Issue #225: The Cost (and Beauty) of Following Your Gut

On the lives we leave—and the ones that feel truer

📚 A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst: I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this memoir, given my fascination with the Pacific Ocean, but I’m so glad I finally picked it up after seeing it on multiple “best of” lists. In 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were shipwrecked by a breaching whale, and spent over a hundred days surviving on a tiny raft, against all odds. As much about a marriage enduring extreme circumstances as it is an incredible story of survival.

📺 ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ on Netflix: ‘Knives Out’ is back with another charmingly over-the-top, well-cast whodunnit, this time investigating a murder at a Catholic church in upstate New York. As with each previous iteration, this one has a political bent beneath the tomfoolery, holding a light to fundamentalist Christian intolerance.

💿 ‘Getting Killed’ by Geese: This genre-defying new album sounds like a cross between Radiohead and early Talking Heads. It’s weird, groovy, and, while a bit sharper and more metal than the music I normally go for, I can’t stop listening to it.

P.S. Don’t forget to join Alisha Ramos and my book club discussion tomorrow of Heart the Lover! See you there! x

📚 Join Our December Book Club! 'Heart the Lover' by Lily King

I hadn’t walked along the L.A. River since I lived in Los Angeles with the man I would end up marrying.

Back then, we would stroll from our apartment in Echo Park to the La Colombe in Frogtown, stopping for a flat white, before continuing on past the herons and river-soaked algae, to the Sunday farmers market in Atwater Village three miles away.

It was one of my favorite rituals—a comforting routine that was part of my life for half a decade, and easily could have lasted a lifetime. It probably would have, if I hadn’t felt a quiet but persistent tug for something else. As I walked along the river path last week, I could almost feel the ghost of that self brush past me, chatting comfortably about meal prep or work the next day. I wondered, as bikers wound their way around Toast and me, what that version of me would make of this current iteration. How would she react to learning that I had left Los Angeles, my career, my husband—the cozy security I had worked so painstakingly to build? (Maybe I’d give her a moment to process before telling her that I’m currently single and spending the year living out of a van...)

My 25th birthday, the nook in my first L.A. apartment where I started writing my book

I’ve spent more years of my life in Los Angeles than any other city, so any return feels like falling headlong into an archaeological dig site. I am constantly stumbling over emotional relics from past lives: the highway I once drove down with a crush, scream-singing that summer’s pop song; the office where I managed an editorial team; the backyard I got married in; the path we walked every Sunday.

What unsettles me isn’t just the nostalgia, but how each of these memories feels like an entire life I could have stayed in, if I hadn’t made the choice—and the effort—to step out of it. The city is a living reminder of the way my life has unfolded in distinct chapters, each shaped by an intuitive knowing that something had run its course, followed by a leap into the next unknown. It’s only in looking back that I can see the pattern, how every few years, I start over completely—geographically, socially, professionally—and dismantle a life that was working in many ways, in order to make room for one that felt truer.

Each time, I’ve had to let go of a life I could have lived, in order to find a more expansive one. And each time, the cost has been enormous.