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.