Today is September 3.

3 months ago, on June 3rd, my mother died.

And today, I begin the journey home.

Not home to the beautiful little casita I moved into this year.

The one surrounded by trees, where Duma has already claimed her favorite spots and where I have begun imagining and weaving another chapter of my life.

Another home.

My first home.

Puerto Rico.

A few weeks ago, I bought a one-way ticket for the first time since arriving in Costa Rica back in 2021.

I will be gone for at least three months.

Typing one-way flight feels so strange…

I love my life here.

I love waking up to this peace. The birds and howler monkeys announcing the sunrise. The familiar faces. Even the dirt roads. Because traffic here comes from horses or cattle, not cars.

I love walking into a restaurant and knowing the owners. The people cooking my food. Serving it.

I love that they know my order.

Love that there is a Dali pizza and a Dali pinto and a Dali wrap on menus.

I love the way my life has found its own rhythm here.

I love this ridiculous little bubble we have created, where somebody always knows somebody, somebody has the thing you need, where the mechanic calls you ‘mi niña’ and drinks coffee with you in the mornings, where conversations with your landlord end in ‘- I will miss you…I love you!

Where a friend is always available to pick you up, feed you, check on your cat, sit with you, make you laugh, tell you the truth, sing a song, dance, and howl under the moon.

I have learned so much about friendship from living here.

About community.

Here we simply take care of each other.

This land has held me during some of the most incredibly painful experiences of my life.

Costa Rica has seen me through so many versions of myself.

I have cried here. Face on the Earth. Fallen in love here. Had my heart torn to pieces here. Built things here. I’ve been homeless here. Sat in countless ceremonies here. Danced here. Grieved here. Received the news of my grandmother, my aunt, my dog, and my mom’s deaths here.

I’ve died a million deaths, and now I am reborn into a woman that the chick who first arrived could not have imagined.

I am so fucking grateful for this place.

So why leave?

There’s nothing here I need to escape.

Still…

Something deep inside of me said: buy a ticket. Leave September 3rd.

I didn’t even make the connection that I was leaving exactly three months after my mom’s soul departed from this realm.

Logic and reason threw their usual tantrum as soon as I hit ‘Pay now’. Demanding proof, staying loyal to the comfort of the known.

But right in the midst of this intense eclipse cycle, something said: it’s time.

I have watched so many of us arrive at these strange internal crossroads lately.

Relationships changing. Collaborations revealing themselves. Friendships being examined. The ways we work. The ways we love. The ways we speak to ourselves.

Shining a light in the places where we have quietly put ourselves last and called it devotion or loyalty.

The places we have been selling ourselves short.

Playing small.

This energy is calling us relentlessly toward authenticity.

To embody EVERYTHING we are. ALL. OF. IT.

To build the life we dream, the life we want, deep inside.

Not the one we feel is feasible or reasonable.

The life we DREAM. We DESIRE.

And somewhere inside all of that, I desired to go home.

I have been going back to Puerto Rico for years.

But for most of those years, there was always a reason.

Mostly, I went because of my mother.

Because I needed to see her.

Because her health was changing.

Because there were decisions to make.

Because there was some responsibility, some occasion, some invisible thread of duty pulling me back to the island.

Even when those trips were beautiful, even when I ate the food I had been craving and slipped immediately back into the music of the way we speak and stood in front of that water thinking, God, I love this place, there was usually something attached to my being there.

This time, there isn’t.

Nobody needs me to go.

There is no emergency.

There isn’t even a particularly reasonable explanation.

I just want to go home.

That might be the most important part.

I chose this.

For me.

I want to wake up and hear Puerto Rico outside the window.

I want the humidity on my skin.

I want to get in my car with nowhere particularly important to be and drive with the sun shining through the sunroof of my dad’s car, blasting salsa.

I can’t wait for my Spanish to get more Boricua with each passing day.

I want to hear myself stretching words and swallowing letters and slipping all the way back into the rhythm that lives underneath every other version of my voice.

I want Puerto Rico in my body again.

I want my accent.

I want my people.

I crave their hugs.

I crave our food.

I want my ocean.

My beach.

My water.

I want salt drying on my skin after I’ve been in the Caribbean Sea for too long.

I want tangled hair and sandy feet and that delicious heaviness in my body after hours in the sun and water.

I want to dance.

I want my hips DEEPLY involved in this homecoming.

I want to learn how to dance bomba.

I want more salsa in my life.

Más reggaetón.

I want drums.

Our percussion.

I want to eat quenepas behind my grandmother’s house.

I learn how to make pasteles from my grandmother’s sister while I still can.

I want the stories that come out while women are cooking.

I want to sit with the women who are left in my family and ask them questions.

Real questions.

I want to know who they were before they became somebody’s mother, grandmother, or wife.

Who did they love?

What did they want?

What did they give up?

Who were the wild ones?

I want their stories while their voices are still here to tell them.

I want to see old friends and discover who we are to each other now.

I want to meet people I haven’t met yet.

I want to go dancing.

Dancing until I am dehydrated, sweaty, and stinky.

Then go skinny-dipping in the sea.

I want to flirt.

But the natural flirting that arises between Boricuas.

Not sexual. Just flirting because it’s SO FUN.

I want to be surprised.

I want my hands in the Earth.

I want to plant a tree.

I want to visit tombs and plant gardens.

I want to go to the gym and get strong in a different way.

Because that part feels especially clear now.

My body wants my attention.

For years, so much of my transformation has happened emotionally, spiritually, mentally.

I have excavated down to the depths of hell.

I have remembered.

I have grieved.

I have held space.

I have created so much beauty.

I have burned things down.

I have learned how to sit inside some enormous, life-altering truths.

And through every single one of those transformations, there has been this body carrying me through them.

These legs.

These arms.

This heart.

These lungs.

This skin.

This vessel that has absorbed every airport, every ceremony, every sleepless night, every heartbreak, every death, every rebirth, every fucking thing I have asked of her.

And lately I can feel her tugging at my sleeve like,

Okay, babe. My turn.

Fair.

It is my body’s turn.

I want to dive deep into the study of pleasure.

Sleep in the middle of the day.

Get sun drunk.

Get stronger.

Get to a place where I catch my reflection and feel proud.

I want to fall in love!

Yummy, steamy, passionate, bold, wild, intense, fiery, all-in, ride-or-die LOVE.

And that brings me to the first man I ever loved…my father.

For the first time in my life, I am going home to spend this much time with him sin mami.

The last years were heavy.

Our relationship became tangled inside her disease, her care, the decisions that had to be made, the things we agreed about, the things we didn’t, the heaviness of loving someone who was slowly fading away.

We were a triangle.

Always have been.

And now there are two of us.

I don’t know who we are yet…

Who are we now?

Who am I with him when I am not navigating their marriage, her illness, our history?

Who are we now, as two adults who have lost the same woman in completely different ways?

I don’t know.

I get three months to find out.

And yes, for the last couple of weeks there have been moments when I sit outside, look around the gated garden, Dumita by my side, and think:

What the fuck am I doing?

I JUST MOVED HERE.

Duma loves this house.

I love this house.

My life is here.

My community is here.

I am finally starting to feel lighter in this grieving process.

Everything is flowing.

Abundance is starting to trickle in.

And now I’m packing up my cat and moving in with my dad?

At almost 42?

I can feel a cycle closing.

A 7-year one.

And it feels like I am going back to merge with the best parts of me that I left there.

I feel like I am going back to collect them.

The girl who stayed behind so that I could do the work I needed to do in Costa Rica.

I want to bring her into this new woman I recently birthed.

And bring this woman home to her.

I leave Costa Rica today.

I’ll spend the weekend in Florida with friends, this tiny bridge between one home and another, and then I will land in Puerto Rico.

She left on June 3rd. Three months later, on September 3rd, I leave too.

I didn’t do that math on purpose. My intuition did.

I want to let Puerto Rico have me for a while, just as Costa Rica has.

I want to see what happens when I give myself time to feel like I fully belong to the place that held me the moment I was born.

With my father.

My family.

The women who came before me.

With whatever magic and beauty want to find me there.

Puerto Rico, te amo. Nos vemos en unos días…

I refused to wear pink for years when I was younger. Or have anything pink in my room.

I also hated being called cute.

Pretty.

Adorable.

Those words irritated the shit out of me.

I didn’t want to be cute. I wanted to be powerful.

I was bossy. Bold. I wanted to do the things my brother did.

When he started Kajukenbo, a martial arts style, I wanted to do it too…but my mother told me bruises looked ugly on girls.

I wanted to play the drums.

I got piano lessons.

Looking back, I can see how early the equation was forming.

Girl meant pretty.

Girl meant delicate.

Girl meant being looked at.

And I wanted to do things.

I remember thinking about how frustratingly inconvenient it was to be a girl. Boys could pee standing up. They seemed stronger. More coordinated. They could get bruised without anyone worrying whether the bruises were attractive.

They seemed free in ways I wasn’t.

So I rebelled.

For a long time, I thought I had rebelled against femininity.

But it is clear to me that I was actually rebelling against the tiny definition of femininity I had been given.

Because I don’t think I ever hated being a woman.

I hated the terms and conditions that came with it.

Vogue

A memory came back to me recently…

I was little, at an all-girls summer camp in Puerto Rico. We were having a snack during recess, and MTV was playing on the television set.

Madonna’s “Vogue” came on.

And I disappeared.

I don’t remember deciding to dance. I just remember dancing.

At first I think some of the other girls were moving too, but I was GONE. Completely inside the music. Inside my body. Inside whatever world Madonna had opened through that television.

Then the song ended.

I looked around.

Everyone else was sitting there eating.

Watching me.

Why are you dancing like that?

I don’t think anyone actually said those words. I just remember the feeling of them.

I remember realizing I had been seen.

There is something that happens when you’re completely inside your body and suddenly discover yourself through somebody else’s eyes.

One second you’re dancing.

The next you’re watching yourself dance.

I would become very good at that.

The Body

My body developed early.

Big breasts. Tiny waist. Big ass.

I was hyper-sexualized before I had any real understanding of sexuality, and I became acutely aware of the danger that came with being perceived that way.

I could get into clubs at fifteen.

And when you’re fifteen getting into clubs, you’re not surrounded by fifteen-year-old boys.

You’re surrounded by men.

I never slept with those older men.

But I understood, even then, that I needed to learn to navigate this power dynamic QUICKLY if I wanted to survive. These men, just like my own father, had jobs. Cars. Money. Independence. A kind of stability and authority I didn’t have yet.

I didn’t have the language for the danger, but I could feel it.

I knew that being young and female put me at a disadvantage.

And I knew that being desired by older men didn’t make me powerful. It made the imbalance more visible.

A similar education was happening at home.

I watched the power difference between my father and my mother.

My father seemed to occupy the stronger position. He had more authority, more control, more access to money and the outside world. My mother seemed more constrained by the roles available to her.

I absorbed that dynamic before I understood it.

I thought women were weaker.

Pathetic, even.

I thought being a woman meant being more vulnerable, more dependent, more easily overpowered.

So when I looked at my own body, I didn’t only see sexuality.

I saw risk.

I saw the possibility of being reduced to something other people could use, judge or control.

As a child, I understood parts of my father’s world only partially; as an adult, I understood them differently. His world was full of men, money, power and things we didn’t talk about outside of the family.

Secrecy itself was an education.

Then I left the tiny elementary school where I’d grown up with essentially the same handful of children and entered a wealthy Catholic school full of doctors’ kids and lawyers’ kids.

I knew there were things about my family I couldn’t explain.

So I learned another skill.

Assimilation.

The Virgin and the Whore

Catholicism didn’t exactly expand my understanding of womanhood.

There was Mary.

And there was Mary Magdalene.

The Virgin Mother and the woman generations of Christian culture would portray as a prostitute, despite the fact that the biblical text never actually identifies her that way.

One woman purified of sexuality.

The other defined by it.

What a spectacularly efficient way to make the range of womanhood disappear.

Where was the woman who craved pleasure and prayer?

The mother who was furious?

The virgin who could fight?

The seductress who was holy?

The woman who could nurture you and destroy you?

Where was the woman with blood on her thighs and a weapon in her hand?

Where was the woman I was?

I found pieces of her in strange places.

One of them was Gwen Stefani.

No Doubt was one of my first concerts in Puerto Rico. I remember Gwen singing “Just a Girl,” dropping to the ground and doing one-arm push-ups, climbing the lighting equipment like some beautiful fucking maniac.

I was mesmerized.

Here was a woman who was feminine, sexy, and physically powerful.

She wasn’t becoming less of a woman when she climbed.

She wasn’t becoming masculine when she dropped to the floor.

The strength itself was sexy.

I didn’t have language for why that mattered to me.

I do now.

What can my body do?

In my mid-twenties, I started working out.

I was skinny, but I didn’t feel particularly comfortable in my body. I had never considered myself athletic. I had spent years being the girl who found ways out of P.E. I had never played sports.

Then one day I did a full push-up.

I still remember how good that felt.

My body wasn’t just something to look at.

It could do shit.

I got stronger.

And something strange happened.

The physical strength leaked.

It moved into the rest of my life.

Every time I discovered something else my body could do, I discovered something about myself.

I was athletic.

I was coordinated.

I was strong.

I was relentless.

My trainer, Dwight, who eventually became like a stepfather to me, still talks about how difficult I was to train because I tore through everything he gave me. He had to keep inventing things because I would get bored.

I loved it.

Who was this baddie that was emerging from me?

Where had she been?

Maybe I wasn’t the girl who wasn’t athletic.

Maybe I was the girl who never got to find out.

Then I decided to compete in bodybuilding.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the question changed.

It stopped being:

What can my body do?

And became:

How should my body look?

I remember going to try on competition bikinis.

None of them fit.

I picked one up, and the woman at the shop practically smacked it out of my hand.

“You’re going to break that. Your butt is too big.”

My ass.

My beautiful Boricua booty…

We went through the entire rack. Nothing fit. She got more annoyed with every one we tried, until we landed on the biggest size they carried and altered it to fit me.

Suddenly my body was a problem.

My tattoos were a problem too. We needed enough tanning product to disguise them.

My hair was a problem. I needed to part it differently so the shaved side wouldn’t show.

That wasn’t feminine enough.

For months, I tried to make my body resemble what a bikini competitor was supposed to look like.

But a Puerto Rican woman is built like a Puerto Rican woman.

Not one bikini on that rack was built for a body like mine.

And somehow the conclusion wasn’t:

wrong bikini.

It was:

wrong body.

Eventually I fell out of love with training.

Something that had returned my body to me had handed it right back to the gaze.

This would happen again and again in my life.

Every time I learned to inhabit my body, somebody taught me to watch it again.

Learning the room

I became very good at reading rooms.

I worked in accounting and finance. First in creative environments, then increasingly in corporate ones in the United States.

I was often surrounded by white men.

And I learned another version of assimilation.

Caribbean culture has a warmth that doesn’t always translate.

We touch.

We tease.

We laugh loudly.

There is sensuality woven through things that aren’t necessarily sexual.

So I edited.

How warm can I be?

How friendly?

How direct?

How soft?

How much of my body?

How much Puerto Rican?

How much woman?

You learn the particular dialect of femininity each room rewards and then decide whether you can afford to speak it.

A decade later, I moved to Costa Rica and entered a spiritual community.

I thought perhaps I had finally found a place where all of me could exist.

Surely here, in rooms dedicated to consciousness and truth, people could see beyond all of that.

Turns out spiritual communities are still full of humans.

And humans bring their projections with them.

Warmth could still be interpreted as sexuality.

Kindness could still be interpreted as invitation.

Movement could still be watched.

There were times even dancing became a calculation.

How am I moving?

Does this look sexual?

Am I attracting attention?

Am I distracting someone?

Am I too much?

Again:

One second you’re dancing.

The next you’re watching yourself dance.

It is fucking exhausting.

Not simply being a woman.

Watching yourself be one.

The Hand on Your Back

Years ago, someone very close to me transitioned.

I had known him for years before his transition, and when we saw each other again, his appearance had changed dramatically. I told him openly that he was the first person I loved who had gone through this process and asked if I could ask him questions.

That conversation has stayed with me.

He told me about something that changed when strangers began perceiving him as a man.

People stopped touching him.

Not dramatic touching.

The tiny shit.

The hand on the small of your back as someone passes behind you.

The hand on your shoulder to get your attention.

Being gently repositioned by a stranger as though your body is public furniture.

Microaggressions so woven into everyday life that women barely register each individual one.

Until they stop.

He had experienced the world interacting with him when it perceived him as a woman, and then experienced the world interacting with him when it perceived him as a man.

The casual access disappeared.

That conversation gave language to something I’d spent my life feeling.

The vigilance of womanhood isn’t only about the moments when something terrible happens.

It’s the thousands of tiny calculations made because something could.

Can I walk there?

Can I wear this?

Is he being friendly?

Did he move closer?

Is my friendliness being interpreted as interest?

Should I soften so I don’t intimidate him?

Should I harden so he doesn’t think I’m available?

Can I dance like this?

Can I be sensual without inviting?

Can I be kind without offering access?

How small do I need to become in this room to remain safe without disappearing entirely?

Do that long enough and another question appears.

Who am I?

And who have I learned it is safe to be?

Then there was Sarah

And sometimes a woman shows you another possibility.

The first time I saw Sarah in ceremony, she was surrounded by men.

The musicians were men. The people serving around her were men.

And there she was.

The only woman in the room.

Completely herself.

She reminded me of the ocean.

Not because she was soft.

Have you met the fucking ocean?

Sarah was a surfer from Santa Cruz. A mother. Loving. Silly. Assertive. POWERFUL. Tender. And a whole lotta gangster in her.

She didn’t seem interested in resolving those things into one coherent, socially acceptable version of womanhood.

She contained them.

I remember watching her and thinking:

I need to study with this woman.

There was something in her I recognized before I understood it.

And perhaps most importantly, she didn’t only model that freedom for me.

She made room for mine.

The little girl who wanted drums instead of piano eventually found herself in another room full of male musicians.

And Sarah handed me the drum.

Play.

The little girl who once looked around after dancing to Madonna and realized everybody was staring eventually found herself afraid of being watched again.

Sarah told me:

Get up.

Dance.

Move the energy.

She understood something about dance that had taken me decades to recover.

Movement didn’t have to be performance.

My body didn’t have to be an object in the room.

It could be an instrument.

And perhaps this is one of the most sacred things women can do for one another.

Not teach each other how to be women.

Create rooms large enough for another woman to discover what kind of woman she already is.

Wife

Of course, the rooms aren’t only professional or spiritual.

Sometimes the room is a marriage.

I learned another definition of womanhood there too.

Caregiver.

Keeper.

The person who anticipates what everyone needs.

The person who holds the emotional and practical architecture together.

I mothered.

And for me, mothering someone put me into an energy where desire couldn’t survive.

So naturally I wondered:

What’s wrong with me?

Maybe nothing was wrong with me.

Maybe desire had information.

Maybe the dynamics we had created made it impossible for me to meet him as a lover because I no longer experienced myself as one.

Being a mother and mothering your partner are very different things.

I know enough women now, and have had enough brutally candid conversations, to know I wasn’t alone in the confusion.

We inherited scripts about being good wives, good mothers, independent women, desirable women, successful women, nurturing women, sexually liberated women.

We are supposed to need no one while somehow caring for everyone.

Make your own money.

Raise the children.

Keep the house.

Build the career.

Stay soft.

Stay sexy.

Don’t be intimidating.

But don’t be weak.

Receive.

But don’t depend.

Surrender.

But for fuck’s sake, make sure you can survive if he leaves.

My father was adamant about that last one.

Make your own money.

Never put yourself in a position where a husband can leave you with nothing.

I listened.

I became fiercely independent.

And I still became the one thing my father warned me not to step into.

Maybe the Categories are Too Small

The deeper I’ve gone into studying women, bodies, cycles, mythology and the Moon, the less interested I am in tidy definitions of masculine and feminine.

The female body itself refuses them.

We are cyclical.

The woman I am in one phase of my cycle isn’t exactly the woman I am in another.

There are days for visibility.

Days for building.

Days for retreat.

Days when I want to mother the entire world.

Days when I would prefer the world stay very far away from me.

Our ancient archetypes knew this.

The feminine wasn’t only maiden or mother.

She was lover.

Queen.

Crone.

Mystic.

Warrior.

Witch.

Destroyer.

Creator.

Kali doesn’t become masculine because she destroys.

The ocean doesn’t become masculine when it kills.

The Earth doesn’t stop being Mother because she erupts, burns, rots and devours.

Birth itself is one of the most brutally physical acts a human body can perform.

So why did we make femininity so fucking delicate?

I’ve spent too much of my life trying to decide which parts of myself are masculine and which are feminine.

The more interesting question is why we needed such narrow categories in the first place.

I Never Wore Pink

I think about that little girl now.

Bossy.

Tomboyish.

Wanting Kajukenbo.

Wanting drums.

Hating when someone called her cute.

Wanting to be seen as strong long before she knew she was.

Dancing so hard to Madonna that she forgot there were other people in the room.

She would eventually shave her head.

Build muscle.

Wear tiny bikinis.

Cover herself.

Uncover herself.

Become an accountant.

Become an executive.

Become a wife.

Leave a marriage.

Sit in ceremony.

Pick up the drum.

Dance again.

Spend years trying to understand whether she was too feminine, not feminine enough, too sexual, too intimidating, too independent, too soft, too loud, too warm, too much.

And I want to reach backward through all of those rooms and tell her something.

Nothing about her was ever unfeminine.

She wasn’t rejecting womanhood.

She was rejecting surveillance.

Restriction.

Fragility.

The requirement to be pleasing. To be comprehensible.

The requirement to become smaller so someone else could remain comfortable.

I would tell her that she never had to choose between pretty and powerful.

Between soft and strong.

Between adorable and dangerous.

Between being desired and belonging completely to herself.

They were never competing identities.

They were always me.

ALL OF IT.

The version of womanhood being offered to me was too small.

So I’ve spent a lifetime making it bigger.

Big enough for my strength.

My sexuality.

My anger.

Tenderness.

Ambition.

Pleasure.

Contradictions.

Big enough for my whole, ever-changing, physical body.

And let me tell you…

I still love feeling powerful.

I also really like being pretty.

Sometimes I’m even fucking adorable.

Oh, and I rock pink now.

And more importantly, now when I dance, I’m getting better and better at not looking around the room.

That vote brought me back to something I wrote after a ceremony in February 2024, while both my grandmother and my mom were still alive.

I didn’t share it then. I wasn’t sure whether it was too raw, too personal, too much.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to make myself less anything for other people’s comfort.

So here it is…

Feb 2024

At some point in the night, after the third cup, the chaos began to settle. I rested for what felt like a minute in my ceremony chair and slowly entered into a painful process.

Underneath the layers of judgment I had been grappling with through the first half of the night, I discovered a prison of pain, partly of my own making through my thoughts and outdated beliefs, and partly inherited from my mother’s suffering.

I felt trapped. I couldn’t move.

I felt her body inside mine. Frozen. Weighed down. Just as she is now in her wheelchair.

So much pain.

So much weakness.

The weight of it pressed against me, and yet, it also cracked something open deep inside me.

The pain became unbearable. I felt like I needed to stand up, purge, move it through my body. But I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. I wanted to call for help, but I couldn’t speak.

I screamed Sarah’s name in my mind, then Brad’s.

Anyone who could help me.

Help me move through this.

Help me stand up and get to the bathroom.

Finally, I tapped the arm of the friend sitting beside me and whispered for her to help me.

I felt terrible doing it. She had finally found some rest too, her dog scooped up and cuddled in her lap. But I felt like I was going to die if I stayed in that chair.

Somehow, she got me to my feet and walked me toward the bathroom.

All I could feel was pain and despair.

When we arrived, I walked into the stall and tried to purge, but nothing came. Something ancient, bitter, and massive was wedged between my heart and my throat. It wanted out, but it was stuck.

I knew this thing.

It was part of why I struggled to sing in ceremonies. Something that wanted me in pain. Something that wanted to keep me quiet.

When I came out of the stall, I collapsed onto the floor, defeated.

I couldn’t free myself from the pain. I couldn’t free myself from whatever this energy was inside me.

My friend sat beside me, rubbing my hair and my back.

I allowed her to support me.

I allowed another woman to come close enough to witness the depth of my pain and the weight I had carried throughout this lifetime.

And then I broke.

The tears came from the very core of my being. Deep. Guttural. Completely unhinged.

This was not pretty crying.

I was covered in tears, snot, and drool. My body was heaving. There was nothing composed or graceful about it. I had no mask left. No way to make myself presentable. No ability to control what another woman saw.

And she stayed.

I lay on that floor for hours, crying in a way I never had before in ceremony.

At some point, another friend appeared beside me. I don’t remember when she came or how long she had been there. I only remember realizing that there were now two women on the floor with me, one on my left and one on my right, each holding me in her own way.

Three women.

Three sisters.

Together, we created a container so safe, expansive, and deep that I could allow myself to be seen in the most vulnerable state I had ever known.

Through the purity of the love and sweetness present in that space, something that had been moving through the women of my family for generations began to shift.

I connected with my mother’s essence through the medicine, through the women beside me, and through the earth.

Literally THROUGH the Earth.

My hands were pressed into the ground, and I could feel my mom’s spirit through it. It was as if I were holding hands with her.

Through that connection, I could feel all the pain in her body. Her burdens. Her grief. Her fear, anger, and resentment.

All of it.

And now, I could move the energy.

Transmute it.

It was brutal.

And in the midst of that brutality, there was so much beauty. A testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of healing.

Then came forgiveness.

Of her.

Of myself.

It was the same friend who had walked me there who spoke during my process. Her words shifted something inside me.

She said:

“Everyone talks about a mother’s love, but we don’t talk about a daughter’s love as often.”

And in that moment, I saw for the first time the depth of my love for my mom.

The love that daughters have for their mothers, even when the relationship is imperfect. It is a different kind of love, yet just as profound. Just as unconditional.

A love so deep that sometimes it moves us to explore and heal what our mothers couldn’t and, through our own work, bring something new into our lineage. For ourselves, and perhaps for them as well.

I have always known that healing this lineage is my mission.

It is what I came here to do.

And yet…

I realized that while I had accepted this truth, some part of me still resented it.

Why?

Why couldn’t my mother listen to me while she still had time?

Why couldn’t she do the work and set herself free?

Then, beneath that resentment, I touched a deeper layer of compassion.

For her.

And for myself.

Our mothers live with so much more pain than we could ever imagine.

We see their choices from the outside. We see what they did, what they didn’t do, and everything we wish they had done differently.

But we cannot walk in their shoes.

We cannot know every war they fought within themselves, every pattern they interrupted, or every piece of the pain they inherited from the women who came before them.

They did what they could.

They healed what was theirs to carry from our grandmothers.

And whatever they couldn’t heal, we may find ourselves working through now.

The ability to do this work is a gift.

It means I somehow have the strength to do it.

I have access to tools, language, spaces, and relationships that make another choice possible.

I can meet the inheritance consciously.

I can decide what continues through me.

And it all stems from love.

I also saw, with piercing clarity, how the mother wound becomes the sister wound.

We learn to judge ourselves through the ways our mothers judge us.

We also learn by watching our mothers judge themselves.

At least, that was true for me.

I watched my mother speak to herself, doubt herself, diminish herself, and live inside the expectations placed on her. I absorbed those patterns before I could understand what they were.

Her relationship with herself became part of the blueprint for my relationship with myself.

And then we carry that framework into our relationships with other women.

We hide behind masks of perfection, shoulds, fear, insecurity, inadequacy, not feeling like enough, and feeling like too much.

We struggle to let ourselves be fully seen.

We filter other women through our own hurt, resentment, and fear. We project our wounds onto one another and react to reflections we do not yet understand.

That night, these ideas were alive on the floor between us.

Eventually, one of the women left.

The friend who had walked me there stayed.

She kept holding me.

And then she began to unravel too.

There we were, wrapped around each other, covered in snot and tears, asking each other for forgiveness.

We talked through what we reflected back to one another. The wounds we had projected. The mirrors we had been. The mirrors we wanted to become.

We spoke about the mother wound and the sister wound. About the beauty of being given the opportunity to face them and the brutality of what facing them requires.

We allowed ourselves to see what had been moving beneath the surface between us.

Then, for a moment, we saw each other exactly as we were.

Two little girls playing adults, trying to navigate lives we had never been taught how to live.

We had no idea what we were doing.

We were exhausted. Destroyed. Covered in snot, drool, and tears.

And we started laughing.

We laughed at the absurdity of it all. At the depth of what we had just witnessed. At these two little girls taking everything so fucking seriously while trying desperately to get it right.

The laughter brought lightness into a place that had felt unbearably heavy.

And it happened in the arms of another woman.

In truth.

In my willingness to let another woman see me completely unhinged and her willingness to see her own pain reflected in mine.

My healing became part of her healing.

Her healing became part of mine.

My mom. Her mom. My grandmother. Her grandmother.

All of us present in that moment.

All of us touching the same wound from different places in the lineage.

All of us changed by what happened on that floor.

This is the ripple.

This is why sitting in circle matters.

Why sharing our stories matters.

Why honesty and authenticity matter.

Why allowing ourselves to be witnessed in the places we have been taught to hide matters.

When one woman gives herself permission to be seen, she creates an opening for another woman to see herself.

When one woman frees herself from a pattern, that freedom moves through every relationship she touches.

This is the root of what we call the sister wound.

It is also where its healing begins.

One woman allows herself to unravel.

Another woman stays.

And somewhere between the tears, the snot, the forgiveness, and the laughter, both of them become more free.

That night made me take this work even more seriously than I already did.

I hadn’t thought that was possible.

It made me want to take better care of myself. To keep practicing self-care, self-acceptance, and self-love.

I want to step fully into my power.

Into my light.

Shamelessly.

In pure joy and celebration, because I want every woman to do the same.

Because it is time.

It is time to share our voices.

To sit in circle as women.

To allow ourselves to be fully seen.

To help change the world.

We help change the world through love, remembrance, and reclaiming the power that has always been ours.

I see now that this work is about honoring what has always been whole beneath the wounds, beneath the stories, beneath the layers of forgetting.

It is about waking up.

Waking up to the truth that we have never been alone.

That we were never meant to carry these burdens in silence.

That when we come together, truly together, there is no wound too deep, no pain too great, no past too heavy to be held, honored, and transformed in the arms of our sisters.

This life, this path, this mission…

It is a blessing.

And I will walk it with love.

With reverence.

With joy.

Because that is the revolution.

That is how we change the world.

Love.

Yesterday, I spent an unusual number of hours on Instagram.

I opened my stories to questions, and people asked me really good ones.

Which, admittedly, I love because I would much rather write about myself than talk about myself.

Anyway, while searching for photos and videos to go with my answers, three things caught my attention.

The first was a video of myself dancing salsa with a dear friend back in December 2025.

Víctor has been dancing for decades. Every kind of dance. It lives in his body.

I love dancing. But I am not classically schooled or trained.

As a Boricua, I can confidently say que me defiendo.

I have rhythm, instinct, and enough confidence in my body to follow where someone takes me. But dancing with someone who has spent decades learning how to move with a partner makes me look SO MUCH better than I am.

In the video, you can see my face squished against him and completely melted into the present moment. I am smiling so hard my cheeks would hurt by the end of the night. I am not looking around the room. I do not care who is watching me or what I look like. I am completely enthralled, fully present in my body. Completely lost in the dance.

As I watched the video, I remembered the feeling. But seeing us from the outside, I could better understand why my body could surrender fully into him.

He was present with me, but also present with himself and the entire room.

He navigated my body through the dance floor, expertly guiding us and making sure we didn’t bump into anyone.

He was owning that dance floor, showing me off with delicious pride: Look at the woman I am dancing with.

He led me without diminishing me or making me look small and inexperienced in front of his amazing talent.

His mastery revealed a more sensual, embodied, present version of me. This magnetic goddess energy flowed from somewhere deep inside my body.

You can see in the video how, at one point, a couple is dancing close behind us. I never see them. My back is to the room. He lifts my hand and changes our direction so seamlessly that it looks like part of the choreography.

I probably experienced it as sass, a sexy ornament, another flourish inside the music.

But watching us, it was so evident that if he hadn’t done that, we would have hit this couple.

I never knew. I never had to know.

He saw what I could not see and adjusted without making me feel corrected, controlled, or pulled out of the moment.

That is the kind of leadership my body trusts.

Leadership so embodied that it feels like freedom to the person being led.

And watching him, us, made me think about how I have been longing to move through the world beside a partner.

I want to feel that same awareness and presence in my daily life. I want him vigilant. Leading me without diminishing me or controlling me. I want us to continuously dance through life together.

I have gone out with men who walked several steps ahead of me, entirely lost inside their own minds. I could stop, fall, turn suddenly, or disappear behind something, and it would take them forever to realize.

That is not leading. It is not presence.

A man cannot lead a woman he has stopped noticing.

I want him to notice. I want him to open doors, scan the room, track the energy, the traffic, the time, the environment.

I want him to walk on the side closest to the cars.

I want him fully embodied and present.

Because being beside a man whose awareness extends beyond himself releases something deep within me.

Just like that night, dancing with Victor. I can be free.

The delicious irony is that Víctor is happily married. I know his husband. I adore them both.

Nothing romantic or sexual was being negotiated between us. His actions were not a performance. No agenda hid behind them.

It was sensual because dancing is sensual. It was intimate because presence is intimate. But he wasn't performing masculinity wanting something in return.

He simply was masculinity embodied.

And because he holds it so naturally, something deeply and deliciously feminine emerged in me.

I don’t think those energies belong exclusively to our genders, or that every man should lead and every woman should follow in every situation.

It is an eternal dance inside of each one of us and in relation to others.

The second thing was a short, AI-generated video of a warrior crossing a field, his body pierced by swords. Someone shared it in their stories, and something in it caught my attention…

Even as his body gives out, the sword remains planted between the woman and the world. He still faces whatever may be coming.

His final act says: Even after death, I’ll protect you.

It is beautiful.

But I saw something else too.

I saw a man returning from war.

I saw someone who had walked through hell finally arriving at the one place where he no longer had to hold himself upright.

His final act was not only to protect her.

His final act was to melt into her.

The symbolism gave me chills.

The masculine goes out into the world to meet whatever battle he needs to fight that day: his own personal demons, the battle for his family, for his purpose, for the world, for his own becoming. Then he returns to a place where the warrior can die.

Not the man.

The vigilance. The armor.

The version of him he embodies to survive the “battlefield”.

He plants the sword at the threshold, comes home to his woman, and falls backward into her.

She does not fight the battle for him. She does not carry his armor or wield his sword. She becomes the place where he no longer needs them.

He holds the perimeter.

She holds the return.

The third thing was a sentence from a letter Henry Miller wrote to Anaïs Nin, one of my favorite writers:

Give me a few days of peace in your arms—I need it terribly. I’m ragged, worn, exhausted. After that I can face the world.

There it was again.

A man exhausted by the world, asking for somewhere to surrender before returning to meet it.

He was not asking her to face the world for him.

He was asking for peace in her arms so he could face it again.

And I understood why all three images had found me on the same day.

Because I know both positions.

The warrior is not exclusively masculine. Feminine energy can be warrior energy, too.

When I am in ceremony, some part of me is always watching the room, feeling into the people, the space, the energy. I check on Sarah, the team, my people, even though I know they don’t really need it. I can’t help myself.

But still, there I am, trying my best to be fully present with everything and sensing what the guests might need.

I move through my own process while staying open to everything happening around me. I am inside the experience and watching over it at the same time.

I expose myself completely. I try to become a clear channel while remaining aware of every movement at the edges.

And then the sun rises, and I come home. Exhausted. Raw. Empty. Naked.

Many times I lie in my bed and cry.

I am so tired and so open.

The warrior has returned, but no arms are waiting to receive her.

All I want is to be held.

In those moments, I want to sink into the feeling of another body’s weight around mine. To melt into strong arms wrapped tightly around me.

This is how I understand the masculine and feminine. Not as a strict, gender-based, universal doctrine governing every man and woman, but energies that live inside our bodies, constantly looking to dance into beautiful harmony. And this is the way I long to experience them in partnership.

Personally, I see the masculine as the container. The pillars. The edges.

The steady, unshakeable structure with boundaries so palpable I can feel exactly where it begins and ends.

It is not a prison. It does not restrict or diminish what exists inside it.

It is the kind of container that makes surrender possible.

The feminine, I see, as water. Laguna sagrada. The womb. The blood.

The ocean. The tides.

And with five huge placements in Scorpio, my waters run deep.

Sometimes I am tranquil inside that container. Inside those arms holding me.

Sometimes I move slowly, caressing the edges.

Many times I am warm, playful, magnetic, sparkling in the sunlight.

There are moments the moon pulls something through me that neither of us expects.

I become animalistic, primal, all wolf. Lioness. Hungry.

Sometimes I am a hurricane sea, thrashing dangerously, threatening, throwing the full force of myself against everything that holds me.

And guess what? I am not less feminine when I am dangerous than when I am soft.

ALL OF IT is the feminine.

We have reduced the feminine to whatever version of womanhood creates the least discomfort: softness, sweetness, receptivity, delicate beauty.

But the ocean is feminine too, and nobody stands before choppy water demanding that it behave more like a lake.

Nobody looks at the waning moon and accuses her of failing to be full.

When a woman finally feels safe enough to surrender, what emerges will not always be soft.

It may be grief.

Anger.

Desire.

Rage.

Wild passion.

The truths she has been swallowing to keep everyone around her comfortable.

What I need from the masculine is not that he remain untouched by me.

It is that he doesn’t make every change in my waters mean something about his worth.

I need him to remain present.

He can be moved. He can feel hurt. He can disagree with me. He can tell me when I have crossed a boundary. Boundaries are part of what makes the container real.

His steadiness is in his capacity to remain present to himself while being affected by me.

And I have a responsibility too. I do not get to avoid accountability for my impact by calling myself water.

The ocean may not be malicious, but it is still very powerful.

My rage cannot demand that he abandon his boundaries to prove that he can hold me.

He does not need to collapse every time I become a storm.

I do not need to destroy him to confirm that he is strong.

That is the container I want.

The container is energetic, yes, but it is built through evidence.

Through consistency. Through honesty. Through words that become actions.

Through promises kept often enough that my body no longer has to constantly anticipate when they'll be broken.

I cannot surrender into what you say you are capable of holding.

I surrender into what you demonstrate that you can hold.

Every lie creates a crack in this container.

Every unexplained inconsistency.

Every time you say you will do something and don’t.

Every time I have to remind you, pursue you, translate your own promise back to you, or pretend that your intention should matter more than the impact of your unreliability and incoherence.

At first, the water leaks out through the small cracks painfully slowly.

I compensate. I become more understanding. More patient. More self-sufficient. I carry more of the structure because I still believe I am protecting something we are building together.

But eventually, the cracks become too large.

I begin pouring myself into the work of containing us. My energy leaves faster than it can be restored. I become depleted inside the very relationship that was supposed to give me somewhere to surrender into.

The feminine cannot surrender into a container she is also being asked to hold.

Of course I need to know how to hold myself. I need my own structure, boundaries, discernment, and capacity to stand alone.

But I am tired of self-sufficiency and hyper independence being offered as the solution to every relational disappointment.

I do not want to build everything alone.

Can I? Hell yes!

Do I want to? NO.

I desire partnership.

I want someone to hold the container and build this amazing life and empire with me.

Cracks in the container are part of the experience. How we work together to patch them up is far more interesting to me.

For me, erotic intimacy is part of how the container is rebuilt.

It is where the distance closes, where the armor comes off. Where we pour back into what the outside world has depleted.

If you give all of your vitality to work, arrive home exhausted, and continually offer me the scraps of what remains, we are going to be in deep shit.

I understand tired. I understand responsibility. I understand that life has seasons but I will not pretend that the chronic disappearance of desire has no consequence for me.

I want erotic intimacy.

I need to feel you moving toward me. I need the particular restoration that happens when the man who has been holding the outside world comes home, puts down the sword, and pours himself into me.

I want to be poured into…fully, deeply, without reserve.

I want to open and receive him.

I want him present enough to look into my eyes because he is actually there. To tell me he loves me because the feeling has moved through him and needs somewhere to land. To bring me his desire rather than making me infer it from his compliance.

And I want him to melt into me too.

I do not want a masculine that is hard everywhere. I want a man who understands where his strength is needed and where his softness is safe.

I want him attentive to the world around us and surrendered inside the world we create together.

This cannot be performative.

Neither of us gets to enter the space between us wearing the masks we use for the outside world.

The armor has to come off.

The superhero cape. The sword. The shield. The perfectly composed woman. The invulnerable man. The performance of seduction. The choreography of what intimacy is supposed to look like.

All of it stays at the door.

We have to show up in our full vulnerability. In our truth. In our brokenness. Our humanness.

It is the only way this works.

I have known men who knew how to look masculine. Bodies built to appear powerful but disconnected from their own vitality.

Men performing dominance while unable to remain present inside intimacy.

Men who could stare intensely into my eyes because that is what desire is supposed to look like, but could barely speak to me from inside their own hearts.

So much of what we call masculinity has been optimized to be witnessed from the outside rather than inhabited from within.

I am no longer impressed by masculinity that can be seen but cannot be felt.

I do not want a man who looks like he could hold me.

I want to feel what happens in my body when he actually does.

And I want to offer him that same depth of holding.

I want him to come to me, remove the armor, and share himself without already knowing the answer.

I want him to trust the oracle in me: the part that listens beneath words, that feels the thing moving underneath the thing, that can offer an honest reflection without trying to dominate or diminish him.

I want to surrender into his protection.

I want him to surrender into my perception.

I do not want to fight his demons for him, or become a rehabilitation center for a man refusing to confront his own life. I want him to go into the battle, to meet what is his, to participate in his own becoming.

Again and again.

Maybe this is what a power couple means to me.

It is not two people who look impressive side by side.

It is not about money, status, influence, matching ambition, or a relationship packaged beautifully enough for other people to envy.

A power couple is two people whose presence expands what becomes possible in the other.

Víctor did not give me rhythm, sensuality, or confidence. Those things were already inside me. They come with the territory, so to speak. It’s in our DNA. But his mastery of himself gave them more room to emerge. Because he was so grounded in himself, I became more expressive in my own body.

He made me look better without diminishing me.

He led in a way that revealed more of me.

That is what I want in partnership.

I want the way he moves through the world to call forward a version of me that is even more confident, creative, sensual, and alive.

And I want to offer him that same expansion.

I want him to feel so safe, nourished, seen, and desired inside the space between us that he returns to the world with more of himself available.

More confident.

More vital.

I want what he receives from me to strengthen the way he leads.

And I want the man he becomes in the world to return with even more capacity to hold me.

His groundedness gives me more room to express.

My nourishment gives him more strength to create.

His expansion feeds mine. Mine feeds his.

We are not completing each other.

We are amplifying each other.

To me, that is power.

And I want a relationship that generates more of it.

This is what I saw in the warrior falling backward into the woman. This is what I heard in Henry Miller asking Anaïs Nin for a few days of peace in her arms.

And this is what I saw in myself dancing. I became water.

This is what I am calling in.

He holds the world around us.

I open the world between us.

And there, without the armor, without the performance, without either of us asking the other to carry what is ours, we finally have somewhere safe to become more of who we already are.

Music on. My back to the world. Completely wild and free.

We are experts at celebrating and planning for beginnings.

Very few of us are ever taught how to plan and move through endings.

We celebrate weddings.

Launches.

Births.

Grand openings.

New jobs.

New homes.

First kisses.

New beginnings receive rituals.

Endings are often left to improvisation.

And maybe that’s why they leave so much unnecessary suffering behind.

People talk about heartbreak all the time.

They talk about the crying.

The sleepless nights.

The songs that suddenly become unbearable.

The empty side of the bed.

The ache.

No one talks about the workload.

Because heartbreak comes with work.

I am not talking about the obvious emotional work.

I am referring to the mundane, 3D world work.

Logistical.

Social.

Practical.

Relational.

The flights that were already booked.

The plans that had already been made.

The house you chose to live in because your lives had become intertwined.

The groceries you were going to share.

The promises that quietly shaped hundreds of tiny decisions.

The people who ask,

“How’s he doing?”

And suddenly you find yourself giving the same explanation over and over again.

No...

We’re not together anymore.

No...

I’m traveling alone now.

No...

It’s just me.

Again.

And again.

And again.

People think heartbreak is grieving one big future.

Marriage.

Children.

Growing old together.

Sure.

But it’s also about grieving hundreds of tiny futures.

The song you thought they were going to write for you.

The trip you were already planning.

The Sunday dinners.

The groceries.

The laundry.

The person you imagined sitting beside you at your family’s Christmas table next year.

Those slowly fade…one by one…as life continues to unfold.

You arrive at a moment that was supposed to include someone...

and suddenly it doesn’t.

Ending a relationship quietly rewrites the future.

When my mom died, the people around me naturally assumed I wasn’t carrying that grief alone.

They knew I was in a relationship.

They knew there was someone in my life.

So they loved me accordingly.

They offered support accordingly.

They trusted that when they couldn’t be there...

someone else would.

But that wasn’t the case.

And that was hard.

That experience has stayed with me.

It taught me something about timing.

Our lives don’t unfold in isolation.

Sometimes our decisions intersect with someone else’s greatest loss.

Sometimes they intersect with illness…uncertainty.

Sometimes they intersect with a season where another human being is already carrying more than they know how to hold.

I feel like moments like these ask something more of us.

A deeper humanity.

When sitting with the reality that you are about to walk away from someone’s life, you need to recognize these things.

Honor that someone trusted you with their heart...

and that, for a while, the two of you built a life together.

Even if that life was only going to last a season.

When we decide we can no longer continue...

we’re not only ending a relationship.

We’re helping dismantle a world that two people spent time creating.

I think that deserves care.

Love doesn’t necessarily end the day a relationship does.

Right?

It transforms.

It changes shape.

But energy can’t be destroyed.

If that’s true...

then compassion shouldn’t disappear the morning after the breakup either.

You once held that person’s heart.

You learned what made it feel safe.

What made it laugh.

Ache.

You learned its tenderness.

And one day...

you realized you could no longer keep the promises you had made.

I have been on that side of the equation.

Sometimes that’s the right decision.

The only decision.

How do we carry out that decision?

Because we are not only breaking all the promises we made…we are also breaking a heart that was trusted to us.

Or at least we are returning it.

Handing it all back.

All of it.

How you hand it back matters.

I’ve spent years around communities that speak beautifully about compassion.

About integrity.

About conscious relationships.

About love.

And yet I rarely hear us ask one of the most important questions.

How do we leave well?

Compassion isn’t only measured by how we care for people while they’re still ours.

But how we care for them after we’ve decided they no longer will be.

Maybe they don’t want to hear from you.

Maybe they’ll ignore your message.

Maybe they’ll tell you to leave them alone.

Maybe they’ll need space.

Respect that.

Space and disappearance are not the same thing.

If you were brave enough to end the relationship...

be brave enough to witness some of its consequences.

Acknowledge the reality you helped create.

Check in after the dust has settled.

“How’s your heart?”

Help untangle the practical pieces of a shared life.

Not all of the consequences.

Never all of them.

But the ones we can see.

The ones we helped create.

Leaving isn’t the end of our responsibility to the transition.

Maybe that’s what integrity really is.

Not staying in toxic environments, or sabotaging our health for someone else.

Something way simpler…

Sometimes we are called to protect a shared world.

Sometimes the calling is to let it go.

Maybe integrity is dismantling it with enough tenderness that both people can one day remember it not as abandonment, but as a quiet gratitude for what was shared.

Maybe every time we leave a shared world, we should at least consider becoming stewards of its dismantling.

I was diagnosed with Lyme disease back in 2019.

I was in my 30s…

My mom was around that same age when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

The realization was sobering.

I could see the parallels so clearly; I could almost glimpse what my life might look like twenty-three years later if I didn’t begin making different choices.

And trust me when I say, I already had.

By the time my diagnosis came around, I had spent over 6 years nerding out on “self-development,” “self-help,” trauma, the nervous system, nutrition, exercise, wellness, biohacking, spirituality, movement, grief…anything that helped me better understand my body and get to the root cause of all my symptoms.

I was relentless…I was laser-focused on saving my own life.

And I did.

Took me years, thousands and thousands of dollars/hours, medical appointments, alternative medicine/modalities, courses, certifications, and what seemed like endless nights writhing in pain, wondering how much longer my body could withstand this.

But I built a system that I 100% trusted, and that same year, when my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I honestly believed I had found a framework that would help her.

I was convinced that everything I went through prepared me for this moment.

Part of the reason I moved back to Puerto Rico was that I wanted to walk that journey with her.

Instead, I faced having to learn one of the hardest lessons of my life.

I can’t heal another person. I don’t even get to walk someone through their healing if they don’t choose it for themselves. I learned that I’m simply not God. That sounds shocking, but if we are really honest with ourselves, we default to believing we are God. Believing we are in control. That we know everything. That we know what’s best for everyone. We are so silly, funny, and adorable sometimes.

So there it was. Right in front of me. The realization that I don’t get to decide someone else’s journey or what their soul came here to experience. Only my own.

Once I went through the different stages with it — sadness, frustration, rage, hopelessness, victimization — and truly accepted this, I stopped trying to fix my mom. Stop trying to fight “it,” her. I surrendered and became a witness.

And witnessing changed everything.

At some point, my mom started telling stories from decades earlier as though they had happened that morning, or the day before. It was as if time had collapsed. As if it were just a concept (wink wink).

I had heard these stories before. Some of them she had shared with me as a child, which, looking back, should never have happened.

So, although I knew they hadn’t happened when she said they did, I also knew she wasn’t lying.

She started calling her siblings, calling neighbors, and sharing these stories of abuse, of old family secrets. But people knew about her diagnosis and assumed that she was just losing it, hallucinating.

It was a masterclass for me. Seeing her. Seeing people’s reactions. It was like watching this fascinating and heartwrenching documentary, except I wasn’t just watching it. I was living it. With her. Through her.

She paced around the house constantly; she wouldn’t sit down, she was always asking where my dad was, checking the time, convinced he had been gone too long.

She was giving voice to the thoughts that had been playing in her head over and over again for YEARS…externalizing the mental loops she had been stuck in.

She was displaying anger. Resentment. She became physical. She started to fight back. To say NO. To shout it. Yell it. Stand her ground. Something she didn’t do much of in her life.

Everything was coming out. Rage. Indignation. Fear. Shame. Regrets. Decades of worry. Mental loops she had lived inside of for years.

I have read The Body Keeps the Score as well as other books on PTSD and listened to dozens of podcast episodes on it, but I had never witnessed someone liberating it in that way. This was visceral. Uncontained. This was the body, finally speaking on its own terms.

It was as if her prefrontal cortex exited the room...and her body finally got hold of the mic. The ego, the fear that had been running the show for so long, finally lost its grip — and the wisdom that lived inside her bones grabbed the mic instead. Desperate to be heard before it was too late.

It was as if, not being able to filter herself through what was culturally, socially, Christian-like appropriate, her body finally had room to express everything it had been carrying. Her story. Her truth. Her pain. Everything she swallowed and pushed and shoved inside was finally spilling out. All of it finally had room to express itself.

Witnessing this creates an urgency, an unwavering, almost angry belief that we MUST live our lives in coherence, speaking our truth…to find those spaces where we get to be ourselves FULLY, safe spaces to speak about our personal experiences. Even if that’s just a therapist.

We have to give voice to the fear and the anger, the resentment, the trauma. To let it OUT.

We have to move it. We have to talk. Cry. Write. Dance. Shake. Howl. Stomp. We have to sit with it. Sit with the big emotions. Sit in the discomfort. We have to allow ourselves to grieve. We have to find ways to share this with the world. To spend time in nature. To give it all to her. Nature transmutes. Cats transmute. Get yourself a cat! Really…

We all go through really fucked up things. We survive the best way we know how. Until one day those survival strategies become our life.

Part of my framework involved talking to a therapist, and one of the most powerful exercises she gave me was incredibly simple.

Whenever I was describing something I was feeling, she would stop me and ask, “How old are you right now?”

And from somewhere in my body the number would come, and I would blurt it out — “Seven.”

Then she’d ask, “What happened when you were seven?”

And sure enough, the trigger was happening in the present moment, but it was triggering something old in me. Something I had not fully processed yet. A memory lodged in my body, deeply, beneath layers of “protection.”

Little by little, I started recognizing that most of my reactions belonged to younger versions of myself that still lived inside my body.

Awareness became the first step. Then came the work of moving through it. Of returning to myself. Of acting from coherence instead of survival.

Plant medicine really accelerated that process for me. It is alleged that one ceremony equates to years of therapy; imagine sitting in hundreds of them. Yeah. That.

But you know what is also true? At least true for me?

The body doesn’t only hold on to/remembers trauma and pain. It remembers everything…

It remembers grief. It remembers joy. It remembers love. It remembers our lineage. It remembers our resilience. It remembers the songs our ancestors sang. It remembers the rhythm of drums. It remembers prayer. It remembers our essence. It remembers nature. It remembers how to dance. How to heal. How to create. How to persevere. How to THRIVE.

It. Remembers. EVERYTHING.

The body doesn’t only carry our wounds. It also carries our wisdom.

That’s why healing has started to feel less like fixing myself...and more like remembering who I am. In my essence. In my core. Underneath all that isn’t mine. To continue coming back to it. Over and over and over again.

My mom’s journey changed me forever. In ways I am still discovering and have yet to understand.

What I am certain of is that it left me with a responsibility. To keep listening. To keep paying attention.

To keep studying and remembering the power inherent to us women. To keep dancing with the feminine without fear of weakness. To keep breaking the patterns I recognize in our lineage. To keep creating spaces where women don’t have to wait decades before finally giving their bodies permission to speak. Safe spaces for us to move through our shit. To be the most pristine mirror for myself and those around me.

It left me with a huge responsibility…to DANCE.

There have been rumblings inside of me for weeks now around leadership, community, and acceptance.
They don’t arrive as thoughts first. They arrive through my body.

They show up in restlessness. In tenderness. In irritation. In the way my nervous system responds before my mind has language. I’ve learned to listen there, because my body has always known things before I was ready to articulate them.

Movement is one of the ways I listen.
So is sound.

Through dance and through drumming, I can access something older than reason. The drum, especially, opens a portal for me. 🥁

Its rhythm bypasses logic and drops me straight into lineage, into Indigenous memory, into something that feels ancestral rather than personal.

Last night, I was in ceremony.
And at some point, I started to dance.

When I dance, something ancient moves through me. It isn’t choreographed. It isn’t learned. It’s instinctual. It’s delicious. It’s deeply familiar.

It’s one of the easiest ways I know to connect to my roots, to the Indigenous blood of Puerto Rico that lives in me, to the African blood that runs strong despite being diluted by history. To memory carried in muscle, rhythm, and bone, not language.

I am Puerto Rican. Born and raised.

And in the plant medicine spaces I’ve moved through over the years, I have never worked alongside another facilitator who was born and raised in Puerto Rico.

Ayahuasca circles, plant medicine spaces. These rooms are often beautifully diverse, filled with people from many countries and backgrounds.

And still, I have never co-facilitated ceremony with someone from my island.

I find myself surrounded by songs being sung in Spanish, songs that carry histories, landscapes, and lineages.

And tonight, there was irritation in me. Not because of accents or mistakes. What moved through me wasn’t judgment. It was the sharp ache of absence.

Because this microcosm I dance in exists in the middle of everything else that’s going on in the world.

Political turmoil.
ICE.
Racism that no longer hides behind politeness.
Hispanic bodies treated as disposable, criminal, less than human.

This is the year 2026, and we are still experiencing violent discrimination.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. What happens in the United States happens to us. What happens to us echoes back into the lives of our families on the island. There is no clean separation.

And yes, we have been treated like animals.

When my father lived in New York, he saw the signs with his own eyes:

No dogs.
No Blacks.
No Puerto Ricans.

That isn’t ancient history. That is lived memory. This is the present moment.

And in the midst of all of this, Bad Bunny wins a Grammy. 🏆
A fully Spanish album. Album of the Year.
The first time it’s ever happened.

He’s about to perform at the Super Bowl.
The backlash is loud.
The death threats are real.
The disbelief that a Spanish-speaking man deserves that platform is unmistakable.

And he does it anyway.

That’s leadership.

Not asking permission.
Not translating himself into something more digestible.
Not making his culture smaller so others feel more comfortable.

So many of us were taught that assimilation was the price of belonging.

Learn English. Lose your accent. Tone it down. Be grateful.

He’s showing a new generation that it isn’t.

And that matters not just on massive stages but in small rooms, in ceremonies, in moments when culture is present but home is not.

Puerto Ricans are different, just as every culture is.

Difference isn’t hierarchy. It isn’t better or worse. It’s texture. It’s history. It’s rhythm. It’s the specific way a people learn to move, love, speak, and survive.

We move differently.
We speak differently.
There is rhythm coded into our DNA. 💃🏽

We come from an island that is roughly 100 by 35 kilometers in size and somehow infinite in heart.

We produce world-class athletes, artists, scientists, thinkers, not because it’s easy, but because resilience has never been optional for us.

We grow thick skin early.
We learn to adapt.
We learn to fight and to love fiercely.

For my generation, “ride or die” wasn’t a phrase. It was lived truth.

You would die for your family.
Loyalty ran deep. Sometimes to unhealthy extremes, yes. But also from a place of devotion and care that is rare in cultures built on individualism and competition.

I can hold both truths.
I can honor what was beautiful without denying what was harmful.

There is nothing wrong with us.

We carry warmth.
We carry joy.
We carry community, loyalty, trust, music, and dance.

And still, we create.
We rise.
We achieve.
We dance.

I’m tired.
I’m so fucking tired.

But I’m still here.

And I’m still dancing. ✨

I tell all of my guy friends the same thing.

They usually laugh.

I am dead serious…

I grew up with dogs.

My grandmother used to say, “Dogs are loyal. Cats are traitors. They betray you. You cannot trust a cat.”

To the surprise of no one, I went on to being a “dog person”, self-proclaimed Pittie Mommy (I had three pitbulls at one point in my life).

Then, in 2019, a little tortie cat showed up at my door.

Literally.

I opened my front door one day, and there she was.

I said hi. She meowed back: “You are mine.”

And from that moment on. I was.

After getting to know her personality, I named her Arya. Obsessed with Arya Stark, I observed how this cat moved and lived.

It quickly became obvious her name couldn’t be anything else.

Arya was a badass.

Full of personality. Full of opinions and things to say.

She climbed the tallest trees. She climbed branches no other cat would even try to reach.

She was an incredible hunter. Confident. Fierce.

Soon, this tiny jaguar became my greatest teacher of the feminine.

Arya sought affection when she wanted affection.

Demanded space when she needed space.

Arya was moody AF.

LUNATIC. She would go bat shit crazy during the full moon.

She had daily rituals. Non-negotiables.

No compromising on those.

She had crystal clear boundaries.

So crystal clear she would draw blood if crossed simply to make a point.

Slept whenever and wherever she wanted.

On my lap or as far away from me as possible.

She just was. Herself. All the time.

Unapologetically.

One day, I was staring at her as she slept soundly on her cat tree; she had just returned from her morning adventures outside.

And it dawned on me…

I LOVE THIS CAT.

I loved this freaking frustratingly unpredictable, intense, wild, untamed, fierce, lunatic creature.

I loved her SO MUCH.

And, if I could love this cat SO MUCH, exactly as she was, then maybe someone could love me exactly as I was.

My intensity.

My rhythms.

My wildness.

My boundaries.

My everything.

That single realization changed the way I understood what loving the feminine meant.

I didn’t have to play small, play nice, or be anything other than me.

My person would see ALL OF IT, would see ALL OF ME, and simply know.

Her.

Every minute.

Of every day.

Her.

A year and a half later, after declaring many times -”a black cat is coming to me”- I was driving with my mom down a country road in Puerto Rico. And there he was.

A tiny, malnourished, black kitty. Sitting in the middle of the road. Waiting for me.

I took him home, honestly unsure if he would survive.

But he did! He THRIVED. I named him Antares, after the brightest star in the Scorpio constellation.

He grew into this enormous, beautiful black cat.

My little romantic vampire.

Every morning he would wake me up by purring. LOUDLY. While massaging my chest.

He adored Arya.

And Arya made sure he remembered who was in charge.

I loved my babies so much…

When I moved to Costa Rica and got divorced, my ex-husband kept both Arya and Antares.

That was so hard for me.

I missed them every day.

Every day for two years.

I thought it would get easier.

It never did…

Until…

I saw her.

I was recently single and semi-homeless and saw a video of some kittens, a litter my friends’ cat had given birth to.

And there she was…

A tiny feral kitten, colored completely differently from her siblings.

I knew it the second I saw her.

She is mine.

I had to wait a few weeks before I could have her, and during this time I began having these crazy lucid visions (in real life, not ceremony) of cheetahs.

I would see one rushing towards me.

I would see them walking around my room.

When I looked into the symbolism of the cheetah, it felt as if life were holding up a mirror.

Discernment.

Knowing where to place your energy.

Trusting your own timing.

Moving with intention.

These messages arrived exactly when I needed them.

I had spent years learning how to stop chasing what wasn’t mine.

To stop explaining myself.

To stop pouring my energy into people, places, and relationships that asked me to become smaller in order to belong.

The cheetah doesn’t waste energy trying to convince the world of its power.

It knows exactly when to move and exactly when to remain still.

That was the medicine I needed.

To stop running.

To become more discerning.

To trust my instincts.

To know that my timing doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s.

To remember that there is a profound difference between urgency and alignment.

I knew I wanted to bring that medicine into my home.

Into my life.

Into my heart.

I knew I had to call this wild little being that was soon to arrive in my life “cheetah.”

So I started looking through different languages until I found the Swahili word for cheetah...

Duma.

The search ended the moment I read it.

That was her name.

Duma.

When Duma finally came home, she wasn’t very interested in me.

She had been deeply attached to her cat mother and hadn’t spent much time around people.

Trust wasn’t something she gave away easily.

The person I was dating at the time thought I had picked the wrong kitten because she wasn’t as affectionate as her siblings.

I couldn’t disagree more.

I knew she was perfect…FOR ME.

Years earlier, I had fostered an abused pit bull.

That experience taught me something that Duma would ask of me again.

Trust has its own timeline.

You don’t rush it.

You can’t.

You can’t push someone to feel safe with you.

You earn it.

With action.

With consistent action.

As time passed, little by little, Duma found safety in me and in return, gave me something I didn’t realize I had lost after my divorce.

She gave me home.

And, little by little, she became everything her name promised.

Duma has long, lean legs.

She’s small in size and ridiculously fast.

She chirps instead of meowing (just like cheetahs do).

She has those beautiful dark markings around her eyes.

She’s unbelievably silly.

She’s a complete little alien.

And every day I let her know she’s the love of my life.

I yell - ¡Amor de mi vida!

And she immediately plops over to her side, or starts twitching her tail.

She knows I am talking to her.

This being has my heart.

People think she’s too “cold,” “snobbish,” “arisca.”

She isn’t. Not with me. Not with the humans she trusts.

What they see as snobbish is actually discernment. Boundaries.

An animal that has never forgotten it belongs to itself.

Maybe that’s why cats have taught me so much about the feminine.

The feminine has spent centuries being asked to become easier to love.

More accommodating. More predictable. More available.

Less intense. Less wild.

Neither was ever meant for that.

I pray she keeps her wildness. I pray no one. Not even me. Breaks her free spirit.

I want her free.

She is free.

Admittedly, there are times when she walks out the open door, and paralyzing fear rises in me:

What if she never returns?

But I let her go, trusting her wild heart, and in that trust, honoring my own.

Each time she disappears, I am reminded that to love the wild is to risk heartbreak.

It’s true…

Every time she walks out the door, I know she might never come back.

And I choose to love her with my whole heart anyway.

I refuse to love her cautiously.

I refuse to hold back because loss is possible.

I refuse to “protect” myself by loving her a little less.

She deserves all of my love.

Not a guarded version of it.

The whole thing.

Every afternoon, when I hear the little bell on her collar and watch her come back home after another morning adventure, I find myself thinking the same thing.

Thank you.

Thank you for choosing this home.

Thank you for choosing me.

Again.

Every day she teaches me:

Love would never dare to tame the wild.

It wouldn’t even try.

Love simply creates a safe place through consistent action and expresses deep gratitude every time the wild chooses to return to its embrace to rest.

Maybe that’s what we’re all here to do: love the wild in each other, and in ourselves, all the way to the edge of freedom…

Feliz tercera vuelta al sol a uno de los amores de mi vida.

Duma Luna.

Duma Pinta.

Dumita.

Mi cheetah.

El amor de mi vida.

🐆🐆🐆

I had my first reading with a brujita from Puerto Rico a few weeks ago.

It was 20 minutes of pure channeling, and at one point, she said something that completely caught me off guard.

“If you don’t want to get pregnant, use protection.”

The reading was over the phone. I couldn’t see her face, but there was no hesitation in her voice.

“The spirits keep showing me a little girl. They keep placing her in your arms. She’s beautiful. There’s so much happiness there. If you don’t want to get pregnant, use protection.”

I waited until she finished.

Then I blurted out,

“...Are you saying I’m pregnant?”

“You aren’t listening to me,” she replied (I can still feel the eye roll behind that statement).

“If you don’t want to get pregnant, use protection.”

That small part of the exchange stayed with me long after the reading ended.

It felt like she had given form to something I’d been wondering about for years.

The dance between fate and free will…

For years, I’ve wondered where destiny ends, and free will begins.

Is life already written out for us?

Are we simply living out a script we agreed to before we got here?

Or do we genuinely shape our lives with every decision we make?

I’ve never been able to fully subscribe to either side.

At times, life has felt far too orchestrated for me to believe anything is random.

I’ve experienced too many impossibly stunning synchronicities to dismiss them as coincidences…

AND, at the same time, I can’t look at my own life and conclude that my choices don’t matter.

So there it was…right in front of me.

The spirit world presenting a possibility that seemed fated.

AND reminding me that I still had a choice in front of it.

Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about co-creating with life.

We are dancing with it.

Dancing between free will and fate.

Life keeps moving toward us.

We keep moving toward life.

Sometimes we’re ready.

Sometimes we aren’t.

Sometimes the opportunity arrives before we’ve become the person capable of receiving it.

I’ve started to comprehend what so much of our inner work is actually preparing us for…

It is preparing us to simply become available, more available, by creating enough space within ourselves to clearly see what is right in front of us.

Available enough to recognize the opportunity when it appears.

Available enough to believe we are ready.

Available enough to say yes.

The Universe can place an opportunity in front of us.

It can’t make us recognize it.

It can’t make us trust it.

It can’t make us choose it.

That's where fate meets free will.

This is why knowing ourselves matters so much.

Because if I don't know myself, it's incredibly easy to confuse my unconscious stories with reality. And if I'm not careful, I'll start living inside someone else's too.

Without realizing it, I stop relating to what I know to be true and begin relating to my fears, or worse, someone else’s “truth”.

Their illusion becomes louder than my own knowing.

Their interpretations begin carrying more weight than my own experience.

Little by little, I stop dancing to my reality and start reacting to theirs.

I think that’s how so many of us end up living lives that don’t actually belong to us.

We stay in relationships that deplete us.

We build careers that imprison us.

We shape ourselves around expectations that were never ours to carry.

The more I’ve come home to myself, the easier it has become to recognize what belongs to me and what doesn’t.

People still project.

People still misunderstand.

People still hand me stories about who they think I am.

Sometimes those reflections are gifts.

Sometimes they reveal blind spots I genuinely couldn’t see.

And sometimes I know, with every fiber of my being, that what they’re handing me simply isn’t mine.

It belongs to their movie.

Their patterns.

Their fears.

Their way of making sense of the world.

I don’t need to argue with it.

I don’t need to defend myself.

I don’t need to convince them they’re wrong.

I can simply leave it where it belongs.

With them.

The more I sit with this, the more I realize that everything is a possibility.

Healing is a possibility.

A child is a possibility.

A friendship is a possibility.

A calling is a possibility.

A relationship is a possibility.

None of them become reality simply because they’re possible and available.

Possibility always requires participation.

That’s true of us.

And it’s true of the people we love.

One of the most valuable lessons my first marriage taught me was not to build a life around someone’s potential.

The question became simple:

If this person never changes... if this is who they are for the rest of their life... would I still choose this relationship?

But over the last few years, another layer revealed itself.

Through ceremony.

Through relationships.

Through relentlessly studying my own patterns.

I realized something I had never been able to put language to.

Potential belongs to possibility.

Patterns belong to reality.

When we fall in love, we naturally see possibility.

That’s part of love.

We glimpse the highest expression of another human being.

Sometimes we can even see it before they can.

The mistake isn’t seeing that possibility.

The mistake is relating to it as though it’s already real.

The possibility is real.

So is their freedom not to choose it.

Relationships aren’t built on potential.

They’re built on patterns.

The ways we communicate.

The ways we repair.

The ways we protect ourselves.

The ways we withdraw.

The ways we take responsibility.

The ways we avoid it.

Those patterns are today’s reality.

And today’s reality is what we’re actually in relationship with.

That doesn’t mean people can’t change.

Of course they can.

The question is whether they’re willing to become aware of the very patterns standing between them and the life they’re capable of living.

And that part has never belonged to me.

The most powerful and liberating thing I’ve realized lately is:

I don’t have to participate in someone else’s story about themselves.

If someone believes they’re unworthy...

If they believe they’re impossible to love...

If they believe everyone eventually leaves...

No amount of love from me can replace the work of seeing themselves differently.

I’ve learned that the hard way.

You can reassure someone a hundred times.

You can choose them over and over again.

You can remind them how extraordinary they are.

If they aren’t ready to loosen their grip on that story, your love rarely lands where you hope it will.

Eventually, you realize you’re no longer in a relationship with the person.

You’re in a relationship with the story they believe about themselves.

A story that quietly unfolds through their unconscious patterns.

I don’t want to live there.

Love does not require participation in someone else’s illusion.

I can hold space for someone who is willing to meet themselves with honesty.

I can walk beside someone who takes responsibility for their own healing.

I can offer love, truth, encouragement, and compassion.

What I can’t do is convince someone they’re worthy.

I can’t prove my love enough to quiet their fears.

And frankly, I don’t want to.

I don’t want to live a life of proving and teaching and convincing.

The deepest act of love isn’t believing in someone’s potential.

It’s respecting their freedom by letting them choose it.

Or not.

I think that’s what co-creation has been all along.

My work isn’t to control which invitations arrive.

My work is to become someone who can recognize them.

To keep clearing away the stories that feed the illusions…

The ones that tell me I’m too much.

Or not enough.

Or too late.

Or somehow unworthy of the life standing right in front of me.

We all have patterns.

We all return to what’s familiar.

We all mistake familiar for safe.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

Patterns are simply the strategies that once helped us survive.

Awareness doesn’t erase them.

It gives us the freedom to decide whether they still get to lead.

Maybe that’s where free will actually lives.

Not in having endless choices.

In finally seeing the ones we’ve been making unconsciously.

Every pattern we become conscious of gives us back a little more freedom.

Freedom to see more clearly.

Freedom to choose more honestly.

Freedom to choose from coherence, from love, from courage, from our hearts.

Life has always been placing possibilities in front of us.

A child.

A partner.

A friendship.

A calling.

A different version of ourselves.

So maybe fate presents the invitation.

Awareness allows us to recognize it.

And free will is choosing whether we continue dancing with our patterns...

or finally begin dancing with life.

People have been asking me this question a lot lately.

Actually…they’ve been asking it for years.

It’s such a loaded question.

One I’ve never really known how to answer until just now.

My answer, if I could be 100% honest, would be:

My womb and my people.

I arrived at this answer by reflecting on my life over the last seven years.

The last seven years slowly dismantled almost everything I had learned to rely on for security.

In 2018, I had a dream house, dream car, husband, beautiful fur babies, and a career that was financially rewarding and successful.

Then everything started shifting.

I almost died from Lyme disease.

I went on medical leave.

I quit my job.

I packed up my life and moved back to Puerto Rico.

A few months later, I packed it up again and moved to Costa Rica.

I got divorced.

I moved homes ten times.

There were seasons when I genuinely didn’t know how I was going to pay rent.

Moments when I was homeless.

I’ve watched years of savings and my retirement disappear.

I believed I had found someone I would spend the rest of my life with.

That relationship ended.

A couple of other short-lived romantic relationships followed, each one ending at moments when I could’ve used stability the most. The timing of those endings was so cruel it was almost comical. Almost.

I walked away from places that presented themselves as “safe” spaces of healing, only to discover they were still made up of human beings carrying unhealed wounds, agendas, blind spots, and contradictions.

I also said goodbye to some of the beings I loved most.

Akira, Amaya, Antares…

I lost my therapist, Sherley, who had become a dear friend and who sat beside me during my very first medicine ceremony.

Mi abuela.

Then mi tía.

And, just a few weeks ago…

Mi mamá.

Reading that list today, I could see why people ask me how I’ve kept going.

And truthfully? I’ve asked myself the same question many times along my journey.

But in the moments the dark thoughts would creep in, life reminded me - you are not meant to carry this much alone.

You see, one of the greatest lies we’ve been sold is that strength looks like figuring everything out on our own.

We’ve been sold hyper-independence as strength and have confused codependence with love.

When in reality, just like nature, we are built for something different.

Interdependence.

The ability to stand on our own two feet while also allowing ourselves to be held.

To offer support when we have it to give.

To receive support when we need it.

To remember that healing doesn’t happen in isolation.

It happens in relationship.

In community.

In shared stories.

In circles.

I think that’s one of the reasons I’m still here.

Them. My people.

Learning to receive has been one of the greatest initiations of my life.

And I have received so much along the way…

There were people who opened their homes to me.

People who cooked for me.

Who helped me with groceries.

Who trusted me with work when I needed it most.

Who sat beside me in ceremony.

Who prayed for me.

Who reminded me who I was when I temporarily forgot.

I am so grateful to each and every one of them.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

And while I am handing out thank yous…

To quote the great philosopher Snoop Dogg…

I’d also like to thank me.

For staying.

For picking myself up, dusting my butt off (or my face), and moving forward.

For continuing to trust my intuition, even when it made absolutely no sense.

Because in hindsight I see clearly that over those seven years, I didn’t just experience loss.

I found myself again.

By staying.

Ceremony after ceremony.

Conversation after conversation.

Moon cycle after moon cycle.

I watched old versions of myself die.

I watched new ones emerge.

I met every corner of myself I had spent years trying not to look at.

The fear.

The control.

The perfectionism.

The abandonment.

The need for certainty.

The patterns.

The trauma.

The triggers.

The little girl who wanted to be chosen. Who still does.

And seeing those parts wasn’t the transformation.

Awareness is only the invitation.

The real work began when I stopped treating awareness as the destination.

When I stopped using my wounds to explain why I couldn’t choose differently.

I learned to stay after the awareness came.

To stay with the discomfort.

To stay with the grief.

To stay with the uncertainty.

To stay with the questions that had no immediate answers.

To stay.

Long enough for something inside me to soften.

Long enough to choose a different response.

Again.

And again.

And again.

And with this never-ending practice, I noticed something extraordinary.

My capacity expanded.

My capacity to hold paradox.

To hold two truths at the same time.

Grief and gratitude.

Heartbreak and love.

Fear and trust.

Exhaustion and wonder.

Loss and deep, undeniable joy.

To understand that everything is true.

At the same time.

That realization has changed me.

We spend so much of our lives trying to organize and control the human experience.

Trying to get rid of grief so we can finally tap into joy.

Trying to eliminate fear before we’ll allow ourselves to trust.

Trying to wait until everything feels certain before we’ll let ourselves begin.

Life never asked that of me.

The opposite is true.

Life simply kept asking me to become spacious enough to experience it all.

And then, yesterday, exactly one week after coming home from Puerto Rico, where I went to bury my mom’s ashes, something clicked.

In my whole body.

Everything I have gone through, everything I studied, during all of it, all this time…

I was just remembering what it means to be human.

To fully live the human experience.

And all along, my womb was the home for it all.

Every single month, my body has been rehearsing what life keeps asking of me.

To release.

To create space.

To become curious again.

To express what is true.

To look honestly in the mirror.

To discern.

To begin again.

Again.

And again.

And again.

My moon cycle is my framework.

A framework for embodiment.

A way of understanding what it actually means to move through life’s initiations with a little more grace, a little more trust, and a lot more honesty.

Because guess what?

Life is going to happen.

Relationships will end.

People we love will die.

Our bodies will change.

Dreams will fall apart.

New dreams will be born.

We can’t change the human experience.

What we can change is the way we walk ourselves through it.

The way we return to ourselves afterward.

Yesterday, all of those threads finally came together.

Every ceremony I’ve sat in.

Every friend I’ve sat in circle with.

Every book I’ve highlighted.

Every woman who has trusted me with her story.

Every mistake.

Every heartbreak.

Every loss.

Every ounce of beauty.

Every ounce of pain.

Every conversation.

Every initiation.

Every single thing built up inside me until something exploded out of me.

I birthed something yesterday.

I’ve called it The Moon Method.

It feels like the culmination of the last seven years of my life.

A way of sharing the practice that has quietly carried me through these most beautiful and devastating years.

This practice shaped by seven years of living.

Seven years of grieving.

Seven years of loving.

Seven years of surrendering.

Seven years of studying.

Seven years of remembering.

And seven years of coming home to myself…

Again.

And again.

And again.

The Moon Method is one pillar of that practice.

Community is the other.

Our bodies teach us how to move through life.

Community reminds us that we don’t have to move through it alone.

One helps you come home to yourself.

The other reminds you that home has always been bigger than just you.

I don’t think healing happens in isolation.

I think it happens in circles.

In shared stories.

Around dinner tables.

In ceremony.

In voice notes.

Through laughter that somehow appears in the middle of grief.

Through the simple act of someone saying,

“I’m here.”

One of the greatest gifts we can offer each other isn’t advice.

It’s our lived experience.

We don’t all have to watch every security blanket disappear before we remember what has been holding us all along.

We can learn from one another.

We can borrow one another’s courage.

We can become living proof that another way is possible.

This has been my way.

Yesterday, I spoke this way into existence.

It seems as if there are moments when life simply asks us to give language to what we’ve already been living.

So here it is…

If you ask me today what has been carrying me through...

My womb.

My people.

🌙

If my journey resonates with you and you want to learn more about The Moon Method, please visit my website for details.

I knew losing my mother would teach me about death.

But what I didn’t expect was that losing her would also become a masterclass in love.

During this process, I have been in awe of the many ways people show up when someone they care about is going through loss.

Friends brought meals.

Hearty soups.

Homemade cookies.

Favorite desserts from my favorite places.

People came into my kitchen and took over.

They washed produce.

Cut fruit.

Portioned snacks into containers.

Someone sent beautiful flowers.

Airport rides.

A beautiful friend gifted me a lighthouse coloring book and colored pencils.

Another one offered to bring me outfits for the burial so I wouldn’t have to spend emotional energy deciding what to wear.

She also called her veterinarian, explained what was happening, and made sure there would be a path forward if I decided at the last minute to bring Duma with me.

Friends texted every day without expecting a response.

Sent prayers.

Lit candles.

A lot of my friends gifted me their time, their embrace, their services.

Some people brought humor…sometimes at the most wildly inappropriate moments…which was, oddly, exactly what I needed.

People shared stories about my mom that I had never heard before.

Stories about her childhood.

Stories about high school, how much I look like her when she was young.

Stories from parts of her life that existed long before I arrived.

And a couple of times a day, I found myself having the same thoughts/feelings:

How on earth did this person even think of doing this for me?

I was amazed by the thoughtfulness.

The creativity.

The attention.

The fact that someone paused long enough to imagine what this experience might be like and ask themselves what could make it a little softer, a little easier, a little less lonely.

Everyone arrived carrying different gifts.

Different instincts.

Different forms of care.

The people who solve problems solved problems.

The nurturers nurtured.

The storytellers told stories.

The organizers organized.

The artists sent beauty.

The longer I sat with it, the more curious I became.

It seemed as if everyone was reaching toward grief with a different set of tools.

Offering the thing that made the most sense to them.

The thing they know how to give.

The thing they believe helps.

The thing they themselves might want during a difficult season.

I have found myself paying much closer attention to people, to friendship…to love.

A couple of friends volunteered to pay for my flight, and I kinda wish I had let them book it.

Because I was doing it myself, I had to select my “purpose of travel,” and the only two options American Airlines provides are “Business” or “Leisure.”

And I remember staring at the screen, feeling sickened by those two options.

There was no box for loss.

No box for “my world just changed, and I need to go home.”

Not even an “other” box I could select to feel less cringe.

It was such a tiny moment, but it perfectly captured something about grief.

The world keeps moving.

Forms still need to be completed.

Questions still need answers.

Even when nothing about your life feels remotely normal.

And maybe that’s part of what made people’s kindness stand out so much.

Because while systems, society, and culture all asked me to fit my experience into predetermined categories and boxes, people didn’t.

People made room for it.

People adapted. Paid attention. Imagined.

People cared.

And perhaps that’s what has stayed with me most of all.

Not just that people showed up.

But how they showed up.

The ingenuity of it.

The creativity of it.

The thoughtfulness of it.

The countless ways people have found to say:

I see you.

I’m thinking about you.

You don’t have to carry all of this alone.

I have always considered myself a thoughtful friend.

But over the last few weeks, I have watched people love me in ways that never would have occurred to me.

I have now seen entire ways of caring that I didn’t know existed.

Ways of loving that expanded my understanding of what support is.

What friendship is.

How hugely important community is.

What it means to truly show up for another human being.

And for that, I am deeply grateful.

My hope is that I remember these lessons.

That I allow this experience to forge me into a better, more thoughtful friend.

A friend who pauses long enough to ask not only, “How can I help?” but also, “What might this person need that hasn’t even occurred to them yet?”

If there is a gift hidden somewhere inside all of this, perhaps it is that.

The opportunity to witness how people love.

To see that most people are trying to love each other better than we realize.

And the reminder that love, in all its forms, is what carries us through.

Lately, I have found myself reflecting a lot on the relationship between love and ego.

Being in a relationship has a way of bringing these things to the surface, mainly because there is nowhere to hide.

It is so much easier to feel self-aware, “healed,” and “enlightened” when no one is close enough to challenge your stories or touch your wounds.

But then you go spend time with your family, and/or romantic love arrives.

I am not talking about the fantasy or illusion of love.

I am talking about the actual day-to-day experience of sharing your life with another human being.

And suddenly, all these fascinating thoughts, doubts, and questions begin to emerge.

I find myself putting my discernment to practice and begin to study…ok…what am I being invited to look at?

What belongs to this moment? What is a projection?

What is this person’s behavior telling me about them? What am I making it mean about me?

What am I being invited to accept? What am I being invited to communicate and share?

The more I sit with these questions, the more I find myself arriving at the same realization.

What if love were a safe space where our ego can rest?

But the ego mistakes that rest for death?

What if love nurtured the beautiful aspects of our ego?

What if, inside of a safe, loving space, we discover that our ego is not something to relentlessly hunt down and try to kill off? Punish? What if it allowed us to befriend it?

To realize that our ego is actually a beautiful thing? The part of us that learned how to survive.

But left unchecked, it becomes the storyteller. The strategist.

It becomes the protector, developing stories about who we are and what to expect from the world.

“I am too much.”

“I am not enough.”

“I don’t belong.”

“I disappoint people.”

“I have to earn love.”

“I have to prove my worth.”

“I will eventually be abandoned.”

And once those stories become ingrained in us, the ego begins organizing our reality around them.

Constantly on alert, finding ways to prove these stories right.

We begin to act from this lie, this illusion. We stop acting from the heart. From love.

We unconsciously live life through this lens.

But then, if we are lucky enough, love arrives, asking (demanding, really) us to build from reality.

And reality is where things become uncomfortable.

We often imagine that love feels safe.

And while true, most of us haven’t truly experienced unconditional love.

So when it arrives, it can feel profoundly destabilizing.

Because real love does not always behave as our wounds and stories predict.

Healthy love challenges the stories we’ve built our identity around, confronting us with possibilities we weren’t prepared for.

A person who believes they are too much meets someone who is inspired by their passion.

A person who believes they are not enough encounters someone who continues choosing them.

A person who expects rejection is met with acceptance and compassion.

A person who expects criticism instead finds profound understanding.

Which brings me to something else I have been contemplating.

Relationships illuminate what solitude lets us avoid.

Relationships in their natural and most loving essence do not create our wounds.

They illuminate them.

But we are blinded to this difference.

And then a misunderstanding becomes a story about belonging.

A moment of distance becomes a story about abandonment.

A difference in desire becomes a story about worth.

And before we know it, we are no longer relating to the person in front of us.

We are relating to a story.

And suddenly, we have to ask ourselves…what if the story is wrong?

Not the person standing in front of us.

Not the relationship.

The story.

What if we were wrong…all along.

And that. Can feel. Terrifying.

Because maybe… just maybe…for the first time in our lives, we are being invited to allow our ego to rest.

To stop working so hard. To stop scanning for danger. To stop predicting.

Controlling. Defending. Bracing for impact. Living in tension, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

To stop trying to earn what is already being offered.

It is being invited to rest. To allow.

And to something that has spent decades protecting us, this can feel extremely dangerous.

Rest can feel irresponsible, vulnerable, even like death.

This is where I believe much of the work lives.

We carry traumas, fears, blind spots, assumptions, wounds, and contradictions.

We bring those with us into our partnerships and relationships.

So we will be triggered by our partners.

We will inevitably hurt one another.

Not intentionally.

But because we are humans. With big feelings and gentle hearts.

So the question is not whether hurt will occur.

The question is, how do we show up when it does?

Can we become curious enough to ask:

Is this person’s behavior telling me something about my worth?

Or is it telling me something about them?

That distinction has changed my understanding of love.

Because so much suffering is born from making everything personal.

Taking another person’s nature and turning it into evidence against ourselves.

What if the invitation is not to stop getting triggered, but to stop assuming that every hurt feeling is truth?

To look more closely. To study the story. To question the narrative.

To allow love to reveal.

To offer us something even greater than certainty…

Acceptance.

In its full meaning.

To choose love is to accept risk.

To choose love is to accept uncertainty.

To choose love is to accept the possibility of heartbreak.

The more and deeper we allow love in, the farther and higher we risk falling off.

There is no way around it.

The alternative is control. Distance. Separation.

And while those things may reduce risk, they also reduce intimacy.

It limits the capacity of our hearts and our lives to expand. To experience oneness. Bliss. Creation. The very essence of consciousness and god.

I have never been interested in that bargain.

I have never wanted a life organized around avoiding pain.

I refuse to become cold and jaded.

Is it scary? Yes. Terrifying actually.

So terrifying at times that I want to escape. To run away. To hide.

So scary it can be paralyzing, suffocating, crude, raw.

So what? SO WHAT?

You know what is also terrifying for me? A life half-lived.

Looking back and realizing I was the only person responsible for not experiencing the highest love.

The purest love. That I chose fear and control over truth and authenticity.

That I “protected” myself against the most beautiful and natural gift life has to bring.

We are all going to die. Yet we take our lives for granted. We live each day as if we were guaranteed tomorrow.

This moment. This breath. This life. This human experience.

With all of its ups and downs. All of the pain and magic. All of the hurt and pleasure.

It’s all a gift.

We came here to experience being humans. And all that it entails.

Human BEINGS. To BE. To be ourselves. To love ourselves. To meet ourselves. To GIFT ourselves.

To offer ourselves to one another. To meet one another.

To learn from each other. To learn from all the other mammals, insects, and birds. To learn from nature. To see the beauty and perfection of it all. To know that what is outside of us is inside of us.

That we are all interconnected. Interdependent.

To live and act from our hearts. From love.

And yet, here we are, living with so much fear. We forget to live. To love hard. To embrace the beauty of it all.

I had a friend text me today, and she said:

“You are a crazy badass witch
You are brave
And soft
And weak
And strong
And beautiful
And horrible (shadows)
And everything all at once
The point is
That you are Dali
And I fucking love Dali
All of it!”

And I don’t know if there’s a better way to describe the complexity of humans and the beauty and acceptance of love.

Seeing each other - messy, radiant, whole - and choosing love anyway.

And in choosing love, to allow our egos to finally rest. Illusion to melt away. To live fully in the present moment. In gratitude and awe of the miracle of life. Of every single thing that had to happen for us to be here in this moment.

To rest in the knowing that somehow, we can all walk ourselves back home. Over and over and over again.

Back to love.

I believe Sunday mornings should be deliciously slow.

A morning to wake beside the one you love.

To linger in that liminal space between dreaming and waking, where the world hasn’t yet asked anything of you.

To wake with your lover’s body intertwined with yours.

Half asleep “Good Mornings” with the perfect lazy smile.

Slow kisses.

Gentle caresses.

Cuddles that last longer than they need to.

Lovemaking that feels less like an act of prayer.

A prayer of gratitude. Gratitude to be alive.

Gratitude for having each other…

Then on to the perfect morning drink.

Taking turns on who will get out of bed to make it.

For me, it’s my daily ritual of cacao and coffee.

Sipped slowly in bed while we linger in the goodness of the week that just passed.

Remembering our favorite moments.

The things that made us laugh.

The moments that brought us closer.

The beauty we witnessed.

The little things that could have easily gone unnoticed.

Reminding each other of what we’re grateful for.

What we admire in one another.

Allowing it to become a practice.

A ritual.

Of remembering.

Of training ourselves to always look for the goodness.

To notice it.

To celebrate it.

To let gratitude become the foundation we build upon.

Allowing that sweetness to infuse the rest of the day.

And we stay there until hunger finally calls us into the kitchen.

Music fills the house.

Bodies sway.

Bare feet dance across the floor while breakfast comes to life.

Then, gathered around the table, we turn our attention toward the week ahead.

The weather forecast.

The astrological forecast.

Work.

Commitments.

Dreams.

Calendars.

Finding the spaces where life can happen and the spaces where love can continue to grow.

Making sure neither of us gets lost in the movement of the week.

Making sure we keep choosing each other within it.

There is something deeply settling about that.

Knowing where the other person is.

Knowing what they’re carrying.

Knowing when you’ll have each other again.

The week no longer feels like something that will pull you apart.

You can rest.

And from that place of rest, everything opens.

Not into doing.

Into being.

Sundays are for lingering.

For letting the day unfold without forcing it.

For gentle strolls with nowhere particular to go.

No agenda.

No urgency.

Just enjoying the calmness and groundedness of the day.

No phones.

Just presence.

Sundays are for puzzles and coloring books.

For lying in bed, taking turns reading a book out loud.

For conversations about philosophy, spirituality, and conspiracy theories.

For naps that turn into cuddles.

For takeout.

For legs intertwined in a hammock.

For a movie playing in the background that neither of us is really watching.

For speaking through touch more than words.

For making love in the middle of the afternoon because there is nowhere else to be and nothing more important to do.

For remembering that intimacy is not something squeezed between obligations.

It is part of the rhythm itself.

Part of the nourishment.

Part of what makes a life feel full.

Sundays are for outdoor showers.

For long soaks in the tub.

For bathing in the frequency of love.

For remembering that a beautiful life is not built through grand gestures, but through ordinary moments savored completely.

Sundays are for devotion.

Not to productivity.

Not to achievement.

But to love.

To rest.

To beauty.

To joy.

To us.

Where one part of you can clearly see why something happened the way it did.

Can see the decision.

Can see the path forward.

Can see the action that needs to be taken.

And still, there is this very real physical and emotional reaction moving through the body that makes you ache to tear yourself open, and you feel like you just want to crawl out of your own skin.

Because the choice is always the same:

step from love or step from fear.

But sometimes stepping into love can feel terrifying, too.

So even when you know what the loving choice is, even when you can see it clearly, the body can still react like danger is everywhere.

And no amount of rationalizing, zooming out, understanding, or negotiating necessarily makes it easier. There are moments where the mind understands completely, and the body still trembles anyway.

And in those moments, I want to escape.

I want to run.

But lately, instead of freezing that instinct, instead of trapping it inside my body, I let it move. I pace. I shake. I walk. I let myself feel how primal it is.

There’s a saying that you’ll see lions and tigers in a circus, but never a wolf.

And that’s what it feels like sometimes.

Not because the wolf cannot be physically trapped, but because its spirit refuses domestication.

It doesn’t become something else to be loved.

It remains a wolf.

And there are moments where that wildness inside me claws and howls and feels like it’s slamming itself against the walls of my own body, trying to find somewhere to go. Anywhere else but this.

Today was one of those days.

I tried to breathe through it.

I talked compassionately to myself.

I was able to zoom out enough to witness it happening in real time.

But there was no escaping the feeling.

And truthfully, I didn’t want to escape it.

Because I know the only way out is through.

Discomfort is not something to bypass or “spiritually” workaround. It has to move. It has to speak. To howl and scream. To burn through the body, through bone and marrow before it leaves.

And in those moments, music saves my life.

Music lives and breathes through me.

It echoes in every cell of my being.

I’m always dancing, always listening, always feeling it moving through my body.

But channeling it, actually allowing it to move through me, is different.

When I have to do it, I feel caged.

When I get to do it, it saves me.

So today, even with my hands hurting so badly that I could barely hold the drum, I grabbed the cha-cha instead. And I used it.

I used it to call the wind.

To call nature.

To cleanse myself.

And at first, it almost didn’t work.

I almost broke down crying.

But I dug deeper. I clawed at the pain. And I let it out. I let it out in prayer.

Because that’s what music becomes for me sometimes.

Prayer.

A call to the medicine of the serpent.

A prayer to help me shed what no longer supports me.

To shed what no longer belongs to me.

What may have never belonged to me at all.

To stop gripping so tightly.

To release.

To keep walking in integrity.

To keep leading from my heart.

And to keep choosing love, no matter the outcome.

No matter how terrifying it feels. No matter the chaos. The confusion. The noise. The insanity of it all.

To keep choosing love anyway. 🐍✨

Mi mamá, Carmen Lydia Arocho Cruz was born on November 13, 1958, in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico.

She was beautiful, still is, the kind of woman you never truly forget…

There was something about her smile. Her laugh. The sparkle in her eyes…that stuck with you. Some would say haunt…

A fellow Scorpio, she seemed to see things other people missed. There was something deeply perceptive and intuitive about her.

As a child, I remember her as a little bit witchy. Before religion reshaped her worldview, she was endlessly curious about the unseen. She let me play with Ouija boards and believed in energy, spirits, angels, messages, and the deep mysteries of life. She was deeply intuitive and connected to the spiritual world in a way that later became filtered and reframed through Catholicism into something different.

Later in life, she made the bold decision to leave the Catholicism in which she was raised and convert to Evangelical Christianity. It created tension and distance within her family, but she stood firmly in what she believed at the time. Even then, she was searching. Seeking. Trying to find truth, belonging, meaning.

She was brilliant with her hands. She could sew, paint, cook, or work with ceramics, anything creative. Her patience was remarkable, and her mind worked in deeply artistic, intuitive ways. She may not have fit neatly inside traditional systems like school, but she carried immense creativity, sensitivity, and talent within her.

She loved dancing, music, and people. There were no strangers in her world. She would talk to anyone and everyone, cashiers, neighbors, children, strangers in line. She moved through life with an openness that made people feel instantly familiar.

She talked to birds. She noticed flowers blooming on the side of the road. She saw beauty everywhere. She taught me to look for shapes in the clouds, to pause for sunsets, to pay attention to the small details most people rush past. Wonder was natural to her.

Her compassion knew no boundaries. She cared deeply for animals, the earth, children, and doing good in the world. She had endless curiosity!

As a kid, she signed me up for modeling lessons, art classes, piano lessons, swimming…all the experiences she wished she could have explored too. Looking back now, I think part of her was trying to live those dreams through me, while also hoping my life could feel bigger, freer, and fuller than her own.

She studied theology. She dreamed of traveling. She dreamed of working again, of feeling purposeful, of becoming more than the life she had settled into.

Life was not always gentle with her. Years of betrayals, heartbreak, and unspoken sorrow wore down her spirit. The woman who once danced with abandon and painted her world in color became quieter, her brilliance shrinking into shadows, her laughter echoing only in memory.

Over time, her heartbreak and escapism were labeled Alzheimer’s. That became the diagnosis.

In the years after her diagnosis, she became obsessed with lighthouses. She painted them everywhere, on canvases, ceramics, and even on the street lamp outside our house. But she also collected them. She would buy them wherever she went, and eventually, people began gifting them to her, too. Over time, our home quietly filled with lighthouses.

Looking back now, it feels deeply symbolic.

I think some part of her understood. I think she was trying to surround herself with reminders to keep following the light. To trust light as a compass through darkness. To remember that even in fog, even in storms, there is something that guides us home.

Maybe she was becoming that lighthouse herself while her own memory slowly faded.

This journey with my mom has changed me forever. For the better.

It has been the most brutal and beautiful ceremony of my life…a masterclass in grief, heartbreak, resilience, and faith. I have learned the language of duality: how a heart can hold joy in one hand and unbearable pain in the other, how love and loss can live side by side.

It has taught me that mothers are human long before they are mothers…women with dreams, wounds, fears, desires, contradictions, sacrifices, and invisible griefs we may never fully understand.

So many women from previous generations carried enormous pain silently. They stayed in marriages that diminished them. They abandoned parts of themselves to survive. They carried worlds on their backs with very little support, language, resources, or freedom.

And still… they chipped away at the chains in the only ways they knew how.

None of us truly knows what it was like to walk in their shoes.

But what I do know now is this:

We are all here because a woman split herself open - her body, her heart, her dreams - so we could walk this earth.

And whether our mothers were perfect, “broken”, soft, complicated, joyful, religious, rebellious, wounded, nurturing, absent, magical, exhausted, or all of it at once… they shaped us.

My mother shaped me.

Her rebellion lives in me.
Her wildness became my compass.
Her prayers became my path.

She taught me to care for this earth. To defend animals. To give generously. To speak up. To live from the heart.

She is my root.
She is the first sacred space I ever knew.
She is the source of strength fueling everything I do.

When I decided to leave everything behind and move to Costa Rica, she looked dead into my soul and told me she was proud of me. When I told her about the ceremonial path I was walking, she told me she wanted to sit in ceremony with me one day. She told me she just wanted me to be happy.

And she meant it.

My relationship with my mom taught me many things…things like:

Love people while they are still here.
Celebrate them for who they are, not who you expected them to be.
Support their dreams, not project your fears onto them.
Get out of their way. Let them live.

So much time is wasted judging the very people we were born to love.

That is not my understanding of

the role of family.

The role of family, of a loved one, is to witness.
To walk alongside one another.
To mirror someone’s light back to them when they become lost in their own darkness.

Happy Mother’s Day to the mothers, the daughters, the grandmothers, the caretakers, the women who stayed, the women who left, the women who tried, the women who broke cycles quietly, imperfectly, invisibly.

We are here because of you. 🤍