I didn’t know desire could exist outside of literature and in my life.

I didn’t know I could use it for myself.

Growing up, many dreams or leaps of faith were usually met first with fear, worry, or a worst-case scenario. Love shaped through caution.

Fear is a vessel through which my mother has loved. I’m now wondering if it’s a form of loving that I’ve inherited and use on myself.

The first and biggest desire that fear didn’t kill was moving from Tracy, CA, to New York City in 2006 for an internship at VIBE.

VIBE and Latina were the two magazines I grew up reading and dreamt of working at, and I made it happen.

The next fulfilled desire I remember is creating a magazine about love. The possibility kept me up at night. I would scribble in my notebook on the 4 train from Union Sq to Franklin Ave—excited to start my 5–9 the minute I left my 9–5. In 2016, I launched ILY.

This is me planning the name ILY and the first digital issue themes after my best friend, , helped me paint the wall with chalk paint.

I just realized it’s been 10 years since and in between. Since and in between then, it’s been present, but either encapsulated and floating or I’ve halted it, whether unintentional or intentional.

What if desire is immediately followed by a doubt?: Are you sure? What if it doesn’t work out? What if you get hurt?

I think after a while, you start interrupting yourself before anyone else can.

You learn to anticipate disappointment before possibility. You learn to explain your wants before fully feeling them. You disengage before you’re honest. You think you need to justify a want before even whispering it in an empty room.

I don’t know if there was as much room for desire in earlier versions of my life. There was room for responsibility, sensitivity, and vigilance. There was definitely care for other people’s emotions. But desire always felt charged somehow—indulgent, risky, difficult to trust.

Was it because it was more for me, than for others?

I wonder how much this has shaped not only my life but also my creativity.

Maybe part of my perfectionism comes from being afraid to fully stand behind my own desire before it’s fully figured out or validated.

Maybe that’s part of why making now feels almost too vulnerable.

Desire asks you to trust yourself before there’s proof that it will work out.

You have to believe wanting matters before it becomes useful, validated, or understood by anyone.

To make something requires loving myself differently.

To make something requires staying with desire long enough to give it form. Not just observing it. Not just longing from a distance.

But existing inside it long enough to say: I want this. I made this. I chose this.

I choose this.

And now I’m thinking about something my leadership coach, Natalie Davis, once said to me:

“You are in choice every day.”

I want to live with those words in mind—but I’m realizing how far I’ve been from them. For a while now. (I hate to admit it, but I probably have little by little since childhood, when love was often disguised as fear for protection. As a teen, I rebelled against it, as most teens do. But it’s been hard to fight these past few years of adulthood.)

Most of last year was centered around fear, even when it didn’t look like fear at first. It showed up as anxiety, as catastrophizing, as preparing for future pain—mine or the people I love, a battle around the corner, for the other shoe to drop. I saw the meme above about getting further from their goals in 2025, and I felt that. There were so few moments when joy or ease could fight through the fear. And when I did catch one of those moments, I tried to do everything at once before it slipped through my fingers like sunlight. Warm, then gone.

That’s fear, too, right?

My best friend, , has told me more than once: his only wish for me is that I live more than I think about living.

Yesterday, when we were catching up, he asked how I spent New Year’s. I said it was great—and then immediately went into a moment that still stings: How I got sick during the holidays before heading to Mexico for New Year’s. How my partner was a little bummed that we didn’t go out to celebrate. The travel and the cold kept me tucked in tightly through the night. (Forgetting a quote my therapist had shared with me when exploring guilt: “Into each life some rain must fall.”) I led with that, even though the next day got better. My health is improving, our moods lifted the moment we ate chilaquiles with a cafecito the next morning, and we realigned. We were there for a wedding, surrounded by love, and I could feel our love as warm as the weather.

But the first thing I offered my best friend—after weeks of not talking—was the rock, not what was on either side of it. Not the warmth. Not the Christmas lights my partner and I let ourselves get lost in while eating ice cream in the cold. Not the joy I felt when he and my dad laughed about their football teams. Not how, even in the midst of holiday-induced family conflict, I still felt connected to them. Not the blues of the ocean water and sky blending. Not my partner mentioning he’s planned our future wedding playlist down to the timing of each song. Not the dream I had, while in my parents’ homeland, of my dad’s late father walking into our future home and embracing me with a big smile. (He hasn’t visited me in a while.)

Even when it’s not fear of the future, I’m living in the pain of the past. Even if those moments are very few, they’re so heavy that they overshadow the sweetness.

And I’m scared I do this in my writing too. If you look at what I’ve been working on—the longing, the pining, the letting go—I’m still in those moments. I’ve had to stop at times because of how much so. I recount them to process them, but sometimes it feels like I’m reliving them.

That’s far from “free & gentle.”

I recently came across a poem by Mario Benedetti called “No Te Salves (Do Not Spare Yourself)”—which Maria Popova shared on The Marginalian and translated. In it, he writes: “Don’t stand motionless / by the side of the road / don’t petrify your joy / don’t desire with reserve / do not spare yourself now / or ever.”

But Popova’s words hit me even harder: “To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive.”

Before the holidays, I made myself a promise: when a decision feels hard, or when I catch myself thinking of someone else—anyone else—before myself, wondering how they might feel about said decision (which I know the answer to from its conception, if we’re being honest), I’d pause and ask—does this bring up fear? And if it does, to take the next step without it beside me. To act without fear.

I haven’t been keeping that promise. I’d very much like to. I very much need to.

So maybe this is the question: What would it look like to not only write from, but also live from, that place instead? To lead with the warmth, not the wound? To live the life I have, not the one I’m afraid of losing?

I don’t have the answer yet. But I’m noticing. And maybe that’s the start.

For a minute, when I wrote for others’ eyes, it often felt like too much and not enough at the same time. (Let’s welcome one of the infamous themes of my life—maybe even the lead: too much.)

This is not a newsletter about love. Not only, anyway. It’s about the myths we’ve inherited. The teeter-totter of skepticism and gratitude that comes with lasting love. The haunting pull of almost loves. The quiet work of remembering who we were before we were told what to want and how to be.

It’s about longing, emotional inheritance, and what unfolds when we stop waiting to be chosen.

It’s about being too much, and learning not to shrink it—but to hold it and celebrate it, even when it’s uncomfortable.

I write as a Mexican-American woman shaped by the good, the bad, and the complicated: by marianismo and inherited guilt. By the ache of the in-between. By the awe of forever love’s reassurance. By the quiet violence of self-denial and the lure of perfectionism’s sabotage.

I’m a writer, artist, hopeful romantic, founder of ILY, and deep-feeler. All of that will live here.

Here you’ll find:

• Interviews with people who’ve been told—or felt—they were “too much” and loved more.

• Essays on choosing ourselves, even when it hurts.

• Fragments of a book I’ve been writing in the dark.

• Downloadable zines that are emotional studies at their core.

• Notes on grief, longing, silence, and the women we come from.

Whether floating or grounded, I hope this becomes something to hold onto (for you as much as for me.)

If you’d like to support my “emotionally-slutty” ramblings, become a paid subscriber. Either way, thank you for being here. For reading. For feeling. For choosing.