Some Things Were Never Yours to Carry—Here’s What Happens When You Finally Put Them Down

Sabrina Rudin has built something most people only dream about—a restaurant that became an institution, a loyal community, and now a debut cookbook. But the version of herself that pulled it all together almost didn’t make it through her first year of motherhood. On The Wellness Process, she sat down with Elizabeth Endres to talk about postpartum OCD, the sport that cracked her back open, and why she spent most of her life convinced the good stuff was meant for other people.

Sabrina Rudin on Postpartum OCD, Surfing, and Letting Go

The postpartum OCD nobody warned her about

Rudin was no stranger to intrusive thoughts, she’s had them her whole life. But she definitely wasn’t prepared for what happened when those thoughts latched onto her baby.

After her first child, the thoughts became relentless. Every bath, every bedtime—a spiral of what-ifs that she describes as earth-shattering. She chose to heal holistically, which took time, and the trauma of that period fractured something in her that took years to fully locate.

The turning point came in a therapist’s office. Rudin could barely walk through the door. She was shaking, couldn’t fill out the forms, and told her therapist in a whisper that she was afraid to be seen because of the thoughts she was having. What Tolchin said back stopped her cold: “People who kill their babies don’t have anxiety about killing their babies. They just very unfortunately kill their babies. You’re just having anxiety.”

That reframed everything. Every time a what-if thought crept in, she had a way to name it and put it down. The OCD was just noise. But it was hard not knowing what was happening to her. “The biggest part of what happened to me is that I didn’t know what was happening to me,” she says. Nobody had told her this was possible. Nobody had prepared her for the specific cruelty of intrusive thoughts directed at the person you love most.

She was better within a year, but she marks five years out as the moment something genuinely shifted—a night on a tropical island during COVID, looking up at the stars after her first real surf lessons, when she started crying and thought: “Oh my God, I’m still in there.”

How surfing finished what therapy started

Rudin had always been drawn to surfing, but she never seriously considered herself someone who could actually do it. That changed during COVID, and what started as a hobby quietly became something much bigger. Despite being a strong swimmer, she’d panic the moment a wave came. Sharks, drowning; all the what-ifs followed her into the water. Her instructor eventually gave her an ultimatum: “You’re good at this. You could do this, but not with this fear. If you’re this afraid, I can’t teach you. You have to go home. You have to decide, are you going to do it scared or are you going to just not do it?”

She went home and journaled, and somewhere in that process she recognized what was actually happening—it was her OCD. The same intrusive thoughts, just a different setting. She went back, her instructor noticed the shift immediately, and she told him, “I am afraid, but I’m doing it anyway.”

A thought is just a thought—”same thing in a different font”—and you move through it anyway. She now surfs in the winter in Montauk, runs into cold dark water, and not long before this episode, fell off a wave in LA and came up saying out loud, “I love life.” Something that was hard to engineer in a therapist’s office kept getting reinforced in the water.

The late bloomer arc

Rudin has a specific memory she keeps coming back to. She’s sitting in an auditorium right before high school graduation, watching someone else take the English award, feeling like a failure. That girl went on to become a bestselling author. Rudin went on to bomb her SATs, switch colleges, and open a juice cafe in Aspen.

She jokes that if anyone had to hire her off a resume, it wouldn’t happen. Nothing screams “future published author.” But every step was chosen because it lit something up in her, and that instinct turned out to be the throughline.

When she first approached a publisher about a cookbook, the response was essentially “not yet.” Build more, share more, grow more. So she opened Spring Cafe in New York, kept writing on Instagram, kept showing up. Then that same person came back around and connected her with an agent. The timing that felt frustratingly slow turned out to be exactly right.

“If you don’t find your niche when you’re 18, thank God. It means there’s so much more in store for you,” Rudin says. And the other piece—that the path that looks like it’s taking you away from what you want is often what’s taking you straight toward it. She never imagined opening a restaurant would be what made her a published author. Looking back, it’s the only way it could have happened.

The cookbook

Healthy with a Side of Happy is 100 plant-based recipes, but Rudin says it’s not really just a recipe book. It’s everything she wishes existed when she was figuring out how to feed herself and her family—pantry staples, her actual fridge, how she washes and stores produce, non-toxic cookware, the brands she trusts across different price points.

The recipes themselves range from childhood dishes to things she developed specifically for the book, alongside a few Spring Cafe hits that people have been asking about for years—including the superhero burrito, which has its own kind of cult following. There’s a radicchio and chickpea dish she’s been making her husband since they got together, a shepherd’s pie, a lasagna, grain and bean dishes, homemade granola she makes every week. Food that’s healthy but also genuinely satisfying.

She wrote every word herself, and it reads that way, grounded in years of actually cooking for real people with real lives.

It’s out April 8 and available anywhere books are sold, or at sabrinudin.com/book.

To hear the full conversation, listen to The Wellness Process wherever you get your podcasts.

Read More

• You’re One Boundary Away From a Life That Actually Feels Like Yours
• The Reason You Keep Wanting to Throw Out Everything You Own
• Feel Like You’re Overreacting? You Might Be Misreading Your Anxiety