By Sloane
It was a warm summer night in Tuscany. The kind of evening that looks exactly like you’d imagine when someone says Italy in the summer, with the air carrying a softness that makes everything feel slightly cinematic. I was wearing a blue, one-shouldered dress I loved, standing outside an open-air venue in the Tuscan countryside with my boyfriend and a group of friends, waiting for Andrea Bocelli to perform the opera he hosts once a year in his hometown.
My seven-year-old daughter, Colette, was with my mom at our villa in Lucca. Being on this idyllic family trip was something I had long pictured.
Bocelli’s voice moved through the warm night air, and the crowd was electric. Thousands of people had travelled specifically for this one night because there is nothing else like it.
I sat there thinking: this is objectively one of the greatest nights of my life.
And underneath that thought was another one.
I feel so alone.
It was that particular loneliness of looking around at the people closest to you and feeling like everyone is closer to each other than they are to you, feeling out of the picture while you’re in the middle of it. I know now it wasn’t really about them; it was a reflection of me.
I had spent years putting the pieces of my life together in a way I believed would make me feel happy. The boyfriend who wanted to travel the world, though he wanted things light and easy, while I craved depth and real intimacy. The friends who loved travel and adventure, though what I really wanted felt more like soul family. Family time in Italy, though my mom and daughter were spending a lot of time alone. Every piece looked right from the outside. But the more I chased it through bigger experiences and more beautiful places, the more unfulfilled I was. Underneath this dream life, I was ignoring how I actually felt.
It’s like moving into the $5 million home you’ve long envisioned and realizing you still don’t feel the way you thought you would—the kids are in another wing entirely, and now there’s so much more to manage. You’re left wondering what you were actually hoping the move would give you.
I was hoping for intimacy and joy. It gave me more rooms to feel alone in.
Six months later, I was back in my apartment in Santa Monica. I had taken space from everyone to figure out how I had created a life on purpose that was so far out of alignment… and who I needed to become to do it differently. My boyfriend had moved out, and most friends and family were hurt or frustrated by my sudden withdrawal. Besides Colette, the coaches I’d hired were the only people in my personal world. I was going through some of the deepest grief of my life, almost entirely alone. And what I had been running from the whole time, being with myself fully and completely, was now my life.
What I started to see in that stillness was something I hadn’t been able to see before. I had spent years wanting more without having a deep, soulful relationship with myself. This made it natural to ignore how I felt, while under the illusion that I didn’t have enough or the right thing. It was like a house of straw, seeming substantial from the outside but with no real foundation.
All the money, access, and resources were making it easier not to see the truth. I see this with women all the time. They have thriving businesses, full family lives, so much to do. But behind the scenes, they’re asking themselves, “Is this all there is?” Any of it can cover over how you’re actually feeling because almost none of us have been taught that the way you feel matters. In fact, it matters more than anything.
With nothing left to distract me, I saw that the aliveness I was chasing kept slipping away the moment the peak experience ended, because it was never coming from inside me. My inner experience was the thing worth building. The real work was learning to feel the heights of goodness just being with myself, a state I refer to as true pleasure.
That’s the only place from which the “dream life” is really a dream.
When you live from true pleasure, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The moments you used to rush past, a simple dinner, an unremarkable Tuesday, your daughter’s voice in the next room, start to feel like the thing you were looking for all along. Everything else, the concert, the man, the Tuscan night, is still beautiful. It just becomes the scenery.
Sloane guides high-performing women to create success on their own terms—more money, more freedom, deeper relationships—through a peak performance path rooted in true pleasure, self-trust, and clarity from within.
Designed especially for women, this work begins on the inside and leads to real, tangible results on the outside.