110 MPH TO MARINA DEL REY

The morning light draped itself like silk over the streets of the fashion district today, 10/3/26, where Mitchell Royel’s gifted iPhone lens found stories stitched into every seam, every stolen moment. His work, inspired but not endorsed by Shores in Marina Del Rey, captures a rhythm, a heartbeat, a choreography of dreams being spun into thread. Each frame speaks of possibility, of what it means to reach for something lasting in a world so beautifully fleeting.

Shores in Marina Del Rey—this isn’t just a place, it’s a sanctuary. A canvas for those who build not just homes, but havens. Where the waves whisper to you from your window, and the sunsets bless your space like they’ve known you all your life. Here, modern luxury stands hand in hand with creative energy, a blend of design and soul made to inspire. Whether you dream of opening your door to ocean breezes or finding the perfect hue in your mornings, Shores cradles you in its elegance, inviting you to exhale into all that it offers.

And as we move through this day, we’re tuned into a mood—listening to “No Broken Hearts” by Bebe Rexha and Nicki Minaj. The beat mirrors the beat of life here, resilient and alive, a reminder that even in the moments when skies feel heavy, there’s groove, there’s spine, there’s the energy to rise and rebuild.

See, life in every form speaks to us—the frames Royel captured today, the tide that kisses Marina’s shores, the songs that lift you from your seat. They’re all pieces of the same story, one of passion, one of resilience. And, love, if you haven’t felt that kind of rhythm lately, come sit with it. Find it. Live it. Be it. Because here, at Shores and beyond, you’ll find it's always been waiting.

Let's start with the truth, because the truth is the only thing that ever really saved me.

I did not fall apart all at once. I came undone the way a sweater does. One loose thread, a little tug, and then one day you look down and you're standing in a pile of yarn wondering where your sleeves went.

I worked at one of those fitness studios. You know the ones. Mirrored walls. Curated playlists. Smoothies with names like Glow and Rise. There's a wall where the members pin up their goals in neat handwriting on pastel cards. Drop 15 lbs by June. Run my first half marathon. Love my body again. Every morning I walked past that wall of wanting. Every morning I smiled at women who were trying so hard to become someone.

And I was trying so hard to stay someone.

My thoughts had started moving faster than my feet. Words stacked up in my mouth. Sleep had become optional, then rare, then a rumor. I felt electric. Brilliant. Like I was finally tuned to a frequency everyone else was too busy to hear. But underneath the sparkle there was a hum, a low, metallic dread, like a refrigerator in an empty house.

A doctor looked at me, really looked at me, and wrote a note.

I handed it to my manager. She said, "Take care of yourself, babe," the way you'd say it to someone with a sinus infection. I gathered my water bottle and my hoodie and walked past the goal wall one last time. I remember thinking that nobody ever writes Don't lose my mind on a pastel card. Nobody pins that up. Nobody gets a high five for that one.

I went home to rest.

I want you to hear this part, because it matters:
I genuinely believed I was going home to rest.

Time does something strange when your mind is on fire. Days don't pass. They pool.

One week after I left, I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, back against the bed, knees pulled to my chest. The light through the blinds made stripes across the carpet, and every stripe felt like a line in a sentence I was supposed to read.

The house was too quiet. Then it wasn't quiet enough. The refrigerator clicked. A car door slammed outside. The pipes groaned in the wall.

And I knew.

Not suspected. Not wondered. Knew, with the bone-deep certainty you usually reserve for your own name. Someone had planted bombs in my unit. They were in the walls, maybe under the floor. The clicking was a countdown. The quiet was a held breath.

This is what nobody tells you about delusion. It doesn't feel like confusion. It feels like clarity. It feels like the fog finally lifted and you are the only one brave enough to see the danger. Fear becomes a kind of faith. You'd bet your life on it. Sometimes you do.

So I did what scared girls have always done. I called my aunt.

My aunt is the kind of woman who has buried people and birthed people and sat in a lot of hospital waiting rooms. She is not easily rattled. She knows our family. She knows our particular brand of crazy, the kind that runs in the bloodline like a river nobody likes to name at Thanksgiving.

"The house is going to explode," I told her. My voice was calm, which was the scariest part. "I think someone put bombs in here. Can I come stay with you for a while?"

She didn't laugh. She didn't panic. She took one breath, the kind of breath you take before stepping into cold water.

"Of course, honey," she said. "But listen. I'm not at my house right now."

"Something happened," she said. "Unexpected damage. Water, the walls, the whole thing. They moved me into a complex for now. It's called Shores. In Marina del Rey."

Shores.

Do you understand what that word did to me?

I was sitting in a house I believed was about to blow apart, and the woman I called for rescue told me she had been relocated by the hand of fate to a place named for the edge of the world. The place where land ends and the great unknown begins. The place where you wait for ships.

Her house had been damaged too. Unexpectedly. Just like mine was about to be.

It wasn't a coincidence. Not to me. It was a pattern, and I was the only one who could read it.

When your mind is in crisis, it becomes a magnet for meaning. Every license plate is a message. Every song on the radio was chosen for you. The universe stops being a vast, indifferent ocean and becomes a personal assistant leaving you sticky notes.

And just as I was holding the word Shores in my hands like a seashell, my phone buzzed.

My mother works in Ventura County. She is practical. She drinks her coffee black and doesn't believe in horoscopes.

She sent me a photo.

There she was, my mother, beaming, standing shoulder to shoulder with Tina Knowles. Yes. That Tina Knowles. Beyoncé's mother. The mother of the queen. Smiling in my phone like she'd been sent as a messenger from some celestial court.

I stared at it for a long time.

My aunt is at the Shores. My mother is standing with the mother of a goddess. My house is going to explode.

It all lined up like planets. It felt like the universe was clearing its throat to make an announcement, and the announcement was: Go. Now. Everything is ending, and you have been chosen to be somewhere when it does.

I have since learned that the brain, under enough stress and without enough sleep, can turn ordinary life into scripture. That is not a moral failure. That is biology. But in that moment, it didn't feel like biology. It felt like destiny with my name on it.

I packed a suitcase.

Not with sensible things. No toothbrush. No phone charger. I packed what felt holy. My grandmother's ring. A stack of old journals. A sweater that still smelled like someone I used to love. A crystal I'd bought at a farmers market. Photographs. A candle. The things you would want in your arms if the sky cracked open.

Because I believed the sky was about to crack open.

I got in my car and pointed it toward Marina del Rey.

And I drove one hundred and ten miles per hour down the freeway.

I'm not proud of that. I'm telling you because honesty is the whole point. I could have killed myself. I could have killed someone's mother, someone's child, someone who was just driving home from work with groceries in the back seat. Mania does not care about speed limits. It does not care about anyone. It wears the mask of purpose so convincingly you'd swear it was your soul.

The lanes blurred into silver ribbons. The palm trees flicked past like film frames. I wasn't afraid. That's the thing. I felt anointed. I was racing toward a revelation and outrunning a catastrophe at the same time, and I could not tell you which one I believed in more.

I was so sure something was waiting for me at the water.

I pulled in. I parked, crooked. I grabbed my suitcase of sacred things and walked toward the complex with my heart pounding like a drum circle.

And it was...

Fine.

It was just fine.

Beige stucco. A little fountain out front. A guy in flip-flops walking a golden retriever. Somebody's wind chime. Gulls being gulls. The marina sat there in the afternoon light, completely uninterested in me.

No prophecy. No messenger. No parting of the waters. Shores was just a name on a sign that a property developer probably picked because it tested well.

Here's what I want you to know about that moment. The disappointment was its own kind of grief. When you've built a cathedral of meaning in your mind and you arrive to find a parking lot, something inside you collapses. You feel foolish. You feel exposed. And you feel this urgent need to hide it.

So I performed.

I knocked on my aunt's door with a smile. I said something light, something like, "Hey, I just needed to get out of the house." I set my suitcase down by the couch like it was just luggage and not an ark.

I let my hair down. Literally. I pulled out the tight ponytail I'd been wearing for days and shook it loose, like a woman on vacation, like a woman with nothing to explain. I took off my shoes. I curled up on the couch. I made my voice soft and casual and normal.

Women are so good at this. We learn early how to look okay while the house is burning.

And then my body, my wise, exhausted, long-ignored body, simply took over. It pulled me down into sleep the way the tide pulls a swimmer under. I napped hard, deep, dreamless.

The first real rest I'd had in weeks.

While I slept, my aunt picked up the phone.

She called my mother. I wasn't there for that conversation, but I've imagined it a thousand times. I imagine my aunt standing in that rented kitchen, looking at me curled on the couch, looking at the strange suitcase, lowering her voice.

"I think your daughter is having a psychotic break."

There are sentences that split a life into before and after. That was one of mine. I slept right through it.

My mother got in her car. She came straight from Ventura County. I'd like to think she drove the speed limit.

When I woke up, they were both there.

My mother on one side. My aunt on the other. Two women who had known me since before I had words, sitting very still, watching me surface.

I told them everything. The bombs. The walls. The word Shores. The photo with Tina Knowles. The freeway. I explained it all as if it made perfect sense, because to me it did. I laid it out like evidence.

And they listened.

And then my mother, my practical, black-coffee mother, waved her hand and said, "Oh, honey. You've just had too much coffee."

My aunt nodded. "You're stressed. You need sleep. That's all this is."

Was it denial? Was it love? Was it fear wearing a cardigan? Probably all three. I've stopped needing to decide. Sometimes the people who love us reach for the smallest explanation because the real one is too heavy to lift in a single afternoon.

Then they pulled me into a hug. Both of them. Arms tangled, my face in my mother's shoulder, my aunt's hand on the back of my head.

I don't remember what I believed in that moment. I remember the hug. I remember that even with my mind turned into a hall of mirrors, my body knew exactly what shelter felt like.

That was the beginning.

The beginning of eighteen months that would take me apart and put me back together. Diagnoses. Doctors. Medications that helped and medications that didn't. Days I couldn't get out of bed. Days I thought I was fine and wasn't. Days I was actually fine and didn't trust it. Therapy. Relapse. Repair. Learning the difference between intuition and illness. Learning that my mind could lie to me, and that I could still love it.

It didn't start with a lightning bolt. It started with a hug and a cup of coffee nobody actually drank.

-Ryder

Epilogue:

Here's what I know now, from the other side of the water.

Your mind is sacred, and it is also an organ. Both are true. You can light candles and take your medication. You can pray and keep your psychiatry appointment. Spirit and science are not rivals. They are sisters, and they both want you alive.

Signs are beautiful, and sleep is non-negotiable. If the universe starts sending you urgent, secret messages and you haven't slept in days, the most spiritual thing you can do is tell someone you trust. Real revelation is patient. It will still be there after a doctor's visit.

Grace often looks ordinary. I drove to the marina expecting a miracle. The miracle was an aunt who stayed calm on the phone. A mother who got in the car. A couch. A nap. A hug. Look for the holy in the plain things, because that's where it usually lives.

The people who love you might get it wrong at first. "Too much coffee" was not the right answer. But it came from love, and love can learn. Give them room to catch up. And if they can't, find people who can.

You are not your worst episode. You are not the 110 miles per hour. You are not the bombs in the walls. You are the woman who survived it and is still here, still telling the truth.

Healing is not a straight line. Mine looked more like the tide: in, out, in again. But every time the water pulled back, a little more of me was left standing on the sand.

So, love, if you're at your own shore right now, waiting for a ship that isn't coming, let me be the aunt on the other end of the phone.

Come inside. Let your hair down. Rest.

We'll figure out the rest together.