Today is November 1st, and I turned 26.
Tonight I am going to sit at the table with my family, the same table I have sat at on so many other birthdays, and for the first time in a long time I am going to sit there feeling realized. Not finished. Realized. There is a difference, and it took me years to feel it.
I have been trying to name what this year felt like, and the closest word I have is déjà vu. So many things happened that I had already lived once, years ago, in my head. I closed my first attempt at a company. I founded Klayen. A small idea became Malla, and Malla became a real team. I started university. Conversations I used to only rehearse alone started happening for real, with real people sitting across from me. More than once this year I caught myself in the middle of a moment thinking: I have seen this before. I just had never been allowed to live it.
I tell you this because of something I only understood a few weeks ago, and it changed how I look at every year that came before this one.
It was never that I did not want to
For a long time I carried a quiet suspicion about myself. If I had not built more by now, if I had not studied what I wanted, if so many of my plans stayed plans, maybe the problem was me. Maybe I did not want it enough.
That was wrong.
It was never a lack of will. It was a lack of opportunity. The situation I was living in my country did not leave room for most of what I wanted to do. Some years the whole job was getting through the year. You do not choose your dream in those conditions. You put it on hold and you keep it alive, quietly, so it is still there when a door finally opens.
This year the doors opened, one after another, and everything I had been holding came out at once. That is the déjà vu. I was not dreaming new things this year. I was finally living the old ones.
Fall in love with it, and do not ask permission
Valentín Fuster, whose way of seeing life I have written about before, describes four attitudes he believes a full life rests on. Two of them have been mine this year whether I meant it or not: acceptance and authenticity.
Acceptance, the way he means it, is not resignation. It is looking at your circumstances without resentment and then acting anyway. I accepted where I come from and what those years cost me. I stopped arguing with them. And the moment I stopped arguing with my past, I had both hands free to build.
Authenticity, for him, means being the same person in every room, at a formal dinner and at a neighborhood meeting. I accepted that I am going to live my life as myself. Nobody else defines my direction. Nobody else sets my limits. Nobody else gets to slow down my path, and nobody gets to tell me what to do when I already know what I have to do. I know what I want to achieve. I know how I want to live.
I have learned there is only one way I will reach my dreams: I have to fall in love with them. Obsessively, without fear, with my whole chest. When you love something that much, you stop waiting for it to arrive. You go after it every single day until it starts moving toward you.
Viktor Frankl, writing about the human being after everything he survived, put it in one line:
“Es el ser que siempre decide lo que es.”
The human being is the one who always decides what he is. Not the circumstances. Not the people around him. Him.
Living now what I could not live then
There is a small sentence I get to say this year that makes me prouder than almost anything else: I am going to class.
I started studying industrial engineering this year. Many things I could not live when they were supposed to happen, I am starting to live now, a few years late and with more gratitude than I would have had back then. Every day I can say I go to university feels like getting back a piece of something I thought I had already lost.
And then there is Malla. We are in the final stretch before launch, and I am honestly surprised by what this team has built in so little time. I am proud of the product, and I am even prouder of what it represents: small Venezuelan businesses getting software that was made for them, by people who understand them. We have done good work. That good work only exists because of the people I get to build it with.
I love my team. To every person who has trusted this project, to everyone who has pushed me, motivated me, believed in us before there was much to believe in: thank you. You know who you are, and I hope you know how much of this belongs to you.
About the seventeen hours
I know how this part sounds. Lately I have been working up to seventeen hours a day, day and night, and I have published more on this site in the last few months than in the whole year before.
I am not recommending that pace to anyone, and I know it cannot be forever. I am learning to rest too, slowly. But I want to be honest about what is underneath those hours, because it is not pressure and it is not fear. It is passion. There is something inside me that lights up when I build, and for years it had nowhere to go. Now it does.
That fire is the same thing I want to protect, which is exactly why I will learn to pace it.
The table
So tonight I will sit with my family, and I will not be performing being okay. I will just be okay. More than okay.
This is only the beginning. I have many goals left and many things still to do, and I do not know how I will reach all of them. But I want life to shine on me. I want it to keep showing me that there is so much more still coming.
And if you are reading this from inside one of those years, the kind where the whole job is getting through it, I want to say something to you directly. Your dream is not dead because it is waiting. Keep it alive. Accept where you are without letting it decide who you are. Fall in love with what you want so deeply that no one else gets a vote. When the door opens, and it can open, you will want to be ready to walk through it with everything you have been holding.
Today I turn 26, and I am finally at the table.
Thank you for being here for it.
