Honesty that sparks connection.
What's happening: I walked into a room of 10 badass Latina entrepreneurs and fell apart — in the best possible way.
What you'll find here: The story of a permission I didn't know I was still waiting for, and what it revealed about the box I'd quietly built around myself. Again.
The real talk: The same pattern that kept me from joy in my personal life followed me into the thing I built to set myself free.
I want to tell you about the moment I started crying in front of 10 strangers.
It was the good kind — the kind that happens when something true gets said out loud after being quiet for too long. Pero still. Not exactly how I planned to spend my Friday.
I had just joined The Table, an intensive for entrepreneurs. Ten women in the room, all of them magnetic, brilliant, building something real. And the moment I walked in, I felt it: that old, familiar question creeping in.
Is what I'm building... enough?
When it was my turn to share my project, something I hadn't planned happened. I opened my mouth to talk about my newsletter and before I knew it, I was talking about everything else. The health stuff. The heaviness of being a first-gen Latina with deep ties to immigrant communities. All of it spilling out, things I'd been carrying without realizing just how heavy they were until I was in a room where I felt safe enough to set them down.
And then someone asked: "What do you actually want?"
I sobbed. Because I knew the answer immediately, and I hadn't let myself say it in a long time.
I want to dream big. I want to feel joy without consequence. I want to write and read books and bake and just... be me. I want to stop giving so much of myself to everything else that there's nothing left for the things that light me up just because they light me up.
The leader of our group looked at me and offered: "I give you permission to do all of those things."
I know I didn't need it from her. But you know what? I needed to hear it. She knew that. And I cried harder.
Here's the part I've been sitting with — because this wasn't the first time this has happened to me.
A few years ago, I did a group coaching program. That was the first time I realized how much I'd been suppressing joy in favor of being responsible. Dependable. Useful. The eldest daughter who takes care of everyone. I'd spent so long nudging my own dreams toward service — not because I didn't genuinely want to serve, but because I'd absorbed the message that just wanting things for myself wasn't a good enough reason.
I thought I'd done the work. I thought I'd untangled myself from that.
Después del intensive, I sat with my journal and realized: I had. In my professional life, I really had. But somewhere along the way, I'd brought the exact same pattern into my personal life and what I had been building to be free.
I started treating my newsletter like a job description. I told myself my brand needed to grow into coaching and speaking — because I watched other brilliant women doing it and assumed that's what success was supposed to look like. I began filtering myself. Packaging my insights into neat frameworks. Quietly wondering whether any given piece of content was "worth" putting in front of you all.
I was doing the eldest daughter thing again. Just behind a newsletter.
La verdad es que there is so much of myself I haven't fully shared with you yet. Not because I've been hiding, exactly. But because I've been quietly asking: Is this enough? Is the me who dreams about pastries and bread — who never became a pastry chef because someone told her that wasn't a real career — is she enough? Is the me who lights up surrounded by books enough? Who feels genuine butterflies putting her plans into a planner? Who has 2,000 pictures of her dogs and counting? Who feels everything so deeply she sometimes has to take a breath before she can respond?
Is that me — the unfiltered, unpackaged, fully herself one — is she enough to make you care?
I'm not entirely on the other side of that question yet. Some days will be harder than others to show up as myself, and I know that. The fear is still there. But sitting at that table with ten women who saw all of me — the crying and the dreams and the heaviness and the hope — and still cheered for me? That shifted something. The fear got quieter.
And I've decided to take up more space.
So here's what I want you to know: more of me is coming. The baking experiments, the book moments, the planner joy — all of it. Not because it's a content strategy, but because the real, fully-herself version of me is more interesting than the curated one, and you deserve to meet her.