For as long as she can remember, Lenéa Sims has been interested in better understanding the world around her. So much so, that in college she studied everything from sociology and art history to communications and media studies. “I’ve never been able to choose anything,” she says. “So I just did everything.”
But by the time she finished school, she was burned out and knee-deep in post-collegiate flail. “I was experiencing a lot of anxiety and depression, and just having a hard time figuring out where I belonged and what I should do with myself,” she says.
To counteract her feelings of aimlessness, she started exploring the world of wellness—a space she was already pretty familiar with, having grown up in Los Angeles. Still, she had a hard time trying to find where, exactly, she belonged.
“As I got really involved in wellness, I just started to realize that I didn’t really fit in,” Lenéa says. “There wasn’t really a space where I felt like I could be myself. I’m super colorful, and I want to live a more vibrant life. But the wellness I was experiencing was really beige and monochromatic and there’s nothing wrong with that, it just wasn’t my vibe.”
She wanted to give people like herself the space to dabble in wellness without forgoing their own shine—a project that eventually turned into her first digital community, Inner Play (which now lives on Mighty Networks, too). “It’s a space where we deal with self-development and self-help kinds of things, but through the lens of play and creativity,” she says. “It’s all about self-reflection.”