Twenty-five years of telling other people's stories. Then my own.

I was born in Colombia and grew up in the United States, and like a lot of men who arrive somewhere new, I learned early to measure myself by what other people could see. A title. A byline. A room where important things were happening. If I was in that room, I assumed I was fine.

Nobody teaches you that the version of success you inherit at twenty-five is not built to carry you through fifty. You just keep running the same play, faster, and you call the tiredness a season.

Looking back, the fog did not arrive suddenly. It settled. Slowly enough that I could keep explaining it away.

I spent twenty-five years at CNN. Twenty-five years of deadlines, breaking news, other people's worst days handled with a steady voice and a clean edit. The work was real and I loved it. It also gave me a very convenient place to hide.

In a newsroom, urgency is a virtue. You are always needed, always moving, always sure of what matters next because someone else decides it for you. That structure held me up for a long time, and it kept me from asking what I actually wanted.

The cost was quiet. Presence at home. Curiosity about my own inner life. The parts of me that were not useful on a deadline slowly went unused.

At fifty-five, it ended. The role went away, and with it went the identity I had spent a quarter of a century building on top of it.

I want to be honest about what that felt like, because a lot of men will recognize it and very few will say it out loud. It was not just a job loss. It was a stranger in the mirror asking who I was without a business card to answer for me.

That is the point most men try to sprint past. Another title, another project, anything that stops the silence. I could not sprint anymore, and that turned out to be the most useful thing that ever happened to me.

So I did the unglamorous work. Therapy. Hard conversations with my kids. Sleep, movement, and a long look at the habits I had been calling coping.

I also began studying psychedelics seriously — the research, the risks, the traditions, the screening and safety questions that responsible people ask first. Not as a treatment, not as a shortcut, and never as something I recommend to anyone. As education, and as one part of a much larger effort to become honest with myself.

What actually changed me was not any single experience. It was the months afterward: the integration, the boring repetition of new behavior, the willingness to keep telling the truth when it was inconvenient.

Cultivating Wisdom started as a phrase I used to keep myself accountable. Wisdom is not something you arrive at. It is something you tend, deliberately, the way you would tend anything you want to keep alive.

It became a body of work: honest conversation, responsible education about plant medicine, and practical inner work for men who have achieved a great deal and quietly lost the thread.

It also became a lifestyle and apparel brand — a way for people in this conversation to recognize each other, and to carry a reminder into an ordinary day.

Today I speak, I write, and I sit down with men who are exactly where I was: successful on paper, foggy underneath, and unwilling to admit it to anyone.

I teach education, not treatment. I do not give dosing guidance, I do not source anything, and I am not a clinician. What I offer is straight information, hard questions, and the company of men doing the same work.

I am a father of three, and that is the measure I care about most now. Not the résumé. Whether the people closest to me experience me as present.