Inner Lives

Join Mariana for the first episode of Season Two of Inner Lives, with fitness entrepreneur, YouTuber, and longtime friend Sally Schoenack. Sally became a mother and an entrepreneur at the same time. What began with pregnancy workout videos grew into a YouTube channel, fitness programs, and eventually a yoga retreat in Italy. Along the way, she found herself building a business during naps, feeling...

For the Season One finale of Inner Lives , Mariana turns the questions she’s spent the season asking other women on herself. She reflects on growing up between countries and cultures, becoming exceptionally good at adapting, and how achievement became a compass while asking What do I actually want? became much harder. From leaving a successful career in finance to entrepreneurship, motherhood, and...

Join Mariana for a conversation with Ruthie Ackerman, author of The Mother’s Code . Long before Ruthie became a mother, she had already learned how to take care of other people. Growing up with a mother struggling with mental illness and a brother with complex medical needs, she became a caretaker early—and learned to mold herself into the person other people needed her to be. That pattern followe...

Join Mariana for a conversation with Meghan Krempetz. As a little girl, Meghan was imaginative, playful, and always creating worlds of her own. Then adulthood brought responsibility, motherhood, loneliness, divorce, and the slow realization that somewhere along the way, she wasn’t entirely sure who she was anymore. Now, approaching 57, Meghan has built a life that feels deeply her own—filled with...

Join Mariana for a conversation with Keltie Maguire about one of the biggest decisions a woman can make: whether or not to become a mother. For most of her life, Keltie assumed she would eventually have children. Growing up, she couldn't think of a single woman in her life who had chosen otherwise. But as she got older, she found herself waiting for the certainty everyone told her would eventually...

Join Mariana for a conversation with Juliana, a former brand strategist and U.S. diplomat who became a model and wellness creator in her 50s. For much of her life, Juliana was always moving toward the next experience: living around the world, changing careers, raising children, and building the life she wanted. Then, in her late 40s, something changed. On paper, her life had finally come together....

Join Mariana for Part Two of her conversation with Nicolette Amarillas. When we first sat down, Nicolette was in the middle of a season she was still trying to understand. She talked openly about aging, sadness, identity, belonging, and the feeling that her life didn’t look the way she thought it would. A few months later, we sat down again. And something had shifted. This time, our conversation w...

Join Mariana for a conversation with Ruchi Pinniger. Ruchi spent years on Wall Street before building Watch Her Prosper, a company devoted to helping women understand their money and redefine what prosperity can look like. But her own relationship with money began much earlier. After experiencing profound loss at a young age, Ruchi went on to build a life defined by independence, ambition, and fin...

Join Mariana for a conversation with Nicolette Amarillas. Nicolette built a career helping people become stronger. As a coach, entrepreneur, and creator, she spent years building a life that, from the outside, looked like she had everything figured out. But after losing her job, she found herself asking deeper questions about belonging, identity, and what it really means to feel at home in your ow...

Join Mariana for a conversation with Annemieke Umberg. Annemieke shares what happened after she left corporate life, fell in love, and set sail around the world with her young family in search of a different way of living. But somewhere along the journey, she began asking a different question altogether. Together, we explore ambition, motherhood, intuition, reinvention, slowing down, and what happ...

Sara Brown spent years collecting labels. A Division I athlete. A Google executive. A mother of three. An entrepreneur. A podcast host. But somewhere along the way, she began asking a different question: What if none of those labels are actually who I am? We talk about identity, ambition, motherhood, entrepreneurship, self-worth, belonging, reinvention, and what happens when we stop introducing ou...

Maggie Dickens spent much of her life becoming exactly who she thought everyone else wanted her to be. A therapist, community builder, and founder of Unapologetically Childfree, she has spent years helping women reconnect with themselves after a lifetime of people pleasing, perfectionism, and seeking belonging through achievement. We talk about emotional neglect, codependency, body image, perfecti...

Megan Sales believed love meant sacrificing herself. Building the perfect marriage, becoming a mother, and giving everything she had felt like the path to a meaningful life. But when motherhood and heartbreak unraveled the future she had imagined, she was forced to ask a different question: What if love was never supposed to cost me myself? In this conversation, Megan reflects on becoming a single...

Nino Kvernadze grew up moving between countries, languages, and identities before building an extraordinary career that took her from Wall Street to the CEO role of one of Georgia's largest hospitality groups. But after years of chasing achievement, her body forced her to ask a harder question: what is success actually for? We talk about immigration, ambition, motherhood, burnout, chronic pain, an...

Welcome to Inner Lives! In this short introduction, Mariana Crestani shares why she created the podcast, the questions that inspired it, and what you can expect from the conversations ahead. If you’ve ever felt caught between who you’ve been, who you’re becoming, and the many ways a life can be lived, you’re in the right place.