class I excused myself to the loo and puked my brains out. Empty. I think I let go of him in that moment. And the 5 drinks too many from the night before. I had to protect my heart.

I remember thinking, “Who hurt you?” Funny, I didn’t ask — who hurt me?

And as I pulled back, he leaned in. His ego had a hold of me. I let it. For two weeks longer and one last adventure my intuition warned me to cancel but I will never stop believing in happy endings. He suggested I wear something casual. A faux pas to suggest what a woman wears without warrant, and if my man is flying in for dinner, the only casual will be my casual desire to keep him company. So I slipped out of the shower and into a black cut out onesie, weather permitting no outerwear and me permitting no underwear. And no reservations, we slipped into 4 Charles prime rib for carnal consumption, ate meat with our hands, and ravaged each other after, ferocious from start to end. Melancholy morning music, hot yoga, and brunch at ATLA before he flew home. He texted me throughout his journey, and then disappeared for two days, days that felt dark. His grip was already too tight on my heart, so I called it quits. I sent him a note declaring my detachment and opted out of being his option. With a heavy heart and longing libido, I resigned.

The thrill of the chase, the ego of a boy, and the hopes we hold onto along the way. But I didn’t yet realize the power of silence. My hurt wanted to hurt him too. A few days following, I sent one last late night message, “As you make your way to your next conquest I suggest you choose your words more wisely. We all have feelings. Do not create false expectation to fuel your ego.” I wasn’t angry at him for being him, I was angry at me for not trusting myself from the beginning. But looking back, perhaps it was just me creating false fairy tale expectations about a playboy, his toys and his first date declaration that he could love me.

I feel almost a little shy now, reading these back. I wrote about sex so openly. And also so blindly. Felt so disconnected from my body. But dissecting them helped me understand them. And revisiting them helped me find compassion for the part of me that was so desperately longing.

But when you learn yourself, you learn to love yourself, cracks and all. And when you choose yourself, you don’t wait to be chosen anymore. First I was the pattern. Then I could see it. Then, slowly, I started to choose differently.

These tales were before I understood anything my body was carrying. And my decision to stop dating, to choose celibacy for the past few years was intentional: to redefine my relationship to myself, my desire, my body— to get clear on what I want. Present. Not giving myself away, dissociating for another. But aligned. This time, I’m the one choosing.

I’ve dated guys who made me promise I wouldn’t write. I’ve dated guys who secretly knew I would, and liked that. I might write about love again when it meets me. But likely not so overtly. The right love, this version of me, I don’t imagine I’ll have to work so hard at understanding. TBC.

xx
Olivia

I was in Miami Beach for two weeks. I wrote this when I returned and put it on hold. Because I wrote it from anger. I had to let that pass. Hold the younger parts of me that still felt unseen. Grieve what I didn’t get but needed. And then return to something more whole. More integrated.

Our cells hear everything. The anger, the sadness, the tired, the wired. For me, that looked like a body that started asking loudly for what I’d been quietly ignoring. And eventually, it got my attention.

When I returned to this post, this morning, it needed a reframe: not lack, just love. It always comes back to love, if you let it.

Lori Gottlieb said, “We marry our unfinished business.” This business, these feelings. I was determined to finish.

I sat down to write something light. Dating diaries, New York, old memories. Instead, I found myself back in the same place I've been circling for years: my father.

We don’t date (or marry) people.
We date what love felt like the first time we learned it.

I’ve been writing about my dad for years. We are two sides of a coin. Leo. Big-hearted. Big feelings. He was in the meat business. Desperate for his attention, I was a vegetarian until I was 23. Clever child. He loved my cooking, so I went to culinary school. His entire existence was work. With good reason. He wanted to take care of his family. And as an entrepreneur, I built my life the same way.

And then I dated men just like him.

Two weeks ago, I wrote: Will you stay in Aspen? The real question is, will you stay inside yourself? And somewhere in the weeks that followed, I realized, parts of me don't want to hold onto this anymore. Wherever I am, I’m home.

My dad is old school. Real old school. Kindhearted, quiet. Not one to call and ask how you are. He gets his intel from my mom, who has octopus arms. Four kids, grandkids, a million jobs, ten hobbies. And yet I know my dad loves me, undoubtedly. He just lives inside his own mind. His fear, his worry, his internal reckoning. His own meat grinder. I know because I recognize it. Leo's in our den. Ruled by the heart, but sometimes hiding. But the flex is to come out and play.

The other day, on the phone, my wise middle brother said, “Olivia… you’ve been saying the same thing for five years.” And he’s right. I can keep carrying it. Keep finding new ways to explain it. Keep pointing to where he fell short, and how it shaped me. Or I can write a new story. Grieve it. Forgive him. Let it go. Move on.

That same trip, I grieved. Furiously. The inner child in me was raging. Anger first. Then the sadness underneath, then the grief. Grief for what I didn’t get. For what I kept trying to earn. For the versions of me that kept choosing the same love, hoping for a different ending. I had to let her feel all of it — her being the younger version of me, teenage me, present me. Not fix it, nor bypass it. Not make it pretty. Just feel it. And let it move through me, slowly. As I stayed with her, undistracted, entirely present, the charge began softening. Not because anything changed outside of me. But because I finally cared for the parts of me that needing caring.

Two weeks in Miami Beach. My dad didn’t say much of anything. I blamed him, or brought it to his attention, and he spent the day with me. When I left back to Aspen, it was confirmed, he really didn’t feel well, another health scare, and also why he was extra withdrawn this time. My wise brother yet again said, “Olivia… that’s what old men do. They don’t talk. He doesn’t talk to me either.”

I wish he’d talk to me. And listen. Like I listen. I wish he’d ask me questions, asked me questions all those years. I desire his curiosity. His presence. And then I settle on knowing, I’m not going to change him, but then remember, I already did. Two years ago, I got him walking daily. He called me often to tell me how much a simple morning walk changed his life.

When I was in Miami, through tears, and some form of reckoning, I let him know how sad I was that he doesn’t show up differently. And since, he has. He calls, even if its more butt dial than intentional, and asks how I’m doing. That’s growth. Growth is possible whenever, wherever, at any age. In an 81 year old man and his daughter who finally stopped waiting, expecting, and instead finally said how she was feeling.

When I wrote about my New York moments the other week, I revisited the dating diaries I’d written. All the stories, but through a different lens. One who now realizes, how desperate I was for love, seeking everywhere outside of herself to find it. Pointing fingers at him, instead of looking within. Not because I was nasty, or even desperate, but because I literally didn’t know any different. I was dating my unfinished business.

I love patterns. My work, in myself and in those I work with, always comes back to patterns. Recently I've gone deeper into my own. My origin, my foundation, the beliefs that formed early. Particularly how I relate to the masculine. Because I do want love and partnership. And what I found, when I looked honestly, was a type. The same man, different faces. Chosen for his emotional incapacity, his success on paper, his status. Successful to the world. And just like me, desperately seeking the one thing I think all of us want: to be loved. How we experience that is different for all of us. How we give it, receive it. Or don't. Those values, those ideals, they're formed early.

I had a prototypical guy. I chose him and he chose me, likely for similar reasons. If they were too interested or too nice, I wasn’t interested. And when I became too interested, they pulled away. I preferred driven, successful, building, focused. And emotionally repressed. Absent. Stressed. Funny, my love language is presence. I want you to be present for me. Not presents or physical things. They’re nice. But I wanted the one thing my dad never gave me. Time. Attention. Presence. And yet I chose exactly the opposite, because I didn’t know how to ask for it. Because I was attracted to what I learned, early.

And then after a series of heartaches, I changed my prayer. I prayed for him: in he most surfaced way: Tribeca (close in proximity to me), drives a Range Rover so we can get out of the city, similar interests, and will actually do those things together. He appeared: similar upbringing, family. And he was the first man I’d ever dated that joined me in acitivity — running, yoga, hiking, travel. He surprised me with vacations, took me to faraway places to give me a break from a burgeoning business. But there was something missing. It felt right in every way and felt wrong chemically. I resisted him. I wasn’t nice to him.

On my birthday, my parents flew up to meet us on a trip. When I left the table, my dad said to him: “You can’t be so nice to her. She doesn’t like it.”

Following a heated argument, my ex told me.

I felt so betrayed by my father at the time. And it wasn’t until Miami that I realized the true reason. I learned early, the prototype for male attention my brain developed around, someone who presented as unavailable. Not someone who didn’t love me. My father loves me more than he knows how to express. And that gap, between what he felt and what I received, became the template.

So when someone did show up differently, open, available, kind, I didn’t trust it. It felt unfamiliar. Hard to settle into. Because part of me didn’t know how to receive what I had never consistently felt. And part of me had learned the hard way that opening too quickly, without discernment, can hurt just as much. So I stayed in the pattern I understood. Not because it felt good. But because it felt familiar.

My dad worked like a dog. Provided. Cared only about making sure his family was taken care of. With good reason. He gave what he had, how he knew to give it.

I remember two times my dad took me shopping. He bought me black Seven jeans when I was seventeen at Neiman Marcus Bal Harbor. And he bought me a Gucci dress for my ex-boyfriend’s homecoming in 2003. Black silk. A slit nearly down to my belly button. I paired it with crystal Christian Dior earrings that fell to the nape of my neck. A smoky eye and bubble gum pink patent leather Louboutins.

When I walked out, my dad said: “What the hell is that? Go put some clothes on.”

In a full Clueless Cher moment I said, “What do you mean? You bought it for me. It’s Gucci.”

He was with me but not present. I wore it anyway.

We don't choose unavailable people because something is wrong with us.
We choose them because that's what we learned love felt like.
The work is reorganizing your desire.

Look at your patterns. What was your prototype? Who did (do) you keep choosing, and who taught you to choose them?

It was never about the things. It was the quality time. I have three brothers. I’m the only girl. And the only thing I ever wanted was my father’s love and affection, my whole life. His health has declined. I fly to Miami often to make him dinner. Homemade hot fudge with his coffee Häagen-Dazs after. Quality time.

“I love you” wasn’t a phrase I heard even a handful of times. Hugs are a new thing. I’ve requested them. Held on tighter. Not let go. And now I get hugs back. And he holds on.

I’ve been writing about this for years, working through it. Here’s what came out.

2020

Dad, it wasn’t always a love story. Rather a really entertaining tennis match. Emotional, no doubt. Tears for sure. But I love you now more than ever. It took time to understand your love. To stop seeking outward to fill the love I sought from you. We are so much the same: focused, ferocious, intense, but all love. We play to win more than to play. I’m lucky to have learned your habits, so I can unlearn my own. When I got tired of hugs that weren’t hugged back, I hugged tighter. I changed my expectation around your love. And we changed.

Fathers be good to your daughters. Love them with all of your heart. Show them your love so they gravitate towards love. Let your love be available so they don’t chase unavailable. Always be available.

Dad, I will always cook you dinner, share my stories, hug you tighter. Even if it feels overwhelming at times. Love has no bounds and I will never stop sharing mine with you.

2023

In the last ten minutes of class, I found my seat in pigeon pose. Shin parallel to the front of the mat, back leg long. I bowed down to the ground and let Mother Earth hold me. Pigeon pose is a hip opener, and the hips hold a depth of emotion. When a waltz-like song came on, surrendering completely, from head into body, my tears just started flowing. My heart cracked wide open as the music took me into a vivid vision of my father and me dancing at my wedding.

I’ve long dreamt of the day my father walks me down the aisle. And it wasn’t until I left that I understood the depth of its meaning: Olivia, stop waiting. Stop waiting for the wedding to dance. Dance with him now. Tomorrow isn’t promised. Now is all we have.

2024: The Most Important Question I’ve Ever Asked

A whole week with my dad. Just me. I’d never spent a whole week with him solo. I didn’t want to get too excited. I’ve learned that expectation leads to suffering. So my best bet was to just arrive grounded, open hearted, and free. And ask: What would love do?

I wanted nothing but to be in his company. The greatest gift was just sharing, listening, spending time with the guy who still matters most to me.

In the kitchen one morning, I put my hand on my dad’s heart and asked him to close his eyes. The same heart where a pacemaker was put years prior. The same heart that flutters from time to time. I put my other hand on his third eye and asked him to breathe into my hand and breathe into his heart. We breathed together.

When he mentioned the overripe bananas the afternoon before my flight, I decided to stay another day and make banana cream pie.

“Dad, when I get married, promise you’ll walk me down the aisle,” I said.
“Of course, Olivia.” He replied.

After that week, he called me every day. He told me walking changed his life. Then came the health scares. Multiple surgeries. April through July 2025, life stopped.
A year later, still healing. Lots of hope. Lots of love.

I believe any emotion that comes up, or repressed energy that surfaces, does so because it doesn’t want to be stuck anymore. It wants to be released.

What blocks love? My answer is me. Not my dad. There's no blame to be had. And I'm bored of blaming. This is what I learned about love early, from him. Not on purpose. Because this is what he learned about love, early, too. This is how it informed my beliefs, my choices, my decisions. Any hurt I carry, any grudge I hold, it's only separating me from letting love in. From expressing fully.

I used to think I was afraid of heartbreak. I’m not. I’m afraid of not letting my heart break open. The body keeps score in ways we don’t always want to see. What we don’t express doesn’t fly off into the ether. It settles. And at some point, it asks to be felt.

Sometimes love is facing what you can’t change to honor what you can.

This is the permission I wish I’d found sooner: you are allowed to love someone fully and still grieve what they couldn’t give you. Those two things can live in the same heart. They have to.

Love lets the anger rage.
Lets the sadness be.
Lets the grief come.
And still chooses love.

I texted him last week: Every moment a gift. Don’t live in fear. Live in love. He didn’t reply. He doesn’t always reply. And then he went into another procedure. Prior, I texted him: Today’s going to be great, Dad. You’re so brave. I used to need him to be different. Now I just love him as he is.

He replied: Thanks Olivia. I love you.

If you’re still choosing the same kind of love, the same feeling in a different person, it’s worth asking where you first learned it and how it’s shaping what you choose now.

And then, simply, without blame or self doubt, ask:

What Would Love Do Now?
Love to you,
Olivia

Send this to someone you love.
Reach out if you’re ready to look at your patterns.
Stay tuned for a look into dating diaries from the past, next week.

Read recent posts here:
Body, Health, GLP1s, VO2 Max
NYC Makeouts, Austin Hideouts, Aspen
Hit in the Head on Collins Ave

Last post I left you with this: “Will you stay in Aspen? A normal question. But the real question is, will you stay inside yourself. And that question is also my answer. Wherever I am, I’m home. And I’m learning to live inside my home. And sometimes that feels really hard.”

And so, after said declaration, I was tested, naturally. “Will you stay?” In a world of distractions, staying inside yourself is challenging —trusting the body, allowing intuition to lead. But the body knows and the body shows. It protects. And it’s often the last thing to release.

Over the past few years, I’ve shared my deep dark journey to come home to myself, which I’ve moved through in layers: first the mind, then the nervous system. Now, back to the body.

For as long as I can remember, I didn’t feel at home in my body. Floating outside of it. Separate. Two different entities. And now I’ve brought myself to safety — real, chosen safety. But my body doesn’t know that yet.

So I dug in: I need to understand: functional medicine, bloodwork. DEXA scan. VO2 max. All the data points. On paper, from the last 16 months, lots of trends with upside, and yet my body was still holding on to everything. That’s when I stopped asking what and started asking why.

My period regulated, my hormones are pumping, my nervous system settled, but suddenly I felt fluffy. My pants wouldn’t zip, but my routine remained the same, I eat well, I work out, I breathe, I sleep, I no longer stress out. Nothing changed in my habits and yet my body was changing.

When the results came back, my lizard brain didn’t even look at the bone density. The only thing that stood out was the number under “weight.” Also the reason I’d delayed opening them in the first place. I haven’t known my weight for fifteen years. I turn around when the doctor weighs me.

For decades, the scale was triggering. Freshman year: 2x4 dorm room, two twin beds, mini fridge, microwave, and right at its feet, a scale. Obsessed with a number, defined by a number. Something to control, a goal to achieve. The body is the easiest thing to punish, to try and control, to judge. And yet the more we control it, the less it shifts.

My lizard brain said: just get the shot. Lose 5 lbs. Like so many other women on IG who are magically skinny. But my results came back 2nd percentile body fat, meaning only 2 percent of women my age share the same low rate. My lizard brain celebrated that too. For the wrong reasons. And then the truth: Low body fat isn’t ideal for women hormonally.

Then the VO2 Max to test how my heart rate and breath respond to high intensity. They put a mask on you and have you walk then jog on a treadmill in three minute intervals as incline increases. At 16% incline, running at 4.6 speed, my stats landed in the 99% percentile. Basically, I’m trained like a machine, for war, if something goes down, trust me, you want me on your team. I was made for that shit. Ready for anything. A gift of PTSD, and the wound of an over functioner.

When my bloodwork returned, everything mapped out, clearly. Fasted insulin compared to my VO2 max, the doctor called it out immediately: “You’re conditioned as an athlete, your body is under stress, and you’re not fueling like one.”

Not surprising. When I feel puffy, I eat less and move more. My body still senses stress, even if I’m not running anymore. Are we safe? My body asks. It doesn’t believe it yet. It’s still sensing threat. And what does the body do under stress? It holds onto everything. Hormones, estrogen, everything tightens. I can feel my body gripping.

The age of skinny. Microdosing GLPs, which is not an option for me — if I lose more body fat I lose body function. And yet the last thing someone wants to do when they’ve gained weight is eat more.

I’ve tried it though. Peptides before they were cool — 2022, BPC 157, Ipamorelin for body compositioning. When I felt fat, shocker, in 2023, I ordered some shwag semaglutide from SkinnyRX via Instagram ad, a call center with a 305 number, but India. I injected myself thrice, but within a week lost all interest in food completely. Woof. That shit is crazy. It really took the joy out of eating. Ie, these drugs work, obviously, but for someone who enjoys food, it is not the way forward. I love taste, touch, texture. I love preparation, to entertain, nourishment, passion. And I don’t deal with food noise. I deal with a limited belief that still wants to be smaller. Or rather, I did, until I checked myself this past week.

GLPs have changed the game for obesity. But they are a bandaid. They don’t ask why. More costume than healing. That’s like moderating your drinking instead of asking yourself why you always drink to numb. Or the epidemic I speak to most often, dissociation disguised as success, working to prove worth instead of asking yourself why you feel so unworthy in the first place. No work or weight will change the way you see yourself fundamentally.

The wellness industry will sell you a thousand answers before it asks you one question. But the shot, the supplement, the protocol — none of it asks why. IM OBSESSED WITH THE WHY. Because from the why — from the root — you can actually understand what’s happening and create change that lasts.

Ok so you eat to dissociate. Why?
Ok so you drink to numb? Why?
Ok so you’re desperate to date desperate for external love. Why?

For a moment, I was brainwashed by the shot shortcut, but I never take short cuts. This age of comparison culture is crazy. And I fell into it? What the fuck.

I move my body everyday. My diet has always been the same: greens, fish, fat, avocado, sardines. I was a sardine fan long before it was hot girl food. Sweet potatoes, kabocha squash, egg whites, potato, dark chocolate. Occasional piece of sugar. Clean. The frustration when you do everything right. Maybe too right. I love feeling hungry, knowing my body is communicating with me and listening. Another reason a GLP wouldn’t work for me.

And I lived so many years distracted: In summer camp, I loved going to bed hungry, waking up in pain because I was starving. I felt triumphant, like I’d won some sick game. If I’d tough it out long enough, the hunger would just go away. Not feeding properly. Letting the mind dictate. Salad culture. Protein culture. Carnivore culture. How about body culture? Listening. Learning to trust the pings. The intuition. Treating your body like it’s someone you love. That simplicity is the entire answer.

I can look at all the IG reels talking about hormones, and thyroid but they never address the history — the cells that learned danger, that live in it long after the danger passed. A vast majority live in a body we learned not to trust. The stigma keeps people stuck in symptoms, the why goes underneath so you can understand the pattern.

For years before I understood my own history, I went looking for answers in functional medicine. The best doctors in New York City: Frank Lippman, Aviva Romm, Gabrielle Lyon. Some told me to get acupuncture and have more sex. Others couldn’t figure it out. Dr. Lyon knew immediately: she saw what I didn’t yet remember, but it wasn’t hers to remember, so instead she took me under her wing.

I was only reacting to symptoms with no context. Treating the what without ever asking the why. Years passed, and I dove deep. I still do: podcasts, panels, testing. Data points, modalities, experts. I aggregate information and then come to my own conclusion. Because the body always speaks, but the flex is learning to listen. First, I had to learn my history.

Fast forward, Covid 2020. I moved to Miami Beach for three months and for the first time, slowed down enough to feel my exhaustion: realizing that going to bed at 6P.wasn’t normal, but rather an underfunctioning thyroid and depression. Months later, I began psychedelic assisted therapy where the truth met me and started to understand why my body had been overcompensating for decades. The history, the assaults, the dissociation. A stranger in my own skin. Something to control, to manage, to fix.

My first therapy, my intention was vague but clear: reconnect me to my body and open my heart. By my fourth psychedelic assisted therapy, I became much more clear: Why did I always hate my body? What caused my eating disorder? And then I was shown — exactly. 13. Assaulted by a friend’s stepfather, just after having my period for the first time. I went home and threw up for the first time. I needed to get him out of me. I needed to get out of me.

My body remembered, and now so did I.

Eating disorders don’t come out of nowhere. You’re not born hating the skin you live in. That god gave you. They are a byproduct of something much deeper. In college, I became an expert at escaping myself. Bikram yoga to sweat my brains out. Straining solids from cans of Campbell’s soup. Blowpops from CVS, sugar to quell the hunger. Diet soda and mini candy bars from the dorm corner store. I treated my body like someone I hated, like someone who hurt me, without realizing, that it was always protecting me.

Even when I pass out. 2023. Austin, TX. Mia’s office.

Functional medicine requires bloodwork. Lots of bloodwork. For context, I hate bloodwork. Needles. I pass out. I go into subconscious memory. I turn white. They give me some capri sun chemical shit until I come back to life and then drive myself home with a snack, deep breaths, holding the younger parts of me that are frightened. It sucks.

Mia greeted me kindly. I sat back in the chair. “I’m not going to look,” I said. “Will you just keep talking to me?” She agreed.

As she drew my blood I repeated quietly: you’re ok, you’re strong, you’re courageous. I tell myself what I need to hear, sometimes served with a lollipop. Six year old me likes lollipops. Mia kept talking as I felt myself getting woozy. “Are you almost done?” She was only halfway there when my body gave out.

As I began to pass out, a memory surfaced, the blood draw triggering its release. The memory of being sexually assaulted by a cab driver in college. When I came back, tears were coming. And with them a blessing: my passing out was never failure. It was my brain protecting me. Saving me by not remembering for nearly 16 years. My brain hadn’t failed me. It had protected me.

Fast forward three years, I proudly declare, I haven’t passed out the past 3 times.

December 2024, I moved into a new high rise off of the highway, after deciding that it wasn’t time to get to Aspen. I signed a lease in the office as the movers waited outside. My body knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t think I had other option. Wrong. Within weeks, my glucose skyrocketed to 118. I was doing HIIT, 12mph treadmill sprints to deal with anxiety, not sleeping. Three weeks later, I broke my lease, manifested the exact house I’d wanted, found on Zillow one fateful morning after sleepless night of highway listening. And within months and the right supplements, glucose dropped to 99, inflammatory markers too -- homocysteine and cortisol all trending down. I was building my own safety internally. The home as a reflection of the home I’d built in me.

My body was responding to safety, not effort. The WHY.

When I think about the times my body exhaled, the weight melted, the nervous system breathed — I didn’t change anything:

when I moved out from my ex-boyfriend and broke up.
when I visited Aspen in the summer.
When i wasn’t controlling or bracing, just living.

Living here full time, I’d have thought my body would finally exhale. I feel grounded, safe, for the first time. But it’s still gripping. Still clawing before surrender.
Everything tightens before it opens.

For a lifetime my body was running on conservation and stress: elevated cortisol, suppressed hormones, high output, low reserves. When you start to exit that state, the body doesn’t go lean first. It goes safe. I no longer operate like that machine. But my body hasn’t caught up yet. The body is the last to trust the message.

That’s when I remembered a framework my friend Lauryn has mentioned called German New Medicine, which I’ve studied via Louise Hay’s work, “How to Heal Your Life.” It validated what I’d already felt in my body. Emotion = energy in motion. And what gets stuck tells the story.

Bone density loss in the lumbar spine: linked to self-devaluation. Feeling not good enough, not measuring up, carrying something you feel you’ve failed at. The spine is about how we hold ourselves up in the world.

Weight retention and the body gripping: the body literally padding itself against anticipated threat. Building armor at the biological level.

Hormonal system: reproductive conflicts relate to loss. Something deeply wanted that felt out of reach. Relationship to femininity itself.

This traces back to the root, not the story built around to explain but the cause itself. For me, it was age six. I’ve owned that truth in my mind, and am reconciling it in the body, true integration. Age six is when the nervous system makes its most fundamental decisions about the world. About safety. About whether you can be seen and held or whether you have to hold yourself. Those decisions live far deeper than memory, they live in tissue, in cells. And my diagnosis is exacting. Three decades of bracing stored in me.

My body isn’t sick or behind. It’s right on time for what it’s been carrying.

I don’t have a heart problem, I have an unexpressed love problem.
I don’t have a thyroid problem, I’m not using my voice. I’m unexpressed, after years of being silenced.
I don’t have a weight problem, my body has been protecting me.
I don’t have a hormonal problem, I have under function, after years of repression.
I don’t have a structural problem, I’m being invited to honor my strength and step into my power.

I stopped listening to my body a long time ago, with good reason. First I was shut off from it, then I punished it, then I tried to control it. Then I started learning to trust it. Now it has to learn to trust me. I’m not trying to fix it anymore. I’m trying to earn that trust.

God wants to give us abundance, to expand us enough to receive. But to receive you have to feel safe. To receive you have to feel worthy. We are only served what we can handle. When I was ready to face my suffering, I was served. Now I’m ready to hold my capacity. And my body is adjusting.

So I began somatic therapy alongside all the functional medicine. To let my body feel what it hadn’t been safe to feel. In tandem with my DEXA scan, deficiency in my lumbar spine, the sacrum, where we hold safety, worth, sexuality. As I sat in meditation, I pictured a glittery gold thread, honey dripping down my spine, my body rooting into the earth beneath me. As I let myself be held again, safe to release, and to receive. Safe to be.

My body began softening.How exciting! To work with the body, A whole new world of opportunity. A different kind of strength. Connectivity.

If something feels off, listen. Your symptoms aren’t random. Your body knows. It signals. It whispers before it screams. After the what, ask yourself why. The more you know yourself, the more you realize the answers were never outside you. Everything you need is inside.

This isn’t longevity maxxing. This is learning how to live. From the inside.
To trust. To thrive. I’m into it.
Love to you,
Olivia

Resources:
Dr. Shannon Ritchey
Kara Swisher x Dr. Eric Topol (SuperAgers)
Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
Superpower Health (similar to Function Health) I do not recommend this
Humanaut Health (had a wonderful experience, awesome data)
Louise Hay
German New Medicine

If you’re interested in somatic therapist or function mdicine recommendations, please reach out.

I’m often asked, “How’s Aspen? Is it forever? Will you stay? Or just a stop on the map?” I’ve had many stops on the map. My answer is always the same, “I don’t have the answer to that. I’m just here. It feels nice today.”

I’m coming up on my six month anniversary as an Aspen resident, one of only 6K year round residents. One thing I’ve always known: at some point, in some way, for some time, I’d live here.

I woke up this morning and opened my inbox, to Thursday Substacks flooding in. Simple things. I have zero issue bleeding my soul, sharing my deepest secrets and desires with thousands of strangers, clearly, you know this if you’ve been here a while, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that deep, I thought. So after I interpreted my dreams from last night, by candlelight, I sat down to write something light.
A city guide.
And then I didn’t.

I’ve lived in New York (11 years), Austin (5 years), Aspen (6 months) and I’m from Miami Beach.

NEW YORK

You move to NYC because you want to be somebody. You want to build something. A career. A platform. A wardrobe. A name for yourself. New York requires grit. Tenacity. It gives and it takes. Dreams are created and crushed everyday. It asks a lot of your nervous system. You have to be on. All of the time. Because you might actually get punched in the face when you’re not paying attention. New York is too hard, exhausting, expensive to reside without reason. Rent is high, space is tight, people are uptight and also awesome. It’s a rat race.

I loved living in New York City. I never thought I’d leave. I still dream of it from time to time. The filth of it. The smell of hot garbage wafting through the early morning streets in the heat of summer. Downtown, I only lived downtown, near Hudson and Spring just north of tribeca where most of the city left town on weekends. I loved the quiet of it. And the excitment of it.

All of it. I moved in the dead of Winter December 2009, not heart broken, just rejected and hurting from a not-a-real relationship relation. I’d graduated college a year prior, with little direction, worked for my Dad for a hot minute, which really meant getting his mail and getting him lunch, but I’d been obsessed with food. Eating it, not eating it, controlling it, and mostly the creation of it, the craft. I loved cooking for others’. I wanted to work at Food & Wine magazine. So I did what nearly no one with a pseudo managable disordered relationship with food would do, and go to culinary school. One spot opened and my Mom and I flew up, we found a sublet on Craigslist on Mulberry Street between Prince and Spring, walking distance from French Culinary Institute on West Broadway and Crosby and Equinox on Prince Street. One bedroom, furnished fully, green couch, part time doorman. It all worked out. Sort of. I cried when I moved in, I was so afraid of everything and yet, I did it. I put on my chefs whites, black and white checkered pants, silly hat, walked to school with my knife kit and went to work. Towards the end of the first six months, I emailed one of the editors of the magazine and she hired me to be a cookbook intern.

I was exacting with how I ate. Oatmeal or cereal for breakfast, very little lunch, meaning a blow pop or too and kombucha from the corner store, wreaking of pork chops, potatoes pomme, and egg souffle, all of which I never ate, just smelled of and smeared with, so that I could enjoy something delicious for dinner, after sweating for an hour or too in step class or HIIT class. When I interned, lunch became a cup of soup at Hale & Hearty in Bryant Park and a few pieces of double bubble gum, or a taste or two from the F&W test kitchen down the hall.

One night, fresh in the city, shortly after moving in, in the middle of a snowstorm, the streets were quiet, but I was hankering for my favorite dish. Chili crab from this wonky place in the Meatpacking district. So I hailed a cab. Fatty Crab served Singaporean street food. I didn’t realize at the time living on the cusp of Chinatown, I could likely get a very similar dish for 1/3 of the price and no cab fare. But I wanted to dig my hands into a saucy display of dungenness while it snowed outside, to pick it up and picnic, towels down, hands in, on my living room floor — like the Little Mermaid. Although her best friend was Sebastien and he was my dinner. I started talking to the manager, who was kind. We talked restaurants and culinary school and he gave me his number. I texted him one night and we went out for dinner, I don’t remember where, only that he picked me up on Mulberry Street on his skateboard.

Mulberry Street. Just after I began interning at Food & Wine, Torrisi opened. First of its kind, an homage to Italian American food but done right. Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone were behind it. Everyone was talking about it, especially Kate Krader, the F&W restaurant editor and Queen of the NYC food scene, was friendly with the guys. They were young and hot and one day, on my way to work, I decided to be bold and say hi. I was wearing a red Miu Miu coat and a polka dot dress and heals. I’m Olivia, an intern at Food & Wine, I live across the street, I just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood, I work for Kate, blah blah blah. I was shook by Mario’s good looks. His dark features, facial hair, maybe even his chefs whites. And then I left hurriedly, little shy, very giddy. And afterwards, for weeks, I wouldn’t even cross the street. Mario asked Kate about me, “Olivia the intern…”

The first time I had dinner at Torrisi, I sat next to Tony Bennett, dining solo, just painting. That was New York City. I was in awe. Months later I was hired as Chef Michael White’s assistant at 23, which turned into a Communications Director role and Brand Director of Altamarea Group quickly, and for the next 7 years. I took my work seriously and really didn’t want to date a Chef, or at least that’s what I told myself. My Dad often said, “Don’t shit where you eat.” Gross expression. Perhaps he was right. But there was electricity. I was walking home one night, on my birthday, I think, and he was standing in the Street. And from then on, for a while, I’d tell him we couldn’t date, but I’d pull him outside the restaurant while he was cooking to make out with me on the street. Our first date, he took me to Lever House for a multi-course meal for a chef he was auditioning. On my birthday, he brought slushies over from parm and took me to Peter Luger. He invited me to concerts — Jay Z, we had dinner one night with Aziz Anisari, but I think I didn’t let myself like him because he was so kind to me. I didn’t believe I was worthy. And instead I got wrapped up in something a lot more violent, emotionally, that led me to Mexico, on a rickety boat, to Puerto Vallarta, alone. But that dating diary for another time…

New York City. I moved with a dream. I made it happen — all of it. I had boyfriends and short love stories. I built a career in hospitality. I left the food world and opened a fitness concept. I signed leases, hired teams, built studios. I was focused, ferociously focused on being someone, on proving myself, on building. It was rare if not ever that I slowed down to ask myself where I was always rushing. It was always somewhere — running miles on the west side highway or Williamsburg bridge, boxing rounds down at Church Street Gym in Tribeca. Sweating my eyes out at Lyons Den Yoga or Tracy Anderson. I went from Michelin starred meals to dive bars. Running to my studio on Bond Street. Slurping mezcal negronis and bowls of saucy duck wings after teaching class at ATLA on Saturdays and Sundays. Breakfast at Grey Dog. Coffee at La Colombe. Red Breast Whiskey rocks at Ear Inn, my favorite. Belly Laughs at Broome Street Tavern or Tom & Jerry’s with some of my Box & Flow team. I fucking love New York City. And it loved me.

I dated all sorts of guys — sort of, mostly in finance. I liked the high powered guys. The ones who mirrored my emotional detachment, who defined themselves by doing, who hid behind their titles. I was just like them, but I didn’t know it. I was desperate for love but not ready for it. Because I was still trying … running, fighting, proving, striving.

In New York City, I travelled. To London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangtzou, Tuscany. Turks & Caicos, Aspen, DC, Sonoma, Napa Valley. I shot a spread for Box + Flow in Malibu for Cosmopolitan Magazine. I was on the Today Show, featured in Good Morning America, built a rolodex of contacts, built a deep bench and a big life, but much of it transactional. Surfaced.

And then, the inevitable. A global pandemic, a brand new 3-week old studio, and finally an invitation to leave. I never ever thought I’d leave. I miss the Matzoh Ball Soup extra green sauce at Jacks Wife Freda. I miss the random rendezvous, the energy. I even miss the empty Covid streets. I miss the community, and the deep lonely of being so busy, surrounded but alone, entirely. I miss the camradarie and the independence, the access, the opportunity. I miss the frequency, the convenience, and the chaos of commuting (no I don’t take the subway). I miss all of it.

But I had to leave to figure out what was inside of me. It felt impossible to slow down and go inward the chaos of the city that demanded I prove myself to be acknowledged, in the city I built myself. And a nervous system so attuned to trying. God wrote the words on my doors, “Everything You Need is Inside.“ I had to leave to understand what they meant because my New York chapter was lived entirely externally.

AUSTIN

Austin is a weirdAF place, sorry not sorry. First, because its in Texas. Forgive me, truly, but Fuck Texas. The laws, beliefs, restrictions. Why’d I move to Texas? God told me to move to Texas, and I said “What the fuck is in Texas?” That was the point. Nothing. I had to go somewhere so out of my nature, void of distraction so I could look inside me.

Austin is a playground. A collge town. Young energy. Peter pans, cowboys, with a touch of nature and entertainment: live music, a vibrant food scene — chefs who really appreciate their craft and can build something in a community that is open, and less discerning. Compared to New York, IMHO, everyone is less discerning, and less judgmental.

I visited a friend before I moved. She hosted a Hannukah party. We made dinner. At the bonfire, I asked the gent next to me, “So what do you do?” He said, “You mean for work?” That was my cue. In Austin, no one really cares. I needed to move where I could care less about my resume or pedigree or anything I’d externally defined myself by.

Austin is a vibe. It’s become more and more a scene. There is an Hermes and a Soho House. A Discovery Land property is opening. There was a mass exodus from LA to Austin. Up and coming tech scene. Money. Keep Austin Weird, as they used to say, is still kind of relevant, but its not as weird, and also maybe more weird. In the five years I lived there, I detached. I healed, I found a Shaman. I became one. I did a lot of plant medicine, but not in the way Austin does plant medicine — ie, at “Cuddle parties, and sex parties where people dose and then dance and then have sex altogether.” Austin has a lot of body odor and body hair. A lot of communities. Pockets of wealth and poise and fabulous restaurants, too. My favorite part of Austin is LadyBird Lake, and yet there have been numerous bodies found in that body of water which makes the energy a little off putting. The day I moved, on my last run, State Troopers were lakeside on horseback. That was new. And also the nail in the coffin. Austin locals lock to Barton Springs, where the water is magical. I’ve felt it, once. But the vibe is moreso renaissance fair at a public pool. More body hair and tattoos and acro yoga and fire breathing and NOTHING wrong with any of these things, just wholly not for me.

When I moved there, I was all out of sorts. You’d likely be too if you were 34, built a career, a personality, a life —- which you just left entirely, because the man you were dating asked you “Did something happen to you?” After intimacy, and then you began intensive therapy to remember not one but multiple sexual assaults from age six that shaped your entire personality: your fear of intimacy, your need to prove, strive, perform. When I moved to Austin, I was in shock. I was broken. I was bleeding. I needed to patch the wound. So I dove head first into healing, and also into further distraction: dating. My first week, I was still living at a hotel, still eating sardines and drinking IPA from the mini bar on the hotel floor, I went on back to back dates. I found the one guy who went to Penn, Jewish, in finance, familiarity. We dated a few months. On the night we broke up, I met my would become my best friend. It was easier to date then find friends. But he led me to her. And then she eventually led me to my next boyfriend who I’d date for 18 months. A week earlier I prayed, “Please God send me love, Ted Lasso minus the mustache,” and at a party, he showed up, in tennis whites, with a mustache. I wasn’t into him, cancelled our first date. Austin guys like acitivty. This one wanted to paddle board in the lake. I’m not a fish, I said, I’m a lion. He countered with a yoga plan. I said yes, and then hard and fast, we dove in. It was a mess. And filled with lessons. That would eventually end, very painfully. But it was all an act of magic. My best frienship would end too. The first sister I never had, who helped me feel anchored in Austin, for the first few years. Friendships ending are a different type of heartbreak. But you either grow together or grow apart. We were growing in different directions.

I moved to Austin to heal and to hide. And also experience a wild love story, intimacy as a teacher, a pivotal friendship, and build a relationship with myself for the first time. I built and became my own altar. I moved into a home I manifested, one that reflected the home I built in me. And I left. When I moved, I loved how small the airport was compared to NYC, how small everything was. When I was ready to leave, the only place in Austin I could stomach was the airport.

For me, Austin was a place of self discovery: A friendship, a love story with a cowboy with a mustache, break ups with both, met mentors, did plant medicine, built a cocoon, become the home I’d long been searching for. Then left to live.

ASPEN

I always felt most alive in Aspen. The ease of it. The quiet whispers of the mountains, the bird calls, the trees. Magic was different here, it was mystic, natural, serene. Different than New York City serendipity. Magic here is felt. Because the quiet allows you to experience it wholly. No distraction. I love Aspen for everything you don’t see. Not for the Kemo Sabe hats, Caribou Club, Mastuhisa. Not for apres ski or snow lodge or truffle fries at Ajax Tavern. Not for the instagram moments. Aspen is magical. The smell of it. The network of Aspen trees. The vastness of the mountains, the way it makes you feel so insignificant comparably to the wide open space, and similarly so present. Just here.

I love the ease of it. The airport only 7 minutes from town, the grocery stores like small shops, the familiarity. The trails, the activities. Hiking in summer and fall and winter. Skiing. It is one of the highest net worth and most expensive places to live and visit and I like that because it feels safe. I sleep here without fear. I walk without my nervous system needing to protect me. My mind is clear. My body is settled.

Living in Aspen is a dream. A quiet dream. I haven’t quite connected to community. I’m at a weird age, to be honest. 39 and single. And not single in the way that I’m open to date the 60+ Aspen type men who want a younger woman. I’ve met lovely women who have young kids and family. And like anywhere else, most young families hang out with young families. There’s a single scene here, but I don’t really go out much. There’s a yoga crew that is older, who I see often. I love that about Aspen. Everyone is active, healthy, vibrant, young at heart. There are the ski bums. They’re cool too. And there’s also a great deal of social climbing, that exists everywhere, perhaps here a bit more pronounced. It’s a transient town, lots of travelers. Quite the scene. But I love it most in off season, fall, and spring. I love the quiet streets. I love the peace. But is it forever? I don’t think so. I think its a moment in time. I think I moved here to let all the dust settle.

I walk or hike daily. I ski. I practice yoga. I stream Tracy Anderson in front of my fire place. I’m different. I don’t need a fitness class, or even want one. My brain and body no longer operate on externality or urgency. I don’t want to be inside. I want to be in nature. To listen. To breathe. To be. Aspen, to me, is peace. Or I’ve found my own peace, here.

MIAMI

I can’t say much, honestly. I grew up there and left for college. Had a quick few years back after transferring from Boston. And then moved. I grew up in an idyllic community, 40 minutes north of South Beach, 40 minutes south of Ft Lauderdale. A place where you live behind the gates, that has its own police department and city hall and private beach. The perfect place to raise a family. It doesn’t feel real. But once you turn out onto A1A, you’re bombared with reality, with traiffic, with chaos.

Without too much generalizing, here’s how I see it: Miami Beach is a scene filled with people who want to be seen, different than New York. A lot of trying. A lot of surgery, of “wellness,” but less well, more desire to look a certain way. A lot of noise and a lot of development. Bigger, better, more. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you desire that life. It feels more complicated. More flashy. I come from humble, really hardworking people. My whole family still lives there. I visit often.

My favorite part about Aspen wealth, is that the people who have it, you’d never even notice. To me, that’s success.

Every place I’ve lived, each chapter, demanded a different version of me. In New York, I was desperate to build to be somebody. I did that. In Austin, I needed to let that all go, and it was hard, to come off such a high, and let the ego die. In Aspen, I’m learning to be. And still trying to figure out what that means.

I’ve brought myself back to life, here. In nature. Which begs the question — what do I want? I’ve built boundaries, I’ve reclaimed parts of me, I’ve healed. And now I’m facing the deeper layers of Complex PTSD. The old familiar aspects of me that self isolate. The deepest limiting beliefs that feel unworthy, that formed at age six and followed me for the next three decades, the faintest whispers that doubt my capacity, the parts of me that still sabotage and hide. Because I do want love, I do want purpose — to write, to speak, to allow myself to be seen and heard, but this time, its coming from a different place, than all of the years, and places, and posturing prior. This time its coming from “I know,” not “I need.” From my heart, not my ego, and there is still pieces of me, that hold fear. The little girl that was assaulted, the pre-teen, the teen, the college student, and the older versions who dissociated from her own life.

I became a fighter, good at surviving. I’m still learning how to live, that its safe to speak, to share, to contribute and to desire. And in that safety, I’m learning how to show up, to connect, to relate. Because in my life, until a few years ago, everything I did was to survive.

But you know what’s so cool? Before I’d sat with my memories of sexual assault, or even knew I had “CPTSD,” I built medicine for my own ailment. I built Box + Flow, a place to flow through the fight, to face yourself to free yourself — because boxing helped me with my rage and yoga allowed me to slow down and feel into my heart. It reconnected me with my body. Out of my head. It was therapy for trauma I hadn’t even named yet.

And what’s so cool? That it didn’t only help me, but helped others.
And what’s so cool? That plant medicine found me when I was ready to face myself.

That my gym studio doors said, “Everything You Need is inside.” But it wasn’t until I was literally locked out of myself, my life, and the studios with a global shut down, that I was ready to actually search inside myself.

That a guy I dated asked me a question that led me to question myself.
That God led me to Austin.
That Austin led me to Aspen.

That Aspen has led me back to myself.

“Will you stay in Aspen?” A normal quesiton. But the real quesion is, “Will you stay inside yourself.” And that question is also my answer.

Wherever I am, I’m home.
And I’m learning to live inside my home.
And sometimes that feels really hard.

Not in Aspen, in myself.
To not self abandon.
To not give up.
To show up.
To believe that I’m worthy.
Of living. Of love. Of life.

Everyday.

Love to you,
Olivia

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I was walking down A1A the other morning when something hit me in the back of the head. Hard. I was shocked. Stopped. Looked to the traffic to my left. They stopped too. It was a bird. A black crow that hit me square in the back of my head. I took out my AirPods, Oprah & Arthur Brooks talking about the Science of Happiness, and looked around to passerby’s to confirm I wasn’t crazy. Confirmed. Collected myself, kept walking. But only about three feet, when I felt it again. Same bird. Same spot. I froze, then attempted running into the neighboring high rise. The doorman came out, then another one.

“There’s a nest nearby. She is just protecting her young. Come inside,” he said.
“I’m just trying to get home. Maybe I have to call an Uber?” I replied.

“No, I’ll walk you.” And he did.

My parents called me en route back from a show in Coral Gables, around 5P. “Let’s have dinner.” And so we did the same dog and pony show, where to go, batted options back and forth, except in North Miami Beach, pickings are slim. Houstons, Makoto, Motek are in rotation but are beyond exasperated after so many times and so many years.

And then I remembered a newsletter I opened the other week — I get this guy’s newsletter about all things Miami. It’s well done, informative, interesting. I knew him a million years ago in New York City. We both worked in hospitality. Funny enough, he gave me a book on Kabbalah, “The Spiritual Rules of Engagement,” funny enough, I still have it. It didn’t resonate at the time, but for whatever reason, I still have it— from New York to Austin to Aspen. And it’d take fifteen years for the teachings to align. But they did. A few years ago, I dove into Kabbalah. I don’t study it habitually, but I align with many of its lessons.

Anyway — I’d say he’s a trusted voice when it comes to all things F&B, and hospitality. He writes this Miami Beach newsletter: real estate, reviews, business, openings, closings. It’s informative. I enjoy it. And it has a New York edge, which when it comes to F&B, gives you ultimate credibility. This one email in particular, I flagged. Ezio’s: There is a Great Chef Cooking in North Beach.

I sent my Mom the link. “I don’t need to look at the menu, I trust you. Something new, lets try it.” We booked a 6:15P res, and ventured south for an adventure.

A few things that feel helpful upon arriving. It’s on a side street, no valet but ample parking. The outside is vibrant, colorful pink and green umbrellas for outdoor dining. The staff was happy to see early diners, warm. A big enough bar for solo dining or a drink. Large windows to let the sunshine in. A small dining room that fills up by 7:30. Kind, attentive, professional staff. Nothing sloppy. Very comfortable leather bucket seats.

My Dad is 81. And quiet. He used to love food. And my cooking. He had pretty major surgery a year or so ago that rocked our whole family. Nearly a year later, he’s still recovering. He doesn’t love food as much as he used to. But he participates. And everyone was hungry. “Bottled? Flat? Sparkling? Miami’s finest?”

“A shrimp cocktail please.” And then a bottle of flat. Most restaurants down here don’t filter their water. Tap is not Aspen Mountain Tap.

Once we were settled we asked for recommendations from the waiter. He arrived with a thick Italian accent, kind, poised, professional. Exceptional.

My mom said, “Olivia, pick for me. She always picks a wine I love.”

Vinho Verde. Effervescent, mineral-forward, easy.
The waiter offered his favorite. He offered us a taste. We tried that too.
But the first pick was the right pick.

“Can I share the format of the menu? These are my recommendations,” he said confidently. After he finished, I said to my mom, quietly, “Just as he trusts his tastes, I trust my own.

What if we all just trusted our own taste? Intuition. Clarity. And what if the cost of not trusting it is that we spend our lives performing instead of living?

The waiter was lovely. Italian. Wonderful at his job. Between the recommendations and the service, it hit me: he’s acting. I thought, he must go home and be absolutely exhausted for performing, on his feet, for hours, every night.

“I will bring over the presentation of meats.” The waiter said. “Yes, my Dad loves to see the meats” My family business is meat. I didn’t tell him that. My Dad takes it all in, but he doesn’t do the dry aged thing, it’s new age, and in his opinion, “moldy.” He looked at every cut — filet, strip, porterhouse, rib steak, lamb chops — and said to my mom: “Go over there to the dry aging locker, see the mold on that. You don’t want that.”

So I continued ordering. A delicious Caesar salad made with radicchio and bitter greens topped with dressing and a healthy portion of molica, or Italian breadcrumbs. Well seasoned. Branzino pan seared with a light pesto and roasted, plump, sun dried tomatoes. Japanese sweet potatoes, twice fried at least. And a perfectly seared filet. Medium rare plus. Pink center. “This is so yummy, “ I said again. To which my mom replied, every time, “It’s so good, so far.” Dishes wiped clean. When the waiter arrived to clear and offer dessert menus, I knew that’s when we were thru, but if bananas foster is on the menu, my Dad still gets a glimmer in his eyes. Cherries jubilee too.

But we’d already jinxed it. A bust, comparably to the deliciousness prior. And personally, I don’t ever order dessert because I make my magic hot chocolate before bed every night anyway.

When I was young, I wanted to be an actress. Musical theater. I danced, I acted, I sang. I was the lead in the musicals — granted, this was middle school. I went to performing arts camp for years. Perhaps I wasn’t that good. I gave up acting somewhere in between. Life had other plans for me. I gave up on my dream.

The waiter was playing a role. Doing his job. And good at it.

When I gave up acting and ventured into hospitality, I liked the theatrics of it. Setting the scene. All of the players, the characters, the set, the lighting. The food is really just the accessory. The most successful restaurants make patrons feel something. They want to be there. To be seen.

No different. We’re no different. Except now, I see differently.

Four or so years ago, I asked an ex-boyfriend: if you could go back in time, what would you pursue? And then he asked me. Would you go into acting?
I thought about it briefly.

“No, I said. I’d rather tell the truth.” There’s no pretending for me. I’ve tried. And every time, my body tells me otherwise.

The craziest part about acting is — we don’t even know we’re doing it. I didn’t know I was acting in relationships, even though something always felt off. I didn’t know I was walking on eggshells with my family. Being small. Not taking up space. Staying quiet. Even when it never felt right. I didn’t know in my jobs I was playing a role. I didn’t know. Until I did and realized what it cost. How much energy it took. And what it feels like not to. I can’t do it anymore. That’s why I always found the truth in writing.

We’re all acting. Buying cars for status. Posting so people can see where we are. Doing things so we can say that we do them. But are we actually there? I started thinking —
What is left when you take all of that away?
Who are you without the masks? Not the personality, not the roles, not the titles. Just you. Sometimes that happens by force. Covid, global shutdown, for example. People lost their minds when they lost their routine, roles, titles.

And this also happens in every day lives. You break up. You suffer loss. And perhaps in that, you gain. You realize how little you actually need. How exhausting —- all of the pretending the trying the forcing the fighting the posturing.

And sometimes, it happens by choice. There is a catalyst that prompts you to question your existence. And so you get quiet. You spend time alone. Nature helps. Stillness. Movement. Prayer. Solitude. To reconnect to the part of you that you stopped listening to — to keep up with the crowd. You wind down, void of distraction, and return to you.

And then maybe you ask:

Who am I from here?
What does my body want?
How do I move?
How do I speak to myself?
How do I want to spend my time? To contribute?

I just read Belle Burden’s Strangers. A memoir about her marriage to a man who may have been a stranger the entire twenty years they were together. And she too was a stranger in her own marriage. Became a version of herself that wasn’t her. She was acting. Playing a role. Without even knowing it.

I loved her book. It resonated. And it gave me hope for my own publishing journey. Not to mention that the rights were just sold to Netflix, Gwyneth Paltrow is playing her character. And I just saw her interview on Oprah yesterday. Dreams.

In my life, I was acting too, I didn’t know it either.

Much of my life has felt like a movie — one I’ve now relived many times, scenes I’d never want to be in. The plotline reads like make believe. I thought of writing a novel instead. But every novel is based on some truth and this story has no make believe. I hope it gives hope to anyone suffering in silence.

But you can’t write a story from inside the story. I started writing when I started healing. Writing got me through. But simultaneously, for years I sought advice on what this book should be — memoir, narrative nonfiction, self-help. I asked everyone. I paid thousands of dollars to book coaches, book doulas, book professionals, and I was met with: “memoirs are hard to sell unless you’re a celebrity.” True.

So is becoming Brand Director for a Global Hospitality firm, opening 18 restaurants worldwide at 23. Or opening a first of its kind fitness concept in New York City with no experience. Or waking up at 34 and realizing your entire life has been a series of unfortunate events and instead of falling into addiction or continuing the pattern, you save your life.

I tried to make it self help, narrative non-fiction, fit a square peg into a round hole. I tried taking others’ advice, to let rejection not affect me. I kept pitching. It’s not dissimilar to actors. You get rejected until you don’t. Like Paul Anthony Kelly — a model with no acting experience who almost didn’t get seen, until he did. And then he was JFK Jr in FX’s Love Story.

Rick Rubin always says let the work work. Let the art speak. Create it and let it tell you what it is. It always came back to personal story. To memoir. So my work was to stop pretending it was anything other than what it was — regardless of how many book coaches told me what it should be to sell.

So I did it, myself. I finished my proposal. And much of the manuscript. My words. My story. A few days ago. This time with no coach, no peanut gallery, no have to or should. My own.

Perhaps same can be said for love, for which I haven’t yet experienced, but I’ve not given up entirely either. I talk about it. I pine for it. But I also haven’t really stepped back in the ring yet. I’m still hovering on the sidelines, hiding a little bit. I said I’m ready to date. I went on a date. I haven’t been on a date since.

Likely it’s all the same. When I was acting prior — trying to be a version of someone so they would like me, pick me, choose me. I was indeed liked or picked, but they reflected my own insecurities. I needed to be chosen, and they needed to be needed, and it worked until it didn’t. Now with clear eyes, and truth — this is my story
This is the genre
This is the truth
This is me
No mask, no facade, no desperation.
Just me.
That truth will land with some and be repelled by others’ which is perfect. Because I’m not for everybody.

Yesterday morning I had a moment. Going through transcripts of all of my calls with my mentor over the past few months. Trying to pick up and pick out what I wasn’t seeing. What am I missing?

This is the part I have to find peace with. Not waiting. Not trying. Not healing. Not integrating. Living. The part I never did. Because I was always living in the past, trauma PTSD, or future, anxiety. Never able to be exactly where I am. Here.

Always booking to the next thing: Ending the trip early,
Pressing eject when things got murky,
Hiring another book coach to give me an answer
Taking a recommendation from another “expert,”
Bypassing my own intuition.

Instead, I just put on my sneakers and moved my body. The best tool I’ve had since before I knew I needed tools, Before I had memories, before I knew I had anxiety, that I lived dissociated. I just got up and moved. Out of my own way. Flow through the fight, like I used to teach at Box + Flow, from my mind. To my body.

And on the 7 mile jog down A1A, something hit me in the back of the head again yesterday. A big black crow. Same bird, for the third time. And I finally got the message. “Get out of your head.” And I kept going. Remembering all of the coaching I’ve served to others’ as a byproduct of what I’ve learned myself:

It takes as long as it takes.
If you want to go far, slow down,
Pace over race.

Stop worrying about what others’ are doing.
Marriage, babies. People I grew up with on kid #3.

Trust the timeline of your life. Know that God has a plan.
And good things take time.

When I hit mile 3.5, I crossed the street this time to loop back home, on the opposite side, away from the bird. To see my parents. To have a massage, to work the old energy from my muscles from my body, to release. Then to sit by the beach. Listen to the ocean. My dad on my left, my mom in front of me. To hear the waves crash and retreat back. To feel the sand in my feet. To be right where I am.

Being. Exactly where you are. Not performing. Not trying. Just here. With trust.

And for the first time, that felt like enough.

Love to you,
Olivia

It was really nice to see your name in my inbox -- I’ve always admired how you showed up and then showed in and focused on what mattered most to you with no shame or apology, just “me being me.” 

When I read your last line, “id really love a non-update update from you,” I was like hmmm, ok? Here’s mine.

I think I always wanted to be an influencer, build a platform, but when I wanted that -- I was desperate to be seen, before I had any recollection of 30 years of dissociation and repressed sexual assault, and all that resulted in my mind and body.

As I started healing, I still tried. To be seen, understood, heard. Because it felt like no matter how loud I shouted, no one was listening. 

I started writing, first a blog, 10 years ago because writing was the only place I felt heard. Words became my best friends. 

Box + Flow started as words on paper. I had no idea I was really going to open, operate, run a gym and then another one. I just wanted to create a feeling.
Words were feelings. 

When I closed my studios and began doing everything possible to first remember and then integrate my findings, writing was the only way I felt heard. Not understood, heard. Especially by my family. My voice had been silenced so many decades prior, I was still finding the courage to speak.

So I just kept writing. 

And in years of trying, exasperating, exhausting, I discovered very clearly: I no longer want to be an influencer or influence, because I’ve come to understand that 2D culture is not equipped for the depth to which I share or live. (no judgement just truth)

I don’t know how to condense a message into a 90 second reel, or put up something click baity without my heart bleeding to share more and ‘how and why and here’s how you can learn to heal and live to...’

It’s not simple. Nor can it or should it be.

So I kept writing. My substack has a 55% open rate. But the material is dense and deep that I rarely get response. Maybe the open rate is response enough, but I long to both share and listen, to co-create. But I live the truth, share the truth, after living in lies (my own, and those put on me and silenced) I can’t stomach anything but what’s real.

I will never give up on my dream to be published ... which is timely (not late) because anything prior would have been about trauma or healing, and this book—my work—is about LIVING, life. After all that stuff. What happens after, which I actually don’t think many talk about. I brought myself back to life. If I can, anyone can too.

But its been a really long isolating journey. 

I’m 39 and single. I feel love for the first time in my life. Not external. Love in me. I’ve healed as best as I can with my family -- and feel the deepest love and grief for time lost so separate from them, but also love so deep that I was never able to feel prior,
I miss them every moment. I feel so far away from them, and also never felt closer, because I’d always felt so far away from them. So much lost love and lost time.

 And still, extended family doesn’t speak to me, but I’ve made peace.

I left New York, box + flow, all that jazz, moved to Austin, fell in love or trauma bond, twin flame, broke up, healed myself. Became the version of me that has everything she needs, inside. Integrated, sovereign, whole, aligned.

I moved to Aspen, my happy place. And felt inner peace, true inner peace for the first time. But there is still lack -- not in me -- but in my dreams to write and speak, to share story to help others, to use my voice,

and also to live fully, in love. I dream of my husband, and maybe a baby. 

I miss my family (in Miami Beach) but fly frequently to see them. And still, it never feels like enough. But the feelings are ones I never felt, so I welcome them. I never knew this love.

I love being closest to God in the mountains, what a privilege to wake up and hike or ski. But friendships feel challenging. I end up meeting people and becoming their therapist (always younger versions of me), except pro bono -- because we meet as friends and then I’m not like, I’m $xx/hr. 

The work I do (energy, somatic, therapy, life coach, trained shaman blah blah) isn’t work many people want to take that deep. Maybe I’m even limiting myself with my speech. But I’ve learned that most are afraid of their shadow, their depth, darkness, desires, their truth. I swim in that space, willingly. Because that’s where all our treasures hide.

And so I go back to my words. And write, because I know there are hundreds of millions of people who are living in silence (shame, self-hate, addiction, anxiety, etc) and not just those with trauma, but those that live quietly dissociated, existing not actually living. Going through the motions, playing a role, playing a part — separate from their own lives, longing, past, present, heart.

I know because I was them, too. 

So my non-update update is that I’m choosing to keep faith, to walk by faith -- not by sight, that God has a plan for me. 

That the dreams on my heart aren’t there for no reason. 

That I’ve never wanted a huge gaggle of girlfriends. Just a few who can go deep. 

That my husband is looking for me too. 

That in a parallel timeline, perhaps even soon, my work is published -- not just one book, but a few. 

A long note. To someone I don’t know well, but also feel maybe understands all these feelings.  So thank you for inviting them and maybe even reading. 

What I know to be true more than anything is that -- I was given this story, the past, the present, and the future. And as hard and heavy and dark as it has been ... I wouldn’t change it. Because its mine. 

And I choose to believe there is purpose and light and love in everything, even the hard parts, which has been my majority. 

But I didn’t claim the phrase (from box + flow), “flow through the fight,” find ease through resistance, and keep going, for nothing. 

The title of my book, same as the words on my studio doors, “Everything You Need is Inside.” 

Big love to you

X

Olivia 
_____
If you have a non-update update that you feel called to share. I would be honored to receive it.

Go deeper, here.

Last week, my Mom visited and we went skiing. 50 degrees, bluebird day, hopeful that there’d be some snow to shred. There was. When the gondola doors opened, a man was perched with his snowboard. Attractive. Well dressed. South American. Great style, effortlessly chic. “I like your glasses,” I said. “Vuarnet. You can buy them at Gorsuch but wait until end of season.” We chatted on the way up. Easy. Natural. Casual. I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring.

And I also felt a little whisper in my body. Less longing, more quiet, excitement, curiosity. It’s been some time since I’ve felt that part of me, clear, present, thought provoking. “Hello,” I smiled to myself, noticing the feeling. “Have a good day.” And that was it, simple conversation with a stranger. No interest, off limits, just pleasantries. Less about him, more about me.

After three and a half years of celibacy, a ten minute interaction with a stranger on a gondola, a signal returned, light switch turned on, thoughtful information for me. Quietly. Cleanly. Less about celibacy, more about dating. My last date was Christmas Eve 2024, and prior maybe one or two since December 2022. It’s been a while since I’ve cozied up to that side of me. Two days later we walked into a restaurant in town for dinner, randomly, and a few minutes later, so did he, joining a group at the bar. This guy and his wife. She was beautiful. There was no thought from my internal peanut gallery except, “wow funny coincidence, I could see myself with that crew, and I like that energy.” No story, just admiration, the confidence, the cultural ease, the way he ordered his drink, his assertion. And the electricity of the entire group. Elegant. Classy.

Aspen has always been my mirror. Every time I’ve arrived here something has been revealed to me, shown, clearly, which is likely why I’ve been returning for years to feel a sense of closeness to the deepest parts of my knowing.

In 2020, I took my first solo trip — during shutdown, the town was quiet, and I came to celebrate my birthday, summertime. My studios were closed, the world was shutdown, and I ventured into the unknown, what I coined “My Surrender Experiment,” as I listened to Michael Singer’s book same titled, as I hiked up Ajax. I’d pinged an ex-boyfriend for some chocolate microdose mushrooms, the first time I really experimented with a psychedelic, literally micro nibble, and surrendered into something I had no words for — magic, nature, myself. There was freedom in it — on my own time, nowhere to be, no one to please. With me wholly, for the first time, maybe.

One day, on my way up to Ajax peak, I passed a man and his young son, in tennis whites. South American. Classy. Attractive. Elegant. Easy presence. “Do you go all the way up?” He asked from across the street. “Yes, it’s my favorite. Try it, trust me.” “But doesn’t it take like hours? Will we make it?” I looked at him thoughtfully and said, “What is two hours of your entire life? You’ll be so glad you did. Just go, and keep going.” Hours later, post climb and descent I was at Ajax Tavern, listening to bluegrass, eating a late lunch, phone died. Present. And I saw the little boy out of the corner of my eye. “Daddy, Daddy!” he said. “That’s the lady from the hike.” The father and son were joining his wife and daughter. Beautiful family. He jumped up full of joy and said, “We did it! We made it, can I show you the map of the whole way?” Of course, I said, wasn’t it great? They were so happy, so proud, and so was I. And then we went our separate ways.

I noticed it initially, less him more his energy. A particular kind of presence — cultured, grounded, comfortable in his own skin. I filed it away without understanding why. Nearly one month later, I dove into what would become my years long journey into me, healing modalities, moving cities, intimacy, as I relived dozens of repressed memories. That trip was my surrender before my life cracked open. The mountain had held me right before I held myself.

Same energy last week as I felt five years prior. My nervous system recognized something before I had language for it. Less pattern, more desire, coming back online.

My celibacy and no-dating was a strategy, an active choice to not fall back into old patterns. In the space between stimulus and response, we learn. I’ve been dating since I was 15. Sure there were bouts of singleness, but likely I’d be scrolling or swiping, to fill whatever empty I was feeling. I spent most of my younger years desperate to be seen, hyper sexualizing myself for attention I didn’t actually want, as a result of past experiences. Dating to get married, planning as many of us do. I removed it all from the table. I dated myself, fell in love with me. Without attaching to how anyone else saw me, viewed me, accepted me, rejected me. I cleaned and cleared the part of me that “needed” relationship, male attention, validation, to reignite desire within me. To understand what I actually wanted versus what I was performing, chasing, or numbing with. Fast forward, after a self imposed “NO” for years and also exploring what pleasure meant to me, there left space for curiosity. Curiosity is interesting: a space for listening. To turn on. To desire.

I wrote about aliveness in a different context, reflected by Bad Bunny, hip thrusts, and living unapologetically.

Sometimes culture shows us what we can’t yet say about ourselves, which leads me to Heated Rivalry. I avoided it for weeks, not in spite of but because of my curiosity. And that intrigued me. A show about gay male hockey players... interesting. I was curious because I didn’t know how my body would respond. And that not-knowing was itself interesting to me. Would it turn me on? If it did, why? What does that mean? When I felt clear, I turned it on — with curiosity. Instead of judging my reaction, I paid attention to it. My avoidance was information. My curiosity was information. My body’s response, the moments it reacted, the moments it didn’t, was information. Did it turn me on? There were parts where my body responded, but for the most part, no, I just found it interesting.

Watch it or don’t. But before you decide, get curious about how you feel about the premise alone. Where does it land in your body? Where’s the discomfort? Where’s the curiosity? That’s already telling you something. Because what we are triggered by — what we react to, respond to, avoid, obsess over — is simply information about ourselves. Desire works the same way. Some people feel desire and move toward it. Some people feel desire and judge it. Some feel it and numb it. Some obsess over it. Some repress it. The desire isn’t the revelation, the reaction is

Desire doesn’t disappear when it’s denied. It mutates. Intensity replaces connection. The body stops knowing what it actually wants and starts settling, hiding, performing. When desire is interrupted early, taken, shamed, controlled, confused with danger, the body adapts. It doesn't stop wanting, it stops discerning. Adaptation.

Enter, Wuthering Heights. The Oscars are this weekend — which is why these films are on everyone’s mind. Jacob Elordi. Margot Robbie. Lust, desire, obsession, rejection. There is a scene at the beginning. Robbie alone with her own pleasure, present, and then she denies it, ashamed, when her counterpart arrives. She doesn’t deny it because it’s not real — on the contrary, she denies it because of what she’s been told she’s allowed to feel. Because it’s passé or abnormal to feel into your own body. And then as a result, she denies the ignition she feels, the attraction to Elordi. The denial becomes obsession, possession, destruction. Real. The story and visuals are sensual in a feral way: bodies, breath, hunger, the rawness of wanting. Cracked eggs. Hands. Mouth. Taste. Touch. There is an aliveness throughout the movie, passion, which becomes poison as the mind keeps overriding it. Choosing what’s allowed over what’s true. The body rebels when the mind refuses it. Desire denied doesn’t dissolve, it gets buried but only surface deep. And grows teeth. Feral. Ravenous. Caustic. In this case, deadly.

I’ve viewed these movies and shows as someone who lived much of her life dissociated from her body, and now who fully inhabits it. Trauma removes, robs, pleasure. Leaves vacancy. Not just sexual pleasure. All of it. Taste. Touch. Music. Conversation. The simple ability to enjoy being inside yourself. When you’ve been violated, trusting your body again is the most complicated thing to bring back online. And this isn’t just a result of sexual trauma. It’s the byproduct of not feeling safe in your own skin, the epidemic I’ve discussed: high functioning, but vacant.

I’ve both worked with and spoken to so many women who carry this quietly: many are in loving relationships, married, parents, safe on paper, and still unable to surrender in intimacy, they don’t climax, unless they’re alone. They can’t fully receive pleasure, not because they don’t want to. Because pleasure requires safety. And this inability to find safety and surrender results in the desire to control — in everything, outside of the bedroom, the way they manage their bodies, control: what they eat, when, how much. How they move. Everything they do. Militant, high functioning. Dissociated. Controlling.

When the nervous system associates intimacy with danger, the body adapts. It disconnects. It numbs. It dissociates. For a long time vacancy felt safer than feeling.

Autopilot does the same thing. When you’re going through the motions, you don’t feel the ground beneath your feet or sense what your body is asking for. Those signals require presence, slowing down enough to listen. Pleasure lives in presence.

Control, dissociation, hyper vigilance, forcing, not feeling. It’s not punishment. It’s protection. And it isn’t only about who you’re drawn to. It’s in everything.
In how you eat, or don’t. Whether you taste your food or consume it on autopilot, standing over the sink, thinking about something else. Whether you let yourself enjoy it or you’re negotiating with it, controlling it, using it to numb or punish or perform. In the way you move, whether you’re running from something or moving toward something. Whether your body feels like home or like a machine you’re managing. In the way you experience pleasure at all — the cold air on your face on the mountain, the first sip of something that lands exactly right, music that finds the place in your chest and opens it, the feeling of being truly seen by another person and not flinching. Trauma taught us to leave. To numb. To manage instead of feel. To perform aliveness instead of inhabit it. But the body never stopped wanting to be here. It wants to feel. To move with joy instead of compulsion. To connect without bracing. To receive without fear. It wants to be alive, not just functioning.

I saw Hamnet a few months ago. Similar to Heated Rivalry or Wuthering Heights, I like to immerse myself in just enough pop culture to form my own opinion, particularly when something is lauded. Jessie Buckley won the SAG Award and I went to see why. Mid snowstorm. I pulled into the only open parking spot, because it was covered in a mound of snow, and got my car stuck. Luckily, three men were walking by simultaneously and pushed it out. I got to the movie just as the previews ended. And it was absolutely exquisite.

Believe it or not, I had no context. I had no idea it was about William Shakespeare, because it’s Hamnet not Hamlet. But the picture left me in awe, not for the story, but the world, the imagery, the visuals, the greenery. The forest, the hearth, the fire, the life tied to seasons, not schedules. As I watched, I thought, in another timeline, I’d choose that life: grow my own food, make medicine from the earth, move with winter and harvest, tend the fire, birth babies in the forest to play and roam, even homeschool, maybe. A forest witch. I’d like to be a forest witch. Perhaps I’m doing it my own way, albeit in Aspen. In the mountains.

I was moved by her. Jessie Buckley. There is a scene where she births in the forest, alone. Not because she has to, but wants to, because her body knows how, because she trusts her knowing. She is held by mother earth. She understands her body the way she understands the seasons, as something to move with, not against. She grieves in her body. She loves in her body. She creates in her body. This is the same current. Desire that draws you towards something. The creative force that builds something from nothing. The life force that grows a child inside you. The grief that breaks you open when something ends. It’s all the same energy.

Love, eros, longing, passion, desire. It isn’t just sexual, it’s the force that moves towards life, creation. And the female body holds it all simultaneously — death, life, pleasure, passion, grief, renewal, all cycling through the same vessel, just like mother nature. What creates also destructs. As shown in Wuthering Heights. When we shut down one part of the entirety of the human experience, we shut down all of it.

Women with big feelings are often called dramatic, sensitive, bitchy. Ironic, really. Mother Nature doesn’t try nor lie, she just feels and holds everything. And yet, in our current culture, women are actually trying to be less feeling: between GLP-1s to keep us smaller, beauty standards less beauty and more boyish, plastic surgery on the rise, botox to freeze expression, no judgement, just observance, we’ve flipped our desires to fit. Me? I think I want to be a forest witch. Sexy, fertile, feral, longing, in sync with my body and mother nature, simultaneously.

Heated Rivalry revealed my curiosity without judgement. Wuthering Heights opened every sensory part of me (gosh, Jacob Elordi), and Hamnet reminded me of the beauty that is innate within all of us, in tandem with mother nature, reflecting the beauty of the cycles of life. And the man on the gondola reminded me of my own instinct in real time, real life, in my body.

Desire is the opposite of dissociation. You can’t be vacant and feel desire at the same time. The moment desire returns, the body is telling you something: you’re back.

After I dropped my Mom at the airport, I hiked to my favorite rock. Sat and felt a wave of clarity come through me. The feeling arrived quietly. “I’m ready to date.” My heart said. Not in theory, but ready in my body. And then I asked: dating apps? Hinge? Raya. Nope. My intuition and God said, just trust. Not from loneliness or searching. From fullness.

The gondola showed me what regulated desire actually feels like. Calm. Curious. Present. Informational. I noticed him. I felt something. I respected the boundary without effort. No drama. No grief about what wasn’t available. I saw his wife and thought: she’s beautiful. I want that. Not him. That energy.

Desire: your reaction to it shows you where you feel alive, where you feel unsafe, where you feel deprived, and where you still dissociate. Not what you say you want. Not what you post about. Not what you think is healthy. The question isn’t what turns you on, it’s how you relate to what turns you on.

Do you chase it? Judge it? Numb it? Obsess over it? Repress it? Or can you feel it, stay inside it, and still choose clearly? Can you find safety enough within your own body, your own self, to trust desire when it arrives? Not conquer, leak or withhold it, but understand your relationship to it. Your body.

Desire is innate, natural, raw, real. And the opposite? Repression, obsession, dissociation. Confusing intensity for love. Escaping from your body for the sake of another. The return to desire is the return to life: To the body that births and grieves and creates and mourns and wants and loves, all from the same source. The return to you.

I said yes to a date tonight. He’s not my husband. I know that the way I know everything now — not in my mind. In my body. But I said yes to being pursued. To being seen. To showing up and feeling what’s there. With curiosity. That’s the return.

Stay tuned.
x
Olivia

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