Is this my dream life?

Los Angeles is burning, but the rest of the country is frozen. NYC is stuck at a frigid 8 degrees. My co-star and I are curled up on the couch, watching mindless YouTube and bracing against the chill.

A video comes on: Gen Z’ers dissecting social media and mental health. As a geriatric millennial who spent her childhood biking every path in the neighborhood with her next-door besties, “touching grass” isn’t some radical act of self-care—it’s just life after 5 PM.

They launched into topics like comparison and imposter syndrome and I couldn’t help but wonder: who am I supposed to be comparing myself to online? And then I remembered Leopard & Lavender—the lifestyle blog that chronicled Kelli Lamb’s year of not shopping and ultimately launched her enviable career. She’s now the editor-in-chief of the gorgeous Rue Magazine.

I’ve followed her since 2012 and watched her move from Boise to San Francisco with her “artist boyfriend” (seriously, how cool does she sound?), get married, move into their dream home in Los Angeles, and (most recently) start to rebuild after the fires.

Like most lifestyle bloggers, she romanticized her life and made everything seem easy and perfect.

A practice I’ve started doing in my own life to calm my ever-present anxiety. But in my naivete, I thought that sh*t was real! When she flew from Boise to SF for the weekend to visit said “artist boyfriend” in San Francisco. They spent a lovely Sunday together, winding down by making dinner and watching a movie. Then, she got up at the crack of dawn Monday morning to catch her flight back to Boise, just in time to grab coffee at her favorite spot downtown before work.

All I could think about was what time did she have to leave for the airport to catch a flight before work on a Monday? I was exhausted for her. And wasn’t she anxious about falling asleep and missing her flight? How did she have the energy to write her blog post on the flight? And how could she even do her job after all that? My experiences with travel have mostly been exuahsting.

I deeply aspired for my life to feel so breezy, but I knew I was doing it wrong.

I also felt a little competitive because as she moved to San Francisco to find her dream job, I moved to NYC to start my first business. So we were “peers” now…except she was so obviously better than me it was kind of embarrassing.

While the marketing expert in me now is screaming, “that’s how branding works!” The soft-hearted and terrified 26-year-old in me says it’s not that simple. Yes, the onus is always on us to become a whole, healthy, mentally-tough individual that can, you know, exist among other high-achievers and not feel less than. However, constant exposure to this kind of curated life is damaging if you don’t understand that it’s. just. marketing.

A few years later, Kelli and her boyfriend had a “cozy day at home” on the blog. Her hair was curled, makeup and nails immaculate. Her pajamas were actual pajamas—not old t-shirts—and they looked freshly ironed. They were drinking from cute cocktail glasses with fun paper straws, on a gorgeous couch in front of an enviable gallery wall, with a faux fur blanket artfully draped across them. Even their f*cking snacks were cute!

It didn’t cross my mind for an instant that they had planned and prepared for the shoot—this was just what their cozy day at home looked like. And I was failing miserably because I didn’t just wake up and do my hair and makeup easily & effortlessly everyday, nor did I work constantly to ensure an immaculate house at all times…I didn’t even have a house to keep immaculate. Because I was just some nobody, living in Queens with 3 roommates and my finger and my thumb in the shape of an L on my forehead.

No one talked about social media & mental health in the 2010s, not like they do now. It took me until I started doing it myself to realize that a curated feed isn’t the result of a perfect life. It’s just someone’s job. 

I spent a lot of time in my 20s looking at lifestyle bloggers and absorbing the message that I was sh*t at keeping a house, that I didn’t know how to accessorize, that I didn’t have enough cutesy, whimsical $38 tote bags with sayings like “pizza is cheaper than therapy” to artfully hang on my coat rack with a bouquet of farmers market flowers poking out the top.

And that somehow made me the opposite of whimsical and cutesy. My coat rack was filled with practical things—coats, mainly.

It was a functional coat rack, not a decorative coat rack, and that made me feel like garbage. Because it could have been a decorative coat rack, but I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

Everything I did always felt halfway there. Yes, I had a fabulous leopard-print bag, but there was no world where someone would snap a picture of my perfectly manicured hand reaching into it, Michael Kors watch sparkling in the sun. (It was 2014, ok?) My hands weren’t manicured, and my wrists weren’t dainty—everything about me felt like a “nice try” or a B-minus.

Cut to my boyfriend at the time—always annoyed that the my apartment wasn’t picked up to his liking and that I took too long to get ready to go out. What I took from those complaints was that he wanted me to provide that flawlessly curated life. And dammit, I wanted it too!

But what others seemed to do effortlessly took a lot of time out of my day and never really resulted in that Pinterest-perfect aesthetic. It felt like I had to work twice as hard to be half as good. While some could seemingly just snap a perfectly lit picture of their perfectly arranged side table on their way out the door, my curated ones came out like this sad pineapple.

(Because I had no idea how lighting worked in 2014. Or how much of a role it played in the lifestyle blogger aesthetic.)

For years, I felt like I was always one step behind.

Like if I just tried a little harder, invested in the right whimsical tote bag, or found the perfect lighting, I’d finally crack the code. But no matter how much effort I put in, I never felt like I measured up.

Then, in late 2019, something shifted.

I took a writing class at NYU, and it awakened a creative side of me that had been buried for years under the weight of the multi-level-marketing commercial cult that still had its claws in me. For the first time in ages, I felt called to create—not to curate or perform, but to make. I started styling outfits instead of defaulting to jeans and a turtleneck. I wore the for a special occasion pieces that had been collecting dust in my closet. My work bestie helped me document the journey and at first, the pictures were nothing special. But then, I started thinking—what if I chose a location to match the outfit?

So I bought a $18 tripod on Amazon. I started scouting locations and planning shoots. I’d curl my hair into those perfect Pinterest curls in the bathroom of my Greenwich Village office, take the photos, go back to the office to change, and return the outfit I’d “borrowed” from J.Crew on the way home. 😉

Soon, I bought a professional camera. I was feeling full, happy, and excited. The shoots got more and more elaborate—often involving whimsical accessories that my work-bestie and I collected.

“It’s art,” we would say, outdoing ourselves with each new idea.

I couldn’t relate to anyone talking about the links between social media and the declines in mental health, because it felt like Instagram had saved my life by allowing me to connect with others who also left the multi-level-marketing cult and…

I wondered who people were following that was making them feel bad, and why. The unfollow button exists for a reason, I would say.

And when I started studying social media marketing at NYU, I became even more of a self-righteous know-it-all: you get to train your algorithm to show you things that feel good! Mine is all sunshine & rainbows!

Honestly though, except for the news, it pretty much is!

It never crossed my mind then that I might be someone that others compared themselves to.

I was so busy learning about my new camera, how to use Lightroom and Photoshop, and setting up my first-ever brand photography offers. I was healing from narcissistic abuse. And it felt like I was finally getting my career started!

And yet—even with everything I was building—I still found myself envious of people like Kelli Lamb, who had jumped on the personal brand trend early. I felt like I had so much catching up to do, and at 36, I was no spring chicken. I just hoped people would still take me seriously once they found out I was out there accepting internships in my late thirties because I’d been in a cult and had no real skills to fall back on.

Looking back, I realize Kelli wasn’t just someone I envied—she was a guide. I was always drawn to her year of not shopping experiment. Not just because of the discipline it took, but because she had the vision to document it. She’s a perfect case study in how to develop a personal brand.

And now, years later, I find myself telling my co-star about Kelli’s cozy day post—the one I’d once believed was real—and laughing at how naive I was. And then it hits me: we are having a cozy day in.

Outside, it’s eight degrees. Inside, we’re curled up on my MCM leather sectional, wrapped in a plush faux fur blanket. We’re drinking French 75s out of purple champagne flutes. I have my dream job—hustling, getting my name out there. And, to top it off, my co-star is a literal artist who comes from a family of artists.

It turns out, I didn’t need to curate my life to match the aesthetic I admired. I just needed time—to figure out who I was, to grow into myself, to trust that I was already becoming the person I wanted to be.