Welcome!

THE WEEKLY EDIT:
Wearing: Stella & Linda
One of my close girlfriends, Monica Rose, is a celebrity stylist who also runs a great online store. She primarily sells vintage but also sells accessories and I recently bought her Stella Earrings and Linda Sunglasses (wearing above) after seeing her in both - I haven't stopped reaching for either. Total wardrobe refreshers.

Eating/drinking: Flavored Sparkling Water
I was never much of a flavored sparkling water drinker until this pregnancy but now I can't get enough! I can't stop reaching for:

• Nixie Sparkling Water in Strawberry Hibiscus and Grapefruit
  Nixie is my favorite of them all! It's thirst quenching like La Croix but without any question marks. It’s free of synthetic solvents, carriers or artificial preservatives, is purified with reverse-osmosis and happens to be USDA certified.

• Spindrift Sparkling Water in Orange Mango, Nojito and Blood Orange
  Spindrift is sparkling water made with real squeezed non-GMO fruit with no sugar added and comes in 15 flavors. It's less fizzy than Nixie and I crave them differently - this is more of my evening mocktail. I usually add fresh mint to 'Nojito' and an orange slice to the 'Blood Orange' for a little extra something.

• Ruby Hibiscus Water in Fuji Apple
  Ruby Hibiscus is organic sans all additives. The brand/drink is newer to me and I've only tried Fuji Apple but it's a great little tart and satisfying pick-me-up in the middle of the day. I'm excited to try more of their flavors.

Listening: KCRW Eclectic 24 via Apple Music
One of the stations I miss most in LA is KCRW and it turns out, you can stream it on Apple Music.

Using: Tower 28’s new concealer ‘Swipe’
NARS radiant creamy concealer is pretty hard to compare to but Tower 28’s new ‘Swipe’ is pretty close! The clean formula gives great medium coverage, smooths out skin beautifully and a little of the hydrating serum covers the dark circles under my eyes shockingly well. An instant new favorite for my makeup bag!

Going: Neighborhood 3rd St
Neighborhood location #2 has opened up and she's a dream! Located on 3rd and Kilkea, you can expect the same delicious oat lattes on draft but it's different from our La Brea location in a few ways: it has a parking lot, there's a big walk-up window, and a larger shaded seating area.

Reading: The Binge Purge
Between the writers and actors strike, it's clear there are major challenges in the business of Hollywood. I found this article in New York Magazine very informative when trying to understand where it all went wrong.

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ALRIGHT, LET’S GET INTO IT: Welcome!

Hiii and welcome to ‘The In-Between!’ It’s nice to see you here.

I thought it would be best to kick things off by giving a little backstory, an explanation as to how we got here, and shed some light on where we’ll be going. 

We have to go back to December of 2006 to begin. It was a cold rainy Los Angeles day, Christmas in the air, Seven For All Mankind jeans and Juicy suits were the outfits of choice. Sitting at my desk, I curiously clicked on ‘create’ through a platform called Blogger and haphazardly typed in ‘because I'm addicted' when prompted to enter a blog name. It was the early days of the blogspot era (who remembers Cory Kennedy, Fashion Toast, et al?), and there on a free google url, I began documenting parts of my life, outfits, editorials, street style photos, trends, recipes, DIY’s and other musings. On the top right corner of the blog, just below the banner lived a tagline from the author's profile, "the life of a 20-something running wild in LA" was what I wrote for mine. A tagline that would live in that little spot for years, appear in magazines when they wrote about “the rise of blogs” and one that would define an era of my life in many ways.

There was a lot of growth both for me and the internet during my 20s. I studied abroad, graduated college, moved back to LA, started working in the corporate world, moved into an apartment with one of my best friends, fell in and out of love, made great friends, had once-in-a-lifetime experiences, tried on different career hats, figured out who I was, inched closer to where I wanted to go, lived alone for the first time and ultimately raised capital for my first startup, LEAFtv. 

A few other startups launched that decade: MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr, Twitter, and another app that would change the internet forever which we'd all come to know, and love/hate, Instagram. And who remembers the other revolutionary internet product launch? Hint: you may be reading this on it. It was 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the world to a little device called the iPhone, the first model complete with a 3.5-inch screen and a 2-megapixel camera, a phone that would move the internet forward at lightning speed and change how we’d document our lives and the ease in which we’d share them. 

I kept my blog, IG, Twitter, and YouTube alive and well, both through my iPhone and computer, with regular updates for the entirety of my 20s. Before I knew it, my 20s had flown by and I was nearing 30 with one big question looming: what will I do about my 20-something tagline? A tagline that encapsulated the blog, my youth, wrinkle-free skin, the world at my fingertips, and so much promise! 

Despite real concern over changing the tagline, I was energized and ready for my new decade, the big 3-0.  It was a great time for me - I was madly in love, my career was on a successful trajectory and I found myself in a place I had never been: truly content. Deep pure contentment for who I had become and where I was heading. Having never known this feeling, I understood it was fleeting. And so I did something wildly out of character: I threw my first and only birthday party. A dinner party in the backyard of my then-boyfriend's Hancock Park home for 30 friends and family members who had helped get me to that point. I hired LA’s best chef, rented tables, chairs, and white linens, strung twinkling lights overhead, and draped the long rectangular table with 40 feet of eucalyptus garlands, white roses, and a flood of candles. We had a lot to celebrate! 

Toward the end of the evening my boyfriend, Darin, gave a toast and closed it with an offering, a new blog tagline: A thirty-something sharing details of a life well lived. And that’s how a new era of my life on the internet was born! A 30s era where I was pursuing a life well lived as I got married (to Darin!), bought our first home, sold my first company, launched a beauty brand, opened a coffee shop (it was the hustle culture/Girl Boss period after all), had children and again, continued to figure out who I was. 

High highs and accolades aside, the biggest lessons of my 30s came from the low lows. My husband's near-death experience (his heart spontaneously stopped while on his daily 6-mile run when he was just 38 years old), three lost pregnancies, the passing of my best friend who was also my grandmother, struggling to find my footing after having children, a global pandemic that would shut the world down, losing my uncle who raised me like his own, and saying goodbye to a beaming light of a friend who died by suicide to name a few. The other big life event that would define part of my 30s was selling our Hollywood Hills home and moving to a former rose farm two hours north in Santa Ynez, leaving a beautiful life and everything we knew behind. A move that would bring both great joy and intense grief.

The challenges and changes I faced throughout my 30s pushed me in the direction of wellness, self-care (both the fluffy stuff like face masks and the real work like therapy and transcendental meditation), fitness, and a study on happiness. An exploration out of necessity seeking to find the tools, practices, foods, and products to make me feel good, boost my mental health, and help manage all that life can, and will, throw our way.  And while I didn't usually share specifics on the challenges I was personally navigating, I did share my wellness learnings and discoveries via photos, captions, stories, swipe-ups, reels, blog posts (yes, on BIA!), videos (yes, on LEAF! - who watched our show, ‘The Wellness Experiment?’) and in 140 characters or less.

Until at some point, around last January, when I sort of stopped. 

Blog traffic was lost to social and social was in a weird place. It devolved from a place of connection and the rise of TikTok sparked a new era of content. In their attempt to keep up, Instagram morphed into a fight for views, mostly of videos that were saturated with repurposed dancing TikTok videos, parodies, and beauty tutorials. It wasn’t a place I wanted to spend much time, let alone share my personal experiences anymore. Which at that point, as I sat in my 39th year of life, was an existential crisis. Inching toward 40 hit me like a ton of bricks - in ways I never saw coming. I thought a midlife crisis was a cliche reserved for rom-coms but nope, it turns out they are very real. And it’s an experience that, as I’ve learned, many of us identify with. And that’s part of what I want to explore here on Substack, a place that feels safe to have meaningful conversations about life, purpose, relationships, motherhood, values, career, and our health. All while also sharing the fun beauty, wellness, fashion, recipes, and lifestyle-y content you may have once followed me for.

So, welcome! I, for one, am really excited to be here and to be sharing with you again. I’ve spent half my life sharing pieces of my human experience (and let’s be honest, the not-so-human - ehhhhhemmm curated content) on the internet. I grew out of being a 20-something running wild in LA into a 30-something pursuing a life well lived and now here I am, at 40, launching a newsletter inspired by an existential crisis. Some may find it cliche but it feels fitting, a natural progression for a woman who has grown up alongside the World Wide Web and has currently found herself in The In-Between.

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MEALS TO MAKE THIS WEEK:
Green Dream Smoothies (breakfast or snack)
Heirloom Tomato & Peach Salad with Whipped Goat Cheese (lunch)
Panzanella Salad with Grilled Shrimp (dinner)
Roasted Fish with Lemon, Sesame & Herb Bread Crumbs (dinner)
3 Ingredient Mango Lime Sorbet (dessert)