I Said Yes and Immediately Regretted It

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Have you ever said yes to something and immediately regretted it?

This week started with a low-grade mental freak-out, which, honestly, tracks if you know me well.

I’d agreed to speak at Fuckup Nights — a global movement where three speakers get up and talk about a pivotal failure that changed their life. Think TEDx, but messier. The format sounds great in theory and saying yes sounds great in theory. Actually standing up and doing it is another thing entirely and here’s why.

My instinct, predictably for this talk, was to default to the highlight reel of life: Texas to Italy to Switzerland and back again, the life story, the blog story, the safe version that couched bad with good in a predictable but safe fashion.

But that wasn’t the point of doing one of these talks. The point was to go somewhere harder, and it took me a minute, but I did.

And why is this important to do? Because failure doesn’t just show you what went wrong, it shows you what you actually care about….. and the thing about failing is that it forces a kind of honesty that success never does.

When the video goes up on YouTube I’ll share it if anyone wants to see the full speech, plus the other speakers I genuinely loved listening to: Giulia Scarpa and Catalin, aka Celiac in Italy.

I talked about things most people who follow me here probably don’t know. Growing up in a big, chaotic household in Texas, half Mexican, half American, a shy introvert who took forever to get her words out.

Or the time I sat in my Ford Taurus outside a high school swim team sleepover, unable to open the door, convinced the girls inside would see right through me.

That I wasn’t like them, didn’t come from a tidy two-parent family where it was all sunshine and rainbows and sweet tea and Abercrombie (tis the times), and they would see that I was simply performing normal while privately holding a lot together.

So naturally, I made a plan.

To be taken seriously, to speak well and without Texas slang, obtain a degree, a direction, a destination, respect and love in all forms and fashions: Los Angeles, PR, crisis management, being a total work horse badass.

Except writing press copy for B-list celebrities and wrestlers didn’t bring me happiness even if Santa Monaca was a nice place to work.

Neither did the exhausting performance of it all, the body-monitoring, the people-pleasing, the constant need to prove I belonged somewhere my background kept whispering I didn't.

Life back in LA after a semester abroad in Florence and two months teaching English to middle schoolers in China just felt off and didn’t bring me that level of security and happiness I thought it would. Sometimes you can be born in one place and feel entirely more like yourself in another.

But coming back to it reminded me of something I already knew: I have always needed to do hard things.

Joining the debate team as the shyest person in the room. Being loudly myself in a conservative state that had very different ideas about my new independently-formed value system. Moving somewhere with no money and no plan, then doing it again with marginally more sense each time (maybe). And then the harder stuff. The losses you don't choose and can't prepare for: a baby, the only parent you could really trust.

So yes, I said yes to something that terrified me and stood up and did it anyway. And what I remembered, somewhere between the nervous laugh and the words coming out too loud through the microphone, is that this is just who I am, someone who is figuring it out as she goes, without a perfectly executed master plan, and making peace with that.

I don't have to become the type-A version of myself who has the retirement savings/inherited property crutch and the perfect hair, kids, clothes and the tidy life that looks good from the outside. None of us do. We're all just doing the best we can with what we have, and the most true thing, it turns out, is just being honest about it.

This week's episode of Two Voices, No Filter is one I've wanted to make for a while, and honestly one I wasn't sure how to frame until Valentina and I just sat down and started talking.

It's about mental health in Italy, not from a clinical distance, but from inside it. We open with some hard statistics about what access to care actually looks like here (spoiler: the gap between what exists and what's needed is WIDE), but the episode quickly becomes something more personal than I expected.

Valentina shares her experience with postpartum depression after her son was born and the accidental path that led her to EMDR therapy seven years ago. I talk about burnout I didn't recognise as burnout, intrusive thoughts I spent years rebranding as just trying to transform myself into a type-A person, and the loneliness of navigating mental health in a country that isn't your own.

We also cover the Trieste model, a decades-old community psychiatric framework that has become a global reference for dignified, de-institutionalised care and is now under pressure from budget cuts. It's a lot, but it ends somewhere lighter, I promise.

A note: the episode includes a brief, frank discussion of a recent news story involving maternal mental health that is genuinely distressing: we give a verbal warning before it, and I'm flagging it here too so you can decide how you want to approach it.

The rest of the conversation is open, honest, and we hope useful. Non è niente was never the right answer. 🎙️ Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows.