Ownership as a Form of Reinvention
When Waiting for Permission Is Not an Option
Being a co-founder is something I’ve never done before.
I mean, I’ve founded, launched, and relaunched many brands in my adult life, but I've never really, really felt the weight and the FREEDOM of being my own boss while doing so.
I also keep thinking about something Chef Marcela Valladolid said to me on Episode 6, almost in passing: that when she finally decided to leave the Food Network after fifteen years, after the Emmy nomination, the cookbooks and the version of Mexican cooking she had translated for an American audience that didn’t always know what to do with her accent or her abuela’s recipes, the network told her that if she walked away, she wasn’t coming back. And she said, without missing a beat, that she wasn’t negotiating, that she was DONE.
So much chaos and calmness in one statement, right?
Chef Marcela and I have that in common. And I know, in a way, Ana Flores too! There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending fifteen years being excellent inside a structure that is not yours, no matter how good you get at it. I think most of us in midlife know that exhaustion intimately, even if our version of it never involved a television studio. We built the department. We carried the client relationships. We trained the people and mentored while being mentored. We became indispensable to something that, by design, was never going to be ours.
And we called that LOYALTY for a long time because, well, we had it so good.
For so many of us, leaving is envisioned as a rebellion or a reinvention story with a tidy arc. But the truth is, it’s messy. Really, really messy. Y OJO, eso no tiene nada de malo. But it also can be seen as an opportunity to finally own our sh**t in the best way possible. That sense of wanting to be the architect of our own thing instead of the face of someone else’s, and the distinction matters more than it might seem to on the surface.
A “face” is something you perform. An architect is someone who decides where the walls go, what the foundation is made of, and who gets to walk through the front door and stay (or not!).
Ana and I built Her Wisdom Era with that kind of energy. We call it the perfect mix between what happens when you are Done With the Hustle, and you embrace that life is more fun for Las Imperfectas.
For Chef Marcela, it was a bit more serendipitous. The brand she built when she decided to go for ownership, Matriarca, came from a tattoo she had on her hand for years before it became a company. The word had simply mattered to her and told the story about the women in her own family and the presence she had grown up surrounded by.
And it gets better! Nobody owned the domain; it was sitting there waiting for her the whole time. Clearly, this was more a recognition than an invention.
The thing had already been hers. She just had to open up the space (mentally and emotionally) for it to show up. And the exact same thing happened to us with HWE.
What Really, Really Matters
I’m obsessed with processes. Not so much with results. Mainly because I’ve been surrounded by so many “success stories” that feel performative and unsustainable for my artistic brain to even fathom.
In that, I’ve noticed that the part that gets lost when we talk about reinvention is as if it’s about courage alone. Courage matters, and Marcela, Ana, and I surely have plenty of it, but what she actually described to me sounded less like a leap and more like an uncovering. The three of us spent two decades building trust with a community that showed up for our brands, our clients, our content, and stayed for something less easy to name, the sense of being let in, of watching a Latina create, ¡ATREVERSE! without apologizing for any of it.
Of course, this doesn’t always translate into the kind of success metrics love. But there’s no better feeling than the freedom that comes from knowing you’ve built a community that didn’t need to be convinced. That kind of immediate, almost unreasonable trust doesn’t come from a launch strategy. It comes from twenty years of experience.
Or what we call COLLECTIVE WISDOM.
I now think about ownership differently because we tend to talk about it in midlife as something financial, a business we start, a house we finally put our own name on, equity in something with our title attached to it. And we love abundance, don’t get me wrong.
But the ownership we are talking about here is the one that only happens the moment we stop asking for permission to be fully aligned with our purpose.
There is also a particular grief in this stage of life that I don’t think we talk about honestly enough: the grief of realizing how much of our best work went toward building something we will never own a piece of.
I have felt it myself, looking back over twenty years in corporate media, at the magazines I helped shape, the covers I fought for, and the audiences I grew. The goal is not to erase that grief but to sit with it in the most honest way, to listen to what it has to say.
That’s when the magic happens.
Marcela is 47. She started Matriarca last year, surfing in the mornings, alcohol-free, raising her kids, and building a direct-to-consumer brand from the ground up at an age the industry she used to work in would have written her off without a second thought.
Ana is 53, about to send her daughter to college in the UK, and ready for her next chapter now that she has decided to move back home to El Salvador. I’m 47, mothering my 8-year-old girl, writing, editing, working through my grief one creative project at a time.
Do we have our sh**t together all the time? HELL NO. Are we proud of our messy processes? F**K YEAH. Because they got us here. So we own them.
If you take one thing from this conversation, let it be this: What if this reinvention you have been dreaming about is already here? I’d ask you to think about what you might already be carrying that hasn’t found its name yet.
Name it.
Reclaim it.
Own it.
(And tell us all about it!)
Mucho love,
Cristy