From My Notes App, Vol 40

On personal brands, public ambition, and the very specific exhaustion of being a woman on the internet in 2026

Hello loves! I’m sitting down to write this with a big fat cold brew and it’s bringing me to life. Today is a big day for us because Murray is getting tubes, meaning he’ll go under anesthesia, which is making this mama very nervous. I know this is such a good thing for him. His hearing should improve, he hopefully won’t be in pain anymore from the constant double ear infections, and apparently most kids are back to running around a few hours after discharge. So please send us all the healing, positive vibes.

This weekend we actually have some really fun things on the agenda. On Saturday, Danny is golfing at the same golf club where I’m attending a baby shower. The weather is supposed to be absolutely gorgeous, like 75 and sunny, so we’ll be outside showering the mama-to-be with longtime friends, cocktails and lots of baby girl excitement. I’ve felt so lucky getting to see my childhood best friends multiple weekends in a row. There’s something so special about being around the people who have known you through every version of your life.

On Sunday, I get some Mom and Murray solo time! I’m hoping to take him to a local farm to see little goats, cows, sheep, and whatever other tiny wholesome animals they have roaming around, then pop into the farmstand for local produce because nothing makes me happier than buying strawberries from a woman named Susan under a striped tent. Later in the day we’re having a little bbq with friends and kids, which feels like the unofficial kickoff to summer. Also apparently Boston is getting temperatures in the 90s next week (what the f*ck), but I guess summer is arriving whether we’re emotionally prepared or not.

🎧 What I’m Listening To

A weird theme across a lot of what I listened to this week was the tension between building a visible life and preserving an internal one. A lot of these conversations orbit ambition, creativity, identity, AI, public work, and success, but the thing underneath all of them felt similar: how do you keep becoming more yourself while the internet, your industry, and modern work are constantly incentivizing you to perform a more optimized version instead?

🎧 Episode 002: Ara Katz, The Mentor on Take Your Time with Dianna Cohen (Spotify, Apple, YouTube) — This convo felt like sitting inside someone else’s nervous system for an hour. Ara talks about grief, creativity, intuition, physical space and resisting the pressure to contort yourself for algorithms in a way that made me want to throw my phone into the ocean. I loved hearing her say that anxiety can be information, not pathology. Not every feeling of discomfort is something to optimize away. It’s your body trying to tell you you’ve drifted too far from yourself.

🎧 How Hala Taha Turned a Free Podcast into a Multi-Million Dollar Business on Built in Public with Courtney Johnson (Spotify, Apple, YouTube) — This is one of the clearest examples of “start before you feel ready.” No polished brand ecosystem. No perfect strategy deck. No fancy launch plan. Just relentless consistency over a very long period of time. I appreciated how honest Hala was about using partnerships, LinkedIn, audience swaps, volunteer support, and scrappiness to grow before the business looked impressive from the outside. I think most people wildly underestimate how many successful businesses are built through momentum and resourcefulness long before they are built through elegance.

🎧 The Real Life Devil Wears Prada with Cynthia Smith on Everything is Best with Pia Baroncini (Spotify, Apple) — This one was just deeply fun to listen to as someone whose entire personality was shaped by early 2000s fashion media and women aggressively pursuing careers in New York City. But underneath the nostalgia, I found myself thinking about how aspirational career culture used to function. There was something strangely motivating about that era’s version of ambition, even when it was toxic. I’m not saying we should bring back emotionally abusive bosses and eating one almond for lunch, but I think we lost something when every career path became flattened into “content creator with a morning routine.”

🎧 AI Readiness Gap: There’s No True Playbook for AI Development with Lauren Gregor on I Hate It Here with Hebba Youssef (Spotify, Apple, YouTube) — This episode articulated something I think a lot of people are feeling right now, which is that many companies are talking about AI with the confidence of people who absolutely do not have a plan. Everyone knows work is changing. Very few people seem genuinely prepared for the scale or speed of it. I appreciated that the conversation stayed grounded in the human side of adaptation instead of treating employees like machines that simply need a quick software update. I think many workers currently feel behind, but the reality is that most companies are making this up in real time too.

🛒 What I’m Buying

I have a few very fun edits to share with you this week because apparently my coping mechanism lately is aggressively romanticizing my wardrobe.

Recent Favorites is exactly what it sounds like: the things I’ve purchased recently that have genuinely made me happy, filled my cup, and been worn with complete and utter joy.

I pulled together an Amazon roundup of everything I lusted over and bought throughout April and early May. Do not underestimate my ability to hunt down chic things on Bezos dot com.

I also made a Poolside Edit full of swimsuits, jewelry, coverups, sandals, and light dresses for your upcoming beach trip, girls getaway, or hypothetical Euro summer you may currently be mentally planning while sitting at your corporate desk.

And finally, this week’s fashion edit is full of funny little details and pops of color! I’m obsessed with this fringe cobalt blue top and matching skirt, this picnic blanket-inspired dress (and matching clutch) that would be perfect for MDW, this hot purple feather blazer, and these green satin butterfly heels.

👣 What I’m Coaching: Stop Posting for Your Ninth Grade Bullies

A recurring theme in client sessions lately is visibility. More specifically: women who know they need to be more visible online, but are deeply uncomfortable with what visibility now seems to require. Not because they lack expertise or interesting ideas, but because posting online increasingly feels emotionally loaded in a way that surprises them. The second they go to share an opinion, promote their work, show ambition, or take up space publicly, suddenly they are mentally editing for old coworkers, random acquaintances, family members, ex-friends, or people they don’t respect.

One of the biggest shifts I try to help clients make is understanding that visibility is not just a content strategy problem. It’s often an identity problem. Many women are still unconsciously posting for an imaginary panel of critics instead of the actual people they want to reach. They dilute their voice, soften their authority, over-explain their opinions, or avoid posting altogether because some part of them still wants to be perceived as likable, humble and “normal” by people who were never going to support them anyway. Meanwhile the clients, opportunities, community, or career growth they actually want require a level of clarity and self-trust that watered-down visibility can’t create.

And to be clear, I don’t think the answer is becoming an unhinged personal brand caricature or sharing your entire nervous system online for engagement. The real work is learning how to be seen without shape-shifting. The women who are most compelling online right now are not necessarily the loudest. They are the clearest.

📚 What I’m Reading

A lot of what I read this week centered on the increasingly blurry line between building a life and performing one online. People want more freedom, more ownership, more alignment, more visibility, more meaning, but are also quietly terrified of what it may require emotionally to actually pursue those things publicly. Which, unfortunately, is very relatable.

✨ I Used to Cry in Bathrooms Over Other Women’s Confidence (Notes I Didn’t Post, Valeria Lipovetsky) — This piece uses the Emma Grede discourse as a jumping-off point, but what it’s really about is the complicated ways women learn power through each other. For instance, the idea that another woman’s confidence often feels threatening before it becomes inspiring. I think a lot of women quietly move through seasons where someone else’s ambition, beauty, visibility, certainty, or success activates something unresolved in themselves, and the internet amplifies that dynamic constantly. But I also loved her framing that eventually, if you do enough work on yourself, other women stop feeling like competition and start feeling like possibility.

✨ Your Personal Brand is Too Personal (Working Women Agency, Jessie Collier) — This scratched an itch in my brain because I think a lot of people are deeply confused right now about the difference between authenticity and overexposure online. This hot take is one I’d love to scream from the rooftops: “access to your life is just content, access to your thinking is positioning.” I loooove that pov! So many smart women oscillating between hiding entirely and oversharing everything because they think visibility requires constant emotional disclosure. As I’ll keep saying: the strongest personal brands right now are not built on full transparency. They’re built on clarity of perspective.

✨ Facing AI and a Tough Job Market, Gen Z Turns to Entrepreneurship (The Guardian) — Younger workers are entering a job market where the traditional promise of stability feels increasingly broken. A lot of Gen Z workers are not becoming entrepreneurs because they’re all aspiring hustle-culture founders. They’re doing it because the corporate ladder itself feels unstable, inaccessible, or increasingly automated. One quote in the piece described the shift perfectly: “The old promise was stability. The new promise is ownership.” This is a massive cultural shift we are only at the beginning of understanding.

✨ A Working Mother’s Case for Expanding Your Career Instead of Exiting It (The Cabro, Catherine) — A lot of ambitious women are quietly realizing they don’t necessarily want to abandon corporate careers, but they also no longer want their entire identity, creativity or financial future trapped inside a single employer. One line that especially stuck with me was: “Women are taught to aim for the table, not imagine building it.” We are watching more women move toward portfolio careers, side platforms, consulting, newsletters, digital products, investing, advisory work, and personal brands not always because they want to become full-time entrepreneurs, but because they want more ownership over their ideas, voice, opportunities, and future. That feels less like a trend and more like a fundamental shift in how modern women are thinking about work.

✨ You Can Literally Do Anything You Want, Act Like It (Online/Offline Club, Angel Marr) — Beneath the cheeky title is a point I think more adults need to remember: many of us are living inside routines and rules we no longer consciously chose. The author talks about freelancing, scheduling freedom, and intentionally building a life that actually reflects why she wanted autonomy in the first place, and it made me think about how quickly people recreate rigid structures even after escaping them. A lot of adults are more constrained by habit, fear, and imagined permission structures than they are by reality.

🌀 Spiral of the Week: Admiring Someone Without Becoming Them

This week’s spiral is brought to you by the Emma Grede discourse and a Substack essay called “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner Office” by Daphne Delvaux, Esq. I think it’s important to understand why reactions like Daphne’s are happening around someone like Emma, while still fully respecting and admiring what she has built and how gritty she is. Emma is undeniably impressive. The scale of what she has built, the discipline required to build it, the consistency, the ambition, the resilience. Of course women are fascinated by her. We are living through a period where more women are building visible, unconventional careers than ever before, and many of us are looking for models because the old templates no longer fit.

But I also think something strange happens now in internet culture where admiration quietly turns into imitation. Someone can build an extraordinary life that is completely wrong for you personally, and the internet increasingly blurs that distinction. We no longer just consume people’s work. We consume their routines, marriages, parenting philosophies, calendars, habits, homes, bodies, and belief systems until their entire life starts feeling aspirational by default.

Part of internet maturity is being able to separate admiration from alignment. You can respect someone’s work ethic, intelligence, creativity, or success without adopting their exact blueprint for living. Sometimes the wisest thing you can do is take the lesson and leave the lifestyle.

👀 What I’m Scrolling & Saving

These are the posts that actually stopped me mid-scroll.

This middle school librarian is SO fun!
I love that women have stopped settling.
This is my dream summer afternoon.
Garden party of my dreams.
Okay outfit of my dreams! And another.
SO excited about Dianna’s new podcast.
How cute is this outfit? So pretty!
Exciting 4th of July news for Boston people.
Funny but also unsettling. Same with this.
Very valid point.
This could NEVER be me, but seeing behind-the-scenes of this show is wild.
Women founders are winning big exits.
Now this is important.

💬 The Group Chat Says: Everyone Is Feeling Maycember

My group chat has been discussing “Maycember,” which is apparently what moms are calling this particular stretch of the year where life starts to feel eerily similar to December-level chaos. Teacher appreciation gifts, camp prep, final projects, graduations, class parties, recitals, sports, childcare logistics, travel planning, end-of-school everything. At this point every mom I know is basically operating on adrenaline, calendar alerts, and cold brew.

What I keep thinking about though is how often this kind of overwhelm quietly impacts our relationships and communication in ways we do not fully register in real time. I read a Substack piece this week by Carly Valancy about how hard it can feel to reach out to people when you are tired, distracted, overloaded, and mentally fragmented, and it was right on the money. A lot of us are currently misreading exhaustion as rejection. Someone takes longer to text back, declines plans, forgets to follow up, sends a dry response, misses a birthday, or disappears for a few weeks, and we instinctively personalize it when in reality many people are simply underwater right now.

This season requires a little more generosity in both directions. More grace for the people struggling to show up well and more honesty from ourselves when we are too depleted to communicate clearly. Sometimes nobody is mad. Everyone is just in Maycember.

✌️ That’s A Wrap

I’m keeping this week’s sign-off short and sweet. I’ll leave you with this energy, this feeling, this sexy mini and this reminder because it’s exactly what I’m bringing into my weekend. Here’s hoping the impending summer weather brings you an excellent weekend with an iced beverage of your choice. Okay, lah lah lah bye!

xo,
Kelsey