I’m weeping in the kitchen as I clean the stove to get the crumbs from the crisp my husband made last night. My son Noah is sitting in the alcove at the table on the other side of the stove, playing the keyboard and singing a song about Samson and Delilah. My husband is sitting on the couch in the adjoining living room. Our main house, except for the bedrooms and the bathroom, is open. We can each be in a different room, but it’s all one space.

My chest rises and falls ever more raggedly as the tears flow.

I finish cleaning the stove and put the last dishes in the dishwasher. I walk past Noah. He’s moved on to the next cover, his voice resonant, rich, warm, and raw. More tears fall from behind my eyes.

I keep walking, then sit on the corner of the sectional. My husband is reading a book. I continue to weep, fairly silently. I lie down, hugging the deep teal weighted blanket, and give my body over to sobbing.

My husband looks at me and asks if I’m ok. I say, “I’m crying.” He says, “I see that.”

He smiles and places his hand close enough to touch if I want, not so close that it’s touching me. I continue to weep.

I stay separate for a few beats. Then I notice my hand reaching the few inches it takes to touch his. My tears slow. I feel my breath moving inside me. A wave of tears rolls through.

My son looks at me, holds my gaze, and continues to play.

This moment is hauntingly familiar.

I go to my bedroom, grab my laptop, then return to the couch.

I’m transported to 1995, to Pashupatinath in Nepal. I’m on a junior year study abroad program. I stand with my cohort and a Brahim Hindu guide. He’s going on and about Nepali culture, with special emphasis on relationships between men and women, with special emphasis on how dangerous women can be to men, with special emphasis on women’s impurity during their period. I tune him out lest I strangle him.

We’re standing next to a bridge across a river from a marketplace, a hospice, and funeral pyres. As Mr. Brahmin drones on and I continue to autotune him to the teacher from Peanuts, I hear a woman wailing.

I see several people emerging from the hospice carrying a frail body. They proceed to the side of the river. One man has his hand on the frail one’s wrist.

After several minutes, the man drops the frail one’s wrist. He removes the clothes from the frail one’s body and throws them in the river. More than one woman is wailing now; it’s a chorus.

The men in the group pick up the frail one. With a tender somberness, they walk towards the funeral pyres, several fires already burning, several groups of men in white sitting beside them. They find an open pyre and begin making camp. The wailing continues.

I notice that I haven’t breathed for a while. I exhale. My eyes are moist. I can’t even hear Mr. Brahim anymore.

A screeching monkey captures my attention as she jumps from a tree to the ground. I’m used to this by now; in Nepal, you never know when a monkey might make an appearance.

My eyes follow the monkey to the marketplace, where children are playing and laughing while their bright sari-clad mothers do their best to herd them.

Like the monkey, my mind wanders to another time and place: 1991, a hospice in Rockville Center, NY.

I’m sitting with my grandmother, looking at the monitor that reports her vitals. I’m 15. I’m fascinated by the hospice: the dying, the monitors, the beeps, the smells, the nurses and staff efficiently moving through the hallways, in and out of patient rooms.

The other side feels so close. Yet, no one holds my grandmother’s wrist as she transitions. There are no monkeys or children laughing or mothers in saris going about their day.

There is a flat line on the monitor. There is gentle crying and funeral planning. There is taking her body to the morgue and getting her room ready for the next dying person and their family.

I arrive at the funeral home the next day with my parents and brother. I stand next to my father as he approaches the open casket. He falls to his knees weeping, a scene I’ve never seen before or since.

I read a poem that I wrote about our family fitting together like pieces of an ancient jigsaw puzzle. I want to make sense. There is no sense to make.

Standing next to Mr. Brahmin by the bridge with dying, death, and living all happening in the same space at the same time is perhaps the most real moment I’ve ever experienced in my life. I get in my bones what I’d read in my anthropology classes about coevalness—that every experience I’m having is happening at the same time as every other experience others are having. No person or culture is ahead or behind another; all experiences happen simultaneously.

Still sitting on the couch, soft, empty, at peace, I glance at Noah and see a monkey sitting on his left shoulder as he strums his guitar. I look out the handmade wooden window beyond my husband and see the faint outline of a sari-clad woman waltzing by with a laughing child.

My grandmother whispers in my ear, “I’m so happy that he could cry at my funeral. He certainly couldn’t when I was alive; I wouldn’t have had it.”

I am in awe. All these tears falling from different eyes in different places.

I rise from the couch, walk to the kitchen, and eat a green apple that didn’t make it into last night’s crisp. Smiling, I take a bite and walk outside.

Today, there’s a spot on the sand right beside me; plenty of room for us both.

Let’s listen together.

Me

What would you have me know today?

The Ocean

Know that you are loved.
Know that you are held.
Know that you are seen.
Know that you are cherished.

How else could it be?

All creation is loved and seen and held and cherished.
I know it doesn't always feel that way.
Sometimes it feels like being tossed and churned and discarded and discounted and beaten down.
The trick is not to suffer your suffering.
It's not easy, but it's simple.

Today, notice all the ways that you resist love.
That you resist simplicity.
That you resist an impulse.
That you feel threatened.
Notice every moment where you feel out of step with time.

Then fall back into the moment.
Or forward or down or up.
Fall into the moment.
Let it hold you. Stop resisting.
Feel what you feel. Think what you think. Want what you want.
Love what you love.

Remember that you are mine.
As long as you remember, I am yours.

Breathe in life.
Let it animate the life within you.

Your shoulders carry the weight of this lifetime and many others.
That's not what they're for.
Put down what you’re carrying.

Then we can talk about wings.

Subscribe now

It’s 2014. I can barely believe that I made it from my stay-at-home-mom days, through an emotionally and financially challenging divorce, to founding a boutique branding agency, LightLab Studios (2014-18). I worked with designers and web developers and wrote all the copy myself. It was a lot of work, but I was still in founder and creative director heaven. AI was nothing more than a whisper.

As a partner and coach at Conscious Leadership Group from 2018-2024, I solely focused on our brand. After leaving, while building my new brand and website with my former LightLabs partner, Mat Vogels, I was faced with the reality of how central AI has become in the world of brand creation.

I started to wonder in what ways AI has replaced me, in what ways it hasn’t, and the problems and opportunities I see.

In particular, I questioned the value of my brand maps. As is my nature, I extended this question into wondering about my value. Cue many dark weeks with lots of walks on the beach and moaning in between.

After feeling sorry for myself got old, I picked myself back up and found a shard of optimism to build on. I shared my new brand map with Mat, along with design ideas and examples of what I was going for. We made some progress, but no bullseyes.

One evening when I was desperately frustrated, I sat down at my desk overlooking the lush courtyard, which was surely mocking me with its relaxed beauty. I put my brand map into Chat GPT and asked for help in creating the visual identity. It took hours of back and forth, no more or less than when I’d worked with a talented art director or designer.

To my surprise and delight, I got to that all-the-cells-in-my-body-humming moment that happens when congruence arrives.

I shared the concept with Mat and he agreed. We had landed.

This is starting to sound like a doom and gloom story for designers, which in one sense it is. I had worked with AI like I had worked with humans, artists no less. I don’t feel at peace with this.

I come from a lineage of visual artists. I grew up bathed in visual art, with a deep reverence for both art and artists. Yet of the infinite things I am not, a visual artist is high on the list, which I knew from an early age.

My grandmother—Mrs. Lipitz, Grandma Elaine to me— showed her art in galleries from a young age and ran the art department at a large Queens High School for decades, where she was nothing short of a legend. To this day, I still get emails from her former students.

On school breaks, my parents would escape to Portugal or Greece to be adults without kids for a week or two. They would drive my brother and me from our decidedly suburban home in Suffolk County on the north shore of Long Island to a grittier and city-ier Queens to stay with my grandparents. I was too young to know what I was missing out on exotic locations. I was excited to get to go to school with my grandma and have her art students dote on me.

In her enormous art studio bustling with actual artists, it was clear to me that I did not have the gifts that they possessed. The same when I would go into the basement with my grandma to her studio and paint with her. My paintings were fine for a regular kid, but the family visual artist gene that my grandma, mom, and aunt had inherited had clearly skipped a generation.

Later I discovered that I’m a different type of artist, someone with a particular and precise sense of taste. I’m a words person, a vibe curator, and an intuitive knower of aligned creation and living.

I know what I like. I know what precisely matches a person or brand that is both authentic and amplifying. I don’t know how I know this, but I’ve seen enough evidence to convince me that there’s something to this sense I have. I’ve spent my career refining my taste receptors, my ability to translate my knowings into words, ideas, reflections, action plans, brands, and aligned lifestyles for ambitious humans.

Some of my most treasured collaborations are with designers—artists—who have created visual identities and assets based on my brand maps.

Yet I’m not going to lie; working with AI to create my visual identity was liberating.

I’m excited about this new possibility. I’ve run recent clients' brand maps through AI to create visual identity guidelines and been delighted by the results. It took hours of back and forth, days of getting crappy results until I got to gold, but the combination of my taste, intuition, and sense of alignment with AI’s ability to synthesize and translate so quickly got me to results that would have cost me and my client weeks of time and money.

Some of my clients have zero interest in using AI for their visual identity. I love and support that. They can take their brand maps to an agency or designer and they’ll be good to go, with or without my ongoing support. But for people who want to create their visual identity on their own, or with a designer or creative director who uses AI, the brand map gives them what they need to leverage AI supported design.

Next I tested AI’s ability to create a brand map versus the map I would create. I wanted to be as honest as I could with myself about the value of my brand maps in the age of AI. I uploaded the transcripts of the conversations I’d had with a client plus several brand map examples, then asked AI to generate a map.

I couldn’t get AI anywhere near the complexity, nuance, and alignment I strive for when creating a brand map.

I tried with several sets of client transcripts. There’s something about tone of voice, quality of presence, body language, and soul that AI just can’t digest and represent, at least not yet.

My brand maps are still squarely in the human domain because they rely on taste, discernment, and intuitive knowing. Being in living, breathing conversation with my clients allows me to create a precise, aligned, soulful brand foundation.

For many people, creating a brand from the ground up with AI can work well enough. What it won’t achieve is something timeless and essential. We still need another human to experience, know, and reflect us to get to a soulful representation.

Making the investment in a timeless and essential foundation saves time and money going in all sorts of directions that don’t hit the mark.

Once the foundational territory is mapped through in-depth human connection, AI, along with a human designer or creative director, can take this map and spin out aligned and compelling visual brand assets, saving another bucket of time and money in both the short and long term.

I’m delighted to discover that there’s still a place for my brand maps. I love creating them, and even more so, the depth of connection and personal growth that happens for both the client and myself through the process is exhilarating. And it’s not just brand maps; we humans are uniquely valuable for any role, product, service, or art that relies on taste, discernment, intuition, and connection.

And still, I am not at ease.

I don’t know what to do about the obsolescence of designers in the world of advertising and brand, other than to feel the heartbreak of the ending of an era, and the humility of knowing that AI will keep evolving and come for us in all sorts of ways, both known and unknown.

I do know that I don’t want to hang AI art on my walls or see it in a gallery. I want to drink in art knowing that human hearts and hands made the thing.

I want to continue to be impacted by artists so that we question how we do culture, politics, and relationships.

I want to delight in more lineages of artists, in my family and in our human family.

And if I’m wrong, if people don’t value my brand maps in the age of AI, I’ll still map the human experience. Before it was a product, it was just what I did: my art, my way of making sense of the world, and my desire to support individuals and the collective to shine.

In these times, I try to remember this daily: of all the times and places to exist, I get to exist here and now. As long as there’s still breath in me, there’s creative expression and walks on the beach and the joy of seeing my son home from college for the summer making pancakes with my husband in the kitchen. AI can’t do any of this for me. And if I’m out of a job sooner than I expect, I have the best humans around me to come up with another plan where I get to be me and they get to be them, and best of all, we get to be ourselves together.

I hope that AI will inspire more of us to value our beautiful, messy, feeling, intuiting, desiring, art-making, connection-seeking selves.

With love,

P.S. I don’t use AI to write for me. Not ever. This is my art. You’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hands. Another thing that AI can’t do. Ha!

I’m sitting at a round table in a sea of round tables at Loews Hotel just off the Hollywood strip at The Writers Rising Conference. Jen Pastiloff is reading a poem from her forthcoming book Proof of Life.

In the past month, I dropped off my son for his freshman year at college, followed a calling to leave a company and community that I was part of for the better part of a decade, and discovered that my marriage was shaky and needed to either be reimagined or ended.

Jen’s poem cracks me open. My body is shaking. I’m weeping. I sense a crack of light, an inkling of what might come if I make it through this identity crumbling transition.

Jen asks us to write a message from a part of our body to ourselves. I immediately know that it's my throat and vagina that want to speak to me, the two parts that have always represented my voice and expression. They’ve been in an ongoing dialogue throughout my life, speaking to fear and permission and desire and clarity and sometimes massive terror. We have a few minutes to write. I type so quickly, words tumbling out of my body, up from my vagina, down through my throat, moving through my solar plexus and heart, rising back up, passing through my arms and out into my fingertips.

Jen asks for volunteers to share what we wrote. This has happened many times with other presenters. I have not yet raised my hand at this conference, not once. Now my hand shoots up faster than my mind can think.

Jen looks at me. “Come on up, you, the one who danced this morning at the back of my yoga class. Come up close rather than speaking from a mic at your seat. I’m deaf; I need to be able to read your lips.”

I walk to the front of the room with my computer in hand, standing body to body, facing Jen with my back to the room. She asks if I feel awkward. I say, “Beautifully awkward.” She laughs. In our sudden intimacy and beautiful awkwardness, she says, “I do.” I say, "Me too!” There’s energy flowing through my whole body, pregnant and pulsing.

I read what I wrote, which is also a poem. I feel my individual self speaking clearly for the first time in a really long time. With the last line, Jen does a dramatic mic drop. My heart flutters.

I exhale and return to my seat. On my laptop, I see many comments from online participants and participants in the room, in our chat, appreciating and admiring my expression, some encouraging me to publish it, to share it more broadly. I love the experience of feeling seen, celebrated, and encouraged. It’s more than I can even take in during all this ending of eras and being at the doorstep of so much unknown. As for sharing more broadly, as for “publishing,” I’m not ready. Not today. But soon.

*****

That was seven months ago. I haven't published anything since then, though I've written dozens and dozens of pages for articles, for my first book, for sanity.

It’s been seven months of grief, with respites of joy and creative expression and making amends so I can walk forward with integrity and a sense of almost-okayness in my bones. It’s been seven months of processing the last decade mentally, emotionally, somatically, and spiritually. It’s been seven months of couples therapy and hard conversations, finding my way back to love and life, and inching towards more self-love and attunement with my husband. It’s been seven months of facing creative injuries that I’ve carried like dollhouse weights hidden in my body and psyche to remind me of how risky and dangerous it is to share my deepest heart and quirky perspectives out loud.

I’m not through this dark night yet, but the crack of light I saw when Jen was reading is ever present and, I daresay, closer.

I created a Substack account in an SFO airport lounge a week after the conference. Seven months later, I'm ready to hit publish. To share my story, to share the poem that I read at the conference, to share my heart and exhale and tremble as I await to receive you and yours.

The Story You Cannot Afford

This is the time to remember.
What feels tight isn’t always tight.
Sometimes it’s dense and concentrated and fucking rich
like triple chocolate cake.

Stop trying to liberate me, to understand me, to coax me to open.
I am as open as the sky.
You keep pretending that I need you to save me.
There is nothing to save, nothing to remember, nothing to coax.
I existed before your memory began in this lifetime or any previous one.
I existed before your ancestors were even dreamed up.

I am ancient. You are mortal.
Use me better. Trust me more.
I am here for you.

I know how to connect with the whole symphony.
I am breeding ground for love and freedom and expression.
You keep looking up. Look down too.

Life pulses through this body so quickly,
so intensely,
so gently,
so everything-ly.

Betrayal is a story that you cannot afford.

Me reading “The Story You Cannot Afford at Writers Rising 2024. It’s slightly different from above; I want to share the moment with you.

Practice 1: Calling our Parts Back Home

• Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down.

• Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.

• Bring your attention to the sensations you feel in and on your body, the sounds you hear around you, thoughts passing through, and your emotions. As much as possible, be an observer of your experience with minimal judgement.

• Shift your attention to what feels like the center of your being. There is no right place; it’s wherever you sense the center to be at the moment. Rest with gentle awareness here for a minute or two.

• Scan your awareness for a part of you that has left or forgotten this center. Again, there’s no right way to do this. Memories, sensations, sounds, or emotions may arise. Trust whatever comes. Rest here with gentle awareness and open curiosity. What you’re noticing may remain the same or it may change.

• Ask this aspect of yourself what it can tell you about itself: it may share a name, a role in your organism or psyche (ex. “keeper of the peace”), a desire (ex. “to be valued”), a fear (ex. “being rejected"), and so on. Thank this aspect for sharing whatever it shares.

• Now ask this aspect what it needs in order to be true to the whole, instead of protecting itself in whatever way it has been.

• If you’re able to give it what it needs, do so. If the ask needs to unfold over time, you can make an agreement that you’ll do your best to provide what it needs.

• Have whatever feels like your center “ask” this aspect to connect and come back into relationship.

• See what happens next. Any response, including silence, is perfect. You’ve opened a sacred conversation with the potential for integration. You can return to this conversation whenever you’re ready to deepen in connection and wholeness.

• Take a few breaths and open your eyes.

• Write or voice record any impressions or insights.

Guided Audio Version

Inspirations + Recommendations

Jen Pastiloff, Proof of Life

Substack:

The book that Jen read from that had me trembling and weeping. It will be released on July 8, 2025. Pre-orders are instrumental. I’m excited to receive mine. Order yours and we can weep and tremble—and exhale and laugh—together.

A Writing Room is a beautiful, dynamic, and above-and-beyond supportive community for writers. I became a member and went to their 2024 Writers Rising Conference because Anne Lamott. I can’t recommend all three highly enough.