Happy Friday! We’ve got a special interview with Peloton instructor and now-author Emma Lovewell in this issue, where we dive into career, identity, music, and more. This newsletter is a little long—please click “view in your browser” at the top if it cuts off at the bottom.

It’s Mental Health Awareness month, and we want to know: What is something useful/life-changing you learned in therapy? Send us your thoughts. We’d love to share them in an upcoming newsletter. And now, I’m off to finish packing for a trip (some travel tips below, too). Happy weekend!—Alisha Ramos, founder at GNI

P.S. Congrats to our East Fork Butter Living giveaway winner, Misty H.!

This Week's Picks

Beyond the Bike: Getting to Know Emma Lovewell

Now that I'm older and I'm watching a lot of my friends have kids and contemplate having kids myself, I’m just thinking about how much my mom went through and thinking, “Oh my god. How does she do that? That must have been so hard!” As a kid, all I could see was what my mom was doing wrong. And now as an adult, I'm like, oh my god, she was doing such a great job because she had such limited resources.

Speaking of your resourcefulness, which I saw as a theme in this book, would it be fair to say that a lot of that comes from your mom?

Yes, definitely. She just had to make it work. She taught me how to work really hard and to just figure it out and there's no plan B. Like plan A has to work.

In the book you talk about “sticking out like a sore thumb” because you brought Chinese foods to lunch while growing up in Martha’s Vineyard. You also talk about “not feeling Asian enough,” and having to ask for chopsticks rather than forks at a Chinese restaurant. It sounds like your sense of identity has more or less resolved now, and that you’ve embraced the beauty of being “both.” But are there any moments where you still feel like you’re figuring out or carving out your identity? 

Definitely. No matter how secure I am within myself and my own identity, there is still this need and feeling that I need to explain myself to other people, right? I still get questions from people who doubt my ethnicity or my heritage, and then I feel defensive about who I am. Those moments are hard because whereas the internet can be a fun place, it can also be a cruel place—like people thinking that I'm appropriating my own culture. If I’m cooking dumplings, people are like, “Why is this white girl cooking dumplings?” I think it's because a lot of people feel safe when they can put you in a box and into a category.

What’s interesting is a lot of my friends and colleagues are of mixed-race backgrounds and it's been cool to chat with each other about what that's like, even though our cultures are so different. Just chatting about and having companionship in knowing that we straddle a line of multiple cultures is like creating a community within mixed-race people itself, which feels supportive.

Your journey has involved so much hustling, picking up odd jobs (like working in a “traveling circus”), and just making it work. Now your career is very entangled with your life: You are kind of a lifestyle celebrity. How do you view this concept of “career” in the context of your life?

At 28, my goal wasn’t that I'd be fulfilled and have everything figured out. My goal was just, “I don't want to bartend anymore.” So then when my friend was like, “You should come work at this cycling studio, they have health insurance!” I was in, because I was just trying to figure out how to have stability in my life and not wonder where my next paycheck was going to come from.

I have friends that have jobs where they go to work, they stop at five, and they go home and they don't bring their work home with them. It’s completely different, like you said, than what I do because I can never not be “Emma Lovewell from Peloton.” When I go to the grocery store, when I go to the airport, I'm constantly working in a way, because if I meet somebody who's like, “Oh, I love your class!”, we're talking about work, you know? Ultimately, if you find something that you love that you can be at home and not think about, that's great too. I don’t think there’s one right way to do it.

As I've gotten older, it's harder to find new music. I just wanna listen to the things that I'm used to, like your ‘90s playlists on Peloton. How are you discovering music these days?

I use Spotify a lot, so I like their Discovery tool to find new artists. We also have a great music department at Peloton, and their job is to go out and find new music, get the rights, and send it to us. Every few months we'll also have a listening session where the music team will sit us down and share what's new or what we have.

Luckily my coworkers all kind of help each other out and we'll share music with each other and be like, “Oh, did you hear this new album just came out?” Peloton members will message me on Instagram too with music. For the most part, I feel like my people know me! They know my taste and I have to say like, nine times out of ten, the recommendations that people send me are spot on.

You can buy Emma Lovewell’s new book here, catch her book tour this summer, follow her @emmalovewell, and subscribe to her Substack here.

The Feel Good Giveaway

Looking for some extra chill? In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re teaming up with Therapy Notebooks and cool-kid puzzle makers Le Puzz to give away a few of our favorite calm-promoting products.

The prizing package includes Therapy Notebooks' Build-a-Habit Guide and best selling Anti-Anxiety Notebook, Le Puzz' new “Kindness is Contagious” puzzle and a $50 Le Puzz gift card, and Whiled's "Time is for the taking" tote (package worth $195).

Enter the giveaway!

This Week's Reads