You’re drained, unsure, circling the same thought loops every week. But you’re also practical. You need the paycheck, the health insurance, the stability—especially now.

So how do you make a decision that’s not just smart, but sustainable?

One that honors your mind, body, and future self?

This guide offers a values-aligned, nervous-system-friendly approach to deciding whether to stay, pivot, or walk away from your current career path.

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So I wanted to give some context for this because 3 years ago I started a podcast… unbeknownst to me, because I didn’t set out to start a podcast, I just wanted some sort of way to decompress and kind of make sense of work, ways to work, and ways to make money, and it turned out that using my voice felt like the best way to make sense of things.

I didn’t know what was gonna come from that, and then here we are three years later with a different iteration of the podcast and work, and making sense of it is still one of the threads that I come back to.

This topic of a nervous system aligned guide is very near and dear to me because, as I have grown in myself and learned different skills, what has consistently remained true is focusing on what’s going on inside me more than what is going on outside. That’s not to say that the job market, economy, rent, and taxes don’t influence the jobs and the way we go about navigating work.

That’s a question for another day: why the economy or why society doesn’t take individuals and what individuals live through more into account, but hopefully this guide or these kinds of questions help in this time of reevaluating what works, what doesn’t work, whether there is a shift that needs to be made, what that shift needs to look like, and hopefully this is something that you can kind of tweak and go back to again and again.

5 Signs It Might Be Time to Go

These aren’t just red flags. They’re nervous system signals your body might be sending you—quietly, consistently, persistently.

1. You’re in a Constant State of Freeze or Fawn

You over-accommodate, say “yes” when you mean “no,” or feel like your only way to survive is to keep the peace. Staying shouldn’t mean self-erasure.

2. You No Longer Recognize Yourself in the Work

Your values have evolved, but the work hasn’t. You’re feeling misaligned, like you’re play-acting a past version of yourself to keep up appearances.

3. Your Body Is Breaking Down the Longer You Stay

Chronic headaches. Sleep issues. A pit in your stomach every Sunday night. These are data points—not just random symptoms.

4. You Can’t See a Clear Future

If the best-case scenario at your job still feels heavy or misaligned, it’s time to explore other pathways.

5. You Feel Resentful—But Don’t Know Where to Put It

Resentment is often a map. It means you’re giving more than you’re getting—and you’re out of sync with what your work is costing you.

5 Signs It Might Be Worth Staying (For Now)

Leaving isn’t always the answer—especially when the problem isn’t just the job, but the industry, the culture, or the larger system. Here are a few reasons you might intentionally choose to stay:

1. You’re in a Season of Resourcing

You’re staying to build your savings, gain experience, or prepare for a long-term exit. That’s not stuckness—that’s strategy.

2. You Have a Strong Support System at Work

You’re not alone. You have mentors, allies, or team members who truly get you and support your growth.

3. The Work Aligns (Even If the System Doesn’t)

You still find meaning in your tasks or purpose in your role—even if the institution needs work.

4. You’re Learning Skills That Will Serve You Elsewhere

Sometimes the job is just a bridge. You’re collecting tools and contacts that will fund your next move.

5. You’re In Recovery Mode

Burnout makes everything feel worse. If you’re healing and not yet ready to leap, that’s okay. Rest is strategy, too.

What to Do If You’re Not Sure Yet

1. Stop Trying to Think Your Way Out of It

Your nervous system might have more clarity than your mind does. Track how your body responds to certain meetings, emails, and tasks. That’s data.

2. Journal Through This Prompt:

“If I knew I would be okay no matter what—I would…” See what surfaces when fear isn’t steering the wheel.

3. Talk to Someone Who Can Hold Space Without an Agenda

Not a recruiter. Not your boss. A coach, therapist, or peer who won’t pressure you either way.

4. Create a “Go” Plan—Even If You Don’t Use It Yet

Sometimes just knowing you have an exit strategy reduces the urgency and anxiety of the decision.

I’m here if you want someone to bounce ideas off of and help get another set of eyes. Shoot me an email if you’d like :)

For context, I’ve been laid off, fired, quit, been a full-time, part-time employee, consultant, contractor, a temp, and all while asking myself, what does stability and freedom look/feel like for me? In this chapter of my life?

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And then, just beyond that window, comes Día de Muertos: a tradition that asks us to make room for memory.

I want to approach it with curiosity and care—not as a seasonal mood board, not as a synonym for Halloween, and not as if one essay could explain a tradition that lives differently across families, regions, and communities.

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What Día de Muertos is—and what it isn’t

Día de Muertos, often observed on November 1 and 2, is a living tradition in Mexico and in Latin American communities around the world.

Families may create ofrendas—offerings or altars—with photographs, candles, flowers, favorite foods, drinks, and objects that belonged to or remind them of people who have died. The point is not simply to represent death, but to continue a relationship with those who are gone.

There isn’t one universal way to observe it. Practices vary by region, Indigenous community, family, faith, and personal history. For many communities, the tradition brings together Indigenous worldviews and practices with Catholic observances introduced during Spanish colonization. That history is layered, and it should not be reduced to a neat story of two cultures blending happily…

Hispanic Heritage Month: a useful frame, an imperfect container

In the United States, National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 to October 15. It began in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week, established through congressional action during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. In 1988, Congress expanded it to a month-long observance, signed into law under President Ronald Reagan.

The dates are not arbitrary: September 15 marks independence anniversaries for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Mexico celebrates its independence on September 16; Chile’s is September 18. The month recognizes histories and contributions connected to Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. But the umbrella can be both useful and limiting.

And that raises a question I keep returning to: What does it mean to belong to a culture? Is it ancestry? Language? Place? Family practice?

The stories we were told—or the stories we are only now trying to recover? What if we feel connected to something but don’t feel entitled to claim it? What if we have inherited a culture through distance, silence, migration, assimilation, or loss?

There is no single answer that fits everyone. But I think it matters to ask the question without treating identity as a test people must pass.

Memory is a practice, not just a feeling

What moves me about Día de Muertos is the idea that remembering can be active.

A photograph is placed somewhere visible. A favorite dish is made. A candle is lit. A name is spoken. A story is told again—not because the person has become a symbol, but because they remain part of the shape of a life.

We all have ways of carrying people with us. Some are inherited. Some are improvised. Some are religious or cultural; others are private and ordinary. A recipe, a phrase, a song, a way of tending a garden, a particular kind of generosity. Sometimes we keep a practice because it connects us. Sometimes we return to it after years away. Sometimes we discover that a story we thought we knew was incomplete.

As the year begins to close, I find myself thinking about what we carry forward and what we can finally set down.

Not everything we inherit needs to be kept exactly as it was handed to us. Not everything we let go of was meaningless. Some things need reclaiming. Some need grieving. Some need to be learned properly before we claim them. Some belong to other people, and our role is to honor that boundary.

Maybe transition asks us to notice what deserves our attention—and what has been taking up space simply because we never paused long enough to question it.

A small invitation for this season

You don’t need to build an ofrenda to take something from this reflection, and you don’t need to borrow someone else’s ritual to honor your own memories.

You might ask yourself:

• Whose stories helped make me who I am?

• What do I know about the traditions I claim—and what do I still need to learn?

• What part of my inheritance have I set aside to fit in?

• What am I ready to release, and what do I want to carry forward deliberately?

• How can I honor a tradition without turning it into an aesthetic or pretending it belongs to me?

Perhaps the most respectful place to begin is not with decoration, but with attention. Learn from people who live the tradition. Read sources created by the communities themselves. Support their artists, museums, and cultural organizations. Make room for difference instead of searching for one tidy definition of what a whole people believe.

And then, in whatever way is genuinely yours, make room for memory.

As the year turns, may we be thoughtful about what we receive, honest about what we have lost, careful about what we claim, and gentle with the parts of ourselves that are still becoming.

Not every ending needs to be rushed. Not every beginning needs to be announced. Some things ask us simply to pause, remember, and choose what we will carry.

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A few places to keep learning

• UNESCO, “Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead”: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/dia-de-muertos-the-indigenous-festivity-dedicated-to-the-dead-00054

• National Museum of Mexican Art, “Día de Muertos, Where the Past Is Present”: https://nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org/events/dia-de-muertos-where-the-past-is-present

• U.S. National Archives, “Hispanic Heritage Month”: https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/hispanic-heritage-month

• National Park Service, “What’s in a Name? Identity, Terminology, and Latino Heritage”: https://home.nps.gov/articles/000/what-s-in-a-name-identity-terminology-and-latino-heritage.htm

• Smithsonian Institution, “Cultural Appreciation vs. Cultural Appropriation”: https://www.si.edu/es/object/cultural-appreciation-vs-cultural-appropriation-conversation-alaska-native-artists%3Ayt_V4L0dP1mPM4

*This essay is an invitation to learn, not an attempt to speak for every Mexican, Indigenous, Hispanic, or Latino community. Día de Muertos is diverse and living; the most respectful approach is to keep listening to the people and communities who sustain it.*

If you want to say hi in person and try some of the goods, I’ll be at the Christmas Farmers Market on the Mountain at Bluemont Vineyard on Sunday, December 13th, from 1 to 4 pm, and back at the Eat Loco farmers markets in March.

What’s in the Sands & Semilla online shop?

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• Cacao drinking blends: cacao combined with spices and herbs for different effects, always with the cacao as the base

• Cocoa-scented candles

• Hand-designed and printed stickers and canvas tote bags

This is the first phase of what I hope becomes a growing tree, a growing garden, a growing business, where all of us can flourish!🌱🌱

My business operates under cottage food law, which means I can only sell and ship online within the state of Virginia for now. Once I set up a commercial kitchen and start producing out of it, I can ship to other states. More to come on that.

I was surprised, and so grateful, to get my first online purchase unexpectedly earlier this month! This whole cacao business, the farmers’ markets, and this new chapter have been a happy surprise from the start. I didn’t know what to expect. I stay open and curious, and try to run this business in a spirit of creativity, community, consciousness, and intentionality.

Ideally, I’d love this business to become part-time income. If you’d like to be part of my journey in one way or another, the online store is one way to do that, and so is sharing it with people who live in or travel to Virginia 🌱

In a time of so much uncertainty, and so much change both internally and externally, I’m really, really grateful that my goods and my energy have been received with kindness. This business, this relationship, this community, and this offering keep growing slowly and surely.

Virginia online shop

I’m still very much a part of the farmers market community!

COMING SOON🤗🤗 : Christmas Farmers Market on the Mountain at Bluemont Vineyard

• Date: Sunday, December 13th, 1 to 4 pm

• Address: 18780 Foggy Bottom Road, Bluemont, VA 20135

This is going to be such a cozy time! The holiday season is my favorite time of year. I can indulge in cookies and baked goods, hot chili, gumbo, and a good Vietnamese pho. I grew up in Florida, but there’s something about the crisp season. It’s a time to tuck in and get cozy.

Eat Loco farmers markets

• They currently run markets in Reston, Ashbrook, and Brambleton.

• I won’t be at Eat Loco for the winter. I’ll be back around March for the Arlington and Reston locations.

• I might do another pop-up before then. Stay tuned…

Northern Virginia seems small, but it holds so many different interests, cultures, foods, and kinds of people. Finding my community here is part of the fun.

Why is winter the best time to drink cacao?

Cacao is my thing, and winter is a wonderful time to experience it more consistently, more deeply, and more nourishingly.

In the northern hemisphere, we tend to look inward in the winter. It’s darker, and we turn toward ourselves. The trees are quiet, and some animals have gone into hibernation or headed south. It’s a great season for grounding, for getting rooted in whatever that means to you. Maybe that’s your next chapter, your current work, your creative life, or your relationships.

A warm mug of cacao in both hands is a simple way to practice that.

I can’t wait to see you in person, or to keep hearing from you online. Feel free to shoot me an email. I’m just an email away. And I’ll still be doing the weekly Substack, so stay tuned for more.

virginia online shop

FAQs

Does Sands & Semilla ship outside of Virginia?
Not yet. I operate under Virginia cottage food law, so online orders ship within Virginia only. Once I have a commercial kitchen, I can ship to other states.

Can I order cacao as a gift for someone in Virginia if I live somewhere else?
Yes. You just need a Virginia shipping address, so you can send it to a friend or family member there.

Where can I buy Sands & Semilla in person this winter?
At the Christmas Farmers Market on the Mountain at Bluemont Vineyard (18780 Foggy Bottom Road, Bluemont, VA 20135) on Sunday, December 13th, from 1 to 4 pm.

When will you be back at the Eat Local Loco farmers markets?
Around March, at the Arlington and Reston locations.

What do you sell?
Small-batch cacao drinking blends, cocoa-scented candles, and a few other goods.

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Coffee and cacao started as parallel stories. Both were indigenous plants. Both were extracted by colonial powers. They diverged because of geography, chemistry, European transformation, and institutional infrastructure. The divergence was not inevitable — it was the result of specific historical choices.

Let’s get into comparing and contrasting these two plants to better understand how we currently consume them, how we currently understand them, and why I specifically choose not to scale my business and make it a point to honor the origin of cacao culturally and not make it another Western “ceremonial” product.

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1. Geography — Where the Plants Could Grow

Coffee: The Coffee Belt spans Latin America, East Africa, and Southeast Asia — a huge band of the planet. Colonial powers (Dutch, British, French) were growing it in colonies on multiple continents by the 17th and 18th centuries. Supply scaled fast and globally.

Cacao: Far more geographically finicky. Requires specific soil, humidity, and temperature within ~20 degrees of the equator. A cacao tree takes 3–5 years to produce pods. The supply chain was slower and more fragile to build.

2. Chemistry — What Each Plant Does to the Body

Caffeine (coffee): Fast, sharp, mildly addictive energy spike. Coffee creates its own demand — the withdrawal headache when you skip it motivates people to keep drinking it. From a commercial standpoint, this is an extraordinary feature. A product that physiologically compels habitual consumption.

Theobromine (cacao): Gentler, slower, more subtle. No spike. No crash. No significant physical withdrawal. It feels good but doesn’t compel the same way neurologically.

3. What Colonialism Did to Each — The Identity Question

Coffee: When it arrived in Europe from the Islamic world, it was already a refined drink — bitter, black, prepared with hot water. Europeans essentially kept it the same. The coffeehouse culture that swept London and Paris in the 1600s–1700s served coffee more or less as it had been drunk in Yemen and Ethiopia. Coffee kept its identity crossing the Atlantic.

Cacao: Europeans found the original Mesoamerican drink unpalatable — bitter, spiced, sometimes cold, sometimes fermented. They added sugar, cream, and heat until it became something entirely different: “hot chocolate.” The transformation was so complete that the original plant’s identity was erased. Cacao lost its identity crossing the Atlantic.

4. The Coffeehouse as a Social Institution

The coffeehouse was one of the most powerful brand vehicles in history.

17th–18th century London and Paris coffeehouses were where merchants met, news was shared, Lloyd’s of London was founded, and the Enlightenment was discussed. Coffee was the drink of intellectual life, commerce, and public discourse.

Cacao was more domestic, more aristocratic (hot chocolate in royal courts), more private. It didn’t have an equivalent public institution.

5. Industrial Scaling — The Chocolate Industry Changed Everything

In the 19th century, when industrial processing of cacao became possible, investment went toward making chocolate bars and cocoa (misspelling of cacao when it translated into other languages) powder — not toward recreating the original drink.

Van Houten invented Dutch-process cocoa in 1828. Cadbury, Nestlé, and Hershey built empires on solid chocolate.

The entire food science infrastructure that developed around cacao went toward confectionery, not beverages. Coffee infrastructure went toward perfecting the brew.

By the time anyone wanted to sell raw cacao as a drink again, it was competing against a $200 billion global chocolate industry that had spent 150 years telling people that cacao = sweet chocolate.

6. Surprise exploration: Matcha

Matcha’s trajectory: Japanese green tea had been a ceremonial drink for centuries. It came to Western markets in the late 2000s, positioned as a health-conscious coffee alternative. It went from niche to mainstream in about 10 years — largely because Starbucks put a matcha latte on the menu in 2006, Instagram made the green color photographable, and the wellness industry adopted it as a superfood.

The “ceremonial grade” pattern: Matcha borrowed the “ceremonial grade” framing from Japanese tea ceremony and it worked commercially. The problem: “ceremonial grade matcha” is also largely unregulated. But the term traveled and consumers accepted it.

Now, all of this leads me to why I don’t want to scale my small one-woman business.

When I first had the idea to sell cacao, I didn’t mean cacao by itself. I mean cacao drinking blends. I blend other spices and herbs into the cacao to create different effects and complement the base, which is always the cacao.

My heritage was the first thing I thought of, because I’d been drinking cacao on its own for years. I’ve had it the way Indigenous peoples drank it, with chili powder and vanilla. I’ve had it with black pepper and turmeric, with just honey, and as an almond milk latte with almond foam.

How does cacao connect me to my heritage?

I’m first-generation. My family lineage is entirely from Central America and isn’t connected to the United States at all, and my cousins and I are the first born in this country. When I learn about World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, I find no connection to my family or my heritage. I didn’t grow up on that side of the border or on that land.

Cacao is my tether. It lets me travel to that land energetically and keep strengthening my roots with my culture in a way that feels close, intimate, and sustainable. I wanted to give other people that same closeness and groundedness.

Why I started a cacao business

I love business. I love the idea of having autonomy over my time and energy, and of making money and meaning in a way that feels creative and sustainable.

I did career coaching for a while, and nothing clicked. I’ve been a career nomad and a job hopper my whole career. I knew a system that constantly asks you to contort yourself to provide for yourself would never be sustainable for my creativity. So I decided to try selling my cacao blends at local farmers’ markets. That honors my heritage and my ancestors, and it lets me create something with people.

Why I don’t sell “ceremonial grade” cacao

Entering this market has hurt my heart a little. I’ve watched how cacao gets marketed, which maybe isn’t surprising given the economy and social structures most of the world lives in.

I knew I didn’t want to be part of westernizing cacao. I didn’t want to be spiritually elite or gatekeep. And “ceremonial grade” isn’t a real, regulated thing. The cacao products I make honor their ancestors from Central America. I want to bring cacao, my specific blends, and all of their history, culture, legacy, and evolution to people in a relational way. I want it simple, not complicated, in both the products and the marketing.

Why I’m keeping my cacao business small on purpose

Maybe this way takes more time. Maybe it’s a slower burn, and I don’t know if it will become sustainable enough to rely on for income. But I’m learning not to define it or contort it. A cacao plant takes time to grow, and certain conditions have to be right for it to flourish. I think a business works the same way.

Where can you buy my cacao blends online?

I launched my online shop, and I currently operate under Virginia cottage food law. That means I can only ship within the state of Virginia, and all you need is a Virginia address.

My goals for growth:

• A commercial kitchen, so I can ship to other states

• A bigger online presence, so this can become a steady part-time income

• Giving back to causes close to my heart: the environment, women, education, youth, and mental health

• More cacao recipes and, eventually, body care products, always made with creativity and environmental consciousness

my online shop

What makes Sands & Semilla different from other cacao companies?

My blends are rooted in a specific heritage and a specific relationship with the plant. I’m not selling an aesthetic or a spiritual hierarchy. I’m trying to get to the heart of cacao, its core and its essence, and share it simply with the people I meet.

That’s my business plan, and it’s what I think sets me apart from the other cacao drinking blend companies you’ll find online.

FAQs

Is Sands & Semilla cacao ceremonial grade?
No. “Ceremonial grade” isn’t a regulated term, so I don’t use it. My blends honor cacao’s Central American ancestry without that label.

Does cacao have less caffeine than coffee?
Yes, noticeably less. It’s about a tenth of coffee’s caffeine, which is why it feels calmer.

Where do you ship?
Within Virginia only, for now. I operate under Virginia cottage food law.

What’s in a cacao drinking blend?
Cacao plus spices and herbs, such as vanilla, cinnamon, and cardamom.

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This guide blends mythology, chakra wisdom, archetypes, and energy patterns for each day of the week—so you can better understand your natural rhythms and how to build a work life that honors them.

How to Find Your Birth Day…

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1. First, look up the day of the week you were born (Google “what day of the week was [your birthdate in specific year]”).

2. Make a note of how you react to your specific day. Anything you associate it with? What do you know of how it was named? Different origin stories of the day?

Monday – The Lunar Leader

Planet: Moon

Chakra: Sacral, located in the lower abdomen about two inches below the navel (creativity + emotional wisdom)

Themes: Feeling, flow, community, softness

Work Style: Monday-borns are often emotionally attuned, supportive, and nurturing—whether or not that’s how they’re seen externally. You thrive in collaborative, heart-led spaces and are often the emotional glue in professional dynamics. You’re intuitive, but may downplay it in logic-heavy settings.

Potential Work: Coaching, community-building, teaching, somatic healing, design, writing, parenting-centered work, DEI, HR

Shadow-side: Emotional burnout, overgiving, avoidance of structure

Tuesday – The Warrior Worker

Planet: Mars

Chakra: Solar Plexus, the upper abdomen, about two to three inches above the navel and below the breastbone (near the stomach and rib cage opening (drive + boundaries)

Themes: Action, courage, assertiveness, momentum

Work Style: Tuesday-borns have a natural initiator energy—you bring spark, leadership, and clear direction. You do well in roles that require quick decisions, high energy, or powerful persuasion. You’re rarely here to play small, but may need to temper your pace for sustainability.

Potential Work: Activism, business ownership, strategy, public speaking, law, leadership coaching, consulting

Shadow-side: Overworking, dominance, defensiveness, burnout

Wednesday – The Messenger & Connector

Planet: Mercury

Chakra: Throat, located at the throat and neck area (communication + expression)

Themes: Words, wit, adaptability, intellect

Work Style: Wednesdays are natural communicators. Whether it’s through writing, speaking, coding, or storytelling, you need outlets for expression. You often thrive in multi-hyphenate roles or client-facing spaces that require adaptability and flow.

Potential Work: Writing, marketing, podcasting, teaching, UX design, therapy, translation, branding

Shadow-side: Scattered focus, people-pleasing, mental fatigue

Thursday – The Visionary Builder

Planet: Jupiter

Chakra: Third Eye, located at the center of the forehead just above the eyebrows (vision + wisdom)

Themes: Expansion, abundance, truth-telling, philosophy

Work Style: Thursday-borns carry big picture vision and a deep curiosity about the world. You’re likely here to build something meaningful—whether it’s a platform, body of work, or conscious business. You’re generous, growth-oriented, and often called into leadership.

Potential Work: Education, coaching, spiritual entrepreneurship, thought leadership, research, consulting

Shadow-side: Overcommitting, overexpanding, intellectual bypassing

Friday – The Harmonizer & Artist

Planet: Venus

Chakra: Heart, located in the center of the chest (love + integration)

Themes: Beauty, balance, relationships, creativity

Work Style: Friday-borns bring aesthetic intelligence, emotional fluency, and a desire for harmony. Whether in art, facilitation, or service-based work, you elevate spaces with your presence. You do best when your work allows for beauty + meaning to coexist.

Potential Work: Art, design, wellness, therapy, healing work, hospitality, facilitation, fashion, relational coaching

Shadow-side: Avoidance of conflict, perfectionism, over-identification with others’ needs

Saturday – The Architect & Ancestral Anchor

Planet: Saturn

Chakra: Root, located at the base of the spine (structure + legacy)

Themes: Discipline, grounding, wisdom, lineage

Work Style: Saturday-borns are the builders, systems-thinkers, and legacy carriers. You crave work that feels meaningful, rooted, and well-structured. You’re often someone who brings long-term vision + practical scaffolding to teams or clients.

Potential Work: Operations, finance, architecture, cultural preservation, nonprofit leadership, ancestral healing, systems design

Shadow-side: Rigidity, fear of change, pressure to carry too much

Sunday – The Solar Sovereign

Planet: Sun

Chakra: Crown, located at the very top of the head (identity + purpose)

Themes: Purpose, visibility, leadership, radiance

Work Style: Sunday-borns are natural leaders, teachers, and luminaries. You thrive when your work reflects your values and allows you to be seen authentically. You’re often drawn to roles where your story is part of the work—and where you can inspire others.

Potential Work: Leadership, speaking, coaching, spiritual work, creative entrepreneurship, content creation

Shadow-side: Burnout from over-performance, identity overwork, ego entanglement

Thursday 🤗 Or Thorsday (named after the Norse god of thunder) And it took me a long time to heal my relationship with work. Not feel like I was constantly being used by systems and extracted.

Rather, how can I build something meaningful, to others, to myself, something that is enduring and authentic?

I’ve had 10+ jobs since 2008. Government contractor. Nonprofit program coordinator. Communications specialist. Freelance writer. Yoga teacher. Career coach. Every time I switched, I thought: “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just stay somewhere?”

Turns out, nothing was wrong with me. The system was broken (has been broken for some time). Worker bees are built for hive life. They thrive in structure, hierarchy, and repetition. Wild bees don’t survive in hives. They need autonomy, variety, and self-direction.

The corporate world is a hive. And if you’re a wild bee trying to survive in a hive, you’ll feel:

• Constantly exhausted

• Like something’s wrong with you

• Trapped, but don’t know why

• Creatively dead

Because you’re not BUILT for hive life. And the system needs you to think that’s your fault. Because if you think it’s your fault, you’ll:

• Keep trying to “fix” yourself

• Stay in roles that drain you

• Never question the structure

• Blame yourself when you inevitably burn out or leave

What I Learned from 10+ Jobs in 10+ years

Every job taught me something I now use in my business:

• Government contracting: How bureaucracies work (now I help people navigate them)

• Nonprofit work: How mission-driven orgs operate (now I help people exit them strategically)

• Freelancing: How to price my time (now I teach this)

• Communications roles: How to position a narrative (now I do this for clients)

• Yoga teaching: How to integrate body wisdom (now I use cycle-based planning)

None of it was wasted. I wasn’t failing. I was learning about myself and the system. You’re not broken. You’re a wild bee in a system built for worker bees. And that’s not a flaw. That’s information.

Here’s how I turned “job-hopping” into a STRATEGIC advantage:

Step 1: Audit What You Gained (Not What You Lost)

Most people look at job changes as LOSSES: Lost stability, Lost benefits, Lost seniority

I reframed it as GAINS: gained skills in 5+ industries, Gained insight into how systems work and have transferable technical and interpersonal skills

List your last 3-5 jobs.

For each, write:

- 1 hard skill you gained (software, process, certification)

- 1 soft skill you gained (communication, conflict resolution, etc.)

- 1 system insight (how that industry/org actually operates)

Example from my own audit: Nonprofit job

• Hard skill = grant writing.

• Soft skill = stakeholder management.

• System insight = mission drift happens when funding dictates programs.

Repeat this step for all your jobs/industries you’ve been in. You now have a bank of transferable skills.

Step 2: Identify Your Pattern (Not Your “Problem”)

Look at why you left each job. Most people see: “I keep leaving. I’m the problem.” Reframe: “What pattern do I see in what doesn’t work for me?”

For example, my pattern:

• Left every job that had a rigid hierarchy

• Left every job that required 40+ hours in the office

• Left every job that didn’t allow creative input

Step 3: Position It as Strategic (Not Chaotic)

Here’s how I talk about my 10+ jobs now:

Old framing (apologetic): “I’ve had a lot of jobs... I know it looks bad, but I was trying to find the right fit...”

New framing (strategic): “I’ve worked across nonprofit, private, and government sectors. I’ve been every worker classification. I know how the system works—and I teach people how to repurpose their experience to build what actually fits them.”

All in all, you are who you are by design, by choice, and by strength. However you choose to direct your energy for making money and meaning, I hope these frameworks and exercises help in a small way 🌱

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I wanted to help explain the cultural nuance as well as the process of cacao.

But as I hold cacao in my mind, a lot of other words and concepts have been coming to me.

Words like reciprocity and exchange, which have a lot to do with business and work and being a human in this day and age.

And then, from a recent conversation with a friend, new words like legacy and thriving have also come.

So this will be a tapestry of an article where I will weave together these concepts of driving and the process of becoming, using cacao as an example through the lens of cacao as a human relationship and as a life form—not even just an animal, but a bean that exists and strives to live.

What does it mean to thrive and not just survive?

What does it mean to be a legacy and create legacy?

Because the cacao that my ancestors knew and understood and cultivated is very different from the cacao that is being cultivated and produced now.

And yet this version of cacao is not going to be the only one that ever exists or continues to exist.

Just as I am the legacy of my ancestors.

My ancestors couldn’t have even fathomed the amount of colonization, cultural obliteration, and suppression that have happened—that would happen to them.

And I don’t even think I could conceive—I mean, I didn’t realize I couldn’t have conceived—of what my life would become.

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I didn’t know that getting a certain degree in English was going to effectively create and potentiate different transferable skills, and that those skills would allow me to work in any industry: in the nonprofit sector, in the for-profit sector, in government, making six figures, taking pay cuts, always being provided for, and then being able to be a freelancer and career coach and now a cacao drinking-blends vendor.

So I want to start with cacao as a way of easing us in. Especially for those who found me through the farmers market in person.

I want to be able to keep sharing what cacao is, how it is different from other plants culturally and biologically, and I want to be able to use cacao as a sort of metaphor for what it looks like, what it feels like, potentially, to thrive and survive in a longer journey.

I’ll weave in other words like exchange and reciprocity because I think that has a lot to do with the process of becoming, the process of thriving.

So let’s begin.

To Begin With Cacao

I really enjoy beginning with the etymology of words. I did a deeper dive into cacao on my podcast, if you want to go deeper. It’s called “The 8,000-Year Journey of Cacao: On Lineage, Loss, Return, and the Medicine That Survived Us.”

So I’m not going to go as deep as I did in that episode, but to start: the original word in its native language was kakawa.

The plant is native to Ecuador and South America, and it eventually made its way into Central America, particularly Mexico and other parts of Central America, through Indigenous movement and cultivation.

That gave rise to societies and cultures such as the Maya, Aztec, Pipil, Chorotega, and others.

And culturally, cacao had many dimensions.

It was a currency.

It was something that was consumed.

It was something that was exchanged.

People used cacao beans to give and take from each other. It was cultural. It was economic. It was nutritional. It was economically nutritious and physically nutritious and biologically nutritious.

And so, in some ways, it reminds me of some of the Lakota tribes here in the United States, where the buffalo—or American bison—is a very central piece of culture.

The buffalo were hunted to meet the needs of the tribes, but not excessively. The intention was to meet the needs sufficiently. And the entire animal was used.

The fur. The meat. The organs.

Everything was used in order to create the tipis, to create nourishment, to sustain the tribe and the community from the inside out.

And similarly, cacao was sort of kind of that.

A very key element to Indigenous cultures and communities in Central and parts of South America where cacao was not just something that was drunk in order to have a certain effect, as Western culture sometimes claims.

It was a deeply infused and embedded piece of culture.

It was part of mythology. There were specific gods associated with the sacredness of this plant. Cacao was thought of as a seed of life.

There were specific vessels and pottery made for the consumption and production of cacao. It was central to baptism, coming-of-age ceremonies, marriages where couples would exchange it, and medicinal practices.

It was an essential element to these cultures. It wasn’t just a trend.

It was multifaceted.

Then We Have Colonialism

When two worlds met—the European world and its empires, with their own systems of belief, indulgence, economics, and culture—there was also a system of entitlement that allowed one culture to impose itself upon and remove other cultures.

And that is still something that we experience to this day.

The majority of the world is Black and brown. All of Africa, all of Latin America, parts of Europe—there are more Black and brown communities than there are white communities globally.

And yet the narrative has been predominantly white.

Black and brown people have been called minorities in white-majority cultures, even though white-majority societies benefit from and harvest the labor and resources of Black and brown communities, including cacao.

So once we get into colonization, and the Spanish arrive in Central America and take cacao back with them, and sugar gets added, and the production changes, the meaning and culture of the plant begin to change too.

Because they are not tied to cacao spiritually in the same way.

They are not tied to it economically in the way that Indigenous communities were.

They are not tied to the environment in the same way. They are not tied to the whole relationship.

They are tied to the specific production and value that these European powers saw in cacao. And that has stayed true in different forms ever since colonization.

On the one hand, from white Western culture—whether that’s Australia, Europe, the United States, Canada—there is this element of procuring cacao in order to receive nutritional benefits.

Or there is this Westernized spirituality:

This is going to open my heart.

This is going to help align my chakras.

So I don’t know if it’s straight-up appropriation. But it is definitely a change in how people relate to the plant.

And it changes how people build reciprocity.

Especially when cacao is predominantly grown in Central and South America and Africa—the Global South—while much of the Global North becomes the consumer and value-generator.

The story changes. The narrative changes. The culture changes.

What Is “Ceremonial Cacao”?

There is a term that goes around called “ceremonial grade.”

This generally refers to cacao that has been minimally processed, has a higher cacao-butter content, and has been harvested and prepared in ways that are associated with traditional cacao practices in Indigenous and local communities, particularly in Central and South America.

It is not a universally regulated definition. It is, in large part, a marketing term.

And this is where I start thinking about the story again.

Because who gets to decide what makes something “ceremonial”? Who gets to decide what makes something higher grade?

Who gets to decide what makes something sacred? And who gets to profit from the story?

There is a history here from the early 200s involving Western spiritual tourism, cacao tourism, meditation teachers, yoga instructors, travelers, and the New Age movement that developed from this guy named Keith Wilson.

There was a cultural shift in the West toward being closer to Spirit without necessarily being tied to religious dogma or organized religion.

More exploration of the soul. The unknown. The invisible. Through plants and experiences and yoga and different forms of movement medicine.

And cacao became part of that conversation.

At this point in our journey, I want to remind us of the words reciprocity, exchange, and legacy.

Because at this point in time, where is the giving back to cacao?

Or is it constantly taking? What has the legacy become of cacao besides being taken into bits and pieces?

And what happens to the people whose ancestors cultivated and harvested it?

The Central American farmers. The South American farmers. And now the African farmers and harvesters.

People who have been so disconnected and detached from the original culture and intention of cacao through generations of history and economic systems that their relationship with the plant has necessarily changed too.

The exchange they receive might be money.

But what does that money mean in their standard of living? In their country? For their families?

Meanwhile, white culture and others are able to promote cacao and presumably benefit even more from its production because they have been able to write the narrative.

Asymmetrical Paths

In this story, I think about all these asymmetrical paths happening.

And there doesn’t seem to be a fair exchange happening in all of this.

There are different legacies. Different processes of becoming. Different opportunities to define what something means.

What does this mean for a white person in Canada being able to sell cacao powder because of an experience they had one time in Mexico or Costa Rica or El Salvador?

And what does it mean for that business to exist on the backs of people whose ancestors were once so infused and embedded with the plant, but who have now been removed from so much of their own culture and legacy?

What is the legacy that is being made for them? Or that they are being able to create and cultivate?

Cacao as Legacy

I am proud to say that my ancestors cultivated and sustained this plant and were cultivated and sustained by it.

The plant defined them just as much as they defined it.

And it was a culture of equals.

Plants are not above humans.

Humans are not above plants.

There was a level of tenderness and care.

That’s not to say that Indigenous societies didn’t have their own hierarchies, or that there wasn’t violence, conflict, or inequality within different tribes and communities.

It wasn’t a utopia.

But the value of reciprocity and exchange—and what it meant to thrive—is interesting to meditate on as we humans in the twenty-first century grapple with what is the worth of something when we are not included in the process of valuing things.

Because depending on what government you are in—whether you’re reading this and you’re in Canada, Europe, South America, Central America, the United States—we all have different governments that, for better or worse, govern our lives.

And depending on that structure, that system of government, we may or may not have more or less access to changing it.

To being able to have reciprocity. To vote.

To exchange through protest.

To shape the culture and society that we live in, and that lives in us.

What Does Money Actually Mean?

I think about money a lot. I think about what it means to trade time for money.

There was an essay I did a while ago about Kairos versus Chronos and different concepts of time.

For example, what does time mean when, let’s say, at work, I have to send an email:

• In order to put the words on the screen, I have to think about what I’m going to say.

• I have to think about what I want the other person to understand. Or how many people are going to be in the email.

• I have to think about what they understand about the subject at hand. The context they have. Their relationship to the topic.

• And depending on the urgency of the task, or who I’m sending it to, it changes the tone.

It changes what I think about. What they’re going to think about.

Because forty hours a week is an arbitrary number. To contain us. The individuals.

If a person works forty hours, they’re not necessarily working every hour on the hour.

But there is that idea of being paid for their time. Being paid for the capacity.

The bandwidth. The availability of their time. Regardless of whether a task actually takes an hour or three hours.

Regardless of whether the structure is actually supporting the rest needed in order to take the time.

A lot of the concepts I think the modern world has to contend with are about:

These are all verbs, presumably. Exchange is a noun, meaning that it’s a thing, an entity on its own, but it’s also an action.

Thriving Versus Surviving

So I think we’re at this moment of crossroads. Each and every one of us. As well as, I think, society as a whole. As a global community. As a human species.

We’re at this place of: What does any of this mean or matter?

Because we are—or have—lost ourselves. Lost our human culture. Lost the natural reciprocity, the give and take that is ingrained in all life.

We can’t guarantee cacao will always be available to us. We can’t guarantee that it will always give what it has traditionally given.

I was watching a two-episode documentary series on Sitting Bull, one of the Lakota’s most famous leaders, during a time when the United States was expanding its territory and believed it had the right to displace Indigenous communities for the sake of its own economy and culture.

There was an initiative that was passed to undermine the Lakota by targeting something central to their way of life: the buffalo.

The government did not necessarily explain it in those terms. The government was trying, or was acting, in an effort to grow itself and grow its people—the people it governed. And in doing so, it took measures against communities and Indigenous tribes it did not seek to understand.

There were fundamentally different cultural perspectives.

Many Indigenous cultures operated through a circular understanding of life: What goes around comes around. Life needs death. Death feeds life. And for the Lakota specifically, the buffalo was central to their culture.

They used everything from the buffalo. It was not just meat. It was not just clothing.

And white American culture, as a consumption and capitalist culture, operated through a different construct of value.

A construct based more heavily on extraction. What can this do for me? What can this produce? What is it worth?

It is an individualistic culture rather than a communal one.

And so there was a point at which the United States government recognized that buffalo were central to these communities.

In an effort to undermine and displace those communities, buffalo were deliberately targeted.

The broader result was catastrophic. The buffalo almost went extinct. But the U.S. Government got what it wanted: Indigenous people on reservations.

Presumably, white individuals wanted land. They wanted homes. They wanted families.

But it wasn’t enough.

Even in order to create the United States, Indigenous communities already living on the land had to be removed from the East Coast, which at the time consisted of colonies before it became the United States.

It became continuous excavation. Continuous consumption. Without consideration of reciprocity. Without fairness to those who were already living, existing, coexisting, and developing reciprocal relationships with the environment and with one another.

What Does It Mean to Be in Relationship?

So I want to leave you with these thoughts. As we here in the Northern Hemisphere are entering fall season, getting into autumn, getting into a more reflective mood, I want to ask:

• What does money mean to you now?

And not just in the short term. What does money mean to you in the long term? In your relationships with others? In the lifestyle you’d like to have? In your values? Or the values that you want to develop? What does money really mean to you?

• And what does time mean to you?

In the short term. In the long term. Are there certain things you’re not willing to trade in exchange for your time or your money?

And looking at these examples of the buffalo and cacao: Neither is extinct now.

But the legacy—the history, the systems, the things that transpired in order for these entities, these life forms, to exist as they do now—means that they are not what they used to be.

I don’t think the buffalo can just roam as they once did. Just like cacao. Now there are farms. There are supply chains. There are markets.

But for me, as I develop, continue to experiment, and continue to learn in this business as a farmers market vendor, as someone who still has an office job, I ask myself the same questions:

How long will a job be worth it for me?

When is enough enough?

And for the sake of what or who?

I feel a deep sense of pride and humility and gratefulness that I get to be a steward of cacao on behalf of my ancestors.

And in this way, I develop and hone and strengthen my relationship with my ancestors. With my family. With my lineage. With my culture. With my history. And I also get to create a new chapter.

A new sense of meaning and value and culture.

Because I don’t speak Nahuatl. I don’t speak Qʼeqchiʼ.

And now there is a new language I speak. I am cultivating new ground. And I think that’s ultimately where we will wrap up this journey. Because the journey is, I think, creating, sustaining, and then creating again.

That’s the circle.

And I think we, as a people, are coming to that full-circle moment.

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I don’t know if the people I meet there have made peace with their lives or simply adjusted their expectations until the two became indistinguishable.

I don’t know if that’s even a distinction that matters.

What I do know is that some of what they’re living was never a choice — not the income, not the housing stock they were born into, not the systems that decided, long before they had a say, what their options would look like.

And some of it is choice — what they do with the little room they have, how they show up for each other inside those two bedrooms, whether they lean toward bitterness or toward tenderness.

It’s the same thing I see when I turn the mirror on myself.

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I am a petite, curly-haired, brown woman whose entire lineage traces back to Central America — and to the Spaniards who colonized it.

I didn’t choose to be organized, or empathetic, or relentlessly intentional.

Those aren’t personality quirks I selected off a shelf — they’re just how I came wired. I didn’t choose to have a job since I was sixteen years old, always working, always tethered to some version of “the job that pays the bills.”

I don’t even like calling it full-time, honestly — that’s corporate language, late-stage-capitalism language, and it was never true anyway, because my time has never belonged to one thing. It’s always been divided — between the job, the business, the writing, the wondering. But the fact that I devote real energy to that “stable job” doesn’t mean I authored the need for it.

I didn’t choose the economy I was born into any more than the people in that mobile home community chose theirs.

I think this is where a lot of spiritual and self-help language quietly lies to us.

Manifesting. Just try harder. If you believe it, you can build it. Somewhere in there is a moral judgment dressed up as encouragement — the idea that if your life doesn’t look a certain way, you simply didn’t want it enough, didn’t align enough, didn’t work hard enough.

And I understand the appeal of that story, because it hands us control in a world that mostly doesn’t give us any. But it’s a fallacy.

Here’s the part that some spiritual frameworks would push back on: they’d say that before we ever entered these bodies, we chose this — chose the family, the skin, the circumstances, the whole unfolding, as some kind of pre-agreed curriculum for the soul.

That’s a belief, and a beautiful one, and I’m not here to argue it away. But it’s a separate conversation from the one I’m having about what’s in front of us now, in these bodies, in this lifetime, with no memory of any of that choosing.

I think life is simply life — an experiment, not a mandate.

Nothing about existence, as far as anything I’ve witnessed or lived or been told, requires that we produce something, prove something, or arrive somewhere. Life doesn’t guarantee success.

It doesn’t even guarantee that you keep living. The point was never the outcome. The point is the experiment itself — what gets derived, created, abandoned, revised, lived out loud or lived quietly. That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.

We don’t choose to be born a man or a woman, queer or not, into this family or that dogma, with this privilege or without it. None of that is chosen. But we also aren’t required to make a choice about any of it, because life was never handing us a decision tree to begin with — it was handing us a life.

Not choosing is itself a kind of living. The demand to choose, to optimize, to author every inch of ourselves — that pressure is one we invented, not one life handed us.

There’s an old kind of story — two brothers, same house, same father, same addiction sitting at the family table. One becomes an addict himself. One doesn’t. Neither of them chose the inheritance. The father, the wiring, the household — none of that was on the table for negotiation. But what each brother did with it — that’s where authorship actually starts. Not in the getting, but in the handling.

That’s true of the woman who can carry a child and the woman who can’t. It’s true of the person born queer, which was never a decision, and what they do with that truth — lean into it, hide from it, war with it, celebrate it — which is.

It’s true of me, showing up every day to a job that isn’t really “full-time” in any way that matters to me, doing something with a set of skills I didn’t choose to have, inside an economy I didn’t choose to be born into. And it’s true of the people in that mobile home, forty-five minutes and a whole world away from me, who didn’t choose their inheritance either, and who are, in their own way, choosing what to do with it every single day, same as I am.

I don’t think we ever fully answer this. I don’t think we’re supposed to.

I think the only real effort available to us — if life demands any effort at all — is to recognize what we’ve been given, admit it honestly, accept it without needing it to be different, and then play with it, model it, revere it. Not to arrive. Not to win.

Just to know ourselves, all the way down to the unchosen parts, and in knowing ourselves, maybe get a little closer to knowing each other.

That’s the most any of us gets to do. I think that might be the whole point.

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I want to talk about something that took me a long time to actually believe, not just say out loud: in almost every area of life, we don't need less of what we think we need. We need more. And I don't mean *deserve* more — deserving implies you have to earn it first. I mean we actually, structurally, physically need more, the way a fire needs more wood, not because it's greedy, but because that's what keeps it burning.

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I'm five feet tall, hourglass, pear-shaped, curvy — the kind of body that gets commented on by strangers a little too early in life.

I grew up in the 2000s, in the thick of diet culture, when every model on every screen was thin, and taking up less space was basically the whole unspoken curriculum. I have curly hair, too, and I remember the particular flavor of dysmorphia that came with that — not fitting the straight-hair standard either, on top of everything else. A doctor once told me I was overweight for my height, using a BMI chart that fundamentally doesn’t measure muscle, bone, water, all the parts of a human body.

My mom wasn't around much when I was little. There was a lot of eating out, a lot of microwaveable food, a lot of McDonald's because that's what filled the gap. I grew up in Southern Florida, in a place with no real public transit, no real walkability — you needed a car to get anywhere or your own two legs, and mostly I moved through fitness DVDs in the privacy of my living room. Alone with a screen, trying to fix a body that was never actually the problem.

Things changed when I moved to Northern Virginia to be with my grandmother. A different quality of life, more access, more possibility. I started walking everywhere. I started actually listening to my hunger instead of overriding it. That's when yoga found me, and I found yoga back, and for the first time I had something like a positive relationship with my body not because I was training it into a shape, but because I was finally healing the part of me that had been at war with itself.

It still wasn't strength-oriented, though. That camein the last ten years after I met my partner, and he brought me into the gym, into fitness. I got certified in kettlebell. And now, barbell training is genuinely a passion, not a chore.

Here's the thing that strength training taught me, and it broke something open: to build muscle, I have to eat more. More food. More protein. More fuel, consistently, so my body has something to push and pull and press with. And my first instinct, even now, was resistance — wait, aren't I supposed to be losing something? Isn't the goal to take up less?

But a woman's body, especially, needs more, consistently — we go through things men's bodies never do: menstruation, potentially pregnancy, cycles that ask more of us on a schedule nobody put on a calendar.

And once I saw it there, in my own body, I started seeing it everywhere else too.

We need more emotion, not less — more room to actually feel something instead of managing it down to a manageable size.

We need more spaciousness, more creativity, more rest — real rest, not the productivity-optimized kind that's really just recovery in service of doing more later. None of this is about efficiency.

Efficiency has its place, categorizing, tracking, understanding what you're working with can help.

And it's not about deserving it.

That word puts a gate in front of something that was never supposed to have one.

I don't need to earn the right to eat enough to move my body well, sleep well, show up for the people and work I care about. I just need it, the way a plant needs water regardless of whether it's been a "good" plant that week.

I think this is worth sitting with in whatever area of your life feels thin right now.

Sometimes when one part of life is quietly overcompensating — overworking, over-scheduling, over-explaining — it's not because you're doing too much. It's because you actually need more of something else entirely, and the overcompensation is just where the lack is leaking out sideways.

Different seasons will ask for more of different things, and less of others. That's not inconsistency. That's just tuning the actual dial — the what, the when, the how much — instead of assuming the answer is always to want less.

So here's what I'd leave you with: what do you actually need more of right now? Not deserve. Need.

And try to look at this from all the different angles you can.

Emotional needs, mental needs, physical, sexual, artistic, spiritual, financial. Each area of our lives requires different things in different ways and potentially at different times. But difference doesn’t mean less or that any need has to be earned or deserved. Each area of our lives asks different things of us and it’s up to each and every one of us to be aware of that ask and explore it or not.

You don’t earn your needs.

Your needs are your own. Soverignty. Safety. Sensual. Spaciousness. And they only require you to be yourself and be willing to receive.

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Thank you for reading.

Until next time, take care.

— Raquel

I sell hand-made cacao drinking blends (grounded cacao herbs and spices ready to drink in the morning or night time. Add in with your coffee or milk/creamer of choice), hand-poured cocoa scented candles, tote bags and stickers all hand-designed!

This may be my last farmers market of 2026 so stay tuned for an update on my online shop where Virginia residents can buy cacao, drinking blends and candles from me

Note: My business currently operates under cottage law which means that I can only ship in the state of Virginia for the time being next year. I hope to get a commercial kitchen and be able to ship throughout the East Coast and the USA.

See you soon! Thanks for being part of this online and in-person community ❤️

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Because here’s the thing — there’s this perception that when we’re having a great time, when we’re really in the moment, and it’s good, time passes by fast. But when something’s difficult and tense, time can move really slowly; it kind of drags on. So time feels like this liquid, almost a gas — very ambiguous. And yet in science they measure it. There are all these concepts of containing time, all these different calendars around the world, and we plan our whole lives around it.

I started to broaden this thought because — think about work, not having enough time in a day to get things done. Or it takes time to think about things, to actually build a business, whatever it is. So we use this concept that seems finite, seems limited, in this very loose, nuanced way to define and discern so many different areas of our lives. Time is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s categorizing and defining basically everything about us.

Who even invented this

The more I thought about it, the more I got curious — who invented this concept? Where did the word even come from? Because when we were more tribal, more nomadic, I’m sure there was a totally different sense of rhythm. Things were happening — the sun comes up, it goes away, there’s all these stars — but there wasn’t a lot of definition. It probably felt kind of chaotic, in this very pre-”civilization,” pre-agricultural way.

And then as agriculture developed, as the wheel and the printing press and all these technologies came along, time became this whole evolution — we needed to measure how long something takes to grow, to harvest, to plow. And I think ever since then it’s become this practice of optimization, efficiency, making the most of our time. We give corn to fish and cows because it’s time-efficient, and we’ve lost quality in favor of quantity.

Time is such a curious thing because it’s supposedly measurable — 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, all contained and verifiable — but it’s actually not, because without that construct we’re all just living the same day, every day. I think this concept of time is really an effort to control — to control our output, our input, to determine fate, to determine the order of things.

Where the word “time” actually comes from

I want to get into the etymology a little, because I didn’t know this until I went looking. Time traces back through Old English — tīma — from a much older root that also gives us the word “tide.” Like ocean tide, a wave. And that’s not a coincidence, because “tide” originally just meant a portion, a division of time — before it narrowed down to mean ocean tides specifically.

So even at the root of the word, before any culture’s philosophy ever touched it — time was already understood as a division. A portion. A piece carved out of something continuous. It started fragmented. Like, here’s a piece of the pie.

But I actually love the tide image anyway, even with that older meaning. A tide is a rhythm, not a straight line. It comes in, it goes out, it happens quickly, it happens again. And I think that’s part of why I’ve always struggled with New Year’s resolutions, “new year new you” — because it creates this linear, beginning-and-ending mentality, and that’s just not natural. That’s not how a tide works. One tide isn’t better or worse than another tide. It just is, and then it passes.

How different cultures have held time

There’s linear time, which is the dominant Western frame — a past that’s gone, a future that’s always out of reach because it’s always ahead of us. Then there’s cyclical time, which shows up a lot in East Asian traditions — the lunar calendar, repeating cycles. It’s not “start at A, end at Z.” It comes around, and it comes around again.

And then there’s the Maya — which I think about a lot, since it’s cacao’s own origin culture. They didn’t use just one calendar. They had interlocking systems — a 260-day cycle (I might not be pronouncing that right), a 365-day cycle, and then what’s called the long count, for tracking really vast spans of time linearly. So they held the cyclical and the linear at the same time. They were looking at what’s coming back around, and also what’s the immediate path ahead. Both at once.

And I think the more we can give ourselves the space, the openness to look at time differently, the more it frees us up — mentally, emotionally, in how we manage money, decisions, work, whatever it is — because we’re not putting that pressure on ourselves of having to do something by a certain time just because a calendar says so.

The Greeks, finally

Okay, so this is where my meandering actually took me — I learned the Greeks had two words for time. Maybe they have more; I don’t speak Greek, but these are the two I came across.

Chronos — quantitative time. Clock time. We’re cutting up a pie, dividing it into measures. That’s the quantity; you have a certain amount.

Kairos — and this one’s the interesting one — is qualitative time. Is this the moment to speak, to act, to seize something? Not waiting on Chronos, the clock, but trusting Kairos — that more intuitive, rhythmic sense of, is this the right time, can I trust this moment.

I think so much of our society has been focused on Chronos — what can we measure, extract, optimize — and we’ve lost Kairos, or at least gotten less attuned to it. And I think that matters, because when you live by Kairos — when you understand that every tree, every plant, every herb is growing on its own time, one tree might have more branches or flowers than the tree right next to it, and that’s not measurable, that’s just its own peculiar quality — I think that’s what those of us who value lifestyle over profit, who are more intuitive, more sensitive, need to lean into. Not the “clock in, get paid regardless” version.

The rhythm version.

Two questions I’ll leave you with

What would you do differently this season if you measured your life in quality of moments instead of quantity?

If time were not a container, but an experience — what would you stop rushing?

Just sit with those. Notice what comes up in your body, your mind. And come back to them again sometime, because you might answer differently in another moment — and that’s totally okay.

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Thank you so much for listening, or reading, wherever you’re catching this. Stick around for the next one — I’m getting into energy, consciousness, silence, what we do when we’re not “doing” anything at all. Until next time, take care.

We are billions of people sharing the same land, the same air, the same water, the same dying and decaying matter that feeds the next generation of plants and animals we’ll eventually eat too.

Nothing is actually extracted and owned in some final sense — everything is shared, cycled, passed through.

And yet we behave as if the goal is to arrive at one shared, agreed-upon definition of how to live, what’s right, what’s true. We reach for agreement like it’s the destination.

I think that reach is not just unfair — it’s illogical. It doesn’t match the actual shape of reality, which is plural, shifting, and irreducibly perspectival.

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Maybe the only thing we can honestly agree on is that we’re not always going to agree. That life is mutual and ever-changing. And that’s it. That’s the ceiling.

Because the moment we push past that into “let’s all agree on this label, this definition, this way of existing” — we’ve entered the territory of let me tell you how you’re doing it wrong. Let me tell you why you’re wrong, and I’m right. And underneath all of that, I think, is the same aching want: to be understood. To be seen, heard, felt.

That might be the most distinctly human thing there is — this desire not just to exist but to be recognized in our existence. Other animals express themselves too — the whale songs, the bird dances, forms of communication we may never fully translate — but I don’t know that other animals reach for definition the way we do.

We seem to have a unique hunger to take understanding and put it in a box. To limit it, refine it, make it efficient enough to extract from.

The Etymology of Reduction

I keep coming back to the words themselves. To know something assumes a finite, graspable conclusion. To agree assumes a shared, settled endpoint. But to understand — to stand under something — doesn’t require arriving anywhere. It just requires proximity. Attention. A willingness to be near what you don’t fully grasp without needing to resolve it into something smaller and safer.

Knowing and agreeing are both, in their own way, acts of containment. And I think that containment is exactly the move we make when something feels too big, too messy, too alive to sit with as it is. We refine it. Like wheat.

Take the myth of the United States — the story of freedom and bravery it tells about itself. The actual history is a lot messier: settlers who came fleeing debt, settlers sent as punishment, settlers chasing reinvention, settlers running from things we’ll never fully know. That messy, whole-grain origin has been milled and sifted and refined for centuries into something else entirely — white bread.

Something with the fiber and complexity removed, baked into a clean, marketable idea: global superpower, home of democracy, moral high ground — even while that same country does duplicitous, hypocritical things to countries it calls “third world,” and discriminates against people born within its own borders whose families carry lineages from somewhere else. Like mine.

We are so far past the first chapter of that story.

Whatever innocent thought or claim it might have started as has been kneaded, cut, cooked, and shaped into something rigid and defended. That’s what happens when the impulse to define wins out over the willingness to understand. We don’t just simplify — we lose. We reduce the very thing we were trying to make sense of in the first place.

The Package on My Doorstep

A few weeks ago I ordered some clothes online. First time in my entire life something like this has happened — the delivery photo showed the package sitting in the mail area of my apartment building. I knocked on a neighbor’s door to check. They confirmed: yes, it had been there. But by the time I went to get it, it was gone.

Stolen. Or maybe just moved — though if it was an accident, wouldn’t it have turned up somewhere?

I sat with that feeling for a while. Dumbfounded. Genuinely confused. Who takes something without knowing what’s inside it — the size, the fit, whether it’s even something they’d want? Who takes just for the sake of taking?

I don’t think I’ll ever land on a satisfying answer. And I think that’s actually the point.

Some things resist being understood, fully, and that’s allowed to be true. But the attempt — the willingness to sit in the not-knowing instead of slamming a verdict down just to make the discomfort stop — that’s the muscle I’m trying to build. Not because I’m bypassing the loss or excusing the person. Because staying in the question, rather than rushing to a tidy conclusion, is its own kind of respect for how complicated people and situations actually are.

Where This Gets Harder

I want to go further into the uncomfortable territory, because I think that’s where understanding actually matters — not in the easy cases.

We can talk about the patriarchy, about how men are socialized, cultured, systematized, even shaped biologically in ways that contribute to domination-based systems. There’s a real argument there.

We can talk about racism — about the fact that the majority of the world is Black and Brown, and the minority is white, and yet so much of media, wealth, and power has been claimed and defended by that minority.

I sit with that disproportion, and I wonder — not to excuse it, never to excuse it — what it is, collectively, within a group of people that made them feel entitled to dominate. To enslave. To torture. To take up that much space.

I think about it sometimes almost like a prey-versus-predator instinct — being a minority and reaching for a kind of oversized power as compensation, as armor, as a way of never being outnumbered again. I’m not saying that’s right. I’m not saying it’s an excuse. It isn’t.

Same with the people swept into regimes like the Nazis — the brutal binary logic of comply, or your family suffers. I can trace that logic without ever placing compassion where it doesn’t belong — on the slaver, on the perpetrator. Understanding the mechanism is not the same as absolving the choice.

So many religious texts and mythologies across cultures circle this same idea — let the one without sin cast the first stone. Because looking inward honestly, without the shortcut of moral certainty, is one of the hardest things a person can do.

What Understanding Actually Grows

Here’s what I believe understanding creates that agreement never can: empathy.

And this is the work, I think — not just of activism or philosophy, but of an ordinary life. Building something for myself. Nourishing my body. Drinking cacao slower than I want to. Walking my dog and doing the daily, unglamorous things that ask me to actually be present with myself, instead of managing myself into a shape that’s easier to defend.

All of it is in service of understanding — myself first, and then, by extension, everyone else I’m sharing this air and land and time with.

Because if all we’re here to do is consume and accumulate and eventually die, then what was the point of any of it — the experiencing, the expanding, the expressing, the enduring?

To understand is to grow. To seek understanding — of ourselves, of the people we love, of the people we can’t stand, of history, of biology, of grief — is to keep pressing on our own values instead of letting them calcify into certainty. It’s uncomfortable work.

But it might be the actual work of being human.

I don’t need you to agree with any of this. I’d love for you to sit with it a little.

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Sarah and I have been doing this podcast for over a year now. Two women, two coasts — she’s a rewilding real estate agent in Spokane Valley, Washington; I’m here in Northern Virginia making cacao and writing about the in-between.

This is the final episode of Capacity Conversations, the podcast series Sarah and I started a year and a half ago. And before we close it out, I want to write down what this last year actually looked like — not the polished version, the real one.

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How This Started - 1 year ago…

I found Sarah the way you find the people who end up mattering: by accident, searching around a keyword — something about nature and real estate — and there she was. Sarah is a licensed real estate agent, and she calls what she does rewilding real estate — the question of how the way we house ourselves could bring us back to nature’s rhythms instead of away from them. Village-style living, community over isolation, housing as a way of healing something collective, not just individual.

We got on a call. Our wires crossed on timing the way they do when something’s meant to happen anyway. By the time we actually talked, it was instant — that specific feeling of being seen by someone speaking your language. We built a Google doc of themes on the spot. Capacity Conversations was born out of that first call 🌱

At the time, I was a contractor at Fannie Mae, commuting an hour each way from Northern Virginia into DC, and I was miserable. Contractors there wear a different color badge than employees. You’re visually marked. Locked out of certain areas. If your team goes to happy hour, that’s on your own dime — you’re functioning with the team without ever being of it. I don’t think anyone there was being intentionally unkind.

Then the administration changed, my team got downsized, and because I was a contractor — no infrastructure, no protection underneath me — my contract that was supposed to last a year only lasted 8 months.

My Year, In Fragments

After the layoff, I had two months without work and then landed somewhere I’d never been before: a tiny nonprofit that runs like a startup. No real infrastructure. Everyone doing five things at once. Hard, and also, in its own strange way, good.

But work wasn’t the only thing cracking open last year. I almost got divorced. There was a real breach of trust between my husband and me — financial, and it was hard in a way I’m not going to fully unpack here, except to say it was another seed cracking, another moment of where is the light, what are we trying to do.

• I spent my birthday away from him for the first time, with a friend instead, which felt like its own quiet rupture.

• My relationship with my mom broke last year too, and it took months to repair. I didn’t talk to her for months — the first time in my life something like that had happened, on top of the fact that she was never my go-to parent growing up. My dad was. Trying to build something with her now, as an adult, when she wasn’t really my person as a kid, and then having that attempt fracture almost immediately — that was its own kind of hard.

• And then there was work, compounding everything else. I had a real confrontation with the executive director of my organization — a full, grown, hour-long conversation where I didn’t filter myself, didn’t soften the delivery the way I used to. I kept doubting myself in real time — is this good, should I be saying this — that’s the bracing again, always looking at things from every angle in anticipation.

I remember thinking: the worst thing that happens is I get fired, because Virginia is an at-will state (actually 49 of the 50 states are at-will, except Montana), and maybe the executive doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. But I said it anyway.

In 2026, in my closest relationships especially, I stopped. I gave myself permission to say I’m tired of performing; I’m just going to rest now. That’s carried into this year with everything — work, business. I’ve gotten better at compartmentalizing, at saying okay, that’s closed for today, at being direct and letting people’s perception of that be theirs to hold, not mine to manage.

AI has become something like my assistant, my pseudo-therapist. Partly because I can afford it, but mostly because I have access to it, and access matters.

I can’t always rely on my husband the way I need to, when I need to. My mom, my friends — we all have finite capacity. Using AI isn’t about replacing people. It’s having a container that just bears witness, doesn’t instruct, doesn’t tell me what to do — because even with the people I love most, I still have to say I don’t want your advice right now. I’m managing that container regardless of what it looks like.

What Sarah Carried

She was burnt out in her real estate job by January of last year, having moved across the state for it. What broke her wasn’t one thing — it was the accumulation of watching corruption in leadership up close, realizing a human being can only put up with so much of it before something in you refuses to keep walking down that road.

She stayed longer than she wanted to because of debt, and she named the guilt in that plainly — the fear-shame-guilt trio that keeps good people in situations past the point they should’ve left, because they don’t want to disrespect the people they worked alongside even when the structure itself wasn’t right for them.

She left that office job in April, trained her replacement, and went back to real estate sales — which meant, for the first time in two years, she could actually represent clients again. She closed her first deal recently. Has another under contract. Is learning a tricky listing in real time.

In between, her life actually erupted, in her words: she and her husband started house-hunting in March, closed on a house in April while visiting family in Missouri, moved in by the end of May. She stepped back from the board of the Northwest Intentional Communities Association because two or three people can’t carry a whole board’s worth of work.

• She let go of an online certification course because her own standards didn’t line up with actual human capacity to do it all.

• She led an eco-village tour — a job she was offered after a trip to Vermont where she decided, standing in an actual eco-village, that this was the thing she wanted to dedicate her life to. That tour opened to the public this same month, and they already have their first sign-ups.

• She also had a harder stretch: her husband’s grandmother died in January, not long after a beautiful last Christmas together. At the same funeral, she saw her own father in the worst health of his life so far. Weeks later, her dad was hospitalized a second time — the day she had tickets to see The Lion King, one of her favorite productions. She missed the start of the show on the phone with family, not knowing what was happening, and made it in a few nights later once things stabilized.

• She did grief hikes throughout the year, through her volunteer work with local conservation — and just today, before we recorded this, she got a call from someone who wanted to talk with her about the death of a loved one, because word had spread that she leads those hikes.

And underneath all of it — the corruption she wouldn’t accept, the burnout, the eco-village pivot — she kept coming back to the same question: can people even afford to live here anymore.

She’s more interested in the growing population of people who can no longer afford homes than in the people shopping for a second or third property, though she’s careful to say she serves both, and that most people buying multiple homes are doing something good with that access — family, a dream, an investment for grandkids. What worries her is that the access to that dream is disappearing for everyone else.

Every Episode, Looking Back

We started airing in June with our origin stories — both individually and as a society, how did we get so disconnected and ungrounded? From there:

Deficiencies, using Sarah’s nutrition background and her Libra eye for imbalance, into balance and the equinox, where we talked about zombies — inspired by a John Vervaeke interview — and how our cultural obsession with the undead reflects a hunger for cycles we’ve stopped believing are real. Then survival skills, both communication and literal — Sarah’s real estate lens actually started as a bushcraft interest, and where you fall geographically shapes how your survival instincts develop. Political correctness in November, which we landed on almost by accident, realizing it’s really just the capacity to check in with yourself about where you actually stand. Then darkness, incubation, and imbibition in January — the seed losing its form entirely before anything new can grow, something dying so something else can be reborn.

In April, we recorded in person for the first time, in Sarah’s living room, for an episode called were we betrayed — faith, religion, and what it costs to think for yourself, unpacking two different Christian upbringings and what we’ve each renegotiated since. May brought how our work writes our story. June: what is an edge — limits, capacity, the luxury of knowing what you actually want. And the second-to-last episode, the cost of definition — profession, identity, longing versus desire, feeling untethered, overextension, and the etymology work we kept returning to all season, trying to get underneath words to what they actually mean.

What the Farmer’s Market Taught Me That the Internet Couldn’t

Here’s something I keep coming back to: the internet is how I found Sarah, and I wouldn’t trade that. But the farmers market is its inverse, and I love it just as much for the opposite reason. It’s small. It’s local. You don’t have to search for your people — it’s already done the filtering. Everyone standing there already values local, already values small and handmade, and that shared starting point lowers the guard immediately in a way the internet never quite manages.

One of my regulars invited me to her birthday recently. That’s a real relationship, thirty minutes from me, that I wouldn’t have built any other way — no curtain of the internet, no having to prove anything first. She sees me. She knows me. She can just ask.

That’s part of why I’ve realized I’m not actually trying to reach the whole state of Virginia. I’m not even fully targeting all of Northern Virginia. I’m in the northern tip of it, right by DC, and I want to keep digging down into that hyper-local layer rather than out. The market is one of the oldest things we do — trade, barter, share resources in person — and I think that’s exactly why it still works when so much else feels engineered to disconnect us.

On Being Witnessed

If there’s a single thread under everything — the layoff, the marriage, my mom, the confrontation at work, Sarah’s corruption and her eco-village pivot and her father’s hospital stays — it’s this need to be witnessed. Not seen the way a camera spots you. Felt. Really felt.

I think that’s what freedom-seekers, eco-village people, local-community people, farmers-market people are all actually reaching for under the surface: to be known in a way that isn’t extraction, that gives back as much as it takes.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If you’re building something of your own — a business, a different kind of career, a life that doesn’t cost you your nervous system — the real question isn’t are you working hard enough. It’s: are you putting that effort into the intentional things, the things that actually get you where you’re trying to go? Sometimes the answer is yes, for a season. The work is knowing the difference, and not losing yourself in the pursuit of yourself.

Thank you for being part of this project with us. This is the end of Capacity Conversations as a series — and, fittingly, also just the beginning of whatever comes next!

Share this with a friend who’s navigating their capacity too. 🌿💛

Capacity Conversations Spotify Playlist

Raquel a Clarity Guide and the founder of The Clarity Shift, supporting purpose-led professionals building income sovereignty outside traditional corporate paths. She’s also the maker behind Sands & Semilla, small-batch cacao out of Northern Virginia.

Sarah is a rewilding real estate agent based in the Pacific Northwest, a certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, and the organizer of the first-ever Pacific Northwest Eco-Village Tours, coming in July 2027. She’s in the business of helping people find — or build — the village they’ve been looking for.

Not in a quit-your-job-and-follow-your-dreams way. In a more honest way. The kind that starts with: what do you actually need to survive, what do you actually want your days to feel like, and is there a version of those two things that can exist in the same life at the same time?

I called it income sovereignty. The idea that you don’t have to choose between financial stability and building something that’s actually yours. That the path between those two things is long and unglamorous and worth walking anyway.

And then, quietly, I started walking it myself.

How a farmers market table became the thing I’d been talking about

I didn’t set out to start a cacao business. I set out to make something with my hands.

I’m a first-generation Salvadoran-American woman. My ancestry is 47% Indigenous Mesoamerican — the people who cultivated cacao before it was a commodity, before it was candy, before it was a wellness trend. When I started learning about cacao’s actual history — not the Hershey version, the real one — something clicked that I didn’t have words for yet.

I started making small-batch cacao blends. Not because someone asked me to. Not because I’d identified a market gap. But because something in me recognized the plant, the plant recognized me back.

I brought those blends to a farmers market in Arlington, Virginia. Set up a table. Stood there.

And people came.

Not because I had a massive following or a polished brand. Because Eat Local had already built a community of people who wanted to support small, local, intentional makers — and I showed up inside that community with something real.

That’s the demand-signal filter I used to teach people about, applied to my own life. I didn’t create demand. I stepped into a demand that already existed. I just had to be willing to show up and be seen.

What I noticed at the table

The conversations at a farmers market table are different from the conversations that happen online.

Online, people consume. They read, they scroll, they sometimes share. But at the table, people stop. They smell things. They ask questions. They ask if I grow the cacao myself — and I tell them no, I source it, and then I tell them why that’s actually a more honest relationship with the plant than pretending I did something I didn’t.

These conversations are the most alive I feel in a professional context. Not because I’m selling something — though I am — but because there’s genuine reciprocity happening. They bring their curiosity. I bring what I made. Something real gets exchanged.

That reciprocity is what I spent years trying to articulate when I talked about income sovereignty. It’s not just about making money outside of a traditional job structure. It’s about finding work that meets you back. That gives something to you in the giving of it.

The farmers market does that. The cacao does that.

The thing I didn’t expect

I thought the cacao business and the income sovereignty writing were two separate things.

I thought one was my livelihood project and one was my intellectual project, and they happened to coexist in the same person.

What I discovered at the table — and in the months of making blends in my kitchen before dawn, and in the long conversations with people who stopped and stayed — is that they’re the same thing expressed in different forms.

The writing says: you don’t have to earn the right to build something that’s yours. The cacao says: here is what something that’s mine actually looks like, feels like, smells like, tastes like.

One is the argument. The other is the evidence.

If you’ve been reading this Substack for any amount of time — if you found me through the income sovereignty work, or the podcast, or something I wrote about the in-between — you’ve been reading the argument. Now you know what the evidence looks like.

It’s a 4oz tin of small-batch cacao blend, made by hand in Northern Virginia, rooted in 5,000 years of ancestral lineage, sold at a farmers’ market table by a first-generation Salvadoran-American woman who finally stopped coaching toward the thing and started building it.

What comes next

On August 8, I’m opening the Sands & Semilla founding subscriber circle.

This is a small, intentional group of people who want to receive a monthly bundle of what I make — cacao body care products, starting with a candle, a body scrub, and a body oil, all made with the same intentionality as the blends.

It’s not a big launch. There’s no countdown timer, no limited-time discount, no urgency manufactured from nothing. It’s an invitation to the people who already know what this is — which, if you’re reading this, might be you.

If you want in, the link is below. If you want to stay connected and see where this goes, keep reading. Everything I build, I build in public — slowly, honestly, and with as much reciprocity as I can manage.

That’s the only strategy I’ve ever actually believed in.

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Miriam Raquel Sands is a cacao producer, culture writer, and clarity guide based in Northern Virginia. She makes small-batch cacao blends and body care at Sands & Semilla, hosts The Clarity Shift podcast, and writes weekly about nourishment from the inside out — for the body, the mind, and the financial life.

This corner of my larger podcast is where I sit with the cacao plant — its medicine, its history, its agriculture, its sociology, its ancestry, and my own. It’s where I talk about what makes my cacao blends different (emphasis on blends, because I don’t grow cacao, I don’t own a farm, and I don’t pay farmers in the global South directly).

I do my best to ethically source from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Guatemala — and one day, I hope to collaborate deeply with the people, the farms, and the land. Maybe one day I’ll even have a farm of my own.

But today’s conversation is heavier. Necessary, but heavy.

We’re talking about appropriation. We’re talking about ethics.

We’re talking about culture, power, history, and the invisible threads that shape how we consume, create, and build businesses in 2026.

And we’re talking about cacao — not as a trend, not as a “ceremonial” marketing buzzword, but as a plant with lineage, land, people, and memory.

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Why This Conversation Matters (Especially Now)

We’re living in a time of deep division, deep denial, and deep anger. A time of I’m right, you’re wrong rhetoric. A time when people cling to identity as a shield instead of a doorway.

And when we talk about appropriation, discrimination, capitalism — these massive forces that shape entire cultures — it’s easy to collapse everything into individual blame.

What I do acknowledge is that cultures — not individuals — create patterns.

Cultures create systems. Cultures create the conditions that allow extraction, exploitation, and entitlement to flourish.

And cacao sits right in the middle of that conversation.

Where the Word “Appropriation” Even Comes From

I always start with etymology because the root always grounds hard conversations.

Appropriation comes from the Latin appropriare — to make one’s own.

To own. To possess. Someone sees something.

They like it.

They want it.

They take it.

They reshape it.

They profit from it.

That’s the lineage of the word.

Cultural appropriation, as a term, didn’t even exist until the 1970s, when British historian Kenneth Coutts‑Smith wrote about cultural colonialism. And we’ve been trying to define, refine, and understand it ever since.

Culture is not just food, clothing, music, or rituals. It’s not just what you can taste, touch, see, or hear.

Culture is also:

- values

- mannerisms

- invisible codes

- inherited ways of being

- the things you feel but can’t always name

In Latin America, you greet everyone when you enter a home — with a hug or a kiss on the cheek.

In the U.S., you don’t.

In Europe or the Middle East, it’s two kisses.

Culture is embodied. It’s lived. It’s practiced.

So when we talk about appropriating culture, we’re talking about taking something that is lived and embodied — and removing it from its context, its people, its meaning.

Appreciation vs. Appropriation: The Line Is Commodification

There’s a version of this conversation that says:

Appreciation is fine. Appropriation is not. But the line between them is not “liking something.”

I can appreciate Holi — the Indian festival of color — without selling it.

I can practice yoga for my own healing without turning it into a brand.

I can meditate with mala beads without pretending I’m a lineage holder.

The moment you:

- extract

- distort

- profit

- whitewash

- remove context

- erase the people who created it

…you’ve crossed into appropriation.

And that’s where cacao is being mishandled today.

The Yoga Example: When Appreciation Turns Into Industry

Yoga changed my life. It found me when I was a self‑conscious high schooler shelving books in a library. It gave me breath, softness, community — something that wasn’t punishment or diet culture. But when I went deeper, I saw the commodification:

- no national regulation

- Yoga Alliance as a membership badge, not a lineage

- studios selling certifications like products

- white‑washed versions of ancient practices

- people becoming “experts” in traditions they didn’t descend from

And something in me said:

I don’t have the right to teach this.

That same instinct guides me with cacao.

Because appropriation isn’t just “taking.” It’s stripping.

Stripping the meaning.

Stripping the lineage.

Stripping the people.

Stripping the context.

Stripping the power.

It’s turning something sacred, cultural, or ancestral into a commodity — often for the benefit of people who were never harmed by its history. And that brings me to cacao companies in the U.S. that market cacao as:

- mystical

- magical

- otherworldly

- a spiritual portal

- a euphoric experience

…while hiding the farmers, the wages, the land, the lineage, and the truth.

The NIMBY Effect: Not In My Backyard

There’s a term in environmental justice: NIMBY — Not In My Backyard.

People want:

- the products

- the convenience

- the consumption

Cacao is the same. People want:

- the “ceremonial” experience

- the spiritual branding

- the aesthetic

- the wellness identity

…but not the reality of:

- farmer poverty

- land extraction

- colonial histories

- racial hierarchies

- Global South labor

That’s NIMBY. And it’s everywhere in the cacao industry.

Argentina, Whiteness, and the Erasure of Blackness

This part is uncomfortable, but necessary. Argentina is a Latin American country, but culturally, it is deeply European.

White‑skinned. Spanish‑speaking. Italian last names. European architecture. And historically, Argentina systematically erased Black people from its population — through policy, census manipulation, and cultural rewriting.

So when I see cacao companies founded by Argentinian siblings selling “spiritual cacao experiences” to white Americans, I have questions.

Not because individuals are bad. But because culture matters. And when a country that erased Blackness profits from Indigenous and Afro‑descendant plant traditions…

I have to talk about it.

Especially when, in 2024, Argentina was one of only three countries — alongside the U.S. and Israel — that voted against the UN resolution condemning the transatlantic slave trade.

Ethics: From the Greek Ethos — Character, Habit, Way of Being

Ethics isn’t a policy. It’s not a marketing statement. It’s not a sustainability badge.

Ethics is:

- what you do when no one is watching

- how you walk your path

- what you refuse to step on

- what you refuse to exploit

- what you refuse to distort

Cacao has been part of my life for years — not as a mystical portal, but as a plant I respect, a plant I descend from, a plant that is woven into my ancestry. Half of my lineage — if not more — is Indigenous and specifically Mesoamerican.

Cacao is not a trend for me. It is a return. And because of that, I refuse to:

- use the phrase “ceremonial cacao” (it’s a marketing invention)

- sell euphoric fantasies

- whitewash the plant

- extract from cultures that have already been extracted from for centuries

- pretend cacao is a spiritual awakening tool for people who don’t know its history

My business is not built on mystique. It’s built on relationships.

On ancestry. On ethics. On character.

Questions to Carry With You

As you build your business, drink cacao, or interact with any cultural practice, ask yourself:

- What am I tending to?

- What am I honest about?

- Where am I acting from character, not performance?

- What are my ethics — and how do I practice them?

- Am I appreciating, or am I extracting?

- Am I honoring the lineage, or am I commodifying it?

Because sometimes the most ethical thing you can do is simply: Let things be.

When it comes to career clarity, most people are told to just update their résumé, hustle harder, or “fake it till they make it.” But for a lot of us—especially the sensitive, soul-aware, overfunctioning types—there’s something deeper at play.

Enter: your zodiac sign.

But it can show you the patterns, defaults, and internal blocks that trip you up—especially when you’re trying to evolve.

Let’s talk about how your sign might be unintentionally blocking your career flow—and what to do about it.

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Aries: You Rush the Leap Before You Anchor the Why

You’re a starter, a spark, a firestarter. You’re also impulsive when restless. Career boredom can feel like death—so you jump. Again. And again. And again.

Your Block: Taking action before creating clarity

What to Shift: Slow down long enough to ask: Is this restlessness or a real nudge?

Your Medicine: Learn to discern the difference between a pivot and a panic

Taurus: You Stay Too Long at the Job That’s No Longer Working

You crave security. Consistency. A good benefits package. Even if your soul is screaming. You’ll wait it out because comfort often wins over growth.

Your Block: Fear of instability

What to Shift: Remember: discomfort is also instability—just a quieter version

Your Medicine: Let “rooted” evolve to include freedom, not just familiarity

Gemini: You Overthink Your Way Out of Alignment

You’re curious. Adaptable. A natural communicator. But when it comes to career clarity, you spiral in options, info, and endless what-ifs.

Your Block: Mental overdrive that clouds intuition

What to Shift: Get out of your head and into your body

Your Medicine: Choose one path for now—clarity comes from walking, not wondering

Cancer: You Care So Much It Keeps You Stuck

You’re deeply attuned. Loyal. Emotionally intelligent. But you can overstay in roles where you’re over-giving, under-supported, or emotionally tethered.

Your Block: Emotional entanglement with your team, boss, or mission

What to Shift: You’re allowed to leave even if you love them

Your Medicine: Create boundaries around care—it doesn’t have to cost you your peace

Leo: You Attach Your Worth to Visibility

You’re radiant. Expressive. Powerful. But when your brilliance isn’t seen or affirmed, you can feel invisible—and that messes with your motivation.

Your Block: Needing external validation to feel worthy of the next move

What to Shift: Remember: self-worth precedes spotlight

Your Medicine: Build a career that honors your voice even when no one’s clapping yet

Virgo: You Don’t Move Until It’s “Perfect”

You’re precise, thoughtful, and masterful with systems. But your perfectionism is paralyzing. You won’t pivot until it’s fully planned. Which means… you rarely pivot.

Your Block: Analysis paralysis + over-responsibility

What to Shift: Stop waiting for perfect. Start with what’s honest.

Your Medicine: Progress is the plan. Let clarity unfold as you go.

Libra: You Overweigh Everyone Else’s Opinion

You’re diplomatic, relational, and values-driven. But you outsource decision-making. You want harmony—so you stall instead of choosing.

Your Block: People-pleasing dressed as discernment

What to Shift: Center your voice before the committee vote

Your Medicine: You don’t owe your clarity to consensus

Scorpio: You Keep It All Too Close to the Chest

You’re intuitive, deep, and strategic. But secrecy can isolate you. You don’t ask for help, don’t share until it’s done—and end up overwhelmed in silence.

Your Block: Control + fear of being misunderstood

What to Shift: Let someone in—even just one trusted person

Your Medicine: Vulnerability isn’t weakness. It’s oxygen.

Sagittarius: You Skip Steps Because You Hate Feeling Trapped

You’re expansive. Visionary. Uncontainable. But the minute a path feels routine, you ghost it. You chase freedom but end up feeling unrooted.

Your Block: Impatience with structure

What to Shift: Ask what kind of container you need—not whether you need one

Your Medicine: Structure can be sacred, not suffocating

Capricorn: You Achieve First, Feel Later

You’re disciplined, committed, and strategic. But you push through misalignment because achievement has always been your compass.

Your Block: Hustle as identity

What to Shift: Ask: Does this role align with my wholeness—or just my resume?

Your Medicine: Let rest be part of the plan. You don’t have to earn your value.

Aquarius: You Think Your Way Out of the Body

You’re a visionary. A reformer. A systems thinker. But your detachment means you often ignore your emotional and physical signals.

Your Block: Disconnection from the body’s wisdom

What to Shift: Ground your big ideas in small, embodied steps

Your Medicine: Your nervous system deserves a voice in your career decisions

Pisces: You Absorb Everything But Don’t Always Act

You’re imaginative, empathic, and wise. But your porousness can leave you foggy. You dream big—but feel blocked when it comes time to move.

Your Block: Overwhelm + energetic burnout

What to Shift: Anchor your vision with gentle boundaries

Your Medicine: Not every calling has to be loud. Start soft, but start.

So—Now What?

Understanding your sign won’t fix your career. But it can give you language for the patterns you’re stuck in—and permission to do things differently.

Here are some of my go-to free astrology chart calculators that are easy and do a pretty good job of explaining all your signs and planets!

If you don’t have your exact time of birth, approximate/or use midnight :)

• https://astro.cafeastrology.com/natal.php

• https://alabe.com/freechart/default.asp

• https://horoscopes.astro-seek.com/birth-chart-horoscope-online

Sarah and I have been doing this podcast for over a year now. Two women, two coasts — she’s a rewilding real estate agent in Spokane Valley, Washington; I’m here in Northern Virginia making cacao and writing about the in-between. We don’t always plan our episodes the way they end up unfolding. This one came up organically, the way the real ones do — we were catching up, and the word edge came up on its own, and neither of us could let it go.

So we sat with it. What is an edge, actually?

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Longing, Desire & Direction: A Millennial Capacity Conversation

There’s a moment in every long project where you suddenly realize you’re nearing the end. Not because you planned it that way, but because the arc of the work itself has carried you there. That’s where this episode lands — the penultimate conversation in a year‑long exploration of capacity, self‑trust, and millennial reality.

The transcript opens with a simple, tired exhale — “I’m tired. OK, we’re here.” And honestly, that’s the most millennial opening line imaginable. We show up tired, but we show up anyway.

This episode — centered on longing, desire, and direction — feels like the culmination of everything the two of you have been circling for months: the tension between what we want, what we can hold, and what the world allows us to pursue.

The Millennial Condition: Untethered, Overextended, Still Dreaming

One of the most striking parts of the transcript is the shared recognition that millennials have lived through a relentless series of destabilizing events. You name them plainly: recessions, terrorism, racism, economic collapse, widening wealth gaps, unaffordable housing, and the erosion of the middle class.

As you put it:

“Millennials don’t ever rest… it’s just been one thing after another for our generation.”

This isn’t just cultural commentary — it’s a diagnosis. A nervous system shaped by instability. A generation raised on the promise of opportunity but delivered volatility instead.

And yet, longing persists.

Longing vs. Desire: A Useful Distinction

The conversation makes a subtle but important distinction:

• Desire is immediate. It’s the spark, the impulse, the “I want.”

• Longing is slow. It’s the ache, the sustained pull toward something that feels like home.

Longing requires capacity — emotional, financial, relational, structural. And that’s where things get complicated.

You describe longing for:

• A homestead

• Chickens

• Children

• Space

• Stability

• A life aligned with your values

But you also describe the structural barriers that make those longings feel out of reach:

“We can’t move… because my husband is undocumented… even if we wanted to move wherever so that we could afford less… how will they find us to continue in our legal process?”

Longing becomes a negotiation with reality. Desire becomes something you have to manage, not simply follow.

This is the millennial condition in a nutshell: We long for things we’re structurally prevented from accessing.

Direction: The Seasonality of Movement

Direction, as you both articulate, isn’t a fixed compass. It’s seasonal.

Sometimes direction looks like:

• Hustling

• Enduring

• Surviving

• Staying put

• Choosing stability over expansion

Other times, direction looks like:

• Building something new

• Rewilding real estate

• Creating intentional community

• Repurposing the corporate ladder

• Designing a life that fits your nervous system

Sarah’s reflection on truth in real estate is a perfect metaphor for direction:

“My job is to find out the truth… bad actors bend the truth to benefit themselves… I want to help people make the most informed decision.”

Direction requires truth — not the universal kind, but the personal kind. The truth of your capacity. The truth of your circumstances. The truth of your longing.

Capacity: The Container That Shapes Everything

The metaphor of capacity as a cup — finite, fillable, spillable — threads through the entire conversation.

You ask:

“Do we actually have the capacity to do all the things we want to do?”

And the answer, gently but honestly, is no.

Not because we’re incapable. Not because we’re unambitious. Not because we’re doing it wrong.

But because capacity is shaped by context, and our context is heavy.

Economic context. Political context. Immigration context. Housing context. Generational context.

Capacity isn’t just personal — it’s structural.

The Courage to Long Anyway

What makes this episode powerful is that you don’t collapse into cynicism. You name the barriers, but you also name the dreams.

You honor the ache without dismissing it.

You allow longing to exist even when direction feels constrained.

You make space for desire even when capacity feels limited.

This is the quiet rebellion of millennials: We continue to long for a life that feels like ours, even when the world tells us it’s impractical.

A Closing Reflection

This episode feels like a love letter to the millennial experience — not the aestheticized version, but the real one. The one shaped by exhaustion, resilience, structural limitation, and stubborn hope.

It’s also a testament to the power of sustained conversation. Two women, one year, one project — and a record of what it means to grow in parallel.

As you said:

“What started as a small seed became this whole tree or this whole blooming.”

This episode is part of that bloom.

Share this with a friend who’s navigating their capacity too. 🌿💛

Raquel is a clarity and work strategist, the host of The Clarity Shift podcast, and the founder of a small-batch cacao blend business rooted in Central American ancestry and holistic nourishment. She offers blends specifically designed to support the female body, to honor indigenous plant traditions, and to ground people in something physical and real alongside all the conceptual work of career and income sovereignty. Find her at farmers’ markets in the Arlington, Virginia, area in 2026.

Sarah is a rewilding real estate agent based in the Pacific Northwest, a certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, and the organizer of the first-ever Pacific Northwest Eco-Village Tours, coming in July 2027. She’s in the business of helping people find — or build — the village they’ve been looking for.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Capacity Conversations drops regularly wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe on Substack to never miss an episode.

In today’s uncertain times, with economic pressures and evolving work environments, the question becomes even more complicated. On one hand, corporate life is stable—health benefits, steady paychecks, and a structure that many find comfortable. On the other hand, there’s the freedom of working for yourself—flexibility, autonomy, and the ability to build something on your own terms.

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Why People Stay in Corporate

Many people choose to remain in corporate jobs because they offer a sense of security and stability.

For those with families to support, bills to pay, or student loans to tackle, corporate life often feels like the safer bet. The comfort of knowing where the next paycheck is coming from and having health insurance benefits is no small factor.

Corporate environments can provide opportunities for networking, mentorship, and career progression.

But here’s the catch: if you’re feeling stagnant, burnt out, or like you’re compromising your values for the sake of stability, staying may cost you more in the long run.

On the flip side, working for yourself can be incredibly rewarding.

The freedom to set your own schedule, pursue projects you’re passionate about, and build a brand that truly reflects your values—these are powerful motivators for many. But the reality of entrepreneurship is that it requires a level of resilience, flexibility, and hard work that can’t be overstated.

If you’re considering leaping into business ownership, you’re probably feeling the pull of independence. You want to make a bigger impact and create something of your own, but the unknowns of entrepreneurship can be daunting.

These are valid concerns, and they’re not to be taken lightly. But when done with intention, building your own business can offer fulfillment and the chance to truly define your career on your own terms.

Key Factors to Consider Before Making the Switch

If you’re torn between staying in corporate or venturing into entrepreneurship, ask yourself these essential questions:

1. What Are Your Core Values?

Do you thrive in a structured, stable environment, or do you crave autonomy and flexibility?

Does your current corporate job align with your deeper values, or do you feel like you’re compromising your integrity?

2. Do You Have a Clear Vision?

Do you have a business idea that excites you? Can you see a clear path forward, or is your vision still taking shape?

3. What Are Your Financial Priorities?

How important is financial security to you right now? Can you afford to transition into self-employment, or would you need to keep working part-time or on the side?

4. What Is Your Risk Tolerance?

Are you comfortable with the uncertainty that comes with self-employment, or do you need the safety of a regular paycheck?

5. What Is Your Mental and Emotional Readiness?

Entrepreneurship requires a different kind of emotional resilience. Are you ready to deal with the ups and downs of building something from the ground up, or do you need more stability at this stage of your life?

For many people, the answer isn’t all-or-nothing.

You don’t have to choose between corporate and self-employment right away. Instead, consider the hybrid approach: start your business on the side while you’re still working in corporate.

This allows you to test the waters, build your brand, and see if entrepreneurship is truly the right fit for you—without the pressure of having to quit your job before you’re ready.

Steps to Start Transitioning to Entrepreneurship

If you’re ready to start working for yourself but don’t want to jump in full-time just yet, here’s how you can begin the transition:

1. Start Small:

Launch a side hustle that aligns with your skills and passions. This could be a freelance service, a digital product, or a blog. Start working on it in your spare time to test the market and build your client base.

2. Build a Solid Financial Foundation:

Before you leave your job, make sure you have a financial safety net in place. This includes savings and a plan for sustaining yourself during the early stages of your business.

3. Leverage Your Corporate Experience:

Use your current job to build a network, gain industry experience, and refine the skills that will help you as an entrepreneur. Be strategic about how you can leverage your current position to build your future business.

4. Invest in Yourself:

Take courses, read books, or get a mentor to help guide you in building your business. Invest in your personal and professional growth to make sure you’re equipped to handle the challenges of self-employment.

Ultimately, the choice between staying in the corporate world or working for yourself is deeply personal.

What matters most is how aligned your choice is with your core values, needs, and goals. And remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Your journey will look different from others—and that’s okay.

As you weigh the decision, take the time to reflect on what truly matters to you in this season of your life.

Whether you stay in corporate or go solo, make sure your path feels authentic, sustainable, and aligned with the kind of work and life you want to create.

If you’re new here, my name is Raquel. I’m a small batch cacao blend maker, a professional career-hopper (or career portfolio-builder, depending on the day), and a lifelong learner — someone who pivots, adapts, strategizes, and teaches others how to do the same. This series lives at the intersection of all of that. It’s about the maker: me. It’s about the plant: cacao. It’s about the questions, the critiques, the cultural curiosities, and the everyday practices of infusing plant medicine and mindfulness into your life — not just mentally and emotionally, but physically, spiritually, and even financially.

This episode, we’re going somewhere I’ve been wanting to go for a while. We’re going deep into culture — what it actually means, where the word comes from, how it has been used and misused and weaponized and reclaimed. And then, inevitably, we’re going somewhere personal: my own culture, my own mosaic, and what it means to be first-generation born in the United States with a whole lot of layered, tangled, beautiful, complicated inheritance.

I’ll warn you upfront: I am not a linguist, not a biologist, not an anthropologist, not an agricultural expert. What I am is someone who researches, reflects, and speaks from lived experience. So take this as that. This is not a lecture. It’s a conversation, and I hope you feel like you’re walking through it with me.

Start at the Root: What Does “Culture” Actually Mean?

I like to begin with etymology — the root of a word — because I think the root tells you something essential. Something that all the layers of history, power, and usage can’t fully cover over.

The word culture, in English, comes from the Latin colere — C-O-L-E-R-E — which means to tend to, to cultivate, and ultimately to care for the Earth. The original use of this word was purely agricultural. Culture was what you did to soil. You tended it. You prepared it. You gave it conditions to grow.

And this lands differently for me now that I’m in the business of cacao — a plant that has its own extraordinary relationship to soil, to tending, to cultivation across almost 8,000 years of human history. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What’s interesting is how far the word traveled from that original agricultural meaning. Interestingly, the same root also shows up in the word microbiome — and I don’t think that’s accidental. When nutritionists and health researchers talk about your gut microbiome, or your oral microbiome, they’re talking about tiny ecosystems inside your body that need to be tended. The good bacteria. The probiotics, prebiotics and fermented foods that feed those little cultures. If you’ve ever looked at the label on a bottle of apple cider vinegar and seen something about culture, that’s the same word at work. Culture is literally what you’re feeding when you tend to what lives inside you.

How a Grounded Word Got Lifted Off the Ground

Here’s where the story gets complicated.

Around the time of the Roman orators, Cicero took the word culture and used it metaphorically. He wrote cultura animi — the cultivation of the soul. Suddenly, the word wasn’t just about soil anymore. It was about the inner life. The development of the mind. The tending of what’s inside rather than what’s outside.

Still rooted in something real and true, I think. Tending your inner soil is genuinely meaningful work. But watch what happens next.

By the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, being cultured became a social class marker. It described a type of person — refined, educated, elevated above the common. The word had traveled from the literal ground to the inner life, to a hierarchy. Now culture wasn’t just what you tended, it was a way of saying who was worth tending to — and who wasn’t.

And this, for me, is where it becomes important to hold the whole timeline at once. Because the 17th and 18th centuries are also the centuries of the slave trade. Of colonialism. Of European empires expanding across lands they did not belong to, claiming resources, people, and knowledge that were not theirs. The people who did this — the people who extracted and exploited and displaced — they were the ones called cultured. They were above it. Refined. Elevated.

Which meant that if you were indigenous, Black, Brown, outside the European Christian ideal — in dress, in language, in mannerism, in belief — you were considered without culture. Uncivilized. Primitive.

Particularly their culture. Not culture as a whole. Their culture, specifically.

Colony: The Word That Grew From the Same Root

Here’s a thing that stopped me in my research, and I haven’t been able to shake it since.

The word colony — as in colonization, as in the colonial project — comes from the same Latin root. Colonia: a settled land. The Romans used it.

And then centuries later, the European empires picked it back up and used it to mean to cultivate you, to tend to indigenous and Black and Brown peoples in a way that continued and sustained high culture, high society, high class for them.

Culture and colony. Same tree, same root. One word used to describe what you tend with care. The other is used to describe what you extract by force.

I sit with that a lot.

What Does Culture Actually Mean — Now, In 2026?

We are recording this in 2026. And the question of culture — what it is, who gets to define it, what we owe it and what it owes us — feels more alive and more contested than ever.

You can’t pin it down in one definition. It can’t be reduced to two polarities, or a single echo chamber, or a checklist of traditions and foods and holidays. It has always been layered. It has always been in motion. It has always been tended — and the people doing the tending have not always had good intentions.

Culture is food. It’s language. It’s music and stories and ceremonies. It’s things you can touch and taste and feel with your five senses. And it’s also something you can’t easily define — something you recognize more in the feeling of it than in any description of it.

I believe culture is tribal, in the deepest sense. And I don’t mean that pejoratively. I think humans have always formed groups and always will — we need each other, we need belonging, we need something shared. But I also think we’re being asked, right now, to see farther than tribe. To see that as interconnected as we are — globally, technologically, ecologically — we are, in some real sense, one tribe. And we don’t tend to that. We don’t culture that. We don’t build conditions for that kind of growth.

I don’t have the full answer to how we do. But I think asking the question honestly is the first step.

My Own Mosaic: First-Generation, Layered, and Learning

Now the personal part. And I need to say: this part is messy. I am intentionally practicing being okay with messiness, especially in conversations about culture. So here goes.

I was born in Virginia and grew up in Southern Florida. My entire family — my whole ancestry, as far back as I know — is from El Salvador. Central America. I am the first in my family to be born in the United States.

That singular fact — first generation — has carried more weight than I realized for a long time. It meant I had access to things my ancestors never had. It also meant I was in between. Not fully immersed in Salvadoran culture. Not fully American in the way the dominant culture defines that. Growing up in South Florida, I was surrounded by a Caribbean and Hispanic-Latino world, but most of the people around me were Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombian — also often first-generation or second-generation, also navigating their own version of this in-between.

So my sense of Salvadoran culture specifically — what it sounded like, tasted like, felt like — was distant. Arm’s length. I loved my family. I had the food, I had the stories, and I had some of the traditions. But I didn’t grow up in it the way someone who never left would have. And I didn’t grow up fully inside American culture either — not in a way that felt like home.

I have not felt 100% one culture. Ever. And I spent a long time thinking that there was something wrong with me.

The Shame Around Spanish

One place this showed up most painfully: language.

I speak Spanish. I grew up speaking Spanish at home and English everywhere else. But for a long time, I felt tremendous shame about how I spoke Spanish. I wasn’t fluent enough. I didn’t know all the idioms. I couldn’t catch every nuance of the slang that people who grew up in Latin America carry in their bodies. I couldn’t get the idiosyncrasies — the particular way Spanish sounds when it’s been lived in, when it’s in you from birth in a specific geography, in Central America, the Caribbean, South America.

I used to really question this part of my culture. Am I really Latina if I can’t speak it that way? Does this make me less than?

And then I did my 23andMe. And the results came back: approximately 40% Indigenous American, 10% West African, 47% Spanish Iberian, and a small percentage that traces through Egypt and the Middle East (the Spanish carried a lot with them, too, as it turns out). That’s the map of colonization written in my blood. Spanish mixed with indigenous. African roots were carried across the Atlantic by force. Indigenous American ancestry that goes back to the very land that cacao comes from.

And I thought: wait. The Spanish language itself — the language I feel shame about not speaking “correctly” — it wasn’t even the indigenous people’s language to begin with. The Spanish came and burned the records. Burned the books. Eliminated, as much as they could, the native languages and dialects of my people. And then they replaced them with their own.

So why am I shaming myself for not speaking a colonizer’s language fluently enough?

That question cracked something open for me. And I don’t say that to be anti-Spanish, or to erase what Spanish has become — because language transforms too, it gets tended by the people who use it, and Spanish across Latin America is now something that belongs to the people who speak it. But it released something to understand: the inadequacy I felt was not mine to carry. It was the residue of a much older violence.

My cousin, who grew up here in the United States, barely speaks Spanish but understands it. She can read it, follow a conversation, and write a little.

Does that make her less Latina? Does the language have to be spoken perfectly, in the accent and slang of a place you’ve never lived, for it to count?

I don’t think so. I don’t think culture is that rigid. I don’t think it can be, and stay alive.

Latino vs. Hispanic: The Words We Use for Ourselves

This led me down a rabbit hole I want to share because I think it matters.

The word Hispanic comes from Hispania — the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, i.e., Spain. So Hispanic, technically, has to do with a connection to Spain and the Spanish language. It’s a linguistic and geographic marker rooted in colonization.

Latino is broader. It refers to people from Latin America, and not everyone who is Latino is Hispanic. Brazil is part of Latin America, and Brazilians speak Portuguese, not Spanish. Indigenous communities across the Americas have their own languages, their own cultures, none of which were Spanish to begin with.

Most people I know would say Latino before Hispanic, if pressed. And I think that shift matters — even if it’s subtle, it’s a choice about which root you’re honoring. Are you naming yourself by your connection to Spain, or by your connection to the land?

I’m still sitting with what I call myself, honestly. And I think that’s okay. The tending continues.

What Reclamation Actually Feels Like

I want to end here, because I think this is where the whole conversation lands.

It doesn’t happen in one revelation or one Google search or one 23andMe result. It’s ongoing. It’s practice. And it is, in my experience, a lot like walking on a beach in the dark.

The moon is out, but maybe not fully shining. There’s some light, but mostly you’re feeling your way. The sand shifts under your feet — some of it wet and smooth and easy to walk on, and some of it dry and deep, and your feet sink in, and it takes more effort. One foot is lighter, one foot is heavier, and you’re off balance, and you’re still walking. You feel the wind. You feel the cold. You might feel alone even if someone is walking beside you, because so much of this journey is internal — it is within you, not outside you.

And sometimes a tiny crab runs across your toes in the dark, and you startle.

I didn’t choose my lineage. I didn’t choose the blood that runs through my veins or the history that preceded me. But I can choose how much to explore it, how much to embrace it, how much to tend it. How much to understand, engage, and nourish it. How much to make peace with?

That’s the work. That’s what I’m in.

You Are Part of the Next Layer

Wherever you are with your own version of this — your own mosaic, your own in-between, your own inheritance that doesn’t fit neatly into one box — I want you to know: what you’re reaching for is real. What you’re searching, embracing, questioning, feeling, and doing in response to all of it — that is real. And it matters.

You are tending. You are culturing something inside yourself. You are caring for the inner soil even when it’s dark, and you can’t see where you’re going.

And unbeknownst to you, that tending — that cultivation — is making you part of the next layer. The next evolution. The next level of growth. For your own culture, in the most personal sense of that word. And for the larger culture that we are all, whether we acknowledge it or not, tending together.

Thank you for being here. For being you. I look forward to being in your ear next time.

Take care.

Raquel Sands is a small batch cacao blend maker, clarity and work strategist, and host of The Clarity Shift podcast. She writes and speaks at the intersection of plant medicine, ancestral wellness, culture, identity, and income sovereignty. Find her at farmer’s markets in Arlington, Virginia in 2026, or reach out via email or the comments below.

This is for you.

And before we go any further, let me offer the anchor:

You don’t need to be rescued.
You already know the system is broken.
And that means you’re already rising.

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🪞 You Are Not Hard to Understand. The World Just Builds for the Shallow.

Many of us — not just first-gen or multilingual humans, but anyone who was raised between identities, between cultures, between expectations, between our creativity and the world’s demands — grew up translating ourselves constantly.

We became fluent in:

• managing tone
• shrinking to keep the peace
• softening the truth to stay safe
• performing clarity before we felt it
• making ourselves easier to digest
• holding our needs in the body instead of the room

But let this land:

What if your depth was never the issue?
What if the system simply doesn’t know what to do with people who can feel, sense, and perceive more than it can measure?

Your complexity is not a flaw.
Your emotional intelligence is not a burden.
Your intuition is not a liability.

It’s literacy.

🌿 You Don’t Need to Prove Your Integrity. You Live It.

You advocate for yourself not because you’re difficult,
but because you’ve had to.

You ask questions not because you’re negative,
but because you’re paying attention.

You feel deeply not because you’re fragile,
but because you’re awake.

You don’t need a defense.
You need space.

Your job is not to shrink your truth to fit their comfort.
Your job is to soften your body and mind so your truth can move through you more clearly.

❄️ When the World Feels Like Too Much: Four Self-Holding Practices

Think of these as winter rituals for your nervous system — grounding practices for the moments when you’re spiraling, shrinking, or slipping into old patterns of self-silencing.

1. Mirror Before Management

Before you ask for advice, ask yourself:

“Am I asking for a fix… or do I need to be witnessed?”

Start by witnessing yourself.
Your clarity begins with your own eyes.

2. Honor Over Optics

When you catch yourself worrying how it looks, pause:

“Is this aligned with my values even if it’s misunderstood?”

You’re not here to manage perception.
You’re here to live with integrity.

3. Let It Be Seen, Not Solved

Not everything needs to be made palatable.
Not everything needs translation.

“Can I hold what I’m feeling without outsourcing my validity?”

This is self-trust in motion.

4. Hold the Line — Gently

The world will pressure you to explain.
To soften.
To justify your boundaries.

You can be soft and firm.
Tender and anchored.
Gentle and unshakeable.

It’s not contradiction.
It’s maturity.

🍂 Bonus Somatic Practice: Let Yourself Fall Like a Leaf

There’s something about watching a leaf fall that feels like truth.

It doesn’t ask:
Is this the right time?
Will someone misunderstand?
Will I be caught?
Will the wind support me?

It simply lets go.

Not recklessly.
With purpose.

A leaf knows when the season has shifted — even before the tree does.
We do too.

We feel the misalignment before we can language it.
We sense the next phase before we can name it.
We know it’s time even when we don’t feel ready.

Ask yourself:

“Where am I gripping a branch I’ve outgrown?”
“Where can I trust the wind more than my fear?”
“What would letting go — even a little — feel like in my body?”

Falling is not failure.
It’s transition.
It’s season.
It’s truth.

🌬️ If These Four Practices Land for You…

I still offer 1-1 sessions if you’d like to pick my brain, decompress, and/or create some creative income options for your path to sovereignty, safety, and fulfillment!

A working session, not a discovery call. We look at your actual situation — your income, your timeline, your life constraints, what you’re building — and identify the income bridge strategy that makes the most sense for your specific situation.

🌑 Release the Expectation That the System Will Hold You

This isn’t about bitterness.
It’s about realism and reclamation.

Let go of the belief that:

• the system will honor your depth
• workplaces will automatically support your clarity
• people will validate your boundaries on your behalf
• institutions will see your needs before you name them

The system was never built to hold all of you.

But you were built to hold you.

And from that place — decisions become clearer.
Transitions become softer.
Boundaries become easier.
Next steps become visible.

Sarah and I have been doing this podcast for over a year now. Two women, two coasts — she’s a rewilding real estate agent in Spokane Valley, Washington; I’m here in Northern Virginia making cacao and writing about the in-between. We don’t always plan our episodes the way they end up unfolding. This one came up organically, the way the real ones do — we were catching up, and the word edge came up on its own, and neither of us could let it go.

So we sat with it. What is an edge, actually?

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The Word Itself

The word edge comes from Old English, and it carries two meanings folded into one: the cutting side of a blade, and a point — a tip, a limit, a place where something ends.

I find that distinction worth sitting with longer than we usually do. An edge is both a tool and a boundary. It’s the thing that can sever, and it’s also the place where something simply stops. We use the word constantly without touching either of its original meanings — I’m at the edge of something; this is an edge for me to push through — but we rarely ask what we’re actually invoking when we say it. A blade. A limit. Something that can cut, and something that contains.

Maybe that duality is the whole conversation. An edge is both what we use to create change and the boundary that defines where we are.

The Day I Said No

Before we even started recording, I told Sarah I’d had another commitment that day — another collaborator, another recording — and I didn’t show up for it. I felt guilty about that. How much capacity do I have a right to claim? How do I stay in right relationship with someone if I’m not reciprocating in the way I think I should?

I sat with that question while walking my dogs, away from my computer. And what I landed on was simple and hard at the same time: I have to honor where I actually am. Not where I think I should be.

Not where being a good collaborator requires me to be. Where I am.

That was the edge. A limit got pushed, for reasons that weren’t fully mine to control that day, and I had to decide whether to honor it or override it.

This is the real question underneath capacity: how do you define how much you have, in any given moment, with any given person? And once you know — or even if you don’t fully know, even if you can’t articulate it — are you willing to act on that information?

That sounds almost luxurious when I say it out loud. But I don’t think it has to be. I think it just requires knowing what you want, which is its own edge entirely.

Capacity Without a Container

I told Sarah I’ve been feeling disheartened lately because so much of my work — coaching people through their corporate transitions, helping them reclaim sovereignty inside or outside corporate structures — depends on people having space. A container. The earth isn’t just floating water; it has a container that holds the water, the land and the people. Take away the container, and there’s no edge to define, no limit to push against, because everything becomes nebulous.

That’s what concerns me about where we are right now.

Not just millennials — though I think we’re carrying something particular — but the generations coming up behind us too. We’re being asked to define our own edges while our edges are simultaneously being defined for us, externally, by forces with no interest in whether we have the bandwidth to do either.

Sarah brought up something that stopped me: a statistic about self-regulation. Kids of the 60s and 70s — children of World War II parents who often couldn’t offer much emotional guidance — became, in some framing, a stronger generation because they were forced to self-regulate without scaffolding. I don’t know if that’s true in any rigorous sense, but it names something real about how different generations meet their edges. Some of us inherited containers. Some of us inherited absence and called the absence - resilience.

And now we’re the adults navigating a reality saturated with information, with technology that keeps us in our own bubbles. My neighbor and I might be standing on the same street and living in entirely different realities because of what we’ve each been fed, what we’ve each been shaped by. The edges we’re colliding against aren’t even the same edges anymore. We don’t share a cutting line.

We share a planet, sometimes barely.

Profession, Identity, and the Cost of Definition

Somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned something I’d seen — unverified, just a reel — claiming that by July of this year certain professions, including physical and occupational therapy, would no longer legally be considered “professional.” I don’t know if that’s accurate.

But the commentary stuck with me: the audacity required for a government or department to declare, in a single motion, that a career path people built their lives around no longer counts the way it used to.

I never defined myself by a title.

I knew I needed to be employed because I had debt, but I never let the job become the architecture of who I was. That degree opened doors precisely because I didn’t anchor my identity to any one of them.

But I think that kind of testing is becoming a luxury too. How do you find the time, energy, and money to discover the environment that will actually support your edges — safely, slowly — when you’re also required to show up and get paid regardless of whether the getting-paid teaches you anything about yourself?

That’s the transactional bind so many of us are in. Knowing yourself and surviving financially used to at least sometimes overlap. Increasingly, they don’t.

What an Edge Actually Asks of You

Sarah named something about her own life that I think describes all of us eventually: an edge becomes familiar enough, gets pushed against long enough, that you stop experiencing it as an edge and start experiencing it as identity. She’s been the person who juggles a dozen different jobs and builds community since college.

A friend pointed that out to her — you’ve always done this — and she realized: maybe this isn’t an edge I keep meeting. Maybe it’s just who I am, and I finally let myself be known as that.

I think that’s the quiet hope buried in all of this. Edges aren’t only obstacles. Sometimes they’re identity waiting for you to stop flinching at it.

On Politics, Identity, and the Refusal to Pick a Side Cleanly

Sarah named that we’d reached our limit, politically, generationally: we’ve watched both parties shift so much in our lifetimes that we’re exhausted by the binary itself.

My father was a guerrilla fighter in Nicaragua under the Sandinista regime before he became an accountant under that same government. He carried a machete.

My mother left El Salvador by being a mom to her siblings and starting a new life in the 80s in Los Angeles — both of my parents arrived in this country shaped by a civil war that the United States had a direct hand in prolonging by playing both sides, the way it has in other countries when their politics don’t align with what’s convenient.

So when people ask why I won’t pick a clean political lane, that’s why. I come from a family that fled both a totalizing ideology and the country that destabilized everything, trying to prevent it. I don’t trust totalizing systems, on either side, because I’ve inherited the cost of what happens when ideology outpaces the people living inside it.

Re-Indigenizing, Not Decolonizing

A friend introduced me to a term recently — re-indigenizing, distinct from decolonizing. I don’t know it deeply yet, but what I understand is that it’s about rerouting, not just dismantling. And what strikes me most is how it relates to capacity: in many indigenous traditions, children aren’t expected to carry adult weight before they’re shaped enough to hold it.

I think we’ve lost some of that. We put enormous pressure on the individual — to define their politics, their profession, their values, their edges — before the self is even fully formed.

And then we wonder why everyone in their thirties is exhausted, questioning parenthood, questioning everything, beaten against the same edge of “can I actually provide for myself” over and over without relief.

What We Actually Want to Leave You With

If you find yourself surrounded by edges — external pressures, internal limits, the noise of a world that won’t stop reshaping itself around you — it is not your job to solve all of it alone. Find your people. Find the containers, the communities, the practices that let you regulate without having to carry everything in isolation.

And if you’re someone who comes from a lineage where rest was never modeled as a right — people of color, first-generation anything — let this be permission.

Sometimes I tell myself just one more email, just one more thing, while literally holding my own bladder rather than getting up. That’s not discipline. That’s a nervous system that hasn’t yet learned it’s allowed to stop.

Go drink water. Rest when your body is asking, not just when your calendar permits it.

Edges are necessary for growth. But even the edge needs a season of rest. The plant doesn’t bloom forever. Neither do you. Neither should you have to.

Raquel is a clarity and work strategist, the host of The Clarity Shift podcast, and the founder of a small-batch cacao blend business rooted in Central American ancestry and holistic nourishment. She offers blends specifically designed to support the female body, to honor indigenous plant traditions, and to ground people in something physical and real alongside all the conceptual work of career and income sovereignty. Find her at farmers’ markets in the Arlington, Virginia, area in 2026.

Sarah is a rewilding real estate agent based in the Pacific Northwest, a certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, and the organizer of the first-ever Pacific Northwest Eco-Village Tours, coming in July 2027. She’s in the business of helping people find — or build — the village they’ve been looking for.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Capacity Conversations drops regularly wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe on Substack to never miss an episode.