Dear summer I know you're gonna miss me
No, not our beloved Memphis Bleek and Hov track, but rather thoughts on combating seasonal depression—as always, articles and podcasts for your consideration.
Sundays are the time of the week when there’s the most space to imagine. It’s the day I sit at my laptop to review my professional and personal priorities for the week. I also consider whether I have enough protein in the fridge to meet my goals (read this article from Inverse on the American obsession with the macronutrient). And on this particular Sunday, the autumnal equinox and the almost start of Libra season, I’m considering how I can get ahead of what feels like impending gloom during this time of year.
At the top of the summer, I moved to Los Angeles from my hometown, D.C., where I had lived for the past eight months after working on a production in New York. The grounds for my move were plentiful, and in complete honesty, I live by the saying, "You’re not a tree, you can move." Another motivation that comes to mind is an article from The Atlantic on why we should live closer to our friends.
With the end of summer upon us, there’s another sobering reason I wanted to move to the West Coast: sunlight and warmth. I tried to escape the winter blues, better known as SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s not to say that people in Southern California don’t feel depressed in the fall and winter. The fall equinox marks a time when there is less sunlight, and the days are shorter across the country. Here’s an episode of the podcast I produce on SAD.
The past couple of fall seasons on the East Coast have been rough. Looking through my journal entries, I was nothing short of depressed and existential. I would stay in bed, overwhelmed by the real and perceived demands of the day, sometimes until minutes before my first meeting. Self-isolating, having short conversations with friends, and relying on weed became my typical routine. Thankfully, my yoga teacher training last fall helped me break the cycle of spending hours—if not days—inside. My experiences aren’t unique; these are the telltale signs of seasonal depression.
There’s a push and pull between how to connect best from late September through January. There are obligatory connection points, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but as the weather cools, isolating feels natural. Culturally, we’re conditioned to see summer as the height of social interaction, so the colder months can feel like a time to retreat or prepare for the year ahead.
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I recently featured a podcast by Mel Robbins about September kicking off four months anointed as the "new January"—a time to focus on reaching your potential. That mindset has shaped how I view the fall. Q4 often feels like the time to “lock in” before the new year. But for me, this pressure has always made me feel self-conscious and socially awkward. It’s a constant tension between wanting to connect with others and needing to connect with myself.
The LA Times has a useful piece on California’s experiences with SAD, but beyond the standardized tips to hack seasonal depression, I’ve been thinking about how to approach it differently. Outside of tightening my schedule, sticking to a routine, and bringing more light into my space, I’m considering the themes I want to focus on this fall and winter.
I’m moving toward connection, not away from it. Instead of self-isolating—or a more seasonally fitting term, hibernating—how can I indulge in activities, habits, and routines that allow me to connect with myself and others more? I’m focusing on spending a little more time saying my affirmations in the mirror and doing solo yoga sessions in the middle of the day. During these months that are habitually slower and often more gloomy, I’m asking myself: How can I routinely strengthen myself and honor my commitments to myself and others so when the time is right—whether at work, sometime in this last quarter of the year, or when the months are brighter and the days are longer—I can show up at my best, my most open?
A Few Articles (Links In Header)
The Architect of Zendaya’s Red-Carpet Style
On his Instagram, Law Roach called this profile from The New Yorker, and it made me giggle.
Jennifer Wilson dubbed Law Roach and Zendaya, the image architect’s most intimate client, “fashion’s most bankable duo,” known for their method dressing and designer archive pulls.
The piece tells us that Law is “exacting and precisive,” a powerful manifester who modeled his career after Rachel Zoe. It also mentions that Kanye bought Amber Rose a pair of MCM glasses from his Chicago store—Deliciously Vintage. Movies foundational to his styling ethos are The Wiz and Mahogany. I hope his forthcoming book, How to Build a Fashion Icon: Notes on Confidence from the World's Only Image Architect, gives us more insight into “why” he and Zendaya were attracted to each other as creative partners.
Wilson embarks on a personal style and vintage shopping journey with Roach at 2ndStreet and Rick Owens, trading her Keds for Vivienne Westwood heels, a personal dream. The piece is more than a survey of Roach and his career; it gives the reader a peek into the ever-evolving role of a stylist. Did you know old Hollywood studio costume designers used to create entire off-camera wardrobes for actors? We hear insights from Rachel Zoe about how you can’t scale a styling business, murmurs Edward Enninful, Daniel Roseberry, and his partner-in-shade Naomi Campell.
Here’s a quote:
“When Abloh died, he was eulogized as part of a line of Black artists—including Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, and Chadwick Boseman—whose lives were cut short by illness. Their deaths were felt by many to have been hastened by their workloads, and the myriad pressures levied on the young, gifted, and Black. “I think in this country, especially as Black people, we’re taught to suffer through things,” Roach told me. “You almost wear your suffering like a badge of honor. I think when I retired I learned that wasn’t anything to be proud of.”
The Most Sought-After Travel Guide Is a Google Doc
After reading this piece from Thrillist on the community of travel buffs who prefer Google Docs and Google Maps for recommendations, I immediately thought of my best friend, Cher Good Eats, a food content creator with a Los Angeles restaurant recommendation map. You can view and use the map here.
With its quasi-promotion of using Google Docs and Google Maps for travel and food recommendations rather than relying on TikTok's algorithm-driven For You page, this feature feels refreshing in a world where content is KING.
“I feel like a good rec—something that is genuinely special and saves you from a tourist trap—is so clutch, so valuable, and it’s been such a game changer,” de Graaf says. “So if you get my doc, that’s a gesture of love.”
It's not to dismiss travel content creators, but at times, watching carefully curated recaps of Budapest, Marrakesh, and Berlin—three cities I can’t stop thinking about visiting—feels more like a timeshare ad than a personal recommendation. It’s never helpful content for me. Instead, these low-stakes yet highly researched travel guides build community by emphasizing personal taste over aesthetic trends or wealth posturing.
Apple Maps has hyperlocal guides to cities worldwide, curated by celebrities and tastemakers like Alicia Keys, ambré, and N.Y. photographer Ethan Barber.
I visited Mérida in the Yucatán Peninsula for my birthday, and the most fulfilling experiences on the trip came from recommendations by my friend’s colleagues—not the Instagram and TikTok bars, cafes, and tourist traps I was inundated with during my social media search. In 2022, the New York Times dubbed TikTok as the new search engine, but I find that travel content on the app prioritizes aesthetics and luxury experiences, and there’s too much to sort through. My hope? TikTok, which now offers users "search highlights," takes it further by borrowing from Apple’s hyper-local content approach. They could hire influencers, travel writers, or others to curate search results for trending destinations. While I’m a fan of Google’s personalized and shareable maps, the UX/UI is terrible and could desperately use a refresh.
Romeo & Juliet’s Francesca Amewudah-Rivers Received Death Threats, Months of Racist Abuse: ‘I Didn’t Feel Safe at Work’
I’ve never seen work as a safe space—it’s not designed for that—but I have seen our art, talents, and forms of expression as a soft place to land. Kaitlyn McNab for Teen Vogue reported on the months of racist abuse Francesca Amewudah-Rivers experienced while playing the female lead in Jamie Lloyd's production of Romeo & Juliet. The original interview appears in the British theatre publication The Stage, where she implores the industry to take action to protect Black and brown actors like herself from harassment, both online and in real life. Her words in The Stage, “We can’t do our best work if we don’t feel safe, if we don’t feel held, if we don’t feel understood. I think more needs to be done, especially because I know I’m not alone,” echo the experiences of another creative, content creator @Golloria on TikTok, who recently called the internet an 'increasingly violent space, particularly for dark-skinned Black women,' after creating a less-than-one-minute video on the ashy and ill-fitting Giorgio Armani blush shades she received.
In the letter, she says she’s taking a break from the internet, and my heart goes out to her, Francesca, and other Black women whose work and industries don’t love them back, whether the harm comes from fans, commenters or the platforms’ inability to protect them."
We’re living in the era of ‘main character syndrome’. But what if we’re just not that important?
In November 2022, HBO Girls alum Jemima Kirke posted a selfie to her Instagram story with the caption, "I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much," in response to being asked for advice for "unconfident young women." In an op-ed for The Guardian, Róisín Lanigan explores Kirke's quote in the context of our cultural obsession with self-help and questions whether it's necessary or hindering us from living fully actualized lives.
Lately, I’ve been on an anti-self-help content rabbit hole. This episode of Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson kicked off a mailbag episode, answering the question, "Is it possible to be too preoccupied with self-help?" Paired with the article, it scratched a particular itch in my brain.
Some More Articles
I can’t lie; I’m a member of the function beverage cult. From Olipop to Hiyo, read how we got here from Vox.
For his Substack,
, Bobby Hundred writes about how Nike can make a comeback.For Essence, meet the Black women working to preserve the underrepresented side of Western culture, Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo.
I first came across Alemeda when I wrote about music trends on TikTok for UPROXX. She effortlessly blends drum and bass with R&B stylings.
Cheers to TDE’s newest Black alt artist. Read about her in Rolling Stone here.
A Few Things to Listen To, Watch + On Social
Brands & creators are chasing cultural capital. Here’s a TikTok about it.
Every Issa Rae interview is worth listening to.
Listen to Tressie McMillan Cotton talk about tradwives, ozempic, and real self-care. McMillan talks about her podcasting experiences and says there’s a lot of media that sells to us and entertains us but not enough media that helps us figure stuff out, good insights.
The Bottega Veneta show. That’s it.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s episode NPR’s Wild Card is one of those conversations that’s so intimate you think you’re intruding on a lunch with two friends. There’s not a single question he answers briefly or curtly but, better yet, poetically and thoughtfully. He shares insights on running, his views on grace and apologies, and the freedom yet invisibility of being unhoused. The podcast episode reminds me of my love for the card game We’re Not Really Strangers. Wild Card is part interview and part existential game show, and it subtly pushes the imagination of what podcast formats can be.
Some thoughts on Mowalola and the emptiness of subversive fashion.
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That’s all for today friends and followers. Happy autumnal equinox, cheers to Libra season and thank you for reading.
Is there anything specific you’d like me to write about? Article recs? Please email me at ellisellice@gmail.com or leave a comment.
loved this!
would love to see an LA guide from you 🫶✨