Yesterday I spent the day visiting family in the village, Gualaceo, where my grandfather was born. I ate lunch at a restaurant owned by people they know, then later went to my aunt’s house for dessert made with eggs from a nearby farm (criollos). Everyone ate it, and after a couple of calls this morning, I can now confirm they’re still perfectly fine.

And a few moments ago, my doctor, Dr. C, was sitting in my living room explaining why I am not. His theory is that the culprit was probably the eggs. More specifically, small amounts of bacteria that the people around me are exposed to regularly and have spent a lifetime building resistance to. Their bodies know what to do with it. Mine decidedly, does not.

Dr C’s explanation was more scientific than “stomachs of steel,” but that’s how I’m reading it. My family grew up here. They developed the bacteria, enzymes, and defenses that come from living in this environment. I did not. So, while everyone else moved on with their day, I’m collapsed in bed, trying to figure out what bigger lesson might be hiding inside something my cousins barely noticed.

One of the reasons I trust Dr. C so much is because he has repeatedly seen things other doctors missed. He identified a serious heart condition in my mother that dozens of doctors in Los Angeles never caught. Earlier this year, during my big birthday extravaganza, he spotted a circulation issue in one of my guests visiting from New York and insisted she get it checked before continuing her travels.

He’s wonderful but just one example of a standard of care that continues to surprise me. Doctors here often have fewer resources, less technology, and smaller budgets than their counterparts in wealthier countries. They also spend years working in environments where improvisation is a necessity. All doctors here rotate through rural communities and have to see a kind of poverty that few of us will ever truly understand. They learn to diagnose with limited tools and pay attention. And I’ve come to believe (and regularly witness) that this produces a different kind of physician.

As I sat here learning about my weak gringa stomach, it occurred to me: How many other things did growing up when I did, and how I did, in the United States leave me unprepared for?

If I’m honest, I spent most of my life inside systems that worked well enough that I rarely had to think about them. Thanks to the many sacrifices of my immigrant family, food appeared. Thanks to the extraction and harm the U.S has done to so many other places, Ecuador included, I enjoyed the spoils of a wealthy empire where infrastructure functioned. Healthcare was expensive and maddening, but generally available. The assumption present most of my childhood was that tomorrow would look roughly like today.

Here in Ecuador, mudslides in the Andes can change travel plans overnight. Roads are eaten up by a jungle that laughs at most attempts to domesticate it. Droughts reshape landscapes. When the rains deprive our hydroelectric grid, power outages happen. People adapt because adaptation has always been part of life. Of course, if you’re reading this in the U.S., you might also notice that many of these realities no longer feel unique to places like Ecuador. Friends in the U.S. and Europe talk about generators in ways they never did before. Wildfires, floods, failing infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare, political instability, and economic precarity are forcing conversations that would have seemed extreme when I was a kid growing up in Hollywood. A lot more of us than I ever expected, people who assumed the systems around us would keep, are now learning what happens when those assumptions collide with reality.

Obviously, none of this is good news. And a lot of it could have, and should have been prevented. Yet here we are.

Since moving back to Ecuador, I find myself thinking often about my beloved grandmother, my abuelita Blanca, and about other ancestors who lost children before milk was pasteurized. My family navigated hardships I can barely imagine. And though I’ve spent a lot of time admiring my ancestors for the things they achieved, I’ve spent very little time thinking about what they had to survive every single day just to create the conditions that made those achievements possible. Like, aside from the big stuff, what happened on an ordinary Tuesday?

How did they get through illness, scarcity, uncertainty, and loss? How did they continue raising children, caring for one another, working, loving, and dreaming in the middle of circumstances that would have destroyed most of us?

I suspect that resilience isn’t built in extraordinary moments. It’s built through repetition, adaptation, recovery, and necessity. The same ingredients that build great doctors like Dr. C. But the most important ingredient that I’ve been observing since moving here, comes from noticing that nobody builds that kind of resilience alone.

My grandmother didn’t. My cousins who are happily enjoying their day, with their stomachs of steel certainly didn’t.

The longer I live in Ecuador, the more I understand that even though I arrived with extraordinary advantages, there is a difference between being welcomed into a community and earning a place within one.

I won the genetic lottery being born into a large, loving South American family that has opened doors for me, fed me, looked after me, teased me relentlessly, and made room for me in their lives. That’s a gift I don’t take for granted.

But gifts and belonging are not the same thing.

Belonging requires participation. It requires showing up and contributing something of value. Hopefully, becoming someone people can depend on, which requires time.

Every morning for the foreseeable future, I’ll be following Dr. C’s instructions and taking whatever probiotics, prebiotics, and other remedies he prescribes to help strengthen my digestive system. But this whole experience has reminded me that resilience is more than just about my currently unhappy tummy. My cousins didn’t develop stomachs of steel in isolation. They developed them in families, communities, and environments that taught them how to adapt. The same is true of the broader resilience I admire in them, and that I think many of us will need in the years ahead. It wasn’t built in a weekend, or a moment of personal transformation. It was built over years of experience, necessity, and mutual support.

And perhaps most importantly, it was built in community.

The people around me are teaching me not just because of how resilient they are. But because of how connected they are. The resilience I admire in my family was built across generations by people looking out for one another, sharing knowledge, carrying burdens together, and helping each other survive long enough to become strong.

I suspect that’s the real lesson hidden inside my weak gringa stomach.

The kind of resilience I think a time like this demands, surrounded by environmental collapse and state tyranny, isn’t something we can buy, hack, automate, or develop overnight. It has to be cultivated over time, the same way my family built their enviable digestive systems.

Not to sound ungrateful to the antibiotic I just popped, but if my family is any guide, the most important ingredient won’t be found in a pill bottle.

More than ever, the words of the German geographer and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, describing us in 1802, ring true:

"Ecuadorians are strange and unique beings: they sleep peacefully amid smoking volcanoes, they live in poverty amid incomparable riches, and they cheer up with sad music."

In case you watched the post-game celebration of tonight's match against Humbolt's Germany, you may have noticed a song blasting in MetLife Stadium, during what Guiness will likely soon confirm as the largest group cry in recorded history.

It's called Nuestro Juramento (Our Oath), our unofficial national anthem of sorts (by Julio Jaramillo), and here's a taste of the lyrics:

Si tú mueres primero, yo te prometo
(If you die first, I promise you)
Que escribiré la historia de nuestro amor
(That I will write the story of our love)
Con toda el alma llena de sentimiento
(With all my soul rife with feeling)
La escribiré con tinta sangre del corazón
(I will write it with the blood from my heart)

In the single most spectacular moment in Ecuadorian sports (and one of the most insane ones in this sport, writ large), we blasted one of our saddest songs, because we know joy only exists in the context of contrast. Ecuadorians, more than anyone I know, understand contradictions, because we know that's where life's most delicious juice lives.

And we're also used to punching above our weight class.

Our islands taught Darwin about the origin of all living things.

We're about the size of the state of Colorado but hold nearly one-fifth of all of the world's bird species.

Our volcanoes are the closest you can get to the sun.

Just one hectare of our Yasuni National Park (Amazon) contains more tree species than the US and Canada combined.

And 80% of the world's fine cacao is grown on our land.

Then in 2008, Ecuador made history by becoming the first country in the world to legally enshrine the "rights of nature" in our national constitution.

And just like many places, all of this is in danger now.

But for a moment in time, we put our sorrows and our conflicts aside and watched as Black Ecuadorians, from some of the most poor and disenfranchised regions in Ecuador, brought something back to a nation that no one else could...a win to fill our souls with pride, and a story of persistence that the world will not soon forget.

That it happened in New York City, my city, and the city that has been the first port of entry for most Ecuadorians who have immigrated to the U.S. in the last many decades, makes it that much sweeter.

My mayor might be Muslim,
My bagel might be Jewish,
But my dreams will always be Ecuadorian, carajo.

For the rest of the year, once a month, I’ll hold office hours. A one-on-one conversation with a Latina or woman of color, followed by a small group session for a handful of others. Free. Just conversation.

The idea came from a realization that access to me has changed over the years. There was a period of my life when students could find me easily. During my years teaching and working around Columbia and Barnard, office hours were often less a scheduled block of time than a standing assumption that if someone needed help, I would make time. But I find that as careers evolve, calendars harden. Layers form between people who might genuinely benefit from talking to one another, and before long, access becomes something that needs to be arranged, scheduled, managed, and justified.

The response was larger than I anticipated. In fact the open call for this month’s office hours is now closed, and my team is working through the submissions (we’ll open them again next month). As I read the responses, I am finding myself paying less attention to the specific questions people wanted to discuss and more attention to how they described the lives they hoped to build.

One of the questions on the form asked what they hoped life would look like when they were eighty years old. Many answered with remarkable specificity. They wrote about homes near water, grandchildren, gardens, community, art, travel, preserving Indigenous traditions, hosting family, remaining curious, staying engaged with their communities, and continuing to learn throughout their lives. Several described futures rooted in relationships, place, and responsibility to others. Even when people were seeking advice about entrepreneurship, investing, leadership, or career transitions, those ambitions often sat within a broader vision of family, friendship, culture, and community.

What emerged from the responses was a reminder that people don’t experience their professional lives as separate from the rest of their lives. The business they want to build, the career they want to pursue, the investment they want to make, or the transition they are contemplating usually sits inside a much bigger picture. The picture includes the people they love, the communities they want to belong to, the places they hope to call home, and the ways they want to spend their time decades from now.

Only a few hours after I posted the office-hours invitation, the sale of Dreamers & Doers was announced.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, Dreamers & Doers is a community that founder Gesche Haas spent more than a decade building for women entrepreneurs. Earlier this month, it was acquired by Christina Salerno, a longtime community member, in a seven-figure transaction. I suspect the acquisition is attracting attention because it represents more than a business changing hands. The reporting surrounding it corrently points to a broader trend: communities built around trust, belonging, relationships, and human connection are becoming increasingly valuable at the same time artificial intelligence is attracting insane amounts of investment, and generally sucking up a lot of the industry oxygen.

The Forbes coverage connected the acquisition to rising loneliness, declining participation in traditional community institutions, and growing demand for third spaces for people to gather. It also highlighted the increasing value being placed on businesses whose primary offering is not information, software, or content, but connection between people.

One example described a prompt Haas shared with members asking how they were really doing. The responses included conversations about grief, health challenges, family struggles, uncertainty, and disappointment, the kinds of topics a lot of us feel pressure to keep outside professional spaces.

The timing of these two experiences felt less coincidental the longer I sat with them.

The women who requested office hours are not short on information. They have access to books, podcasts, newsletters, social media, online courses, search engines, and increasingly sophisticated AI tools. They can learn from experts around the world, often instantly.

Yet an invitation to spend time in conversation with a relative stranger generated more interest than I could accommodate.

For years, we’ve been promised that technology would make the world more connected. In many ways, it has. I live in Ecuador while continuing to run a company in New York. I can communicate instantly with people across continents, collaborate with colleagues thousands of miles away, and maintain relationships that would have been much harder to sustain in the pre-internet times I grew up in.

At the same time, something else is happening. The easier information becomes to access, the more stark the difference between information and relationships becomes. The responses I read were filled with thoughtful, ambitious people. Many were navigating career transitions, building companies, launching projects, raising children, caring for family members, or trying to make significant decisions about the future. It’s clear to me though, that they’re looking for isn’t simply another source of information. My sense is they’re looking for conversation, context, perspective, encouragement, accountability, and the opportunity to think through important questions with another person.

Getting to know these women (even if only on paper), alongside the coverage of Dreamers & Doers left me thinking about the kinds of things that become more valuable as technology advances. The answers we seek may arrive faster. The tools may become more capable. Knowledge may become easier to access. Yet none of those developments eliminate the importance of relationships. If anything, they make the distinct value of relationships easier to recognize.

A community remembers your history. A mentor sees patterns you may not yet see yourself. A friend can challenge your assumptions because they know the circumstances behind them. A conversation can change direction unexpectedly and arrive somewhere neither person intended. Those experiences draw their value from the people involved, not from the efficiency of the exchange.

That may help explain why communities like Dreamers & Doers continue to thrive, why people continue seeking out meaningful gatherings and professional communities, and why so many women responded to a humble invitation for office hours. Even in a world overflowing with information, people remain deeply interested in connection. They want relationships that grow over time. They want opportunities to share ideas, test assumptions, receive guidance, offer support, and participate in communities where they are known as more than a job title or résumé.

Bottom line, when people describe the future they hoped to build, the picture almost always included other people in it. Family. Friends. Neighbors. Collaborators. Communities. Chosen family. The details vary, but the pattern is remarkably consistent.

At a moment when so much public attention is focused on what machines are becoming capable of doing, I must confess, I’m more interested in what human beings continue to seek from one another. Judging from the women who arrived in my inbox over the last few days, our appetite for things AI will never replace appears to be growing.

If you want to understand how to provide abortion access under criminalization in today’s conditions, you don’t start with decades-old pre-Roe frameworks. You look at the people doing it now.

In Ecuador, a collective of women known as Las Comadres has built sophisticated systems to support people seeking abortions in a country where it is not only criminalized, but where stigma is widely and deeply ingrained. When Colombia and Argentina decriminalized, Las Comadres were brought in to train leaders on how to expand access and operate under a new legal framework. That work did not come out of a university or a policy shop. It came from years of figuring it out in real time, under the worst of circumstances (with the support of groups like Mama Cash).

That is what globalization would look like if it were real.

Whatever you think of globalization, whether you think it’s the root of all evil or the thing that will save us, the truth is it has never been what the word suggests. It has not been an exchange. It has been a one way flow, especially of ideas, from the “West” to the rest of the world. What has flowed in the other direction has often not been exchange at all, and if we stop mincing words, it’s largely been extractive and in many cases outright theft.

What we have been calling globalization has, in practice, often functioned as a more polite name for a much older project: colonization.

But the future of the “West,” a concept I don’t have any particular affinity for, so take it to mean the lives of the human beings who live there, not the ideologies or even the nation states, might very well depend on whether we’re willing to take the idea of real exchange seriously.

Because if we did, we’d have to look in very different places for answers.

If you want to understand the latest tactics for fighting voter suppression, you might start with the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, but you don’t end there. You look to women in places like Uganda, organizing right now under conditions of intimidation, violence, and structural exclusion, building strategies for participation in deeply hostile environments.

And if you want to understand how people organize and survive under authoritarianism, there are places across Latin America and beyond where those conditions are not hypothetical and have not been for a long time. The knowledge exists. It’s been built over years of adapting to systems that do not play by their own rules.

Where else are we supposed to go to learn any of this?

A think tank in England? An Ivy League in New England?

That’s as ludicrous as it sounds.

The United States is no longer, and in many cases never was, a leader in most categories that actually matter. You can see it in the data if you care to look. Adult literacy falls below peers with a significant portion of the population functioning at the lowest levels. Health outcomes tell the same story. The country spends more per capita than almost anyone else and people still live shorter lives with higher rates of preventable death. Child poverty remains stubbornly high for a country with this level of wealth.

We are used to thinking of the United States as the place others look to for answers. That story has held for a long time. It has been repeated enough that many people still believe it without checking whether it’s true.

The gravitational pull people assume the United States still has across industries and geographies is no longer there. Some of the world’s most useful knowledge is being produced elsewhere.

Something I hope people in the United States will start to process and digest with humility and, yes, hope. Because the prospect of simply participating in the world as another country, not dominant or predatory, with honesty, complete with warts and imperfections, is something I suspect the rest of the world would welcome.

I truly believe that the only way we, the people of the U.S., not the broken ideologies or unsustainable enterprises, get through what we have created is to sit our asses way the hell down, ingest a big slice of humble pie, and look outward. There is a world full of people solving problems we are only beginning to understand. They are doing it under conditions that require a level of precision, adaptability, and courage that few US citizens have had to develop in the same way.

If our collective culture of exceptionalism could be quiet long enough to actually listen, there’s a high probability we learn something useful. There are lessons from our neighbors, applied under pressure, with real consequences, that could materially change how we navigate what is coming.

Globalization, the real kind, where exchange actually goes in all directions, is not some abstract ideal. At this point, it might be the difference between holding up under what is coming or breaking under it.

The question is whether we are willing to let go of the version of the story where we are always the ones teaching, and accept that in most of the areas that matter right now, we are late.

This message is for my tired friends, the ones with bruises and scars from a lifetime of fighting and pushing for what we love. If you have never done anything to help your community or the people or places that have held you, I will leave you to your own devices to process what leaving might mean. This is not a letter to you. Nor is it for the patriots.

I, like many around me, come from the camp that knows borders are arbitrary lines, drawn by power. Not innocent lines. You can see that in how they are enforced, in the terrorized streets of many cities in the United States. There is nothing accidental about it.

This is for those who have worked tirelessly to leave their people and places better than they found them.

Leaving is not giving up. And staying is not a fool’s errand. Both can be honest. Today I am writing about leaving.

I am not trying to convince you. I know my kind of people. No one will convince you of something that does not sit right in your heart. You are either staying put or leaving, and the time will soon come when the decision will be clear. Whatever that is, even when you make a move you know in your bones is right, something else inevitably shows up, and it feels a lot like guilt.

This post is for that.

Guilt can come from a sense that we did not do enough. That we are stepping away too soon, or at the wrong time, or when others cannot. It can feel like a break in loyalty. Like a failure to stay and fight.

But leaving is not the end.

For a lot of us, leaving is how we continue the marathon that is our life’s work. You cannot carry this work on a body that’s already breaking.

Many of us are leaving because we have given and sacrificed so much that staying puts us at risk. Yes, physically. But more importantly, at risk of losing hope.

Once that goes, the work goes with it.

So we leave to protect the part of us that is still capable of continuing.

Recharging our own batteries, physically and psychologically, is the only way to plan for the long haul.

Going somewhere where we don’t have to fight, where we can let the land do its work and remember what joy feels like around other people, for many of us, is part of how we reemerge.

Part of how we come back able to fight again.

Leaving is not giving up.

It is how some of us stay in the work.

It’s also how some of us retain any hope of returning. Even if it ends up turning out that we don’t. Leaving, regardless of whether we come back or grow new roots, has never been about the work, much less a betrayal. Leaving, for a lot of us, is how we stay whole. And whole is how we keep hope, and the fights we fight, alive.

If you’re reading this with your own version of “someday” sitting nearby, I hope you stay with the question long enough to notice what you keep delaying, and what it has started to cost you. If you feel like sharing, leave a comment with what you’re negotiating with yourself about. I read all replies. The conversation is better when people speak plainly about the lives they’re trying to live.

Thank you.

Is it standard practice to do a pelvic ultrasound during routine OB-GYN visits?

It said no.

Not recommended. Not necessary. Not standard here or anywhere else.

I asked again, assuming the answer was US-centric.

It doubled down.

That’s when I knew it was wrong.

Because I now live in Ecuador, and here it’s basic. Not exceptional. Not concierge medicine. It’s standard care for OB-GYNs do a pelvic ultrasound as part of a routine visit, often at the same time as a pap smear. Not because you’re reporting symptoms, just because it’s important data and part of a complete check-up.

I saw it happen with a friend visiting from the United States.

She’s in her fifties. Her sister died young of metastatic breast cancer. She’s on hormone replacement therapy. She has access to care, good insurance, doctors she trusts.

And despite all of that, she had never had a pelvic ultrasound.

Not once.

The doctor here didn’t panic. She didn’t assume something was wrong. But she was clear. At that age, with that history, not having baseline imaging made no sense. It put my friend at a disadvantage before anything had even gone wrong.

The visit wasn’t even for an exam. They were there to talk through hormone therapy.

The doctor did the ultrasound anyway.

She found a mass. Large enough that it couldn’t be ignored. Large enough that it needed confirmation. Within an hour, we were in radiology. The doctor made a phone call before we arrived and asked them to rush us into the schedule immediately. Within another hour, we had clarity. Benign. Relief, but also a plan. The doctor stayed late to walk through next steps so we didn’t leave with questions hanging.

All in one afternoon.

No referrals across weeks. No insurance approvals. No waiting for permission to look.

Just care.

When I went back to check what the official guidance says in the U.S., I learned that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists does not recommend routine pelvic ultrasounds for screening.

So the AI wasn’t inventing the answer.

It was reflecting the system it learned from.

That matters.

Because it’s easy to blame the tool. Easier than naming what it’s trained on.

The system isn’t neutral. It’s built on incentives. Insurance reimbursement. Standard of care definitions that are shaped as much by cost containment as by prevention. What gets labeled “necessary” is not just a medical judgment. It’s an economic one.

And women live inside the consequences.

Long before AI started repeating biased outcomes, we built systems that normalize them.

There’s a study from Code For Good Now that made the rounds recently. Identical résumés. One with a man’s name, one with a woman’s. The language gets scored differently. His reads as strong. Hers reads as weak.

The pattern at this point is familiar.

So I’m not surprised that AI reflects it. Nor am I surprised that medical guidance does too.

What I am noticing since leaving the US is what happens when you step outside of our broken system, even briefly.

Because this wasn’t a planned medical visit. It was a second opinion out of curiosity, in a different country, inside a healthcare system with different constraints (we have nationalized healthcare here as well as supplementary private insurance).

And it changed the outcome.

Not with a life-saving intervention caught at the last minute. It gave her information she didn’t have. It gave her a baseline. It gave her a doctor who was willing to look, even when we didn’t ask for or require it.

That’s not a miracle. It’s a different threshold for what counts as care.

I want to be careful here.

Moving countries is not an easy or available option for most people. It comes with tradeoffs I don’t take lightly, and I don’t confuse my ability to do it with virtue.

But it has made one thing harder to ignore.

Living in the United States requires a growing number of people to accept conditions that affect their health and call them normal.

Not because doctors don’t care, but because the system makes it difficult to do anything else.

We’ve all felt it, especially if you’ve ever tried to get something taken seriously before it becomes urgent. If you’ve had to argue for a test. If you’ve been told to wait and see.

And waiting has a cost.

Sometimes it shows up later, all at once. And sometimes it shows up slowly, in the accumulation of things that could have been addressed earlier, like in the case of my friend’s sister, and her metastatic breast cancer.

What changes when you step outside of that system, even temporarily, is not just access. It’s perspective.

It’s prompted me to see that what I’d accepted as standard is not universal.

I’m seeing that different choices are being made elsewhere about what deserves attention.

And once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.

To be really clear, I don’t think everyone needs to leave the United States.

But I do think more people might need to start questioning what they’ve been told is sufficient care.

And for those who can, even occasionally, I understand why more people are beginning to include medical appointments in their travel plans. Less as a luxury and more as a way to gather information. A second lens. A comparison that doesn’t exist if you stay in one system your entire life.

And this isn’t because any another country is perfect, but staying inside one system your entire life limits what you can see.

This is part of beginning again.

You start to notice where your standards came from.

You start to question them.

And at some point, you have to decide what you’re willing to keep calling normal.

I read once about a practice some Japanese parents use with their children, and it stayed with me.

At bedtime, they ask a simple question:

What made you feel proud today?

The question isn’t about praise. It doesn’t ask for grades, outcomes, or approval. It asks the child to notice themselves.

Research on this practice looks at the impact of the question itself. Asked consistently, even over a short period, children begin to locate pride internally. They talk about effort. About trying. About how they handled something difficult. Not about winning.

But the research isn’t what stayed with me, I was intrigued by the framing.

Pride, here, isn’t coming from accomplishment. It’s about how someone showed up.

The question itself changes redirects attention

On the final night of my 50th birthday celebration in the Galápagos, I asked a version of that question to the group without planning to.

It was the last dinner. People split across long tables. Sunburned, tired, relaxed in that way that you only see when something has gone well and is coming to an end.

I asked each table to take a moment and answer this, if they wanted:

Name a moment from the trip that you were most proud of yourself for.

I had spent two weeks hearing lovely things celebrating me and I was trying to redirect (deflect?), so it didn’t land as an exercise or icebreaker. And my guests took it seriously right away.

(Galápagos, 50th birthday trip.)

What people shared surprised me.

Three people talked about not knowing how to swim and getting into the ocean anyway (our first time snorkelers). About the fear of stepping off the boat. About deciding not to turn back.

Someone else talked about showing up as their authentic self over the course of the week. No standout moment. Just the absence of editing.

My niece talked about law school and realizing something basic and anchoring. That her opinion had always mattered. Even before she could prove it.

My father said he was relieved that everything had worked out.

Which was how we all learned he’d been worried.

I thought I was hosting a good trip, a memorable experience. I knew the logistics were sound. I knew the setting mattered. I didn’t expect to watch people see themselves differently.

The question didn’t invite comparison. No one tried to impress anyone else. No one framed their answer as an achievement. What surfaced felt more like recognition than accomplishment.

Weeks after the trip ended, in a later exchange, one of my guests shared something with me. She told me she had believed she’d been invited by mistake. That she didn’t think she really belonged.

What changed that belief wasn’t me reassuring her, it was evidence.

The lengths my team and I, including my family, had gone to welcome each guest. The care in the details. The art exhibit in the hotel when they landed, with photographs and stories of each person’s ancestors on the walls.

Her presence had been deliberate.
Not accidental.
Not provisional.

Seeing herself placed that way made it harder to keep telling the old story.

I could be wrong, but I don’t believe she would have been comfortable naming something she wasn’t proud of and being so vulnerable if the group hadn’t first shared what they were proud of.

Most spaces ask people to offer insecurity or fear first. We’ve all seen the Brené Brown talks about vulnerability. But done wrong, I’ve seen it turn into performance and posturing that I f

ind pretty unsatisfying. Pride did something else.

It gave people a way to tell the truth without negotiating for belonging. And I’ve been carrying that question with me since, ending my days with it:

What am I proud of?

Not as a prompt, it feels more like a different way of paying attention.

Because in the middle of any real transition, it’s easy to wait for someone else to name what matters, or to hold off until you feel more certain, more fluent, more ready. In other words, external validation. But pride, when it’s honest, interrupts that waiting. It makes you answer for yourself, right now, with the life you’re actually living.

I’m increasingly finding that’s the work of every transition worth making. Not postponing your own recognition. Not waiting for the story to be finished before you claim your place in it. No more someday. Just the truth of what you’re proud of, named in the present tense, before anyone else has a chance to opine on what counts.

(For more insights from the brilliant folks on the epic Galapagos trip, I invite you to read this lovely piece from my friend Dr. Mitra Ray.)

It hit me in the shower the other day, holy shit, I live in the Amazon. I am living in the Amazon headwaters, driving distance from some of the most biodiverse jungle on the planet.

Last summer, on a road trip a little northeast of here, I bought what I thought was just locally made honey from a group of women entrepreneurs. Only afterward did I learn that it was medicinal Melipona honey, made by stingless bees that have existed for around sixty‑five million years. These bees lived at the same time as dinosaurs. They are so ecologically significant that Peru granted them legal protection (thank you, Dr Rosa Vasquez Espinoza), making them, as far as I know, the first insects to be granted legal rights.

That honey was not a novelty or a souvenir. It was the outcome of an intact system. Women, forest, insects, history, law, and livelihood moving together without needing to be separated, labeled, or justified.

When I was fifteen, I watched a movie called Mind Walk. It introduced me to complexity, chaos theory, and sub‑atomic physics. It exposed the failure of mechanistic thinking. It cracked open the worldview beneath my entire education. The idea that our world is a machine composed of independent parts that can be understood by breaking them down.

Intellectually, that shift stayed with me.

Living inside its implications is something else entirely.

How do you explain what water is to a fish? Naming the failure of a worldview that defines everything you know is similar. You can see it and describe it without understanding it, until you step far enough away to feel the discomfort in your bones.

I grew up traveling regularly to the Ecuadorian Andes. For most of my young life, the Amazon existed in my imagination as something exotic and distant. I first lived in it at eighteen during a college exchange program. My family couldn’t understand why I chose that instead of a more conventional “study abroad” destination like Paris, where I’d already lived and studied the language. Thankfully, I did not listen.

In fact, I returned whenever I could. Each time, keeping the Amazon mentally separate from the Andes, and separate from my family’s world. I accepted the division as it was handed down to me, as if it were natural.

It is not.

The Andes are the Amazon. The headwaters of a river are not conceptually distinct from the river itself. They’re part of the same living system. Treating them otherwise is a pointless abstraction.

Seemingly unrelated.

In January, a beloved friend arrived in Ecuador and met with my primary care physician here. She’d not come in with concerns about her legs. He examined them anyway. Within minutes, he identified circulation issues that put her at risk of blood clots. He required an ultrasound before clearing her to fly to the Galápagos a few days later.

On the surface, this was unremarkable. A doctor doing his job.

Then I learned she had suffered from foot problems for most of her life. She has access to care, significant resources, and podiatrists on speed dial. And yet no one had looked above her ankles.

No one asked what system those feet belonged to.

The thinking behind that oversight is the same thinking that allowed me to believe the Andes were not the Amazon. A mechanistic worldview that isolates parts, treats symptoms independently, and avoids responsibility for the whole.

I’ve spent my adult life aware that this worldview is flawed. What changed now is my proximity to another way. Being somewhere that doesn’t reinforce mechanistic assumptions every day makes their failures harder to ignore.

Back to the honey.

Those stingless bees are producing medicine we do not yet fully understand. Curative properties we have barely begun to recognize. They existed long before our theories, long before our institutions, well before the habit of treating living systems as a collection of parts.

Those bees cannot exist without a healthy Amazon.

The medicine exists because the system does. Feet belong to legs. Rivers begin somewhere. Headwaters are not optional.

What my departure from the United States is really teaching me is how useless many of the worldviews we inherited have become. They are poor instruments for perceiving living systems, and even worse ones for making decisions inside them. Distance has not clarified everything, but it has stripped away assumptions I didn’t realize were holding things together.

Once that happens, attention shifts upstream. You start noticing where foundations are being weakened, where conditions are being depleted, where short‑term solutions are prioritized over common sense and humanity.

I am thankfully, not alone here. I’m in the company of exceptional humans like my friend Michelle Arevalo‑Carpenter and her Impaqto Capital, Amazon–Andes Fund. She’s building pathways for capital to support the restoration and resilience of living systems from within the region itself, ensuring that small businesses in the headwaters have what they need to thrive and be net‑generative.

And then there’s Edgar Montenegro, who recently asked me to join the board of his company, Amapuri, based in the Colombian Amazon. They use agroforestry to help smallholder farmers move away from illicit crops while restoring the land they depend on.

This is what happens when lived experience collides with inherited thinking.

Life transitions have a way of exposing the uselessness of the worldviews we were handed.

Reality keeps operating anyway.

The bees already know this.

And I feel like the rest of us are being invited to catch up.

Two Julys ago, I spent time with NASA astronaut Victor Glover and his wife, Dionna, during a Renaissance weekend with friends in Banff, Canada.

Over the course of that weekend, across multiple conversations, Victor walked us through the mission in detail. He focused on mechanics and risk. What had been tested. What had not. Where the uncertainty still lived. He spoke with precision, not Hollywood dramatics.

One part of his explanation stayed with all of us. He described the blackout window. The period of time when the spacecraft would be on the far side of the Moon, completely out of communication. No data. No signal. No way to reach Earth. If something went wrong during that window, there would be no call for help and no one watching.

By the end of the weekend, each one of us in attendance was deeply invested. It was a room full of people used to solving problems. Strategists, funders, operators, connectors. People accustomed to being able to make things happen.

One night after a conversation I’ll never forget, we asked Victor what we could do to help. How we could support him and Dionna? How we could be useful to their family?

Victor answered with one request.

He asked us to pray for him during the 40-minute radio shadow. And for Dionna, for their four daughters, and for the rest of the crew.

I’m an atheist. And sitting there listening to the physics of that risk, even I understood the ask.

There’s something about danger when it’s described without theater that sharpens attention. Care comes alive. You feel implicated. Holding people in mind while they are exposed to that level of risk changes you, whatever language you use for it.

As Victor might agree, love moves, even without shared faith.

Last week, he returned from his mission safely.

That same week, Karol G, the Colombian superstar, became the first Latina to headline Coachella.

These moments may not have happened at the same time, but they belong together.

Both unfolded under relentless visibility, with cameras, crowds, and global attention fully trained. And both involved people of color occupying historic space without erasing themselves to do it.

Victor traveled farther from Earth than any human before him while carrying his faith openly, without asking anyone else to share it. Karol G stepped onto one of the largest cultural stages in the world and refuted the fiction of the self‑made woman. She brought an all‑female mariachi. She named the artists who made her presence possible. She made her lineage undeniable.

We can analyze all day long but quite simply, both Victor and Karol G brought love with them. And multiplied it.

That matters not the least because people of color are rarely formed by systems that offer care freely. Many of us grow up under structures designed to exclude us, to surveil us, to demand exceptional performance simply to remain present.

Astronauts and musicians don’t share a job description. Yet, across race, geography, and class, what many people of color share is sustained exposure to hostility inside systems that were never built for us.

So when people shaped under those conditions step into spaces designed to exclude them and arrive whole, a lot of us notice.

What Victor and Karol G’s historic moments showed us, at a time of colossal leadership failure globally, is the kind of presence this moment actually demands.

I have no doubt we will see backlash. It tends to follow this kind of visibility, predictably.

When lawmakers, courts, and institutions actively make voting harder, they are responding to the fear of what happens when people participate.

The same pattern is unfolding here.

Any attempts to discredit, suppress, or punish people who bring love into public life are deliberate. They come from fear. Love, defiantly carried by people long expected to remain silent or grateful, brings people together. It breaks narratives that rely on division.

All hostility directed at my community, Latin American immigrants, indigenous people, and other people of color in the United States over the last 250 years grows out of that fear.

Victor did not ask us to reduce the risk he faced or elevate him somehow. Karol G did not reshape herself to soften the gaze of a nation eager to punish visibility.

They showed what happens when people the world tries to marginalize thrive and show up with love, without erasing who they are.

That kind of defiant presence expands what we’re taught to believe is possible.

And that’s why it terrifies those invested in keeping history stalled.

Prueba A: yo, siendo adolescente, de visita en Ecuador, de pie en la cocina de mi familia, anunciando una tragedia.

Quería señalar mis ojeras. Pero lo que salió de mi boca, con mucho entusiasmo y señalando dramáticamente, fue orejas.

Orejas.

—Míra mis orejas —insistí, señalándome debajo de los ojos—. MÍRALAS.

Me recibieron con silencio. Ese tipo de silencio en el que sabes que tu público está debatiendo en voz baja si estás bromeando o si estás mal de la cabeza.

Mi familia hizo lo que hace toda familia cuando la vida les presenta algo que merece ser contado. Desde entonces, han asumido la responsabilidad de contárselo a todo aquel que quiera escuchar. Han pasado décadas. Todavía estoy pagando las consecuencias de aquel momento, ahora tristemente célebre.

Empiezo por aquí porque, ¿por qué no? Mis primas y tías agradecerán que la historia continúe. Pero también porque estoy notando que las transiciones tienen la particularidad de exponer partes de uno mismo que uno creía resueltas.
No en los momentos épicos. En los pequeños. En las humillaciones cotidianas. En esos momentos donde la confianza se manifiesta pronto y la competencia llega más tarde, si es que llega.

Resulta que la fluidez depende de la situación.

Hace poco me mudé a Ecuador, a Cuenca, con una sensación de preparación que, en retrospectiva, resulta optimista. Pensaba que me sentiría inmediatamente en casa. No solo en mi primer idioma, sino también en mi interior.

La fluidez, al parecer, depende de la situación.

Resulta que mi español suena mejor en mi imaginación que en voz alta. Mis verbos han sido especialmente propensos a la traición pública.

Un comentario que me hizo reflexionar.

Hace unos días, estaba leyendo las respuestas a la primera publicación de esta serie, sobre por qué me mudé a Cuenca .

Un comentario me hizo reflexionar

Su nombre es Juana Estrella.

Si vives en Cuenca, sabes quién es. Es una de esas personas que se sienten más como un elemento fijo que como un individuo. Una actriz de teatro con una trayectoria de décadas . Alguien que pertenece a la vida cultural de este lugar de una manera que no se puede fingir.

No conozco bien a Juana. Nos conocimos porque ella me presentó maravillosamente a la actriz y al escritor que actuaron y produjeron una obra para la celebración de mi 50 cumpleaños aquí en enero.

Por eso me sorprendió su comentario.

Estaba escrito al estilo muy ecuatoriano, español entrelazado con quichua. Me llamó mujer de decisiones profundas. Luego escribió algo más, algo que me impactó con una seguridad a la que no estoy acostumbrada.

Tu “llakta” te da la bienvenida. Siempre.

Si nunca te has sentido abrumado por una bienvenida, puede que no entiendas por qué una frase como esa puede dejarte sin aliento.

No porque sea extravagante.

Porque no es condicional.

La formación

También porque sé lo que significa crecer en Estados Unidos, en un país estructurado por un racismo profundo, donde se presume que algunos cuerpos pertenecen y se espera que el resto justifiquemos nuestra presencia. Aprendes a ser legible. Aprendes a impresionar. Aprendes a ser útil. Y aprendes a tratar la competencia como un pasaporte y la excelencia como un escudo. Según esa lógica, pertenecer no es un derecho de nacimiento. Es condicional. Y tus errores son pruebas que se recopilan, se recuerdan e incluso se utilizan como arma contra uno mismo.

Así que te vuelves muy bueno para no hacer el ridículo.

Al menos no en público.

El brindis

Hace poco, durante el brindis de bienvenida en mi fiesta de 50, rodeado de amigos y familia, me olvidé cómo pronunciar «ucraniano» en español. Con las cámaras y todas las miradas fijas en mí, le pregunté al público, y un amable invitado me rescató, permitiéndome terminar el maldito brindis en algo parecido a un buen español.

Por supuesto, el momento quedó grabado en vídeo, y está incluido en el resumen editado para que el mundo lo disfrute.

No es una gran historia. Sin embargo, es una historia muy honesta.

Esta es la parte de mi mudanza que no anticipé.

¿Hasta qué punto empezar de nuevo implica aceptar ser visto mientras aún estás aprendiendo y adaptándote torpemente? No una sola vez. Repetidamente. En público. Con testigos.

Mi condicionamiento cultural me lleva a interpretar esos momentos como un veredicto. Prueba de que no pertenezco aquí. Prueba de que no puedo sentir que este lugar también puede ser mío.

Prueba de que debería guardar silencio hasta que lo haga “bien”.

Y entonces llega algo como el comentario de Juana. Sin lista de requisitos. Sin audición. Sin “siempre y cuando”. Simplemente bienvenida.

Acerca de esa palabra

Acerca de la palabra, * llakta *.

Lo he estado llevando conmigo durante días, dándole vueltas como si fuera una piedra, dedicándole mucha más atención filosófica de la que quizá se merecía.

Pero antes de que me den demasiada importancia como políglota, todo empezó con una búsqueda en Google. Porque resulta que mi quichua está incluso más oxidado que mi español.

“Llakta,” en el sentido en que ella lo usaba, entiendo significa algo así como tu comunidad, tu lugar, tu gente. Tu ciudad natal, pero también algo más grande. Es un sentido de pertenencia expansiva. Es a la vez donde vives y donde te sientes acogido.

Así que uno de los momentos en los que me sentí más “en casa” llegó con una palabra que no podía definir sin el Traductor de Google.

Lo cual, a su manera, es perfecto.

Primero llegó la bienvenida. Después, la comprensión. Nunca me enseñaron a esperar esa secuencia.

Se acabó el “algún día”

Y es parte de la razón por la que esto del “algún día” se acabo. “Algún día” siempre fue el lugar donde guardaba la versión de mí misma que finalmente sería lo suficientemente competente como para merecer las cosas. Lo suficientemente fluida. Lo suficientemente segura. Lo suficientemente exitosa.

No sé tú, pero yo estoy harta de negociar con esa versión de mi vida.

No tengo consejos. Mi cerebro quizás sea el lugar donde mueren las mentiritas de autoayuda.

Sin embargo, gracias a esta transición, estoy prestando atención, en tiempo real, a lo que se necesita para vivir un cambio sin considerar cada momento incómodo como un fracaso mortal.

Resulta que lo absurdo y el delirio no son el enemigo. Quizás sean el precio de entrada.

This essay is now also available in Spanish [here].

I have a long, proud history of being confident in Spanish in the same way toddlers are confident in their ability to pour milk.

Exhibit A: teenage me, visiting Ecuador, standing in my family’s kitchen, announcing a tragedy.

I meant to point out my ojeras, bags under my eyes. What I actually said, with my full chest and dramatic pointing, was orejas.

Ears.

“Look at my ears,” I insisted, jabbing under my eyes. “LOOK. AT. THEM.”

There was a pause. The kind of pause where your audience is quietly debating whether you’re joking or unwell.

Then my family did what families do when life hands them something eminently tellable. They accepted it. They have been accepting their duty to tell everyone who will listen ever since. It’s been decades. I’m still paying for my now-infamous orejas moment.

I start here because, why not? My cousins and aunties will appreciate the story getting more mileage. But also because I’m noticing transitions have a way of stripping you down to the parts of yourself you thought were settled. Not in the cinematic moments. In the tiny ones. The ordinary humiliations. The places where your confidence shows up early and your competence arrives later, if at all.

Fluent, turns out, is situational.

I recently moved to Ecuador, specifically, Cuenca, with a sense of readiness that now feels delusional. I thought “home” would feel fluent. Not just in Spanish, but in me.

Fluent, it seems, is situational.

Turns out, my Spanish is fine until it isn’t. My verbs have been especially committed to public betrayal.

A Comment That Stopped Me

A few days ago, I was reading the responses to the first post in this series, on why I moved to Cuenca.

One comment stopped me.

Her name is Juana Estrella.

If you live in Cuenca, you know who she is. She is one of those people who feels less like an individual and more like a fixture. A theatre actress with a career spanning decades. Someone who belongs to the cultural life of this place in a way you can’t manufacture.

I don’t know Juana well. We met because she made wonderful introductions that helped me find the actor and writer who ultimately performed and produced a piece for my 50th celebration here in January.

Which is why her comment surprised me.

It was written in the most Ecuadorian way, Spanish braided with Quichua. She called me a woman of deep conviction. Then she wrote something else, something that landed with a kind of certainty I am not used to receiving without conditions.

My **llakta** welcomes me. Always.

If you’ve never flinched at welcome, you might not understand why a sentence like that can knock the wind out of you.

Not because it’s extravagant.

Because it’s not conditional.

The Training

Because I know what it is to grow up in the U.S. inside a country structured by white supremacy, where some bodies are presumed to belong and the rest of us are expected to justify our presence. You learn to become legible. You learn to be impressive. You learn to be useful. You learn to treat competence like a passport and excellence like a shield. In that logic, belonging isn’t a birthright. It’s conditional. And your mistakes are evidence that gets collected, remembered and even weaponized.

The Toast

Recently, giving the welcome toast at my 50th celebration, in a room of friends and family, I forgot how to pronounce “Ukrainian” in Spanish. With cameras and eyeballs on me, I asked the audience, and someone compassionately rescued me so I could finish the damn toast in something approximating good Spanish. It was, of course, captured on video. It’s now in the edited recap for everyone to enjoy.

That is not a big story. It is, however, a very honest one.

This is the part I did not fully anticipate. How much of starting again is agreeing to be seen while you are still clumsy. Not once. Repeatedly. In public. With witnesses.

The old training in me wants to treat those moments like a verdict. Proof I don’t belong. Proof I don’t get to claim this place. Proof I should stay quiet until I can get it “right.”

And then something like Juana’s comment arrives. No checklist. No audition. No “as long as.” Just welcome.

About That Word

About that word, *llakta*.

I’ve been carrying it around for days, turning it over like a stone, giving it far more philosophical attention than it wanted.

And before you give me too much multilingual street cred, it started with a Google search. Because it turns out, my Quichua is even more rusty than my Spanish.

“Llakta,” in the way she used it, means something like your community, your place, your people. Your hometown, but also bigger than that. It’s belonging with edges. It’s both where you live and where you are held.

So one of the moments where I felt most at “home” arrived in a word I couldn’t define without Google Translate.

Which is, in its own way, perfect.

Welcome came first. Understanding came later.

That order is not what I was trained to expect.

No More Someday

And it’s part of why “no more someday” matters to me. Someday was always the place I stored the version of myself who would finally be competent enough to deserve the room. Fluent enough. Certain enough. Accomplished enough.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of bargaining with that version of my life.

I don’t have advice. I might be where self-help delusions go to die. I am however paying attention, in real time, to what it takes to live through a transition without treating every awkward moment as a moral failure.

Turns out, absurdity and delusion aren’t the enemy. They might be the entry fee.

[Bethann Moran Handzlik, “Bringing In The Garden.”]

The first time I remember being told to look away from roadkill, I was a child. I think, whether they were conscious of it or not, my parents could feel my fragility in those moments.

They taught me that loving animals was a moral good.

Yet they raised me in a world where killing them is considered normal.

Something in me had to shut down to hold both.

Sensitive

People who know me wouldn’t call me sensitive.

They might say perceptive. Strong. Stubborn. There are a dozen adjectives I suspect would come up before sensitive, and certainly before extremely sensitive.

And yet, there are entire parts of myself I’ve shut down, in order to survive.

I still look away when I spot roadkill.

The first shutdown

I grew up not understanding how the things placed on our plates were the same beings I had been taught to love and be gentle toward. In my house, loving animals and being kind to them was framed as a core tenet of being a good human. And yet those values sat directly across the table from a dinner that contradicted them.

That contradiction was unbearable.

So I shut something off.

I learned how not to connect. I learned how not to look cows in the eye at petting farms, because the proximity between that living being and the hamburger being eaten beside me at lunch was too much to hold. I needed to bury it and make myself numb.

I don’t say this to make anyone feel guilty about eating meat (though yes, you should probably listen to your doctor here). I say it because this was one of the first ways I learned to survive, by amputating a part of myself. And I was good at it. I was so good that I successfully shut down an entire piece of my humanity and learned that is what was needed to go about my life.

Most of the time, that switch stays flipped.

And then, every once in a while, it doesn’t.

The moment it flips back on

Today my dog found a bird in the park. The same sick bird I had seen days earlier and moved somewhere safer so my dog wouldn’t find it.

But this evening, he did.

He caught it in his mouth, and it was still alive. I pried his jaw open with my hands and freed it, but I was too late. I watched that bird take its last breaths while I tried to restrain my dog. I stood helpless as its body emptied itself of life, and this time I didn’t look away.

There is a very specific weight you feel when that happens.

The moment when a living thing goes limp. Lifeless.

It took me right back to every animal I have ever held while they were put to sleep. The exact same feeling. The same unbearable intimacy with mortality.

This is the part of myself I have buried.

And when it resurfaces, it is not subtle. It is not manageable. It is not compatible with functioning in the modern world.

Functioning means not being the person who has to pull over and break down every time I see a shadow on the road. It means being able to sit at a table while someone eats a hamburger. It means not collapsing entirely over an accident in the park.

So for most of my life, I have carried this as a dirty little secret: that I am actually one dead bird away from being entirely nonfunctional.

There is sadness in that. A kind of loneliness. And until recently, there was also something deeply isolating about it, as if this were my own private flaw. My secret fragility.

And then the world changed.

Ambient tragedy

Genocide is being livestreamed.

We are holding in our hands devices that exist because of the labor and brutality of children in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We know this.

At the same time, we are told that these same machines, these same platforms, are necessary for our children to succeed in school, in work, in life. Even as they are engineered to harm them relentlessly, psychologically and neurologically, every damn day.

There are tragedies now that are not occasional. They are ambient.

And impossible decisions are no longer rare turning points. They are daily requirements for participation in normal life.

What I have noticed, sometimes with heartbreak and sometimes with grim recognition, is that everyone around me is now learning how to do the thing I learned as a child.

They are learning how to shut pieces of themselves down in order to wake up, make breakfast, pay the mortgage, raise the kids, feed the dog, care for aging parents, and function.

It is a terrible muscle. I wish no one had to develop it.

But I see it everywhere.

And I want to say this as plainly as possible: I see you.

If this feels new or disarming, I hope this acknowledgment offers some small salve. I wish I could tell you it gets easier. I lie to myself and tell myself that sometimes, because it is the only way to get through the day. The truth is, there are weeks, even months, when I forget I ever did this to myself.

And then something small and seemingly insignificant brings me right back.

Right back to the seven year old girl being told that the duck in the soup she was eating used to be her pet.

The daily choice

At that age, I had a choice. I could let my world implode, which would have been jarring but honest. Or I could keep laughing with my family, let the banter continue undisturbed, and go on living my life.

We tend to talk about those choices as if we only make them once or twice.

But right now, it feels like we are being asked to make them every single day.

To implode or to keep going.

To feel everything or to be responsible, functional, and reliable.

It does not feel natural.

And yet we have normalized it.

The truth is, this bargain doesn’t get easier. It does not resolve. It feels like a deal with the devil, and the devil always reneges.

And still, we live. The sun comes up the next morning. Somehow, improbably, it remains possible not just to survive but to continue.

Maybe even to thrive.

But thriving, I think, requires telling the truth about the switch. About the fact that it is not permanent. That it flips on and off. And when it flips back on, it can bring you to your knees. It brought me there today. It brought me there the day we learned about Dolores Huerta and the other survivors.

It feels important to have compassion for the version of ourselves that pulls the switch to survive. But I increasingly think we also need to remember that it is a switch. Feeling is not gone. It resurfaces. It always will. Or at least I hope it does.

I look at the people who are burning the world down, or trying to, and I suspect this does not happen to them. Or maybe it did once, and they shut it off for good. I have no doubt that that’s part of what is broken in them. Not that they feel too much, but that they feel nothing at all.

I understand the temptation.

If you had asked me an hour before that bird died whether I wanted to feel what I felt this afternoon, I would have said absolutely not. I can think of a hundred things I would rather have done with my evening.

And yet.

Every once in a while, this is what is required of us.

Not courage to perform. Not resilience as productivity. But the courage to fall when something breaks us, whether we chose it or not.

I did not choose this afternoon.

But I am here.

Not alone

And what I am noticing, maybe for the first time, is that I am not alone in this in the way I once thought I was.

I look around and see people everywhere doing the same internal, brutal work. Learning what parts of themselves must be turned off in order to participate in daily life. Learning how to function while carrying knowledge that would otherwise flatten them.

This is not a personal failing. It is not fragility. It is not weakness.

It is coordination.

We are collectively learning how to live inside an impossible set of contradictions without imploding every morning. We are learning when to look, when to look away, and how much of ourselves we can afford to keep online at any given moment.

And maybe before anything can be meaningfully fixed, the thing we have to stop doing is pretending we are carrying it alone.

To acknowledge that we are all engaged in the same terrible dance:

telling ourselves “not now,”

flipping the switch,

and going on.

It’s not fair, but it might just be what allows the next moment to exist at all.

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Why I Chose to Leave the U.S. for Ecuador

Before I turned fifty, I chose to begin the process of leaving the United States and beginning again in South America, settling in Cuenca, Ecuador, the home of a large swath of my family, a place I first visited at 13, that managed to capture and keep my attention even after decades of extensive, I would argue, perhaps excessive travels.

I still run my company in New York. I’m still the president and co‑founder of Known. The work continues, the responsibility remains, and none of this was an exit from a life I built or a rejection of ambition. What changed was my relationship to waiting.

This move came from a growing recognition that at some point, delay stops being neutral. It starts shaping the body, the days, and the future in ways that are harder to undo. You may recognize this moment yourself, the one where postponement no longer feels like patience and begins to feel like avoidance, even when everything on the surface still looks functional and intact.

I write about choosing again when waiting stops feeling honest. What follows is my first attempt to put language around my reasons behind that choice.

1) Health

For a long time, I treated my body as something I could negotiate with, as if a few good habits and a strong will could offset the steady pressure of running hard, carrying responsibility, and staying sharp in a country that often rewards endurance more than it rewards care. If you’ve ever been the person who people count on, the person who keeps the wheels on, the person who can be trusted to hold the difficult thing, then you probably understand how easy it is to confuse high functioning with well being, and how tempting it becomes to call that arrangement “fine” simply because it hasn’t fallen apart yet.

Over time, I started noticing the cost in ways that didn’t make for dramatic storytelling, but did make for undeniable data, because the body keeps records even when the mind stays busy, and it will eventually ask you to account for what you’ve been asking it to carry. Coming back to Ecuador did not solve anything by itself, and I’m not interested in selling geographic cures, but it did change my baseline in a way I didn’t expect, and that shift forced a simple question into the foreground: how much of what I had been living with was truly necessary, and how much of it had simply become normal.

If you’re reading this with a nervous system that has grown accustomed to bracing, then you already know what I mean, because the relief is rarely loud, and yet you feel it immediately when it arrives.

2) Pragmatism

We don’t need more evidence that stability isn’t guaranteed. You can call it political polarization, you can call it authoritarian drift, you can call it global volatility, but the label matters less than the lived consequence, which is that many people are quietly recalculating where they want to be anchored, and what they want to be near when institutions wobble and social contracts break.

When I say this move was pragmatic, I don’t mean it as a flex and I don’t mean it as fear, because realism can exist without panic. Planning can exist without catastrophizing. What I mean is that as I approached fifty, I took a sober inventory of what I value and what I can tolerate, and I asked myself where those two lists had the best chance of coexisting.

You may be doing your own version of this, even if you’re not moving countries, because pragmatism shows up in smaller choices too, like the boundary you stop negotiating, the relationship you stop rationalizing, the health issue you stop postponing, the place you choose because it supports the life you want rather than the life you’d hoped for (or the election outcome that didn’t happen).

3) Dreams

There’s a version of this story that could be told as a bold leap, and there’s the truth, which is that some dreams stay with you not because you’re sentimental, but because they are accurate. When I was thirteen and first came here, something settled in me with a clarity I didn’t understand then. And even after years of travel and movement and building a life elsewhere, that early knowing kept resurfacing, not as nostalgia, but as orientation. Maybe the product of having ancestors from the middle of the world?

The tricky thing about deferred dreams is that postponing them rarely feels like refusal in the moment. It often feels responsible, especially for people who have been trained to be competent, to be strategic, to be grateful, to not ask for too much, and to prioritize everyone and everything else. You may recognize that training in yourself. It’s especially common among immigrants and children of immigrants, where ambition gets framed as duty, and duty gets framed as love. Love, of course, is always a reason to wait.

At a certain point, though, the question stops being whether the dream is reasonable and becomes whether you are willing to live with the cost of never finding out.

4) Safety

I will always have love for the city that was so good to me. In a lot of ways, NYC will always be home, because the city (and the country I often lament contains it) formed and changed me in ways I can’t deny. But the U.S. also asked a lot of me, and sometimes it asked for a tolerance I could no longer justify. If you’ve ever lived in a place that you love while also feeling your body tighten at the ways the culture shifts around you, then you know how complicated it can be to name the moment when belonging requires you suppress too much.

Safety is a loaded word, and I don’t use it lightly, because I don’t believe there is any place on earth that can feel truly safe now, and anyone promising that is lying or being coerced. What I mean is simpler and more personal than that: I reached a point where staying required a level of normalization that began to erode my sense of dignity, and I could no longer pretend that endurance was the same thing as resilience.

If you have ever realized that the line moved while you were busy adapting, you understand why discernment, at some point, might look like departure.

5) Privilege

I also want to be honest about the fact that this choice was possible for me in part because my family never fully severed ties to Ecuador (or my mother’s native Colombia), and because my parents protected certain connections that many families are pressured to abandon in the name of assimilation. Language stayed alive. Relationships stayed active. Access stayed within reach. That reality matters, because it shapes who gets to consider a move like this and who does not, and it also shapes how supported someone feels once they arrive.

I carry gratitude for that, and I carry responsibility as well, because having options is not a moral achievement, and it isn’t proof of virtue, but it does create obligations around how you speak about your choices, how you tell the story, and how you make room for the many people whose constraints are real and non negotiable.

What comes next?

This is the beginning of a series, and I’m writing this here so you know what you’re being invited into. I plan to chronicle the lived experience of uprooting a life and rebuilding it, including the moments that feel expansive and the moments that feel disorienting (i.e. realizing your language skills aren’t as good as you thought, haha). I want to do that without turning it into performance, without flattening it into lessons, and without pretending that clarity always arrives on schedule (not sure if I’m clear now, frankly). Writing is sometimes how I get clear.

If you’re navigating your own “what’s next,” whether it involves geography or health or family or a dream you’ve deferred longer than you want to admit, then I hope you feel seen here. No one needs to justify their longing in advance (13 year old me didn’t), and you don’t need to wait for a crisis to give you permission to change your life. Sometimes the most honest reason is just that you’ve outgrown the version of yourself that agreed to postpone.

If you’re considering something similar, whether that involves a move, a health decision, or a change you’ve delayed longer than you meant to, tell me what you’re trying to figure out and what information would actually help you. I won’t pretend to have universal answers, but I can keep documenting what I’m learning, including the parts that are messier and more instructive than polished.

(I’m reading all comments.)

I’ll continue this in the next Leap Again — No More Someday entry.