Today, Inner Lives launches into the world, while life feels as though it is moving in every direction at once. I’ve noticed something over the years: change rarely arrives quietly in my life. The biggest shifts usually seem to arrive disguised as chaos.

This time it arrived as some combination of renovating an old house, raising two little girls, trying to care for a marriage that deserved more time than it was getting, trying to keep work moving forward, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, deciding that this was somehow the right moment to launch one of the most vulnerable projects I have ever created. And then, because life apparently appreciates symbolism, Ryan and I got norovirus at exactly the same time.

For a few days the launch I had imagined disappeared completely. I had pictured waking up excited, watching the first downloads come in, responding to sweet messages from friends, maybe ending the day with dinner as a family. Ryan would come home and we’d each have our own can of kombucha because, after all, it was launch day.

Instead, my mother-in-law quietly became the person holding our family together. She cooked for the girls, cared for them, checked on us, and somehow managed to care for toddlers and sick adults simultaneously without ever making it look difficult.

The house kept moving because she kept moving. And because this project has me thinking about women all the time, I found myself thinking about another version of womanhood entirely. The version of womanhood that exists after the years of carrying everything.

This week, that woman took care of us.

It feels strangely fitting that on the brink of launching a podcast about real life, I found myself so deeply in the middle of a real-life messy moment. Because maybe that is what Inner Lives has been about all along: not the polished version of our lives, and not the version that fits neatly into introductions or social media captions.

The podcast is about the inner lives that exist underneath the visible ones. The contradictions we carry. The questions we don't always say out loud. The versions of ourselves we are becoming while trying to hold together everything we have already built.

As the founder of this project, today I could be seen as the woman launching something into the world, but I am also the person who needed someone else to bring me tea this week. I am the mother who was still mothering whenever the medication kicked in and I had an hour of energy to give. I am the daughter calling her mom for comfort. And somehow, in the middle of all of that, I am also the woman who has never felt more alive.

Because perhaps real life was never meant to pause while we waited for the right moment to begin. Perhaps the conditions were never going to be perfect.

The work enters the world alongside the life that created it.

And today, the conversations begin.

Episode 01: What Burnout Taught Me About Success

with Nino Kvernadze

Nino had to be the first episode.

One of my first close friends in the United States, a sister I never had, and a woman I deeply admire.

An immigrant, a mother, a leader, and someone whose life has been shaped by constant reinvention across countries, cultures, and identities.

For years she embodied something many modern women quietly aspire to: ambition, achievement, competence, and independence. Until her body asked a harder question:

What is success actually for?

We talk about ambition, burnout, motherhood, chronic pain, identity, and enoughness.

Listen on: Spotify, or Apple Podcast.

Episode 02: I Thought Love Meant Sacrifice

with Megan Sales

Megan’s story is one that I suspect almost every woman will recognize herself in.

A conversation about love, people-pleasing, perfectionism, loneliness, and the quiet ways women learn to earn their worth through endless giving.

For years she embodied something many women quietly aspire to: being needed, being dependable, being good, and being loved.

Until she was forced to ask a harder question:

What happens when the version of love you were taught requires losing yourself?

We talk about self-abandonment, grief, relationships, identity, and the difficult work of learning that love and sacrifice were never meant to be the same thing.

Listen on: Spotify, or Apple Podcast.

Thank you for being here at the beginning. I have no idea what this project will become. I only know that the conversations we’ve been hungry for deserve a place to live.

Welcome to Inner Lives!

Mari

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Inner Lives was never meant to be consumed alone.

It was always meant to be shared.

It showed up first as a kind of mom rage. The kind that comes when you’ve fully and naively subscribed to the romantic idea of motherhood in this modern world, and then you become a mother and realize something doesn’t quite add up. The system seems to expect mothers to give and give and give, without any real structure that allows them to receive. And I’m not talking about luxury care or wellness time. I’m talking about something much more basic. The kind of care that allows a person to remain a human being. To be a mother, but still be her woman self. Space to mess up as a new mom and still feel like you belong. Space to grow into a new identity without needing to perform. That kind of support wasn’t there for me after my two-day labor and a tumultuous postpartum.

And so the rage was.

But if I’m being honest, that feeling didn’t start with motherhood.

I remember an ambitious little girl who was always invited to be the main character of school plays, but who also understood she had to dim her light so others would find her more approachable. That little girl wanted to be free and adventurous, but as the first daughter and granddaughter, she was told to sit pretty. To others she was quiet and so smart—the perfect daughter, really. Inside her, there was often a storm of emotions she didn’t know what to do with. Or a quiet plotting of how to run away and start her adventures. Or more often than not, a rich, fantastical world she would escape into.

I remember another version of her a few years later, after graduating college and starting her first full-time job. The year was 2012. She was leaving the office one evening, walking into a frozen parking lot in the middle of a Utah winter, stepping into two feet of snow wearing stockings and a pencil skirt. Holding her phone while talking to her dad, she said in disbelief, “I can’t believe this is what adult life is. Sitting inside an office all day, going from meeting to meeting, working toward something that feels invisible, for years and years.” Her dad just said, “buckle up, kid.” And she stood there wondering who designed this disconnected system—and how everyone else seemed to subscribe to it so easily. A realization that no version of life offered to her quite matched her ambition, her energy, or her longing for something more meaningful.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but I recognize it now—it was the same feeling.

I look back at that version of myself and want to tell her that nothing was wrong with her. She wasn't failing to adapt to modern life. She was noticing something about it.

What would have happened if that younger version of me had the freedom to be the star of every play without worrying about shining too brightly? What if she had built something of her own back in 2012, without the fear of not being capable enough or not being supported?

So when my therapist says I’ve been planting seeds, I think she’s talking about the way these moments have been accumulating. The way I’ve been quietly trying to understand how to build something different. Not by tearing everything down and starting from scratch, but by asking how things could be restructured from the inside. How we might create the conditions that allow people to live fuller, more integrated lives.

Because the more I look at it, the less it feels like an individual problem and the more it feels like a human one.

The truth is, this feeling didn’t start when I became a mother.

Motherhood didn’t create it—it revealed it.

As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly aware of the contradictions women are asked to hold. The natural biological cycles of our bodies, the often unnatural expectations of society, and the surreal promise that we can somehow "have it all." We’re building careers, raising children, maintaining relationships, trying to stay connected to ourselves, and somehow expected to make meaning out of all of it at the same time. Of course it feels complex. Of course it doesn’t fully resolve.

And maybe it’s not supposed to.

I think we’ve been taught to want certainty. To believe that the well-defined path is the best one to follow. That eventually things should click into place, and we should feel aligned, at peace, and sure of our choices. But the more I experience life, the less that feels true. The more it feels like we are living inside contradictions—not mistakes.

And maybe that’s not something to fix.

Maybe it’s something to understand.

A rich inner life is not a problem to solve. It’s what makes new things possible in the first place. Nothing meaningful is built from flat, simple conditions. Growth happens when multiple forces are at play—pressure, tension, variation, change. Seeds don’t grow in perfect environments. They grow in rich, layered soil, shaped by elements working together in ways we don’t fully control.

The more I've sat with these questions, the more I've become interested in the inner lives of other people. Not because I think they have answers, but because I suspect many of us are wrestling with similar tensions in different forms. Different stories. Different lives. The same underlying questions.

So I think that’s what I’ve been doing, without fully realizing it.

Planting seeds.

Trying to understand how to make that little girl’s dreams a reality in this modern world. Trying to figure out what it would look like to create spaces where women can explore these possibilities—not to arrive at answers, but to better understand the experience of living them.

More on that soon.

We talked about schedules, what the kids were doing, what needed to get done that week. It was a perfectly normal conversation.

And yet when I hung up, I had this strange feeling that we hadn’t really met.

Nothing was wrong.
But nothing had really happened either.

There’s something subtle happening in the way we interact with each other.

We move quickly. We stay efficient. We say what is expected. We keep things safe.

And slowly, without realizing it, our conversations start to feel like echo chambers or interactions that return what we already know, what we already believe, what we expect to hear.

We don’t push. We don’t linger. We don’t open anything that might complicate the moment.

I recently came across a concept from the sociologist Hartmut Rosa that has been sitting with me.

He calls it resonance.

Resonance is the experience of a genuine encounter: when something outside of you reaches you, moves you, and leaves you slightly changed. It could be a conversation, a piece of art, or even a moment you didn’t plan for. You didn’t plan it. You didn’t control it. It simply happened, and it felt real.

Rosa’s argument is that the problem of modern life is not just that we are busy or distracted. It’s that the world has, in a way, gone quiet.

Not because there is nothing left to say, but because we’ve organized our lives in a way that prevents anything from truly reaching us. We approach experiences as things to manage, rather than experiences that might change us.

And the part that has stayed with me most is this: resonance cannot be produced.

You can’t force a meaningful conversation. You can’t optimize your way into feeling something real. The moment you try to manufacture it, it disappears. All you can do is create the conditions where it might happen.

Which makes me wonder: what would it look like to approach our conversations differently?

To stay a little longer. To ask one question we wouldn’t normally ask. To say something slightly more honest than what feels safe.

Not to turn every interaction into something deep or heavy, but to make space for the possibility that something real could happen.

That we might actually meet each other… instead of just passing information back and forth.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I have a feeling I’m not the only one.

I’m curious: when was the last time something truly reached you? A conversation, a person, a book, or even a question that stayed with you longer than expected and left you somehow different afterward.

I’d love to hear about it.

Reply to this email or leave a comment. I read every response.

Mariana