Let me tell you about the question I couldn’t stop sitting with.

Not a dramatic moment. Not a single conversation that changed everything. Just a slow, persistent question that arrived after Covid and wouldn’t leave: is this still something I can do the way I’ve always done it? Is this still something I want to?

I’m a musician. I still am. That part hasn’t changed and I don’t expect it to. Music is too woven into who I am to disappear. But being a full-time musician is a different question. Covid did what Covid did to the entire industry – to live music, to touring, to the whole ecosystem that a career like mine was built on and when things started to open back up again, I found myself reassessing. Not running away. Reassessing. Looking honestly at what I had the capacity for, what the industry looked like now, and whether the version of it I’d been living was still the version I wanted to live.

I don’t have a clean answer to that yet. I’m only going back to it fully if I love it – genuinely love it, not just feel obligated to it. That part matters to me. So right now I’m in the middle. Neither fully in nor fully out. And in that space, I needed something to build.

So I went looking for spaces that reflected where I actually was. And I didn’t find them.

What I found instead was content made almost entirely by creators in their 20s and early 30s. Beautiful content, a lot of it. But it wasn’t for me and it wasn’t about me. I kept scrolling and scrolling, and I could not find a woman in her 40’s who was single, unmarried, not defining herself by a relationship or a family structure, who had built a real career and was now questioning what came next. I couldn’t find the woman who had spent years following a path that made sense on paper, or that other people expected of her, and was now quietly, seriously, sometimes uncomfortably, asking what she actually wanted. The woman who was finally, in her 40s, giving herself permission to chase the thing she actually loved.

That woman exists. I know she does because I am her, and because I hear from women like her constantly. She has taste. She has a life. She has opinions about hotel lobbies and Formula 1 and the right jacket and what a good playlist does to an ordinary Tuesday. And she has been almost completely invisible in the majority of lifestyle content I’ve seen.

She has been following someone else’s map long enough. She is done with that now.

The Art of the Lift is for her. It is also, honestly, for me – because building something for the audience you belong to is one of the more clarifying things you can do when you’re not sure who you are becoming.

What The Art of the Lift actually is

The name comes from a very specific belief: that the small things deserve our full attention. That making your Tuesday feel intentional – the coffee ritual, the music playing while you cook – is not frivolous. It is, in fact, the whole point. The lift is not a dramatic transformation. It’s a daily decision to treat your ordinary life as something worthy of care.

I’m not writing from the summit. I’m writing from the climb.

Who this is for

You, I think, if you’re reading this far.

More specifically: women in their late 30’s – 40s who have been invisible in the content they consume. Women who are single, who are not defining themselves by a relationship status or a family structure, who built careers and are now questioning what comes next. Women who followed a path that made sense on paper and are now chasing the thing they actually want. Women who have taste and are done apologizing for it.

Women who are done being talked down to, done being handed content made by someone twenty years younger with a completely different set of questions. Women who are tired of midlife being framed as a problem to manage, a body to fix, or a phase to survive.

You don’t have to be a musician. You don’t have to be into F1. You just have to be, in some way, in the process of lifting yourself. Which, if you’re here, I suspect you are.

A note on what I promise you

I will never recommend something I haven’t used. I will tell you when something didn’t live up to expectations — the hotel room that looked incredible in photos and smelled slightly wrong, the coat that pilled after three wears, the restaurant that was almost great. The truth is the whole point. Without it the curation means nothing.

I will show up consistently. Monday to Friday. Because showing up matters more than showing up perfectly.

And I will keep writing from the middle. Not from the other side of the transition, where everything makes sense in retrospect. From right here — where it’s happening, where some days feel purposeful and some feel like nothing, where the music question is still open and that’s okay, and where all of it belongs equally.

Welcome to The Art of the Lift. I’m glad you’re here.

-Manuela