Melissa Bernstein helped build Melissa & Doug, the toy company she co-founded with her husband Doug, into a business with nearly half a billion dollars in revenue. She was also raising six children. From the outside, it looked like a life full of success. Inside, she was struggling to feel understood—even by herself.
Melissa told me about the moment she saw one of her toys on a shelf and thought: I’m in this shiny packaging, and nobody really knows the truth beneath it. That moment became the beginning of telling her story.
We talk about the pressure to look happy, what Melissa calls existential depression, and how creativity, therapy, philosophy and small acts of meaning helped her find her way forward. She also shares what it was like to leave the company she thought she’d be part of for life, and to begin again with Lifelines.
If you’ve ever looked like you were doing well while quietly wondering what was missing, I think you’ll recognise something in Melissa’s story.