Still Life With Jessica Comingore Donais
Still Life With Jessica Comingore Donais
On early blogging days, career shifts, and the question of children.
Jessica Comingore Donais and I go way, way back. We met what feels like lifetimes ago (it was), in the early days of blogging and social media. We started exploring our similar passions and interests around the same time, eventually growing audiences, and then following kindred paths. I’ve always admired Jess, both as an internet and real-life friend — She is a seasoned pro when it comes to branding and visual design projects. Her boutique branding agency, Marbury, builds timeless and elevated identities, and helps lay the groundwork for a brand's long-term growth and evolution. Her eye for design and authenticity inspire me, and I’m so grateful that our journeys have overlapped in various ways over the years. We bumped into each other recently at Canyon Coffee, and even just a few brief moments with her left me feeling enriched. I knew it would be fun to catch up after so many years, and enjoyed this Zoom conversation immensely. Below, we reminisce on the "old" times, empathize over career shifts, and ponder major life questions.
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Transcribed, edited and briefly condensed from our conversation on November 8, 2023.
Elise: Thank you for showing up here with me today! One second, I'm trying to hide my video because I don't want to see the self view… I get so distracted, haha.
Jessica: Same! And I appreciate you reaching out. I feel like I've been kind of under a rock social media-wise.
Elise: I’d love to talk a little bit about that. I was thinking about how we originally connected in the very early days of blogging and social media, and am interested in starting our conversation there. It was a “certain time,” you know?
Jessica: Yes, that’s so funny. It now feels like I’m ancient, like oh, am I a senior citizen? It’s moved so fast and it’s so different.
Elise: I’m curious, what are your memories from that era, and what was the experience like for you back then?
Jessica: There's still a longing to have a sense of how it was then, sometimes. And other times, it exists in glimmers. I don't know, I think back on that time as a strong reaction to me being such a crazy introvert, and the online world being this safe space where I could come of age and express myself.
Elise: Totally, it was so nice to explore different parts of ourselves in new ways, through Blogspot or Instagram.
Jessica: Especially as a creative person embarking on a career in design. I also had just finished college and was moving out on my own for the first time, and had my first adult job in the workforce.
I was in this studio apartment in Playa del Rey, and I would come home at night and just get lost in the internet, on early blogs and then I decided to start blogging. It was such an exploration of self, but that then snowballed into, like, how many years? It’s so many years later now, but what I'm doing is still an extension of that time. But I'm such a different person that I find myself trying to reconcile it all.
Elise: What do you mean?
Jessica: The person that started this snowball versus the one who's still pushing it. It’s conflicting sometimes.
Elise: Yeah. What you said kind of jumped out at me — about working a day job and going home and being on the internet. It was such a similar story for me, and I really used my blog and social media as an outlet and creative space. I feel like that was such a common theme back then. A lot of us stumbled into it as a side hobby. Sometimes it was aligned with our work and other times it was more of an escape or a release. And I think that’s interesting because these days it’s so much more enmeshed and interwoven into our lives.
Jessica: Yeah. I don't even know these days what the equivalent is. Is it TikTok? Maybe.
Elise: I wouldn’t know, I’m still not on TikTok haha!
Jessica: Same, same. I don't even know how — I went on it once and I felt like I was going to have an aneurysm.
Elise: I know I probably sound like a 95-year-old woman, but I get so much anxiety with all the videos fighting for attention. I’m a very visual person and love photography, but when sound and moving pictures are coming at me from a tiny screen, I can get so overwhelmed.
Jessica: Me too. I have to reconcile honoring my own pace and inclinations against the changing tide of things. Because as you get older, you realize how naive and innocent and simple things were. This is probably a very common sentiment when thinking back on your 20s, but you can be so in your own little world that you don't ever think about how much more complicated life is going to become.
Elise: Because you already feel like you're old. You feel like you're an adult.
Jessica: Yes, I thought I totally knew myself and everything I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. And now I'm like, what a dummy.
Elise: Now I'm like, will I ever fully know?
Jessica: Exactly.
Elise: When did you feel like people were paying attention to what you were doing online? Was there a turning point when you started connecting with a larger audience?
Jessica: It was so unsaturated at that time, so it wasn't that hard to stand out or get noticed. I remember I was blogging privately for a long time. It wasn't public. And I had messaged this woman — I think she was called “Habitually Chic” or something. I was very centered on the interior design blogging world because I was working in interior design. And then she encouraged me to make it public. So I did, and it was just: Here's a John Mayer song I like. Here’s a scarf I think is pretty. I would put five of them up in a day. It was like Pinterest kind of, before Pinterest.
Elise: Totally, I remember those posts! It’s actually so mortifying to think about some of the stuff I was posting then.
Jessica: Oh, I know. I think about LiveJournal and MySpace in the same way. I remember I was still working in interior design, and Macy's reached out about doing a styling thing in New York. It’s so weird to think about how natural it felt to then extend into those opportunities, whereas now it seems like there needs to be so much more effort. I can't fathom standing out on that level now.
But actually, through Twitter, I met a lot of people because Twitter felt like an accompaniment to blogging back in the day, and a place where you could find community. I remember moving from Playa del Rey to Los Feliz and meeting up with Justina Blakeney — kind of naturally starting friendships through that. It was a very specific time and place in LA, where everyone was supporting each other both on and offline.
Elise: Ah, yes. I love Justina. It’s so cool to see where everyone from those early days is now, and how everyone has found their own way.
Jessica: I know!
Elise: Now we're older… we’re more fully-formed. I don't know if that's the best way to say it, but we've grown, we've evolved, we've changed. And it's cool to see how that era and that influence is still with us in a new way.
Jessica: It is really interesting to see people who fully rode that train and now have massive influencer status or are running big brands, and other people who took it in a more entrepreneurial direction and have built things on their own.
Elise: Yeah, that was a distinct period of time. I remember thinking, oh, they're choosing to make that shift or I'm choosing to go this direction. Do you resonate with that? It feels like it eventually came to a head and was like, am I going to ride this wave? I feel like you and I both chose similarly.
Jessica: Yeah, there was definite conscious thought around, like, are you going to lean into this influencer thing, or are you going to try to build something separate from it? That’s where branding came in for me, and Marbury. Applying this skill to something people need — something that wasn't me selling myself, because that never made me comfortable. It was like taking my taste and those experiences, and then applying it to a service-based business model.
Elise: Did it feel like a natural evolution for you with Marbury, your branding agency?
Jessica: I was just reflecting on this with my husband. It’s been such a complex relationship with this business because it started with blogging and tinkering around on the computer, then teaching myself this stuff. Frankly, there was a lot of imposter syndrome and faking it till I made it back then, to now — fifteen years or whatever later — and I feel so competent and confident.
It’s night and day what I was doing then versus what I’m doing now, but sometimes I hit up against it and wonder if this still aligns for me, a decision that I made so long ago. I don’t really know anything else but, if I gave myself space, would there be something else? I don't know.
Elise: I get that. I’ve very much been in that place personally, too — asking myself how I can make my work feel the most aligned for me now. Because of course it’s natural for goals and dreams and values to shift and evolve. We’re ever-changing. So it’s always good to slow down, pause and ask those questions.
Jessica: Sitting on a screen for thirteen hours in my 20s was exciting! And now I'm like, give me as much space from this as possible. I need to be in my life, living it and having hobbies for the first time ever. But it's hard getting away from that way of working and being glued to a screen. I feel like that’s my biggest challenge at the moment.
Elise: What are some of your hobbies?
Jessica: I wish I could give you a better answer to this. I still draw a blank.
Elise: What about any rituals or things that you like to incorporate in your day?
Jessica: Morning walks have been amazing, especially living in Tucson now. It is so beautiful, the sunrises and sunsets. I'm like, is this real? Nature's just putting on this show all the time, so that's been really nice and grounding. There's something so peaceful here that I haven't felt anywhere else.
I know the Southwest draws a lot of artists who are more rooted in spirituality and wellness movements, which makes sense to me now just being here for the past few months. And I love cooking — being in the kitchen, eating, exploring through food. For my husband and I, our number one is just everything around food.
Elise: Ah, yes! And you had a pizza restaurant together in Portland for a bit!
Jessica: Yeah. Very short-lived.
Elise: Tell me more about it. You're so multifaceted between interior design, branding, graphic design, photography… and a pizzeria. Is there cohesion in those projects for you?
Jessica: Yes, in the sense that it felt like standing on the other side of things. I’m building businesses for people all the time through branding, and then they go off and run their businesses.
The pizzeria experience was a funny culmination of everything — My husband Justin and I were both very burnt out. I had grown up in LA and was desperately wanting to experience living somewhere else. Justin had been fostering a pizza hobby for a few years and very much had his eyes set on that. So when we found ourselves in a new city, we jumped. I helped do the branding for it, and the interior design — it was an empty box when we started. We did the floor plan, the elevations, the build out, specified all the materials, and then ran the restaurant. It was fun to consider how to market it, and how we wanted the brand to come across.
Elise: Yes! And then everything else starts trickling in… paying the bills, hiring staff and operating a fast-paced hospitality business. That’s a lot.
Jessica: Naïveté. We went in so naive, and I guess that's just life. Definitely got smacked in the face.
Elise: Are you glad you did it?
Jessica: Yeah, I think glad from a learning, growing perspective. It definitely strengthened our relationship. It also challenged it in crazy ways, but it’s good to have different life experiences. It pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me realize how I had created this safe bubble behind a computer that I could very much control. I was working in solitude — I could control who my clients were, what I put out.
And then working in a pizzeria, where literally anybody can come through the door. They can be very opinionated or very hangry. We opened three months before a pandemic in a city that, like most cities, got hit pretty bad with crime. I won't go into too much detail, but being broken into and robbed and sketchy stuff happening, it was really intense.
It brought me full circle to appreciating where I grew up. I think of it as the college experience I never had. It was four years — I went somewhere else, a totally different environment, out of my comfort zone. I learned a lot about myself.
Elise: I bet! That sounds intense.
Jessica: Yeah, and then managing a team of employees in a very small space. Running a business with my husband. We hadn't really worked together in that way before. It was just hitting up against every pressure point. I had to face a lot of stuff. So anyway, the pizzeria didn't end up lasting that long. It was only about two years.
Elise: But that feels like a very long time when you’re in it! I can't believe you guys opened three months before everything shut down.
Jessica: Sometimes I feel like it was a weird universe blessing, being able to get out of something that wasn't the right fit for us. It brought me back to design feeling much more grateful, and also more confident and understanding of the inner workings of a business, too.
But honestly, it's our mantra every single day to be like, “at least we're not in a pizzeria!”
Elise: Haha, you’ll always remember that time. When I started Goodwin, it was something I had dreamed of doing forever, but the realities of running a retail business were just really fucking hard. But I’m glad I did it, I learned so much. I’m proud of what I did but have never looked back.
Jessica: You needed to scratch the itch! I think there's something about brick-and-mortars of any kind that we really romanticize — movies like You’ve Got Mail. Even while we were running the pizzeria, a lot of couples would come in and say, “This is our dream! This is what we want to do. We want to have a little restaurant, a cafe, a bakery, a winery.”
Elise: “Here you go! You can have this one!” Haha.
Jessica: Exactly.
Elise: Now you’re in a new city, in a new state. I saw on Instagram that you were doing some home renovations recently. This could skew more personal or work-related, but I’d love to know what is going really well for you, and also what you’re finding challenging at the moment.
Jessica: Oh my god, I might start crying because I lost my dad in August. That's been hard. Really hard. I haven't had the space or capacity to even navigate what the hell happened. It’s been a lot.
This year has had wonderful highs, too. We've been trying to buy a house for years, and we did it. Honestly, a large driver of coming down here to Tucson was to be closer to him in LA. We knew we didn't want to go back to LA, but I wanted to be closer to family.
Even though I don't feel fully settled yet, it feels amazing to have a sense of home. I felt like I was floating for many years and now I'm trying to settle into routine, ritual, and a nurturing of myself. I've always been someone that's very tied to my surroundings — feeling like an extension of that peace or calm. So now having this blank slate to start doing that, even though it feels incredibly overwhelming, it excites me.
Elise: I love that. It’s like you have a fresh lens on life.
Jessica: Yes. I really do love change and how it can provide these fresh starts. What do I want to take into this chapter, and what do I want to leave behind? Who do I want to be here?
I think when I left LA, I was running away — not knowing how to navigate boundaries and being a people-pleaser. I grew a lot in Portland. But now I'm like, okay, how do I live in peace? Because Portland was very traumatic.
Elise: You’re choosing a new path forward. I love change, too — it can be so wonderful and rewarding. But even when it’s “good” change, it is still an adjustment. And adjustments are hard.
Jessica: I think about who Jessica is now at 36 years old. As you get older and become a woman of a certain age, things shift. Most people have kids, and that’s another thing to navigate — not having kids. How do I show up for people who do, and also honor my own needs within friendships? It’s so interesting.
Elise: I could talk about this for hours!
Jessica: I'm so curious about it because it affects everyone. Every woman has thought about it in some way. It’s so easy to make assumptions around a certain age, especially meeting new people in a new city. So many ask, do you have kids?
Elise: Why do people still ask that, though? Ugh.
Jessica: I know. I'm like, don't you think this is something that's been thought about?
Elise: If I'm not offering this information up, I don't need you to ask. It’s a tender topic.
Jessica: Exactly.
Elise: I’d love to talk with you more about this. There’s so much you’ve said that I resonate with, and we are both the same age asking many of the same big life questions. We’ve known each other in some capacity for, what, almost fifteen years? And we’ve had similar, I don’t know what the word is… stepping stones.
Jessica: Yeah, influences.
Elise: We’re in our quote, unquote “fertile years.” There can be so much pressure. A lot of my closest friends have multiple children, sweet young families. I’m getting older but I still don’t feel old. I have a lot of life ahead, and where do kids fit into that? Do they? Will our planet even still be around? These are the questions coming up for me.
It’s also interesting to navigate different life seasons within friendships — wanting to engage and show up for the parents in my life where they are, finding understanding and love and connection, but also honoring my own needs, desires and boundaries. Does that resonate for you at all?
Jessica: It does. With children, is it choice? Is it circumstantial? I’m thinking about things like, how does life evolve when you don't go down that path?
It’s really interesting to me. All I have is this deep internal desire of — I don't want to be doing this forever, but if I don't become a mom, what does that mean? There's this internal tension. I don't want to feel like I either do that or I'm stuck here forever. There's not a lot of examples, or maybe I just haven't found them yet, of evolving in society as a woman who is not mothering.
Elise: That’s so true. I’d love to share a little bit more about my own journey with you.
In 2020, we decided to start trying for a family. When the whole world felt completely out of control, it foolishly felt like one decision we could control for ourselves. Ha, right! It just wasn’t happening for us. The next couple of years became intense and all-consuming — navigating unexplained infertility, then fertility treatments. Finally, Dan and I started dreaming about what our lives would look like, just the two of us. It was crucial for us to have those conversations and start to untangle our own desires from those of family, society, religion, or whatever it may be.
I don’t want to talk too long about my story, but I’ve reached an overwhelming sense of peace about my life and my marriage. I love kids. I am obsessed with my niece Viola. I’ve always felt like a nurturing person. More than anything, I’m so grateful to be with a partner that is the person I’d want to have a child with, but also the person I’d be super excited to spend a childless life with. It’s not an easy, black-and-white decision for me.
Jessica: Yeah, maybe it is for some people, but I'm more on your route. I really appreciate you sharing that with me. And I feel like we could talk for hours around it because it's so ripe.
Even if you feel clear on things, there's likely going to be days where you're like, well, what if? And what would that be like? And it's this constant renegotiating with your mind — is this societal expectation or is this internal desire? I feel like that's what I've been going back and forth with. It’s so complex.
And then also losing a parent has me sort of thinking about parenting in a totally different way, and how it's this ultimate sacrifice. I think maybe a year ago I would have been like, oh, I don't like this whole narrative around people who don't have kids, like “they just don't get it” or “they'll never understand.” And then losing my dad, I'm like, I won't ever understand. That level of sacrifice is so beautiful, but also so painful. As a parent, you're feeling every emotion in extremes that you just might not, having not gone down that path.
Elise: Some days I’m like, do I want to feel more extremes than I already am? Do I want my heart to live outside of my body? Life is so wild, so heavy, so wonderful.
Jessica: I feel like I'm such a — not exactly fragile — but I need a lot to feel at my equilibrium best. Showing up just as a wife, friend, sister, daughter. I have so much credit for women that are also mothering, also running businesses. It blows my mind. How? Where is that space for self?
Elise: There are so many tangents we could go off on. And I know mothers would have a lot to add to this.
Jessica: I’ve been enjoying having these conversations in private since basically leaving LA. But it hasn’t been something easy to talk about more openly… maybe because when we started online it was so surface, so easy. And then life got hard and real and for some reason the internet stopped feeling like a place that I could articulate a whole other side of life on.
Elise: That’s why I started writing my Substack. It’s been so nice to create a space for conversations like this, or for me to explore more vulnerable, human topics. I still enjoy Instagram for visuals, but it’s not a place that I really go to share in a very personal way.
Jessica: I’m so glad you did.
Elise: Thank you. Oof okay, where do we take this conversation now? Ha! I have some other questions and prompts written down, but I’m curious, is there anything specific you’d want to talk about or go into more?
Jessica: Gosh, it’s so interesting because I think in the past, I wanted the conversation to be around work because identity is so tied to it. And now I realize, my love of work is around the business side of it, and how do I run a business that can give me the freedom I want to live my life? It's less connected.
Elise: Tell me more about that.
Jessica: I'm such a split with the right and left brain. I feel like branding just happens to be the vehicle that I use to understand people, which is what I find so much joy in. My favorite part of the whole process is getting on calls and listening to clients talk about why they started their business or project. What are their deeper values? I’m listening on this very deep level, then extracting and making something out of it.
Elise: Do you still find any joy, excitement or inspiration on social media or the internet these days? I know you share a lot less online now.
Jessica: I do, but it’s funny. I’m active online to run Marbury, market a business, grow a team, deliver to clients, and then the rest is just for living.
I don't share much on the personal side, but I find inspiration and an inclination to see what contemporaries are doing, or where they're traveling, or what's influencing them — things like that. So I think I still do find that glimmer of what we felt when we started online so many years ago. I'll turn to social for that.
I don’t know, maybe I will start sharing more once I feel settled here. There is a level of connection that can happen online that I miss sometimes.
Elise: Are there any particular people or brands that you think are doing it well, that feel like a safe space or influential for you?
Jessica: I don’t tend to scroll through the feed, but I’ll look at Stories. Mostly women my age, like you, who are living similarly. I use the mute feature like a crazy person and have it down to like twenty people on Instagram, so there’s never many.
Elise: It’s okay if you muted me, haha.
Jessica: I did not mute you! I like authenticity, not being sold anything. There's some kind of resonance in the way that these women are living quietly, but purposefully with intention. I still find a lot of inspiration in that. How are other people doing it? I enjoy getting a peek into their existence and align with their values, which I think is probably the root of everything in this whole online journey.
Elise: That’s beautiful. When looking at your life — this new season, this new chapter — what are your dreams now? I’m not asking for your five year plan… more like, what do you hope for your life? What do you see for yourself in the bigger picture?
Jessica: That’s a great question. I think what comes to mind is spaciousness, flexibility, freedom.
Like you said earlier, I feel incredibly blessed to have found someone that I really enjoy spending time with. As long as I'm out of the house, away from the screen, I can have so much fun. We can go grocery shopping, I just want to live life with him. I want to travel more, I’d really like that.
All I can think about is building a business that supports me financially to allow for a life that feels more focused. I want to live more, I want to have more space. I want to cultivate a sense of discovery for who I am at this stage of life — how I’m showing up in the world, how I’m nurturing or mothering in a different way, if it’s not with a kid. Finding my community and contributing to that community offline. It’s not huge. I feel like my vision is quite simple and peaceful.
Elise: Same.
Jessica: Presence. I tend to be racing through to what’s next and focusing on the future. Justin’s taught me a lot about presence. It’s so cliché, but the best days and the best times are just presence and gratitude for what you’ve got around you. Not what you don’t have, or where you’re not at.
Elise: It's so true… it's just such an endless cycle. There’s always going to be more, more, more. What’s next, next, next. And that’s not the way to living a fulfilled life.
Jessica: Exactly. I think just honoring what does feel good.
Elise: I love the word spaciousness. That will stick with me from this conversation. Even though we haven’t always kept in close contact over the years, I see that spaciousness in you. You’ve done such a lovely job of navigating that in your life and in your work. Many people would get caught up in the rat race of it all, but I’ve seen how you’ve pulled back, found what feels right and good to you, and then moved towards that with care and intention. I’m excited to see what spaciousness means for you in the long-term.
Jessica: Thank you. I really appreciate that. I feel like I could talk to you forever, and I really want to continue this conversation in real life. It's so true what parallel existences we've kind of had. That's the gift of this whole journey we've been on — the community, for sure. Whether we talk once every five years or more regularly, there's so many common threads.
Elise: Yeah, I’ve always felt that connection with you, too, and I'm very grateful for that. Let me know the next time you’re in LA.
Jessica: Likewise. And let me know if you’re ever in Tucson.
Still Life, refers to the notion of “stillness” — quieting the noise and seeking to capture a glimpse into this very moment in time. This bimonthly series is a conversation between Elise and various creatives. View past publications here.
Credits: Photos by Jessica Comingore Donais, Pizza Doughnais and Marbury.