I spent years making other people sound better.
My name isn’t on any of those records. That was always the job.
I’m a session singer. Which means someone else writes the song, someone else’s face is on the cover, and I get hired to stand in a darkly padded room in the Valley at 11 p.m. and make the chorus feel like something special just happened. If I do it perfectly, you don’t notice me at all. You just notice that the song got better.
I’m also a songwriter, and a songwriter’s actual trade is the hook—a small arrangement of words that lodges in a stranger’s head against their explicit wishes and stays there for eleven years. That is not a metaphor for what I do now. That is precisely what I do now.
Before all of that I was a competitive dancer, which taught me the least glamorous and most useful lesson available: the performance is four minutes and the rehearsal is four hundred hours, and the audience is never, ever supposed to see the second part.
Social media is choreography. Almost everyone treats it like improv, and you can tell.
And I’ve been on these platforms since I was eleven—which is either a professional qualification or a public health finding, depending on who you ask. I’ve watched Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok each rise, mutate, and quietly change their entire economics, in real time, from the inside, as a user rather than as a case study in somebody’s slide deck.
Then I studied the rest of it on purpose: marketing, business development, negotiation. Because instinct without structure is just a hunch with good lighting.
Where I’m from.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles by Russian immigrant parents, which means I was brought up to understand that “fine” is not a compliment and “good enough” is a mild threat. I’ve made peace with this. It turns out to be a considerable competitive advantage in client services.
I read a great deal of Marcus Aurelius, which sounds like a strange hobby for someone who works in social media until you realize the man was essentially journaling about how to keep your head while several million people watch you. Also Napoleon. My two favorite authors are a Roman emperor and a French one, and I’d prefer you draw no conclusions from that.
I do TM (Transcendental Meditation) twice a day. Not spiritually—it’s a nervous system reset, the neurological equivalent of closing eighty browser tabs. Twenty minutes, no incense, back to work.
The things you won’t find here.
Some of this is a matter of taste, and some of it is a matter of respect for your time and intelligence.
You will not find a morning routine. You will not find the words manifest, aligned, abundance, or energy used as a business term. There is no moon-phase content calendar, no brand archetype quiz, no vision board. I’m not going to tell you to trust the process, because you should not trust a process—you should audit one.
I also don’t do the other version, the one where a woman in business has to shout affirmations at you in all caps. Your brand doesn’t need a cheerleader. It needs someone who has read every comment on your last nine posts and has a specific opinion about post four.
Off the clock.
A short list, offered without commentary:
Drawing and painting · cooking, and dining my way through every notable Asian restaurant in LA with more patience than judgment · the galleries and the water in Laguna Beach · medical science, read for pleasure, which I understand is unusual · fashion, taken seriously · rooms that are quiet, spare, and full of daylight · and a very small, very loving Cockeranian named Dulcé, who is unqualified for all of this but attends anyway.
Work with me.
Thirty minutes, no deck. Tell me what you’re selling and what isn’t working.