A Life Built on Strategy. A Year That Changed the Blueprint.

What I didn’t understand until recently was how often I was building inside a story that wasn’t fully mine.

When I transferred from CAL to UCLA, I came home and worked three jobs. No one handed me a blank check and said, Go to school. Buy the car you want. I had been working since I was twelve. If I wanted something, I figured out how to get there.

Clothing was never vanity for me. It was identity. My wardrobe was simple: Levi’s, Ralph Lauren polos, Bass Weejuns, but I wanted it to stand out. I couldn’t afford the jewelry I admired in the fancy boutiques.

So I made it.

Silver beads. Jewel-toned disks. Pieces that existed first in my head and then in my hands.

Every classroom I walked into at UCL...

Last week, I wrote about recognizing a lifelong pattern of trying to be seen by people who never had the capacity to receive me—and how choosing myself finally brought that cycle to an end.

This week, I want to go further back. Not to explain the pattern, but to return to the place where something else was already forming.

I was seven years old and was rarely bored.

I knew how to disappear into my own world, quietly, completely. I built elaborate houses out of blocks for my Barbies and Little Kiddles on the living room floor, arranging furniture just so, imagining how people moved through space. I sat for hours at the dining room table, drawing, painting, cutting, gluing. I baked from old cookbooks, carefully following instructions I barely understood, trusting that if I paid attention, something good would come out of the oven.

No one stood over me.
No one guided the process.
No one told me it was special.

I was left to my own devices, and in that space, I learned ho...

Last week, I wrote about a lifelong pattern of trying to be seen by people who never had the capacity to receive me, and the clarity that came from recognizing it wasn’t a failure, but a lesson. Choosing myself ended that cycle not through confrontation or explanation, but through boundaries, trust, and self-alignment.

What I didn’t write about is where that pattern began.

In a recent writing class, our first assignment was simple: write about a moment from childhood. Many memories are foggy, but the ones that remain are unmistakably clear, the kind that settle into the body and quietly shape a life.

I was always tactile. I loved to build, bake, finger paint, and paper mâché, anything that involved my hands and imagination working together. One memory I can recall with startling clarity is the smell of glue and sawdust as I stepped into Neiman-Reed’s, the hobby shop just around the corner from our house.

It wasn’t just a store. It was a wonderland.

Shelves stretched...

Choosing Me Wasn’t a Slogan; It Was a Boundary.

The picture is clear now.

For most of my life, I believed that if I wasn’t being heard, liked, or received, it was because I had done something wrong or failed to do something right. That belief didn’t come out of nowhere. It was formed early, in a home where two of the people closest to me simply did not have the capacity to see me.

My father did.

Effortlessly.

He worked six days a week, rarely took time off, and still came home curious, kind, and genuinely interested in who I was becoming. He never dismissed me. Never questioned my ideas. Never made me feel like my imagination, ambition, or creativity were too much.

That was not the case with my mother and my sibling.

No matter what I did, how carefully I showed up, how much I softened myself or tried to explain, there was a wall. A blockage. Something unreachable. Their inability to receive me was reflected in ways that were confusing, destabilizing, and dee...

I have spent much of my life in search of healing.

Therapy, on and off, for decades.
Yoga and meditation retreats.
Torah study that often felt just out of reach, until I found At The Well, where Judaism began to speak to me through the cycles of the moon and the rhythm of the Jewish months.

There were also mushroom journeys. Acid trips. Even ketamine.

And yet, nothing woke me up, healed me, or revealed the truth as clearly as the year 2025.

I have spent a lifetime asking myself what was wrong with me.
How could I fix myself?
Why do I feel so deeply?

I always assumed the problem was me.

I was told I was too sensitive. That I needed to “get over it.”

Only in recent years have I come to understand that my sensitivity is not a flaw; it is the source of my empathy, my ability to listen deeply, my intuition, my capacity for compassion.

What cannot be changed or undone has, nevertheless, shaped the person standing here today.

For much of my life, I carried a quiet...

Today, I sat in the quiet of my room and began my morning the way I’ve learned to, slowly.

Journal open.
Three words written with intention.
Five cards pulled from my oracle deck.

What struck me wasn’t the cards themselves, but how perfectly they mirrored the words I had already chosen. Not aspirational words. Not hopeful ones. Just honest ones. Words rooted in where I am now.

It reminded me of something I recently heard from Rabbi Steve Leder that stopped me cold:

“He’s given up all hope of a better past.”

So simple.
So profound.
And yet, so complicated.

I wish it were as easy as shaking an Etch A Sketch, erasing mistakes, removing what no longer fits, and starting clean. But this past year has taught me something truer: the past isn’t something we delete. It’s something we integrate.

I wrote this on January 8th, one year and one day after the fire ravaged my community and changed my life forever.

The day before, and through that evening, and again the morning...

Today marks one year since the fire erupted.

January 7, 2025. Three hundred sixty-five days since everything familiar- the home, the history, the illusions- went up in flames.

As this anniversary approached, I found myself thinking less about what was lost and more about what it has taken to heal, not just individually, but also in partnership.

For months after the fire, I didn’t have the words for what I was feeling.

The grief was too big. The losses are too layered. The shock is too deep.
I kept moving; doing, managing, surviving because stopping felt dangerous.

It wasn’t until I started writing that something finally softened.

Writing became the place where my nervous system exhaled.
Where truth could surface without interruption.
Where I could name what hurt, what was lost, what was changing, and what was quietly being rebuilt.

And unexpectedly, writing became the bridge back to myself and to Mitch.

As I put words to what I had been carrying, the fear, ...

This is part 5 of 5. Read Part one here  |  Read Part two here | Read Part three here | Read Part four here

This year taught me something I wish I had understood much earlier:

Identity isn’t who we build, it’s who we already are.

It’s the stories we tell ourselves… until we finally learn to hear the truth beneath them.

For decades, I shaped my identity around what the world reflected to me:
Titles.
Roles.
Achievements.
The circles I kept.
The validation that came from being dependable, capable, and strong.

And yet, I was often misunderstood.

People saw me as intense, direct, and even intimidating at times.
But underneath all of that was something softer:

A deeply sensitive, empathetic woman who feels the world more acutely than most.

That sensitivity has always been my gift,  the way I see patterns, truth, and possibility long before they fully emerge.

But for most of my life, I was told I was too sensitive. It became an insecurity instead of the strength it truly ...

This is part 4 of 5. Read Part one here  |  Read Part two here | Read Part three here

It’s been a heavy week.

Australia.
Brown University.
A home in California was terrorized for placing a menorah in the window.

And the senseless murder of Michelle and Rob Reiner. People I knew during those early parenting years, when everything felt innocent and possible.

Some weeks, the world presses down so hard that moving through it feels like wading through water. This week, my body has felt it all: low energy, a quiet mind, and everything in slow motion.

And still, tonight is the fifth night of Hanukkah.

We are closing out the month of Kislev, the month that holds the tension between darkness and light. Hanukkah teaches us that a single flame can push back a vast night. But if I’m honest, there are moments when holding that flame feels almost impossible.

Yet Kislev rolls into Tevet on December 21, and Tevet is a month of resilience.

Not loud resilience.
Not performati...

 This is part 3 of 5. Read Part one here  |  Read Part two here

After last week's blog, "What the Fire Actually Took," my inbox filled in ways I hadn't expected. Messages poured in: tender, brave, mirrored back to me from strangers and friends alike. And what I realized, sitting inside all that reflection, is this:

Vulnerability doesn't isolate us. It gathers us.

In the stillness of my quiet room, where I begin most mornings with intention and listening, something else came into focus with startling clarity:

My trauma had been writing my drama.

For much of my life, I didn't think of myself as "traumatized." I thought I was resilient. Capable. High-functioning. The one who handled things. It wasn't until November of 2021, when I was diagnosed with a brain tumor, metastasized from my original cancer in 2016, that the word trauma stopped being theoretical.

From diagnosis to surgery: 23 days.

Tests. Bloodwork. Experimental radiation. Putting my house in order....