He was standing against a cigarette machine with a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand. Tight pastel skinny pants, cropped t-shirt, a fitted blazer, and Chelsea boots. He had the bluest-green eyes, long lashes, and a blonde shag, looking like he stepped straight out of a British rock magazine.

It was one of those rare nights out with my group of friends who had very different tastes in men than I did. They were hot for muscular, short-haired guys with money. I was a single mom with a three-year-old son, so going out was reserved for every-other-weekend arrangements with my ex, and I always chose anywhere I could hear live rock music. The Rainbow Bar and Grill was the after-hours hub for all things rock.

And there he was.

I needed a good pickup line and went with: “Who cuts your hair?”

He told me he cut it himself and asked if I’d like him to cut mine. A few drinks later, we exchanged numbers. He called the next day and asked if I still wanted a haircut.

I drove down Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles figuring this guy must have some bucks but the gigantic mansions slowly became apartments and liquor stores. His home was an old, beautifully restored Victorian on a tree-lined street. He lived in the back house.

He answered the door in a tight pair of sweatpants and a leopard t-shirt with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. His apartment: a mattress on the floor, Music Connection magazines stacked everywhere, a bottle of whiskey, and some dirty glasses.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

I opted for Jack Daniels to calm my nerves. I hate whiskey, but it was that or tap water.

He gave a good rocker cut. When finished, I looked like a blonde Joan Jett. I took a seat in the only place available, his bed. I moved the rumpled sheets aside to find a pair of women’s Betty Boop bikini underwear. Typical rock musician. I was scared, though not scared enough to leave. Like the many women in my family before me, I was drawn to bad boys. I invited him to dinner.

I made pasta, meatballs, and bought two bottles of Chianti. When an hour passed from the time he was supposed to arrive, I assumed he wasn’t coming. This was pre-cell phones, so there was no way of knowing he was lost. I opened a bottle and drank it. I was a sugary cocktail girl and that bottle of wine had gone straight to my head.

I heard the rumble of his sports car coming up the hill and opened the door to find him apologetic and looking hotter than ever. I had put serious effort into getting ready and looked almost as hot as him. I was also very drunk.

I spent the night on my hands and knees, but not in a good way. I was bent over the toilet.

If you really want to know someone’s character, let something like this happen on the first date. There was no taking advantage of me in my easy-to-unzip dress. He just kept checking on me to make sure I was okay.

I pulled myself together long enough to serve him dinner while I sat across the table looking like what is now the green vomit emoji.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “Dinner was delicious.”

He smoked a couple of cigarettes, said he’d call, and left. He called the next day.

We started seeing each other, and soon enough he had to pass the final test. He had to meet my son. And my son had to like him. My boy, at three, was smart beyond his years and had a mad sense of humor. I told him mommy was seeing someone, asked him to be nice, but made sure he understood that if he didn’t like him, we wouldn’t see him again. Andy had his own test ready. When Bryan arrived, my skinny little curly-headed boy walked out of his room naked, wearing his glasses on his penis, dancing. Bryan thought he was hilarious. This was the first child he’d ever bonded with.

We moved in together two months later. Shortly after, I was pregnant.

We married on New Year’s Eve, seven months after we first met. The ceremony was in a small non-denominational church in our neighborhood, and the pastor showed up drunk in a dirty suit with leaves in his hair. Somehow, he fit the scene perfectly. The guests were an eclectic mix of family, rock musicians, drag queens, and Hollywood types. Kelle Rhoads, the brother of my friend and guitar hero Randy Rhoads, sang the Alice Cooper song You and Me as I walked down the aisle in my Stevie Nicks white lace dress with flowers in my hair. He wore a fitted white suit and Capezio shoes.

My vows were Chrissie Hynde. His were Led Zeppelin:

If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you. If mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.

The reception was at a restaurant on top of a hill with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the San Fernando Valley. We danced to Jeff Beck’s instrumental Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers. We were the quintessential rock and roll couple and we were in bliss.

Six months later, our daughter was born. Bryan showed up to the delivery room wearing Groucho Marx glasses and mustache, scrubs, his camera in hand. We both wanted a girl. She was beautiful with blonde hair, green eyes, and tiny hands. We named her Summer.

Bryan had trouble connecting with her. He bragged about her beauty but couldn’t do the things that should have come naturally like holding her or playing with her. He told me early on that he never felt a connection to little kids, and he’d already had two of his own. The first was a daughter he'd never met, fathered at fifteen. A story straight out of Chinatown, her grandparents raising her as their own. The second, was a boy from his first marriage that he rarely saw.

Given his history, I’m not sure why I expected fatherhood to come naturally. I was sure I could change him. That’s how my warped fix-it logic works.

The first half of the marriage was a wild hurricane and the second was a tornado that tore through our home, causing damage that could never be fully repaired.

For a while, life was good enough to make it easy to look away. We moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills, a two-story perched on the edge of a hill, our bedroom windows facing the Hollywood sign. The neighbors were an interesting bunch. The guy across the street walked his Siamese cat on a leash every morning, and a famous music producer lived up the street, so the sounds of rock bands recording drifted through the hills at all hours.

Our life became a series of parties, camping trips with the kids, and live music shows. Deer wandered onto the property like the rest of our guests, unannounced. Our house had become that house: my mother in the kitchen, Bryan's bandmates on the couch, the kids running around, and somehow it all worked. Until it didn’t.

Someone once told me that the one thing that initially attracts you to a person will be the downfall of the relationship. I thought it sounded cliché until I watched Bryan's Keith Richards routine go from fun to fucked up.

What no one tells you about alcoholics is that many of them can outdrink everyone in the room. Bryan never seemed drunk at first. He could down ten drinks and show no effect. But years later, two drinks led to slurring and stumbling. That's when I knew there was a problem. But it was just the Keith Richards persona, right? And in rock and roll, that behavior didn’t read as decline, but rather as identity.

Bryan grew up in Virginia, and by sixteen he was already on the road, playing bass guitar and touring with the Shangri-Las, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and a long parade of rock bands through the DC area. His band got signed and then dropped, so he did what any self-respecting rock musician would do. He moved to Los Angeles and landed on his feet in the Sunset Strip glam scene.

Then he turned thirty. In rock musician years, that’s ancient.

He contemplated leaving music, but that was never a real option, so he continued to play in headlining glam bands on the Sunset Strip, recording albums, being featured on movie soundtracks, and still hoping for that elusive record deal. It never came because by the 1990s, we could all feel the air going out of the Strip. The labels had packed up and headed to the Pacific Northwest, chasing grunge, and just like that, the scene we’d known was gone.

For Bryan, the only way to ease the pain of aging out of something you loved was to drink. So the drinking got worse.

As for me, my offices above the Whisky a Go Go emptied out quietly. The bands stopped calling, then the labels, and then there was nothing left to call about. The Sunset Strip, once a wall-to-wall circus of spandex and enough Aqua Net to puncture the ozone, had gone still. The posers with their flyers and their big hair had vanished, leaving nothing behind but empty clubs and the faint smell of hairspray and broken dreams.

I was always thinking about my next move. My sister and I created a new magazine, leveraging our contacts to land a deal with a major publisher and distributor in New York. It took off. That made things worse for Bryan. I had one foot in the music business and one at home, still moving forward. He had neither.

We moved an hour north to a sleepy beach town where the fog rolled in at three p.m. and the sidewalks rolled up at nine. The music scene was as dead as the fish that left their stench on the shore. Bryan stopped playing music and poured his energy into wiring hot rods, which became a fairly successful business. But when the sun went down, the drinking began. Glasses of wine became jugs of wine. Jugs of wine became boxes with spouts.

“He’s three sheets to the wind,” my mother would say.

It didn’t matter that he’d stumble into our daughter’s room thinking it was ours. That he’d fall asleep on the floor at family gatherings. That he went face-first down the stairs and ended up in the emergency room. That he passed out at a wedding with an open bar and was later found asleep in the bushes near the venue. By my account, he had a sleep disorder. That was my story and I was sticking to it.

We lived next door to my sister and her husband, but we were isolated. I rarely invited anyone over in fear of Bryan getting drunk. Family gatherings worked best in daylight. The threats to leave weren’t working. He’d beg and make promises, and then I’d find the big bottle of vodka hidden in the clothes dryer. The first DUI came without warning. I was sitting with my mom at a local hamburger joint, waiting for him to join us. He never showed. He was in jail.

On Mother’s Day, we all waited at a café for brunch and he never showed, again. The obligatory call came. He’d checked himself into a rehab, or something like that. Then they let him go and I picked him up. More of the same.

My mother’s illness ran alongside all of it. Metastatic breast cancer eventually took her life. We held her service at an old Catholic church in North Hollywood. After the reception, my cousin invited us to spend the night at her home in San Diego, a good 2-3 hour drive from Los Angeles, as a way to get away from the fresh open wound of it all. I drove in my cousin’s car with Ave Maria still ringing in my head. Bryan was supposed to drive down later. Hours passed. He never arrived. I spent the night with my cousin calling every police station and jail from Los Angeles to San Diego until we found him. He’d been arrested. Another DUI.

This was one of many final straws, but ending the marriage would mean I failed. I could make him a better father. I could make him love Italian culture, see the beauty in opera, in Sinatra. I could make him stop drinking. My daughter had other ideas. Her words were the harshest I’d ever heard from her: If you stay with him, I’ll lose all respect for you.

But I stayed. I stood by him as we released my mother’s ashes over the casinos in Laughlin, Nevada, just like she’d asked.

Then things changed. The house was quiet without my mother to distract me. My master’s thesis was done. My son was at Berkeley. My exit plan was written.

And it wasn’t the second DUI that finally did it. It was an episode of Sex and the City. I watched Carrie standing on a bed, fixing Mr. Big’s tie, and I couldn’t help but wonder, why am I with this guy? It was way past loyal. The man I’d fallen in love with had been replaced by someone who complained nonstop, had grit under his fingernails from working on cars, kept his hair long and straggly, and still wore shirts that could fit a toddler. And let’s not talk about the leopard bikini underwear.

I wanted a man with manicured fingernails and toes, who went to an actual hair stylist, who wore crisp shirts fresh from the dry cleaners. I wanted someone who wasn’t a stumbling drunk. I wanted my own version of Mr. Big.

Bryan tried to be sober. He promised it for the millionth time, and I believed him.

And then Thanksgiving came. My mother had died months earlier, so the day already felt hollow. My sister planned a vegan dinner. My closest friend knows how I melt down when family traditions are altered so she offered me a real Thanksgiving meal with all the trimmings at her sister’s house. After choking down some tofurky roast, I left for my friend’s house but forgot something at home.

I called him once, then again, but no answer. I drove back to the house and there he was, sitting at the table, guzzling down a large bottle of vodka.

He looked at me, then at the bottle. No excuses. No performance. He knew this was it, that there was nothing left to deny. The truth was finally undeniable.

I signed a lease on an apartment in Santa Monica.

And it was over.

*Author’s note. Bryan gave permission for this article to be published with his photo. He left Los Angeles for the desert years ago. He plays music for fun, builds guitars, and is still working on his 1930 Ford hot rod. He says he’s been sober for six months. I want to believe him.

The man who taught me how to be a great professor also told me to wear my hair in a ponytail.

I was up for my first full-time tenured professor position. His position. He was retiring and had chosen me to fill his enormous shoes. He was large in both body size and personality, the kind of professor students quote for decades, the kind who fills a room before he opens his mouth. He was determined that I get this job so he coached me, making sure I was prepared to answer the kinds of questions asked by college hiring committees. I made it to the top three.

The final hiring decision belonged to the college president, a strong woman who he’d gone head-to-head with on numerous occasions. He gave me his advice.

Tone it down. She’ll be intimidated by you. Dress down. Wear your hair up. Maybe a ponytail.

I did what he said. I didn’t wear my pink suit with the cropped blazer. I didn’t wear my layered blonde hair down. Instead, I borrowed a navy blue Ann Taylor suit from my best friend and tied my hair back in a ponytail. I toned it down and I got the job.

He took me out to lunch to celebrate and gave me more tips.

Buy the student media staff pizza but don’t let them take advantage of you.

Keep your head down and don’t piss anyone in administration off until you get tenure.

Don’t shit where you eat.

And then, out of nowhere, he asked if my boyfriend had proposed yet. The man I was seeing. The man I would eventually marry. He hadn’t.

Then came the confession.

If you were mine, I’d whisk you off into the sunset and never look back.

I sat there drinking my iced tea, not knowing how to respond, so I went with the kind of answer a woman gives a man when she wants to end a conversation while staying respectful.

Thanks, that’s very sweet.

This is the man who had coached me to make myself smaller so another woman wouldn’t feel threatened. He had worried I might intimidate her just by being myself and yet he saw no contradiction in sitting across from me making his case. That he knew what to do with me. That I was worth a sunset and a marriage proposal.

He made me small for her but I was plenty for him. I never stopped wondering if I would have gotten the job anyway. Would she have liked me exactly as I was, pink suit and all? By following his advice, I hadn't just changed my hair and clothes. I pre-judged her. I accepted his version of her before she ever had the chance to have the version of me.

If that isn’t the oldest story about women, I don’t know what is.

But looking back, I learned this lesson long before he taught it to me.

My mother believed in me the way only mothers can, completely and irrationally with an intensity that left no room for doubt. She would tell me there was no competition because I was the best at everything. She said it as a a fact, like something that didn’t require any further discussion. And in the next breath she’d tell me: You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

She wasn’t wrong about either thing. That’s what made it so hard. She was handing me two truths that could not both fit in the same body. You are exceptional, but be careful how you show it. You are the best, but the world will not always thank you for acting like it. Go get everything, but smile while you’re doing it. Don’t scare anyone.

I grew up fluent in this contradiction. What that looked like for me was me smiling, nodding, and tamping it down until something finally snaps and I become a person I can’t entirely explain or defend.

Like board games.

I am so competitive that I once told my entire family that they sucked and walked out of a Scrabble game.

I was in my thirties. My son and I were arguing over a word. Everyone sided with him. I grabbed the glass of wine I’d been nursing all evening, pushed back my chair, looked at the people who have loved me my entire life, and rendered my verdict.

You all suck.

My mother did not consider this honey.

I wish I could say that the Scrabble game is the most embarrassing example. The same force that sent me storming out of a board game in my thirties is the same force that makes me lie awake at night thinking about a 0.3.

I’m a professor with a 4.7 out of 5.0 rating on Rate My Professor. Do you know what I think about that 4.7? I think about the 0.3. I think about whoever gave me less than five stars, what I said or did that made one student withhold a perfect score, what they needed that I didn’t give them. A 4.7, by any reasonable measure is pretty great. I know it the way I know my mother thought I was the best at everything.

And I still want the five.

So I go back and make the lectures better. I study the professors in my field with the five star scores. I am, in the most absurd way possible, competing for a perfect score on a website that students scroll through between classes on their phones.

And then there were the student media conferences.

I was a college student media adviser and my students competed in journalism competitions, not the Pulitzer, but you would not have known that from my energy. I made sure they submitted their very best work. I made sure they were all given matching custom made t-shirts because if you’re going to walk into a room full of competitors, you might as well walk in looking like a team, a force. I would sit beside them as they waited for the winners to be announced and I’m pretty sure my seat was vibrating. I know for sure that my heart was racing right along with theirs.

Every time we won big, I would lose my voice screaming and cheering for them. And if they lost to another college, I would sit in silence thinking: the judges were wrong. I would tell them that winning isn’t everything, that they did their very best and should be proud of themselves, but on the inside I was thinking: we were robbed.

I mean, come on. I was their coach. I knew they were the best because I had made them the best the same way someone once made me believe I was the best. The same way a woman once told me there was no competition because I was going to win.

Sound familiar, Mom?

This is what competition does when it has nowhere to go. It doesn’t just live in the big moments like the job interview or the book deal. It lives in the small ones too. The constant monitoring of whether you’re enough.

What I’ve come to understand as a woman is that you are never playing one game. You are always playing two.

The first game is the one everyone can see like the job, the pitch, the byline, the promotion. You prepare for this game and you get good at it.

The second game has a rulebook that exists but no one will give it to you. You have to learn it by losing. By being called too much, too aggressive, too ambitious. By watching a man do the exact same thing you just did and get called a leader for it. By being told by a man who claimed to believe in you more than anyone, to pull your hair back and tone it down so the woman interviewing you wouldn’t feel threatened.

And then there are other women, which is its own complicated territory. We’ve gotten better at performing solidarity. We like the posts, share the wins, and show up with encouraging comments. But when someone else gets the one thing we wanted, something inside of us stirs. Not because of her. Because of us.

We’ve been conditioned to be pitted against each other, and even when we resist, it’s still there. Our mind plays tricks on us and we conclude that some women are not really our allies and others are not really our competition. We spend time trying to sort it out which is exhausting work that men are never asked to do.

The man who mentored me was not a villain. He believed in me and handed me a future with both hands. He also told me to sand down my edges to receive it.

This is what the second game does. It doesn’t stay with the hiring committee or a professor rating website. It follows you to a place where you find yourself competing for your own sense of worth.

We live in a world that says women who compete too openly are problems to be managed. Take your drive, your talent, and your ambition and pull it all back into a neat and tidy ponytail.

I’ve been told not to get my hopes up by people who thought they were protecting me but I have to wonder, from what? From wanting things? From believing I might actually get them? Maybe my competitiveness is deep rooted in optimism. Maybe I believe that I’m capable and haven’t given up on the idea that putting in an effort results in a positive outcome. Or maybe I just hate losing.

My family still laughs about the Scrabble game. I laugh too. And then I ask if they want to play again and they all suddenly have somewhere else to be.

I’ll never stop competing. Somewhere between my mother telling me I was the best at everything and a man handing me my career while asking me to change myself for it, I realized that my competitiveness was never the problem.

The terms are.

The Zoom background looked like a stock photo, the kind Airbnb uses to make you believe every cabin looks like this. Wooden walls, a window full of trees, and a blonde who looks like she came with the listing.

But it wasn’t a background and she wasn’t a model. She was my friend. It was her temporary office that consisted of a bed with messed up covers and a pillow for a desk.

She sat cross-legged on the bed, her long blonde hair wild and untamed, like her. She was writing from a rented cabin in the mountains for a few weeks. No office, no city noise, no neighbors. Just her, lots of notes, and whatever the wilderness decided to offer up between sessions. The wifi was terrible but she didn’t seem to mind.

I would never stay in a cabin in the woods alone. My idea of roughing it is flying in extra room seats. And yet, the women I’ve loved most in this life have all been some version of her. Wild, untamed, and completely at home in a world that terrifies me.

These are my people. The ones I live vicariously through.

I should be clear about who I am. I’m the woman who can walk into a room of strangers and feel her shoulders drop with relief. Give me a crowd, a podium, a city I’ve never been to, and my nervous system ignites. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people at media conferences and felt genuinely calm. I have walked up to people I’ve never met at parties my entire life without a second thought. And don’t even get me started about New York City. It’s my obsession. I lived there for a year, visit often, and dream of moving back. I’ve compared the feeling I get to heroin. I’ve never done drugs but have been told it becomes an addiction after the first hit.

They have the wilderness, I have New York. We’re all addicts.

But the real outdoors? I wouldn’t know which berries to eat. I would eat the wrong ones and die. And if a bear came at me, I’d run, which is apparently the one thing you are never supposed to do.

And yet, I’m drawn to these women like mosquitos to a campfire I could never build.

I met one of my first wild ones the way you meet all the best people. Unexpected and in a crisis.

Ozzy Osbourne was suing me for libel. I was running an LA magazine with my sister, doing what editors do, deciding which stories to publish. This decision ended with us sitting in a tall Los Angeles building, being deposed on video by his lawyers. One of them looked up from his papers and asked, Do you have a degree in journalism?

No, I do not.

In a moment of either genius or panic, or because I felt like a total loser, I decided what I really needed was a journalism class. After my final deposition, I walked into a local community college, the way you do when your life is on fire, and there she was.

Short skirt. Long dark hair. A raspy voice that sounded like it had lived somewhere interesting.

What’s your deal? she said.

I told her. She laughed and encouraged me to sign up for her class. She was a former music journalist. We clicked immediately.

I was released from all liability in the lawsuit, and she’s the reason I got my master’s in journalism and became a college professor. I want to shout that out loud because it still amazes me. I believe that none of the women in my life arrived by accident. They were placed by something divine.

And here’s what I remember most. We went to New York together for a journalism conference. We drank champagne at a restaurant in Grand Central Station after trekking through the snow, an idea she came up with close to midnight. That part was easy for me, the city girl in her natural habitat. The next day she called me to her hotel room. She had something to show me.

In her bathtub was a wild bird she rescued from the streets of Manhattan.

She hadn’t just found the bird. She spent hours on the phone tracking down rescues, and when she finally found one, she put that wild creature in a New York taxi and delivered it herself.

I should mention that I’m terrified of all wildlife, including birds. Even the pigeons of New York give me the creeps. I would have walked past that bird, said a little prayer for its soul, and never looked back. She nursed it back to health and hailed it a cab.

She once eyed my Louis Vuitton bag and said, “Honey, for what that thing costs I could buy myself a horse.” I didn’t confess that the only time I ever got on a horse, it was at a sketchy pop-up circus, the kind that appear out of nowhere in an empty parking lot. After several glasses of cheap wine on ice and a candy apple, I climbed on that pony and lasted about thirty seconds before jumping off. I was twenty.

When her mother's dementia worsened, she left the California beaches behind for Florida, where she describes her property as “emerald green as far as the eye can see.” She loves the wildlife that wanders onto her property, including bears. We stay in touch the way old friends do. We talk about New York again, or maybe her place this time, sitting on her porch, watching whatever the wilderness decides to send our way.

I’m ready. She just needs to protect me from the bugs, the wildlife, and anything that makes a sound after dark. She’d do it without thinking twice.

And then there’s the one in Berkeley.

If my wild women friends make wildness look natural, this one makes fearless sound like a starting point. She operates on a frequency I can’t access. She has a house on an island in Canada that she describes as magical. Before you picture a ferry or a sturdy bridge, let me stop you. Getting there requires a seaplane. One of those small planes that lands directly on the water, which I’m told is perfectly safe and which I do not believe for a second. I can barely summon the courage to fly on a commercial plane with two engines and a beverage cart stocked with vodka. She island-hops on something that floats.

She invites me to the island every year. I really want to go but I’m not sure I’d survive the trip.

And here’s what tells you everything you need to know about her. When she needs a ride, she doesn’t call a car or rent one. She makes a sign, hangs it on her body, and stands somewhere until a stranger takes her where she needs to go. Something that requires a level of trust in humans that I’ve never had. This lifestyle has resulted in hundreds of friends she’s made along the way.

I recently went to her birthday party, a moveable feast across four houses with more food and friends than I could count. Her friends are a bunch of eclectic Berkeley types ranging in age from their twenties to eighties, every single one of them a story. She was dancing in the center of all of it, lit up like sunshine in human form and completely in her element. She doesn’t find her people, she accumulates them.

But the one who has been there the longest, since we were sixteen and the world was already complicated, is my best friend. The Italian one. Calm, loyal, and sometimes a little scary, but in a good way.

When I went through my second divorce, she handed me the keys to her house. No discussion, no conditions. She fed me, got me drunk, and made it clear that nobody was getting near me without going through her first. There was a gun in her closet. She mentioned this once, the way you mention where the extra towels and Italian cold cuts are kept. She knew how to use it. One night the security alarm went off. I saw her shadow standing in the hallway, dark hair loose, white silk nightgown, gun in hand, calm as a woman who has already decided how this ends. And where was I? In bed, covers over my head, hiding. Luckily, it was just the Santa Ana winds.

She had a chicken coop in her backyard in a city where chicken coops are not allowed. Three chickens who gave her eggs and good conversation. One of them was named Peg, after my mother. I don’t have the words for what that meant to me.

We’ve traveled together and every single time she takes care of me the way only she knows how. I’m terrified of flying, gripping the armrest, bargaining with God, holy water in one hand and a mini bottle of vodka in the other. She’s a former VP of a private jet company, which means she knows every trick, every workaround, every bump. She makes sure there’s food and booze, even when they say there isn’t. She has bought me proper suitcases, travel packs, a warm throw, chargers, and everything a person needs to feel safe in the air. She holds the chaos at bay so I don’t have to.

She was doing this when we were sixteen. I was jumped by a group of girls in high school and she was there. This new friend, this girl I had just met, stood by me without hesitation. She visited me at the hospital. She told my father who did it. She knew who he was and she knew he'd take care of it. I’ll leave it at that.

Decades later, she’s still standing there.

I fear her and I love her, in equal measure and for the same reasons. She’s the kind of woman who would kill someone with her bare hands if they hurt the people she loves. No one has tested her. God help whoever does.

She is my person. She always has been.

She dreams of leaving the suburbs north of Los Angeles for the Pacific Northwest. A farm. Land. Room to be as wild as she actually is beneath the civilized Italian girl who is waiting for permission. I believe that one day she’ll do it. I also know that when she goes, a part of me will grieve it like a small death. Having her close by has always been my comfort. She would take a bullet for me.

So why am I drawn to these types of women? I’ve asked myself this question, usually while watching one of them do something that would leave me hyperventilating.

I think it may be that I know who I am. I’m the city girl who loves the crowd. The sound of sirens makes me calm. I’m at home in the kind of commotion that has sidewalks, a wine bar, and a good hospital.

But there’s a part of me that has always known there’s another way to live. Wilder. More unafraid. Less concerned with what comes next and more awake to what’s right in front of me, like the bird on the street, the stranger with a truck, or the island you can only reach by landing on water. I could never access that part on my own.

So I found them instead. Or maybe they found me.

They have let me live through them. The one writing in a cabin with terrible wifi, the one who made lifelong friends from a handwritten sign, the one with chickens, a gun and decades of showing up. They’ve taken me to places I would never go alone, protected me from things I can’t name, and loved me anyway, Louis Vuitton bag and all. I envy and celebrate their wildness.

Some people collect adventures. I collect the women who have them.

*Author’s note: A special thank you to the incredibly talented artist Robin Eisenberg for graciously allowing me to use her stunning work in this story. From the moment I began writing these women, I pictured each one as a Robin Eisenberg drawing. Her art doesn’t just depict women; it celebrates them. And it’s no surprise because Robin herself is beautiful inside and out.

I watched my friends apply to colleges across the state. Santa Cruz. Humboldt. Santa Rosa. I watched them open their acceptance letters and felt that familiar twinge of jealousy.

College was never an option for me. I was expected to get married or get a job that paid the bills. In our house, those were the only two roads, and one of them was a dead end.

My father had made his feelings about education clear long before I was old enough to test them. My brother once brought home a straight-A report card and Dad threw it aside. “What good is this?” he said. A female cousin back East got into Yale. Her father told her she’d be wasting her time. These men weren’t outliers, they were a type. And my father was their patron saint.

The irony is almost laughable. My father’s mother came from an aristocratic family in Italy who were barons and lawyers, some who ran the education system. The men and women in that family were learned, accomplished, and most had law degrees. Somehow, in one generation, that inheritance got buried under cement. My father became a mobster who couldn’t see the point of a report card. He barely made it through eighth grade.

I went on to get a master’s degree. I think about that sometimes. But that came later. First, I had to find a way out of his house.

Dad had a word for daughters who lived alone or lived freely. Puttana. For those who don’t speak Italian slang, the word means whore. In our house, no daughter of his would be one. The only acceptable exit was a husband.

So I dated Steve. He was Italian, 21 to my 16, and the only guy my father approved of. He was a wonderful person who treated me like a queen. I loved him like a brother but I was not in love with him. He proposed when I was 17 and I said yes because I didn’t know what else to say. I was a teenage girl who wanted to hang out with rock-and-roll bands, travel the coast, and go to college.

A girl can dream, right?

When my friends piled into our friend Pammy’s pink VW bus to move up to Santa Rosa, they invited me along. Mom said yes, and told Dad it was an hour away. It was nine hours. Pre-internet. Pre-cell phones. Pre-Google Maps. Lies were so much easier then.

I had never felt freedom like that. Not once in my life.

The house sat back among redwoods on a hill near a creek. Our friend Laurie was already there, and her roommates Jan and Tom met us in the driveway. Tom was tall with brown hair and brown eyes and looked exactly like James Taylor. I was gone.

Within the first week, we were inseparable. We walked through the woods. We swam naked in the Russian River. We caught abalone, battered it in beer, cooked it over an open fire while he played guitar and we all sang. I’d never slept next to a man all night in a bed. I’d wake up to his long brown hair on the pillow and his arms around me and think, oh. So this is what it’s supposed to feel like.

Tom was a photography student and I became his subject. My friends joked that the house was becoming a shrine to me, his photos he’d taken propped up along every wall. I was living in a fantasy where I was Joni Mitchell and he was James Taylor and Joni played on the record player all day long.

By the second week, he asked me to stay.

I called my mother and begged. She said Dad was getting impatient. I said I had nothing to come home to. She reminded me I had a fiancé who called the house daily. I told her I wasn’t coming back.

She told me my brother was coming to get me. He drove nine hours on a Friday and arrived to a long wooden table, twinkling lights and my beautiful hippie girlfriends. My brother had also never quite been allowed to be himself under our father's roof. Dad had a very specific idea of what a son should look like and he was the opposite.

We all ate together in that bohemian house. My brother took one look at Pammy, 18, petite, long blonde hair, and forgot entirely why he'd driven nine hours. By morning, the two of them were walking out of a bedroom together.

Neither of us wanted to go home.

We spent the drive back to Los Angeles along the Pacific Coast Highway talking about someday maybe getting a place up there together. Fantasy built on fantasy.

By the time I got home and reached for the phone to call Tom, it was already too late. He’d gotten my number from my friends. He’d already called. My mother had already answered.

Never call here again. She’s getting married.

That one stung. My mother was always on my side, but she knew better than anyone what my father was capable of. He once chased down a man in a truck just for whistling at her. He pulled him out through the window and punched him in the face. She wasn't protecting tradition when she answered that call. She was protecting Tom.

So instead of planning for college, I planned a wedding. A traditional Italian one. Large amounts of money spent on things I didn’t want. A Catholic church. A country club reception. A long-sleeved lace white gown with a high neck. Pink bridesmaid dresses. Plated prime rib. My mother’s stuffed shells. Pastel almonds in white net.

We honeymooned in Vegas. On our wedding night I thought about running away, catching a plane to Santa Rosa, disappearing into the redwoods. I stayed. Steve didn’t deserve that. Tom didn’t deserve any of it. Neither did I. But my parents were happy.

Tap dance, Toni. Tap dance.

We stayed married five years and had a son. My father died five months after that from a massive heart attack, and I left Steve not long after.

Steve never stopped being family and he never remarried. He called every anniversary with the same line: “Hi toots, we would have been married X years today.” He mailed anniversary cards each year with “ex” written in front of Happy Anniversary to my Wife. My daughter from my second marriage called him Daddy Steve and he earned it. He never missed a holiday call and never missed a chance to show up. When her father didn't come to her wedding, Steve did. No fanfare, no explanation needed. That was just him.

He was 67 when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He had left Los Angeles for Las Vegas years before and I flew there to be at his bedside. Old-school Italian, in sickness and in health, even after it’s over. He was hallucinating near the end and asked me if he and I were still married. I said yes.

I held his hand. I told him I loved him, that I was lucky to have met him, to have married him, to have made our son together. And I meant every word.

He asked that his ashes be spread among the redwoods.

Whenever I’m among the trees, I think of him. Tom doesn’t even cross my mind.

Some things take a lifetime to understand. My mother was my hero. I know that now in a way I couldn't then. I was only 21 when my father died. I was still so young, still so sure I'd been robbed of something. And maybe I had been, but nothing that turned out to matter. I look back now and think she may have known me better than I knew myself. I'm a city person. I would have grown tired of Santa Rosa. I need music and art and busy sidewalks under my feet. The mountains go quiet too fast for me. The trees are beautiful but they don't talk back.

I eventually bought my own pink VW bus. Pammy would have approved. It had no business attempting the LA canyons to the beach but it tried anyway, and my little curly-haired son and I loved every rattling mile of it. We'd stop for ice cream and apple juice in Malibu and stay at the beach for hours, Joni Mitchell playing on the old tape deck the whole way there and back. I had more fun on those beach runs than I ever had in Santa Rosa. The fantasy was real, but the fling would have faded.

I may not have been in love with Steve, or at least not in the way I thought love was supposed to feel at 17. But I loved him my entire life. He was one of my best friends. He was always there. Maybe that's its own kind of love story.

She was seventeen years old, standing in front of a man who held her future in his hands, and he looked at her the way people look at something that needs fixing. Her nose, he said, was too long. Her mouth was too big for the camera. Her face was too much. Her presence filled rooms in ways that made certain people uncomfortable, and if she wanted to succeed, she would need to become something more manageable. Something easier to look at. Something smaller.

She was Sophia Loren and she refused to listen.

“I don’t want to touch nothing on my face because I like my face,” she said.

You have loved this story your whole life. You have told it to other women. You want to believe it yourself.

And yet you type into the search bar: Am I too intense?

Maybe it was two in the morning. Maybe you were lying in the dark replaying a conversation, picking it apart, wondering where you crossed the line that apparently exists somewhere between passionate and unhinged, between loving deeply and being too much to handle. Maybe someone said it to your face. Maybe they didn’t have to because you read it in the way they stepped back, changed the subject, or went silent in that typical way that told you you’d done it again.

The thing is, it rarely comes as a direct accusation. It doesn’t always arrive loud and obvious, something you can point to and defend yourself against. It comes sideways. Offhanded. It finds you in the moments you least expect it.

It comes from a family member who asks why you pose a certain way in a photograph. Never mind that your mother, another too-mucher, a woman who understood that you take up space on purpose, taught you exactly how to stand in a frame and to own it. The question isn’t really about the pose. It’s kind of a signal: you are doing too much, even in a photograph.

It comes from a much younger family member who looks at you across a room and says it plainly, the way younger people sometimes do, as if the words have always been there, picked up from somewhere unnamed: you’re too intense. So you just smile because what else can you do, while something in you rises up wanting to answer back and then goes quiet because you know the trap. The moment you defend yourself against “too intense,” you become proof of it.

It comes from a friendship, the kind that makes you feel like you’ve committed a crime by simply showing up as yourself. Nothing you could ever quite name. Nothing you could hold up as evidence. So you make excuses. Maybe you’re being too sensitive. Maybe you misread it. Or maybe you’re just too intense.

So you add it to the pile. You know the one. The one that keeps getting heavier and heavier that you refuse to be buried under because this is what too much actually looks like. Not dramatic or villainous, and not something you can easily explain to someone who wasn’t there. It’s just a slow accumulation of small moments. A photo. Words from across a room. A drive home in silence that adds up to a woman alone in the dark asking the internet if she’s broken.

I am writing this to you, not the version of you that’s currently auditing yourself. The real one. The one who has opinions that are treated like something that wasn’t supposed to be said out loud.

Here is what I know about women like you: you were not born believing you were too much. That was taught.

Maybe you’ve learned to monitor yourself. To front-load apologies. To laugh and then immediately check the faces around you to see if it was too much, too loud, too long. You learned to serve yourself in small portions. To take the whole, complicated, beautiful mess of yourself and reduce it to something easier to digest.

A storm became a sprinkle. A hurricane became a light breeze. A flame became a flicker.

And still they said it. You’re a lot. You’re too intense.

The world that tells you to be less does not reward you for complying. It simply finds new things to ask you to surrender. Your voice first. Then your opinions. Then your needs. Then yourself. And let’s be honest about what’s happening right now. They are asking us to go back to a time when our voices were background noise and our opinions were tolerated at best. They are framing it as tradition, as virtue, as the natural order of things. But we know what it is. We have always known what it is. It is the same request it has always been, in a different dress.

I named this project Like Sophia because I saw myself in her. Growing up Italian, she was everywhere, on the walls, in conversations, and in the way the strong women in my family moved through a room like they owned the floor beneath them. But it was more than my heritage. It was recognition. Here was a woman who looked like something the world wanted to change and she didn’t let them.

There is a quote of hers that I return to again and again. She once said that she knows how to say no in twelve languages. Think about that. Not yes. Not maybe. Not let me make myself smaller so you’re more comfortable. No. In twelve languages. As if she understood, from the very beginning, that the world would come for her in many forms, from many directions, and she prepared accordingly. She did not learn twelve ways to apologize. She learned twelve ways to hold her ground. That is the woman I wanted to build this space around.

Sophia went on to win the Academy Award, to be called the most beautiful woman in the world, to live exactly the life she had always known was hers. Not because she fixed anything but because she refused the premise that she needed fixing.

Here is what I know after a lifetime of being told I was too much. Too intense is not a flaw or a character defect. It is not something a good therapist is going to fix. It is what someone says when they cannot keep up with you and would rather label you than examine themselves. They dress it up as concern. They deliver it as feedback

There is a difference between a flaw and an inconvenience to someone else.

Your intensity is why your phone rings when things get hard. It is why you’re the one people call at midnight, not to chat, but because something is wrong and you are the person they trust to handle it. It is why you are the fixer, the first call, the one who shows up with solutions before anyone even has to ask. It is why the people in your life lean on you the way they do and sometimes without even realizing how much.

And yet somehow you are the one sitting alone at two in the morning wondering if you are too much.

Think about that.

You are not too much.

That is what this whole project is about. Not fixing your nose or anything about you. I’m a woman who was handed bigness like a birthright, and I’ve decided to keep it. All of it. So many people in my life had opinions about that but I love being a Sophia. I love the fullness of her, the defiance of her, the way she stood in a room and simply refused to be anything other than exactly who she was.

So be a Sophia, a leading lady in your own movie and your own life. And never forget that you, too, can learn to say no in twelve languages.

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Every year the same routine: the dreaded CT angiogram. The scan that tells you whether all the work, the drugs, the exercise, the diet, the constant vigilance has mattered at all.

This year was no different. As I drove through Los Angeles traffic to my cardiologist’s office, my hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter than usual. The what-ifs were relentless. What if nothing had changed? What if six years of discipline, fear, and determination still hasn’t moved the needle? Or what if it was worse?

I had already prepared myself for the answer I’d gotten before: Stable, no progression. Not worse, which was good, but not better either.

But this time, it was different.

This time, the hard work had finally paid off. He looked over all my reports and said the words I had been waiting for six years to hear: “I’m seeing reversal.”

The stenosis was better. The plaque was regressing. There was a 30 percent increase in the blood flow to my heart. It was all good news.

Saying I cried tears of joy would be putting it mildly. My first instinct was to leap off the exam table and tackle my cardiologist in a life-saving hug. Even I know that’s socially unacceptable. So instead, I settled for thanking him properly for being the first doctor to actually take my family’s heart history seriously and, frankly, for saving my life. Because let’s be real: without him, I might not even be here to tell this story.

I’m writing this for anyone with heart disease who is scared and just wants clear, actionable answers and real solutions, especially for women who are so often dismissed because heart disease is still seen as a “man’s disease.”

Can I tell you exactly what resulted in this positive outcome? Not for sure, but I can tell you that after being diagnosed with heart disease, I took the diagnosis seriously.

I followed the advice of my cardiologist, a research specialist in atherosclerosis and preventive cardiology who has authored more than 1,000 papers on reversing heart disease through lifestyle changes, prescription drugs, and supplements.

I did it all. I treated it like a full-time job with overtime.

I’m sharing what worked for me, in detail. The notes in bold that follow each of the protocol below are important to read because I explain the tests, why these drugs were prescribed and why I take them.

I want to add that I’m aware of the privilege I have in this moment. I have health insurance and lifetime benefits from my former college teaching job. My already broken heart breaks even more for the people who don’t, those who can’t afford coverage at all or who pay astronomical premiums for insurance that barely protects them. The healthcare system in the U.S. is a mess, and too often whether you live or die comes down to what you can afford. My advice is to advocate for yourself. Read the research. Ask questions. Look for hospitals running clinical trials. Do whatever you can to protect your health because no one will fight for it harder than you.

Diagnostic Tests

No doctor’s order required at many radiology facilities

Coronary Artery Calcium CAC scan: A CAC score is a number doctors get from a quick, non‑invasive heart CT scan that measures how much calcium has built up in the walls of your coronary arteries, an indirect sign of atherosclerotic plaque and heart disease risk. A score of 0 means no detectable calcium and generally a low risk of a heart attack in the near future, while higher numbers suggest more calcium and a greater likelihood of plaque buildup and cardiovascular risk. Mine was 256, all in Left Anterior Descending Artery LAD, aka “The Widowmaker.” *Insurance does not cover. Average cost is $99. Everyone should have one. This is how I found out I had coronary artery disease.

Ordered by Standard of Care cardiologist who said I was fine

Nuclear Stress Test: A heart imaging test that shows how well blood flows through your heart muscle, both at rest and during activity. Mine was normal. This test only shows blockages 70 percent or more. *Most insurance will cover

Lab Tests: Complete Blood Count CBC (normal), Metabolic Panel: Glucose: 170, Lipid Panel: Total Cholesterol 280, Triglycerides 272, LDL 172, A1C 6.6, HS-CRP 10 Homocysteine 14 (All abnormal) *Most insurance covers

Ordered by my research cardiologist who said I wasn’t fine and is now managing my heart disease

CT Angiogram: A non-invasive CT scan that takes detailed images of your heart and blood vessels. It helps doctors see blockages or narrowing in your coronary arteries, assess plaque buildup, and evaluate your risk for heart disease. Mine showed coronary artery disease with a large percentage of vulnerable mixed plaque and a 50-60 percent stenosis (blockage) in the LAD. CAC score is also calculated as part of the test. *Most insurance covers. I have this test done yearly.

Cleerly Study: An advanced form of coronary artery imaging that uses AI‑enhanced analysis of a CT angiogram to create a detailed 3D view of your coronary arteries, showing not just blockages but the type, amount, and location of plaque buildup. Allows doctors to more accurately assess your heart disease risk and tailor prevention or treatment strategies based on what’s actually happening in your arteries. Mine showed large plaque burden in the LAD with a large percentage of vulnerable mixed plaque and a 62 percent stenosis. *Insurance does not cover. Cost: $950. I have it done yearly with CT Angiogram. Is it expensive? Yes, but for me, it’s worth it.

FFrct: Advanced test that combines a CT angiogram with computational analysis to measure how well blood flows through the coronary arteries. It helps doctors determine whether a blockage is actually limiting blood flow and causing risk, guiding decisions about treatment without needing an invasive procedure. Mine was .61 in the LAD which equals a 30 percent reduction in blood flow to the heart. *Most insurance covers it if your cardiologist feels its warranted. I have this done yearly with the CT Angiogram.

Lab tests: Ordered a complete genetic heart panel that included the LPa aka “heart attack gene.” Mine was negative. Positive for the MTHFR gene, which runs in my father’s side of family that presents with an elevated homocysteine. *If you knew my family, you would understand why the acronym fits perfectly.

Blood tests run every three months: CBC, Metabolic Panel, Lipid Panel, A1C, HS-CRP, APOB, Homocysteine. Insurance covers.

My Current Drug Protocol

Crestor (rosuvastatin) A prescription statin medication used to lower “LDL cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. It works by blocking a liver enzyme involved in cholesterol production, helping prevent plaque buildup in the arteries. I’m on 10 mg daily Started six years ago. My LDL stayed between 90-100 but new studies show that for people with Coronary Artery Disease, an LDL below 70 is not only beneficial, but sometimes result in reversal. He explained that raising the dosage will not ever get the LDL down below 70. *I have Familial hypercholesterolemia FH He decided to add a PCSK9 inhibitor (Repatha).

Repatha An injectable medication that helps lower LDL cholesterol by blocking a protein called PCSK9, which allows the liver to remove more cholesterol from the blood. Prescribed for people at high risk of heart disease who need extra help beyond statins. I am on 140 mg twice monthly. I started taking this two years ago. My cholesterol numbers are now all normal and my LDL is below 30.

Ramipril A prescription medication called an ACE inhibitor that helps lower blood pressure and reduce strain on the heart. By relaxing blood vessels, it makes it easier for the heart to pump blood and helps prevent heart attacks, strokes, and other heart-related complications. I take 5 mg. once daily. I do not have high blood pressure but I get agitated easily, especially in LA traffic or when reading politics, so I’m on this to keep my blood pressure from spiking. My BP stays at about 110/70

Colchicine An anti-inflammatory medication primarily used to treat and prevent gout flares, and reduce cardiovascular risk in patients with coronary disease. I take 0.6 mg. My HS-CRP is now under 2.

Jardiance: A prescription medication for people with type 2 diabetes that lowers blood sugar and helps protect the heart. It works by helping the kidneys remove excess glucose through urine, which can reduce the risk of heart attack, heart failure, and other cardiovascular complications. I take 10 mg daily for my blood sugar spikes. I do not have Type II diabetes but I have been pre-diabetic for years.

Mounjaro A prescription medication that helps lower blood sugar, support weight loss, and reduce the risk of heart attacks in people with type 2 diabetes. It works by mimicking natural hormones that regulate insulin and appetite, improving blood sugar control and overall metabolic health. I take 5 mg. injectable weekly. After my CT angiogram in 2025 was still the same with no improvement, and my glucose continued to spike even when fasting, I was put on a low dose of Ozempic. The side effects of nausea were so bad that I was switched to Mounjaro. I have been on GLP-1s for nine months. Glucose spikes and chronically high blood sugar damage the endothelial lining of blood vessels, leading to inflammation that encourages plaque buildup in the heart. My glucose no longer spikes and I have no side effects.

Low Dose Aspirin: I take 81 mg once a day

I wear a Freestyle Libre 15 day continuous glucose monitor. Since starting the GLP-1, my glucose is normal for the first time ever.

Supplements

• High Absorption Magnesium Lysinate Glycinate 200 mg, 2 tablets twice daily

• Wild Alaskan salmon oil: 1,000 mg, 1 gel tab twice daily

• Co Q10 100 mg once daily

• Kyolic Aged garlic 600 mg 2 tablets twice daily

• Vitamin D3 125 mcg once daily

• Nattokinaise 2,000 FUs, 2 tablets twice daily, plus fresh natto (from the Asian market) once daily

Diet

I eat a low carb Mediterranean diet that consists mostly of fish (especially salmon), chicken, eggs, vegetables (mostly greens), tomatoes, avocados, a very small amount of fruit, usually berries, dark chocolate and coconut. I use olive oil and don’t use seed oils. I stay away from potatoes, pasta, bread, rice, and occasionally eat beans and whole grains like farro. Small amounts of cheese and sugar free Greek yogurt. Almond butter on protein bread. No processed foods, junk food or fast food. No sugar. For snacks, I eat veggies and hummus or salsa, and Khloe Kardashian’s Khloud olive oil popcorn. Love coffee, red wine and prosecco. And yes, I occasionally indulge in a small amount of pasta or a small piece of pizza, but it better be a really good one.

Exercise

• Treadmill: 30-40 minutes a day, five days a week

• Pilates: Twice weekly

• Weights: 3-4 times a week

• Dance whenever I feel like it, because why not?

Results of All Tests As Of March 2026

• CAC Score: 370 (average increase is 20-25% per year) Mine has only increased by 117 points in six years, which equals about 7.5% per year.

• CT Angiogram: Improved from 2025: LAD stenosis decreased, plaque went from severe to moderate. No new lesions.

• Cleerly Study showed plaque volume decrease and mostly all calcified plaque in LAD, changed from 2025 which showed about 50 percent of non-calcified mixed plaque, the kind more vulnerable to rupture.

• FFRct: Showed a 30 percent increase of blood flow to my heart. This is a BIG deal.

• Bloodwork (all normal) Lipids: Total cholesterol 135, Triglycerides 98, LDL 22, HS CRP 2.2, APOB 34, Homocysteine 11, Hemoglobin A1C 5.4

Life is too good to ever give up, and I’m done letting my heart, the one in my chest and the one that loves big, be run over by fear, doctors who won’t listen, or anyone else.

So here’s my advice to every woman and human out there, whether you’re dealing with troubling symptoms, worrisome family histories, or symptoms of heart disease, cancer, autoimmune issues, or anything else: SCREAM UNTIL SOMEONE ACTUALLY HEARS YOU!

Never be intimidated by a white coat because these doctors took an oath to do no harm, and ignoring you counts as harm. And if you run into a doctor who refuses to listen, treat them like your Waze app trying to save you one minute by taking you on an unwanted tour of the city: ignore the directions and find a new route.

Note: The art used in this story was created by a So Cal Chilean artist who is also the mother of one of my former students and current photojournalist, Pablo Unzueta. I admired this piece and sent her a note about how much I loved it. I told her about how I had just been diagnosed with heart disease and she sent it to me, as a gift, out of love. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and it hangs in my home office. I look at it and am inspired to keep going. Give her art a look and support her. She’s a talented badass.

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I lay in my cropped blue paper gown on the white paper sheets of the examining table at my OB-GYN’s office staring at a cheesy cat poster on the ceiling. It’s the same poster I’ve seen many times before. It’s been there so long that the orange cat face has faded and the paper is creased. I’m guessing this cute little furry face is placed above the examining table to distract from the uncomfortable feeling of having a plastic speculum shoved inside of you. The blue paper gown that covered my bare bottom was ripping from the constant movement.

“Scoot down,” he said.

My feet were in the cold metal stirrups and my ass was hanging off the edge of the table but he continued to tell me to scoot, so I scooted. He inserted the speculum and opened it like a starving duck’s bill, did the quick swab he needed, then pulled the speculum out. A moment later his gel-coated, gloved fingers were inside me.

“Ouch,” I said.

“Wow, you’re always so sensitive down there!”

“Isn’t everyone?” I asked.

He pulled out his fingers, stood up, yanked off his gloves and said, “You have the vagina of a 20-year-old.”

Most women might find this comment offensive, but not me. I was flattered. So flattered that I left his office with a skip in my step and a smile on my face.

“I’ve still got it,” I thought quietly to myself. I’m not entirely sure why I took it that way. Maybe I was at a low point that day and needed the ego boost.

It was post-Covid and I hadn’t seen him since the pandemic started. I relied on daily Google searches for answers to all my medical questions because it gave me the privacy to indulge what my friends and family might call obsessive behavior. I had a simple test: if I searched my symptoms and the word cancer didn’t show up in the results, I could exhale, at least for the day. It didn’t matter that I was now married to a doctor. I still felt embarrassed by how much space those fears took up inside me.

Maybe the worry made sense. I had already lost two of the people I loved most to cancer.

My grandmother died of breast cancer that metastasized to her bones and brain. My mother prayed and pleaded with God or one of the saints to just give her a limp and not the same cancer that took her mother’s life.

Apparently, God or the saints were too busy to grant wishes.

We watched in anguish as our mother faced the same disease that took our grandmother’s life. It took our mother’s life too but not before taking her breasts, her hair, her memory and her dignity. She died a horrible death which left my sister and I grief-stricken and terrified.

Each yearly mammogram brought body-shaking anxiety until the “normal mammogram” was reported. My daily long drives in L.A. traffic to the college where I taught often involved feeling myself up for any sign of a lump. I would sometimes press my breasts so hard that they’d ache and bruise. The thought of losing my breasts, my hair and my mind consumed me.

My mother once told me that worrying about something that may never happen was a waste of energy. Her favorite line was, “You could get hit by a bus.”

And then the bus hit.

In all my Google research, I never searched for heart disease because I’m a woman. Let’s be more specific. I’m a passionate Italian woman whose heart beats loud and strong; who feels it break when hearing Puccini, and never once did I think my heart was broken from coronary artery disease.

After all, heart disease was for men. It didn’t matter that my father dropped dead at 57 of a massive heart attack and all but one of his five brothers died of heart attacks at a young age. It didn’t matter that their sons were dropping dead. It didn’t matter that every doctor I’d seen was told about my family history, including numerous cardiologists. According to them, I was fine.

It also didn’t matter that I’d had decades of alarmingly high cholesterol, off the charts glucose levels, and nonstop palpitations that started from my 30s. I guess I just presented well. This is how doctors describe patients. “The patient presents…”

I “present” as charming, charismatic, and younger than my age, or so I’m told. I wear fashionable clothes, have long blonde hair, and as my son says, I walk into a room like I own the place. On the outside, I don’t look like someone with heart disease. But looking healthy doesn’t mean being healthy.

Even someone like the actress Susan Lucci didn’t fit that stereotype. She was thin, fit, and known for daily Pilates. She was given a clean bill of health when doctors later discovered major blockages in her main artery. Her risk factors were there all along. Her father died in his 40s from heart disease yet the focus was often on her mother, who lived past 100, rather than the warning embedded in her family history. Even with a healthy appearance and reassurances from doctors, the disease was quietly progressing.

Doctor’s note. “The patient presents as a healthy, vibrant woman complaining of shortness of breath, concerns of her high cholesterol and glucose numbers, and insomnia. Family history of heart disease and breast cancer. Discussed anxiety. Gained 15 pounds during Covid. Suggested weight loss, exercise, a statin, and consultation with a psychologist. Oh, and she has the vagina of a 20-year-old.” Okay, the last sentence wasn’t in the notes.

After my daughter and daughter-in-law told me that the comments made by my OB-GYN were “gross” and “inappropriate,” I decided to follow up on my own. I went to a lab for comprehensive blood work to get concrete answers. Some of the results were nothing new: abnormally high cholesterol and glucose, but now I was pre-diabetic, insulin resistant, and had high inflammation levels.

I made an appointment with a cardiologist who looked at my bloodwork and said it was “nothing that abnormal.” He prescribed a statin and a baby aspirin. This is what is known as “standard of care.” What it really means is that the doctor has been doling out the same medical advice and prescription drugs for 25 years. But I was armed with research and dressed like a lawyer ready to make my case. I demanded a Coronary Artery Calcium Scan, also known as a CAC. He refused and told me that it was unnecessary, so my husband ordered it. Result: 256 CAC score with plaque all located in the Left Anterior Descending Artery (LAD), aka the “widowmaker.”

This nickname for the LAD says it all. The medical community’s use of this term reinforces the patriarchal notion that only men suffer from heart disease, even though heart disease is the number one killer of women. Let me say that again. HEART DISEASE IS THE NUMBER ONE KILLER OF WOMEN. Not breast cancer. Not ovarian cancer. HEART DISEASE. This fact caused me to stop obsessively examining my breasts.

I went back to the cardiologist who I will now refer to as “Dr. Clueless.”

“So now what? You found that you have something to worry about? The treatment is the same so what’s the big deal?” he said with a smirk on his face.

So I did something I vowed not to do. I cried.

“You’re not the first woman to cry in my office,” he said.

My tears quickly turned to rage and I scared him into ordering a nuclear stress test which he said was the “gold standard for finding blockages.”

I arrived in my pink sweats and tennis shoes ready to run. I jumped on the treadmill with Cher’s music blaring in my ears as they injected me with dye and moved me from the treadmill into a scanner that took pictures of my heart.

The verdict was in. “No blockages!” he said. He added that I have the exercise tolerance of a 30-year-old. Do they teach this dialogue in medical school? I can’t tell you how many women have shared that they’ve been told they have the bloodwork of a 20-year-old or the stamina of a much younger person.

I did some research and learned that nuclear stress tests only showed blockages greater than 70 percent. I went back to Dr. Clueless to discuss the results and my findings.

I asked for a CT angiogram to determine if there were any blockages. He refused and said the treatment for blockages is the same. He told me that I was just looking for something else to stress me out. He also told me (again) about a woman who cried in his office over the results of her CT angiogram.I guess this guy has all kinds of women crying in his office. But I didn’t cry this time. I just vowed to never step foot in his office again.

I returned home and turned my office into a research lab. I moved from Google to PubMed and researched every peer-reviewed meta study I could find on heart disease. My desk was piled with folders marked “CAC/CT ANGIO” and “CAD/ATHEROSCLEROSIS,” and “DIET” and ‘FAMILY HISTORY OF HEART DISEASE” and “TREATMENTS.” I contacted members of my father’s family who could tell me more about our health history. I found that many women in our family had high cholesterol, high glucose, and diabetes. And none had ever had a CAC scan. They just took a statin and an aspirin, as recommended by their doctors.

As I looked through the studies, a world-renowned research cardiologist and expert on coronary artery disease and CAC scoring kept coming up. To my surprise, this doctor conducts his research at a major hospital in Los Angeles County. My goal was to get this rockstar cardiologist to see me and thanks to a very persuasive email, I became his patient.

My first appointment with Dr. Rockstar was unlike any of my past experiences. This doctor didn’t make jokes or tell me I looked healthy or young for my age. He just listened. We discussed my CAC score and he ordered a CT Angiogram, an FFRCT blood flow study, and a Cleerly AI study that breaks down the plaque in your heart to show vulnerable vs. stable plaque, and pinpoints the level of blockages, if any.

The test was easy but the results were frightening. I had coronary artery disease with a 50-60 percent stenosis (blockage) in my LAD with a 30 percent restricted blood flow to my heart.

We decided on an aggressive treatment plan that includes a Mediterranean diet, daily exercise, and a slew of the latest and research-proven pharmaceuticals and supplements.

There is no cure for coronary artery disease but you can do your best to stop the progression.

This became my goal. I immediately lost the Covid pounds I’d gained and reversed all of my abnormal blood tests. Dr. Rockstar repeats the CT Angiogram every year and he closely monitors my bloodwork every three months. He tweaks the plan as needed and I trust his instincts.

So far, I’ve managed to stop the progression, or at least slow it way down. I’ve also slightly increased the blood flow to my heart.

There are Italian family members on my father’s side who say they’d rather die sooner than give up their favorite foods, or that they just want to take a statin and be left alone. These are the same people, who like me, lost their fathers, uncles or brothers to heart disease. And I fear that some may one day lose their mothers, sisters, and aunts.

For a long time, I thought that appearance worked in my favor. Now I wonder if I should have dressed the part of a sick woman instead, bent over a walker, barely breathing and impossible to ignore. But even then, I suspect I would have been dismissed. I would have likely been written off as already a lost cause.

Looking back, it’s hard not to feel defeated. So many years passed before a doctor finally took my family history seriously. There were never any tests ordered other than a lipid (cholesterol) panel and the standard complete blood count and metabolic panel, which is how I knew I had chronic high glucose. I saw several cardiologists throughout my life and not one ever even put a stethoscope up to my heart. They all wanted to focus on my confessions of anxiety and they always attributed this to any symptoms of concern. I’m told this is often too common.

When my anxiety comes rushing in, usually in the middle of the night, I picture my father looking like a million bucks in his custom made suit clutching his chest and collapsing on a Los Angeles sidewalk. The paramedics cut the designer silk tie off his neck and worked on him until he was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital. Like me, my dad presented well. He was strong and handsome and no one would ever suspect that beneath his expensive suits, thick mustache and bulging muscles was a damaged heart that would kill him.

I told my cardiologist about my father’s death and how scared I am of dying of a heart attack. He reminded me that the therapies available today were not an option for my dad in the 1970s. Having heart disease is stressful but I’m lucky to live in a time when medical advances help keep me alive. Sometimes not knowing is its own kind of comfort, but data and early detection might save your life.

I recently took the MESA test which scores your risk of a heart event in the next 10 years. My risk is 6.2 percent. It also calculates your artery age. Mine is 76.

All things considered, I’d rather have a 76-year-old vagina and a 20-year-old heart.

Update: Heart disease reversal is possible. To read the protocol that’s changing my life, read my latest post:

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For most of my adulthood, I wore terribly uncomfortable high heels because my mother said it made a woman’s legs look better. My daughter wears combat boots because they’re comfortable. I put on lipstick before my husband woke up because my mother told me I looked dead without it. My daughter could give a shit what she looks like in the morning. I dated 21-year-old guys when I was 16. My daughter now finds this gross.

Her reaction today exposes how different our definitions of normal have become.

My mother was a beautiful creature who dyed her hair blonde, wore red lipstick, and carried tap shoes in the trunk of her car. If I’m looking at contradictions, she was a walking one. She was confident, independent, and charismatic and had lived a pretty exciting life as a dancer in New York City, but after marrying my father, a macho Italian mobster, she lived under his thumb. She put out his three-piece suits, put on his socks and ties, and combed his hair. She made dinner every night and breakfast every morning. He was the king of the castle and she was his queen, but it was obvious who was in charge. He made all the rules and she was happy to abide. In her eyes, he was a saint, but nothing about my dad was saint-like.

I often wondered how she could put up with a brute like him. She could have married anyone she wanted. I can remember when she’d get angry at something he’d done and her only reaction was to aggressively chop vegetables while muttering expletives under her breath, but that was as far as it ever went. I vowed to never bow to a man.

I married twice before the age of 26, first to the only man my father approved of. He was Italian, respectful, and intimidated enough to know better than to cross him. After my father died, I married his antithesis, a long-haired, skinny rocker in skin-tight jeans, cropped leopard tops, Capezio shoes, and always a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniels in the other. This guy was the type my dad would have thrown across the room with one hand.

Both of those marriages ended in divorce, but I was the one who left. I used to tell myself I was in power because I earned my own money and made my own decisions.
I thought that was the proof, but if I’m honest, I was just living a different version of the same patriarchal model that my mother lived under.

It’s taken me years to understand that control and conditioning can look almost identical.

I defended bad boys when they showed me exactly who they were, whether it be stumbling alcoholics who were also shitty fathers, or misogynistic idiots I worked with in the music industry because somewhere deep down I believed that defending my choices made me strong and accepting them made me weak. I tolerated a culture that demeaned women because walking away felt like admitting defeat. I was called “Queen of the (Sunset) Strip,” but my male business partners and rock musician clients often blurred me with the groupies and girlfriends they treated as arm candy or sexual props.

I didn’t really understand this until recently. Maybe this is what happens when you’ve lived long enough to stop lying to yourself and finally become a wise woman.

And when I trace it back, I see that it began in the contradictions of my childhood. Church-going standards for the women and kids, while my father and uncles lived by a different set of rules. A father who protected me from dating boys my age but somehow saw nothing wrong with his 16-year-old daughter dating a 21-year-old Italian man because he fit his idea of acceptable. Maybe this is a generational or cultural thing, but just because something was normal in our house, or in that era, doesn’t mean it’s okay. It shaped the way I learned to measure love, beauty, womanhood, and power.

And now I find myself reexamining everything I once accepted without question. How dating rock musicians over 21 when I was 16 felt normal instead of troubling. How I once adored Woody Allen’s film “Manhattan” and now watch it through a lens of discomfort. How I instinctively trusted only male pilots and doctors with gray hair and even felt a flicker of apprehension when a woman was in the position. How being told I “look young” was the highest praise I could imagine as if youth, male authority, and their approval were the measures of my worth.

Well fuck that shit.

As I sit here drinking my second glass of prosecco, I’ve been thinking about today’s feminist culture in a way that feels a lot more personal. Women my age say we’re empowered, but we’re still chasing youth like it’s the ultimate prize. We want tighter skin, smaller waists, and bodies that almost erase our adulthood, as though aging itself is something to apologize for. And something about the attention from men makes us feel desirable and sexy. How sick is it that we were taught to call that power?

When everything about Jeffrey Epstein and the powerful men connected to him came barreling back through the stories of these brave women, I was shook. I began to see the patterns that had always existed around me. I thought about my father and how he would call my mother Marilyn Monroll if she gained a few pounds. He poured us shot glasses of wine when we were young girls, telling himself it would make us strong enough so no man could ever take advantage. I guess he thought that preparing us for the world meant hardening us for the very men he wanted us to marry.

And here’s where it gets complicated for me: I’m a passionate woman who loves romance and chivalry. I like when a door is opened for me or a chair is pulled out. I like looking good. I love makeup and fabulous clothes. And yes, I even like the occasional shot of Botox to remove those two wrinkles between my eyes that make me look like I’m frowning. But wanting to look good is not the same as wanting to look like a girl. And who am I trying to please? I can try to convince myself it’s for my own confidence, but in reality. I’m chasing approval from a system that taught me my value lived in how I looked to men.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about giving a big middle finger to these ridiculous standards that fetishize girlhood instead of honoring womanhood. I’ll dye the gray hairs that pop out of my roots blonde, and I’ll wear fabulous clothes until I die. And I’ll embrace the wrinkles as they come. I earned these fuckers.

I sometimes long for the days before I taught journalism, when I was simply working in it. I published a local music magazine in Hollywood, co-founded, wrote, and edited an internationally distributed entertainment magazine, penned a music column, and worked as a feature writer for a daily newspaper.

Back then, my biggest fear was spotting a typo after the ink had already dried.

Now, what unsettles me isn’t a printing error. It’s the very kind of feedback I’ve been confidently giving my college students for more than two decades.

I can’t decide if it’s the thousands of student’s journalistic pieces I’ve read and graded over the years teaching community college, or the hundreds of stories crafted by undergrads and graduate students at the university level that have made my own mind so tangled and self-critical that I struggle to write at all. It seems that the higher I climb, the more visible my fear of publishing becomes.

Maybe it’s that dreaded imposter syndrome my students always talk about. I never believed I had it until I found myself staring at a blank screen, suddenly afraid of being judged. Am I actually a good writer? I used to think I was. But even worse, will my students read my words and wonder why I’m the one teaching them?

Before the magazines, stories and columns, I wrote a blog about love and death and grief and the fragile beauty of being alive. I hit publish with reckless freedom, and if three people liked a post, I felt triumphant.

Maybe it isn’t the writing that scares me now. Maybe it’s everything that comes after. The pressure of publishing into the void. The self-promotion. The performance of it all. Social media. The critics. The haters.

It’s almost ironic. I owned a successful entertainment PR and booking agency while working in journalism. I pitched major music clients. I built brands. I secured coverage. Today, I teach that expertise to my students. They learn how to craft strong pitches, write strategic releases, and position clients and themselves with confidence.

But positioning myself? Stepping into my own spotlight instead of building it for everyone else? That’s the part that rattles me.

A student editor of the community college magazine I advised once asked me a question that still lingers on my sleepless nights: “When will you stop making all our dreams come true and start making your own?”

His words reflected everything back at me. I’d tell students about my projects, my ideas, my plans, but rarely made space to finish them.

The stories I wrote would sit like unfinished drafts, waiting quietly while everyone else’s work moved forward. I cheered them on. I told them not to be afraid to publish. I watched them get published, saw their work go out into the world, and celebrated as they landed internships and jobs. I felt, and still feel immense pride in their success.

But me? I became the cliché “wind beneath their wings” while delaying my own flight.

It takes a rare kind of courage to put your work into the world now, where something celebrated this week is dismissed the next yet somehow lives online forever. A byline doesn’t fade with yesterday’s paper anymore. It lingers. It waits. It invites judgment. And judgment always comes.

So here’s the truth. I can’t control the noise, the critics, or the fears in my head. But I can control this moment. Love me. Question me. Disagree with me.

Either way, I’m hitting publish.

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There’s a certain kind of woman the world doesn’t quite know what to do with.

She’s been told she’s too much. Too emotional. Too passionate. She loves deeply and refuses to shrink herself into something more convenient. She wants connection that feels cinematic, loyalty that feels unwavering, and a kind of love that most people insist only exists in movies.

Like Sophia is for the women who don’t apologize for their spark and who refuse to dim their flame. It’s for women who feel everything fully, who lead with heart, who crave beauty, depth, and meaning in a world that often settles for mediocrity.

I’m romantic and passionate. I’ve been called “a bit much” more times than I can count and I’ve come to realize that “too much” is often just another way of saying “unapologetically alive.”

So instead of shrinking, I put on my glittery crown, refuse to dim my light, and dare the world to meet me exactly as I am or step aside while I shine.

This newsletter is about love, passion, desire, and the quiet and sometimes loud rebellion of refusing to settle. It’s about redefining what’s “too much” and realizing that maybe it’s exactly enough.

If you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite fit into the version of the world that asks a woman to be smaller, quieter, or less than she is, you’re in the right place.

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