The Science of Me

I’m lost. Waiting to be found. Or you may say… discovered.

Just like everything in this City of Angels. LA doesn’t hide its soul—it seduces you with it, glimmering just under the sun-soaked surface. The contrasts here aren’t loud like in New York. They’re quieter, stranger. In New York, the skyline tells you who’s winning and who’s barely hanging on. In LA, the contrast is subtler—between palm trees and parking garages, between fame and anonymity, between an owl on a Beverly Hills sidewalk at midnight and a billboard screaming a new face you’ll forget by fall.

I moved here from New York three years ago. I didn’t come to LA to become a painter. I came to act.

I had dreams in my eyes and calluses on my feet from pacing those East Coast sidewalks in vintage boots that looked iconic but felt like punishment. New York taught me how to push. It made me sharp, hungry, slightly feral. I still flinch when someone says “bagel” too loud.

I thought I was escaping the madness. But LA just serves it with oat milk and a rose quartz coaster.

So I fled.

At first, I didn’t get it. Everyone here speaks in a kind of wellness haiku. They’re all actors, writers, reiki-certified energy alchemists… and, like, available if you have a good producer attached. Someone once tried to sell me a crystal and a screenplay in the same breath.

But this dreamscape got under my skin. Slowly. Like sand you find in your bag weeks later that makes you smile for no reason. Avocado trees hanging over sidewalks. Pink sunsets so perfect they feel AI-generated. A city built on fantasy that somehow helped me feel real again.

Because here’s what I didn’t expect: one day, I started to paint. Not because I decided to be a painter—but because I couldn’t pretend anymore. I didn’t want to pose. I wanted to pour.

It started late one night when my anxiety was doing cartwheels. I found myself melting ice cubes onto a blank canvas. I mixed in sand from the beach. Paint from the clearance bin at Blick. I wasn’t trying to make something beautiful. I was trying to feel something that didn’t come with a hashtag or a headshot.

Nature became my therapist.
She told me things.

I painted them.

It hits me like a download:
GIA.
LOGY.
GIALOGY.

The study of me. The science of soul meets sediment. A personal excavation.

I started calling my paintings Gialogy. A new medium. A rebellion. An art form that doesn’t care if it fits neatly into your portfolio or Instagram grid.

It says: You are not separate from nature. You are nature.
Wild, evolving, a little chaotic, gorgeously unfinished.

And because nothing in my life is ever linear, two weeks later it’s 1:00 AM, and I find out my photographer friend Aleks is in Santa Monica.

I message him:
“You have a pool, right? Let’s shoot tomorrow.”

He’s like: “Uh… okay?”
I’m like: “Cool. I’m sunburned from playing pickleball. So it’s clothes-on, full-glam, espresso-fueled chaos.”

We shot for 40 minutes. Hair dripping. Sunlight dancing on water. Me pretending I was some kind of cosmic Bond girl. Then I raced to my first boxing class. Still wet. Still glam. Still very much sunburned.

And I made it.

That’s the thing about LA. You’re always one text away from a photoshoot, a spiritual breakthrough, or an existential crisis in the Erewhon beverage aisle.

And somehow, it’s all connected.

Now, GIALOGY is the thread that holds it together for me. It’s not about becoming a famous painter. (Though if you’re a gallerist, hi.)
It’s about claiming space. About embracing contradiction.

I’m tired of being told I have to choose. Between being deep, or pretty, or actress, or singer, or painter, or muse, or dolphin. Why can’t I be all of it?

I’m still that same girl afraid to post the photo where my nipple shows. Still fighting the inner voice that asks, What will They think?

But I’m learning how to tell her to sit down. We’re painting now.

I used to wear mascara just to take out the trash. Now it’s scrunchie and sunglasses. It’s not weird at all to go to the grocery store at 2 AM in your silk pyjamas. And just casually say hi to Tara Reid in the yoghurt aisle. Here, it’s not about money per se, it’s about weirdness. That’s the kind of growth LA gives you—strange, sun-drenched, and on its own weird timeline.

LA has taught me there’s no rush. Everyone talks to you like they’ve known you forever—like the city itself is leaning in, curious, golden, and barefoot, asking you softly but insistently: So, like, what’s your story?

I still act. I still cry over dumb things. I still crave approval. But now, I have something sacred that no casting director can take away.

Dozens of paintings all over my apartment and on the walls of my closest friends. Yes, friends, I find them here much easier. It must be the good weather thingy, where you meet somebody and actually do something together, like going for a hike or play a game in the park instead of going for a drink. I know, strange, right? 

I don’t know where this is all going.
But when I paint, it feels like I’m coming home.

To the version of me that doesn’t need to be discovered.
Because she was never lost.

She was just becoming.