The chapter is still open
Emily has spent a career being someone else’s vision — a model, a chameleon, a vessel for other people’s dreams. Now, eight months pregnant with her third child and building something of her own, she’s learning what it means to choose her own brief. It starts, she says, with sleep.
There is a version of Emily DiDonato that the world memorized: the Glamour editorial, the Maybelline campaigns across 13 years, the face in Times Square at 17 years old, still in high school, standing next to Christy Turlington on the biggest commercial shoot of her life. That version was real. It just wasn’t the whole story.
“I just knew I wanted a life that was bigger than the one I was born into,” she says. She grew up in upstate New York, daughter of a New York City firefighter and a stay-at-home mom. She didn’t have a plan. She had a feeling. The two things are not the same, and she has spent her adult life learning the difference.
The modeling career arrived before she had time to want it. A Glamour shoot in her senior year of high school, pulled from the Jersey Shore mid-vacation for a fitting she didn’t know would change everything. Maybelline saw that editorial. Called her in. And Emily, who had barely modeled before, found herself inside a machine she didn’t fully understand and couldn’t slow down.
For years she ran on almost nothing. Red-eyes between jobs. Catching sleep wherever she could, on planes, in cars, in hotel rooms in cities she’d leave before she knew their names. “I remember thinking: this is so hard,” she says. “It was hard on my mental health. I needed days just to recover, lying in bed trying to catch up on sleep, which we all know you can’t actually do.”
You can’t catch up. The science backs her up now. But at 17, 19, 22, she didn’t have the data. She had willpower and youth, and she spent both. The sleep solution that gives that recovery back didn’t exist yet.
Growing into an icon
The modeling career gave her a platform. It also gave her a long education in what it means to be a vessel for someone else’s vision. “As a model, you basically show up, you’re someone else’s chameleon, and you make someone else’s dream come true.” For years she was good at it. It paid. It opened doors. It took her to Thailand, to Paris, to shoots she’d remember thirty years from now. But it wasn’t hers.
The shift into entrepreneurship came with a different weight. The freedom she’d wanted turned out to come with self-doubt she hadn’t anticipated. Imposter syndrome. The loss of a clear brief. “It’s much easier to be told what to do, how to be, what to look like.” Without that, she had to find out what she actually thought.
She was told her value would decrease with age. That the industry had a shelf life and she was approaching it. She remembers feeling panicked at 29. Now she’s eight months pregnant, still building, still working, still, somehow, saying yes to projects that feel like her own.
“The universe still continues to make my dreams come true,” she says, without irony.
The full picture
Sleep is the foundation of everything. Motherhood has layered it further. You stop sleeping well when you become a mother. You stop sleeping well when you’re pregnant. You stop sleeping well when you’re anxious about the person you’re supposed to become next.
Nobody tells you how much pregnancy wrecks sleep. Emily is saying it now, because she’s been through it twice before and this time she had something different. The Pod tracking the changes she could feel but not name: temperature shifting, heart rate variability mapped in plain sight, biometric data that turned her body into something legible.
“So much changes when you’re pregnant, and you can definitely feel that. But Eight Sleep helps you see it and map it out.”