My 4-year-old son woke me up at 6 AM on Saturday morning. So even though he had an acceptable amount of sleep, I did not. He had a sitter scheduled for that evening, and the idea that I’d have two nights in a row with not enough sleep made me want to cry.

He has an okay-to-wake light that signals when it’s time to wake up. The wake-up time is 6:45 a.m. He wasn’t so far off, but losing those precious forty-five minutes felt like I was being deprived of oxygen. And so, as he pulled me out of bed with every trick he knows, my mood was something of an ogre.

I tried everything to plead with him on why sleeping until the blue light is so important. Sleeping is when you grow; sleeping repairs your brain and makes you smarter, sleeping keeps you healthy, and then the winner. Sleeping makes your muscles work better.

“It makes me faster?” He asked with a calculating look in his eyes.

“Yes, it’ll make you faster than all your friends.”

And that’s when I knew it was clicking for him. He told me he’s sleeping so much that he was even going back to sleep at that exact moment. That’s when he fake-snored for a few minutes, then woke up even faster.

All this cuteness, though, did nothing for my mood. I was already on my second cup of coffee and had to make it to 5 pm, where then my night would just begin for another five hours of being a charming adult.

I tried taking a shower, doing my hair and makeup, taking my son to all his activities, but nothing was changing my mood. And finally, it was 4:30 pm, I was dressed and ready for my night, and I looked at my son and asked a two-word question.

“Dance Party?”

He nodded yes, but made me promise we’d do loud songs. We started with a mom/son dance to our song, “You Are the Best Thing” by Ray LaMontagne, and worked our way through all sorts of classic rock.

Then the invisible weight on my chest started to shatter. With each move of my body, in synch with the music, the sways of my hips, the twirls, the lifting of my son, and twirling him, and suddenly the mood had lifted. The ogre left my body. The best parts of me were left behind. Glistening with sweat and the reminder. Dancing always helps.

Here’s our current dance party playlist. Just in case you need to find your way back to yourself.

I recently tried. A creative PM role, a good team with meaningful work. And still, my nervous system went on fire. Not metaphorically. Physically. The low-grade panic that sits in your chest all day because you’re not where you’re supposed to be.

This isn’t new. I think it started when I left my first full-time job at the Sundance Institute. I was in charge of the content, digital marketing, and some regular marketing. When I told my bosses I was leaving, the Executive Director at the time was offended that I left without another job lined up. I didn’t know how to explain; I wasn’t looking for my next job. I was going to start making my own work. And so, during the festival, I requested my entire team to ask everyone they interviewed a single question: “What was your last day job before you could support yourself as an independent artist?”

This is what I was trying to drum up the courage to do, and I had this incredible video, “Quit Your Day Job: The Risk of Becoming an Independent Artist.”

It’s been watched 50,000 times, most of the views were probably by me. To give myself the courage to stay at it.

Then, as I was working on my own, I felt like an amateur. I’d watched thousands of movies and read hundreds of scripts. I had a sense of craft, but I still needed to find my craft. I came across a video called The Gap, made from an Ira Glass quote about the time in an artist’s career when their work doesn’t match their taste. It’s the period of learning craft. It also inspired me to keep on going.

Now I’m weeks away, maybe months, depending on my agent, from going out on submission with my first novel, 13 years into committing to my craft. My second screenplay is about to be walked into a major buyer with an attachment. But I needed some cash flow, so an old colleague hired me as a creative PM at his new boutique generative design and digital studio. And my nervous system went on fire. I’m about halfway through what will likely be my last project.

I wanted to understand why I can’t seem to do anything other than my own work. Was it PTSD from terrible workplaces? I mean, I did my time in some rough company cultures. I worked at The Weinstein Company, need I say more? Then I went to a talk at my synagogue, CBE, in Park Slope for Jodi Kantor’s new book, How to Start. We’re not related, but couldn’t be more proud to share a last name with someone I admire.

At the talk Jodi Kantor was joined by Esther Perel, and Priya Parker. Perel said something that snapped into place for me: people have different tolerances for stability and freedom. Stability is a paycheck. Freedom is risk.

That idea struck a chord in me. I need the freedom to leave my computer and take a walk to find the creative resonance that most of the roles I take require. And yet, the need for a creative PM to be always available at their desk, and that for whatever reason, completely dysregulates me.

So, instead, I created a budget, a financial runway, a prayer, because I’m all in as a writer, as a thinker, and as a creator. And I’m going to trust the universe to start paying me for my craft. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s a discomfort my body knows how to hold, more than the slow panic of a life that isn’t mine.

By this time next week, all the smoke, ash, and lead will be removed from my Pacific Palisades home. In planning this week and what to do with my contaminated items, I’ve arranged with the team to clean and pack the artwork encased in glass, my hard drives, and my NFT Ledger, and to have them sent to me in Brooklyn.

Everything else is being placed on th…

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I first learned of Carolyn Bessette’s death while sitting at my summer internship in the original Miramax offices. Someone passed around a CNN link, opened in a browser that felt barely capable of holding the news. The room didn’t stop, exactly, but something inside me did. It was the first time I understood that a person could belong to a city’s atmosp…

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A few weeks ago, I sent the latest draft of my first novel to my agent, and then came the waiting.

Writers know this particular kind of silence. It is the strange, suspended moment between finishing something and knowing what comes next. I did not want to lose momentum, but I also did not know where to direct it.

Around the same time, Anthropic released a…

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I went on a first date recently. It was a fun one, and at the end of the date, we wandered through a bookstore, sharing books with one another. We also talked about the music we grew up with. This date asked if I knew the song "Scentless Apprentice" by Nirvana, and he said he had recently seen an interview in which Kurt Cobain said it was inspired by a …

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It became clear pretty quickly that people don’t want to meet in the dark and walk in the freezing cold. And honestly, who can blame them? It’s been cold as hell here in Brooklyn. So I wanted to offer some alternatives.

I took the question to our WhatsApp group—Where can we walk together without freezing?—and, as usual, the group got creative. There’s a …

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Dear Younger Self (A Newly Barely Surviving Solo Mom),

Remember that first holiday? The one with the two-week-old potato baby, a grieving parent, and—because your timing has always been impeccable—a fresh COVID booster right before Joshua Tree? When you felt so spectacularly awful you could barely lift your own child, your milk supply dried up entirely, …

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Lately, every time I open social media, it feels like a dystopian QVC channel.
A conveyor belt of strangers staring straight into my soul to tell me about the thing I absolutely must buy: a hair straightener, a magnesium gummy, an eye cream, a Korean pore vacuum that literally shows you what was inside their face.

I never asked to know that.

And the wildes…

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Since I don’t celebrate Christmas, the pressure to buy gifts for an entire extended family isn’t quite as intense. My biggest focus is my son, whose 4th birthday is the week before Hanukkah, which is the week before Christmas. He doesn’t yet understand that we don’t celebrate everything, so I’m spreading his gifts across the month and preparing for a ma…

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I listened to this book, translated from its cult-classic status in Japan, but I almost wish I’d read it on the page so I could savor every word. The audio tripped me up a bit with the names—probably my own processing—but I suspect the written version might make the immersion even richer.

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It’s Wednesday, smack in the middle of Banned Books Week—a week that shouldn’t have to exist, but does. Once upon a time, America called itself the land of the free. Today, we need a designated calendar slot to celebrate the books our leaders don’t want us to read. A week to remind ourselves that free expression is now a curated privilege.

The American L…

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Everything in my life has been shown to me from the perspective of a right-handed person. It started young. One of my earliest memories is getting to use the cute panda scissors in kindergarten. I felt cool, yeah, but that was the first time I realized I was different. Being a left-handed person doesn’t seem like a majo…

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Today is my birthday. This time last year, I thought I’d stay in Los Angeles. By November, I had decided New York would just be my summer city—the best of both worlds. It was a freeing choice. I was ready to put down roots, to keep investing in my home…

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Everyone responds differently to catastrophes. Some become doers, talkers, and connectors, while others retreat, disappear, and rely on their neighbors. One thing we all share is that, in that moment, we became passive protagonists.

The fire (or insert whatever climate catastrophe) happened to us. We didn’t choose it and are all just surviving in its wa…

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The talk featured two speakers, Professor Ruha Benjamin and Prof…

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Time is a confusing notion at the moment. The time it took me to evacuate from my home and get to my son, who was at preschool, went by in a flash. It was over 4 hours. Someone else picked…

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If I put my ph…

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