Transcript:
Hello old friend, it’s me, Kathleen.
It has been since March that I’ve been in your inbox, and I wanted the first time back to be my voice, like the old days. Also, somehow I always find myself in this predicament. I call myself lucky despite some of my circumstances. I am sending this on what would have been my mom’s birthday. So, something about it feels less like coincidence and more serendipitous. A little wink from heaven.
Yes, I’ve been lost because I’ve spent these last few months making probably the hardest business decision to date. It stemmed from a conversation with my cookbook agent about my platforms, and some feedback from publishers. And it forced me to look honestly at what I was building and where I ultimately want to land. You know, what my legacy would say about me one day, if I were silly enough to think my legacy is something I control. But I’m human, so I’ve sat with that for a while.
And if you sit with something long enough, it has a way of clarifying itself. And this is where I’ve kept arriving.
Design and wellness are still two of my greatest passions. They are part of who I am, and they always will be. That little girl in me who was redecorating her room could never get lost. Or the woman who made it her mission to lose almost 70 pounds, while not taking no as an answer from the very doctors who told her that at her age, it was impossible. She will never be gone. But this work, the deep work I am doing now, the awakening that happened after my mom’s passing, the recovery of her recipes, the food history, the writing. This is the thing that feels like me in a way I still can’t articulate.
If you’ve been with me from the very beginning, you already know this is where it all started, anyway. 2012, after my dad’s passing. It was only food and entertaining. So in a way, none of this is a departure. It’s simply going back to my roots, but just deeper this time. A little wiser. A little more thoughtful. And always more intentional.
At the heart of it, when my mom passed, I lost her recipes along with her. The dishes I’d eaten hundreds, if not 1000’s of times and never thought to write down, because I believed she’d always be a phone call away. This is your reminder: write them down. Recovering them, piecing them back together through my own memory, long conversations with family, cooking the same dish over and over until it finally tastes the way hers did. This was the beginning, my only intention. Yet, life is funny that way.
The more I recovered, the more I understood this was never going to stay a story about my mom alone. What began in my own kitchen — one daughter and one mother’s recipes — kept opening outward, until it felt so much bigger than I could ever grasp. Bigger than me. Bigger than my family. Bigger than my own loss.
And the deeper I went, the more I found myself wondering about the bigger landscape: Puerto Rican food as a whole. Its history, its politics, everything our food holds but so often overlooked. I found myself asking: had Puerto Rico lost its recipes the way I had lost my mother’s? Quietly, to forces so much larger than any of us, from colonization to everything that’s come after? What I discovered in the course of my research startled me a bit. Many of the recipes I ached for, the ones beyond my mom’s own cooking, were never lost at all. To me, yes — a woman raised in the diaspora. But in Puerto Rico, thankfully, they were alive and well. The real discovery was not that the recipes were the fragile thing. What was fragile was the thread between those kitchens and the rest of us who left, and at times even the younger ones who stayed, thinning a little with every passing generation.
So that’s the work. I won’t pretend to know where it leads, or what will come of it. But when my dad passed, I made a vow to live endlessly elated — it’s where the name came from — and part of that vow was to keep following the things that feel most aligned, even if only for a chapter, even if only for a moment. So from here, this work belongs to more than me and my family. It belongs to my community. To us. And if I could be even a small voice for Puerto Rico as a whole, then this is something I will never turn back on.
So yes, Endlessly Elated, as you know it, a lifestyle brand with a curated home décor product line, interior design services, and everyday recipes, is officially closing. It feels very scary. Very risky. It’s all I’ve known; it’s my business, my livelihood, but like anything great, it cannot become what it is meant to be until I let go of what it could have been.
So, I’ll leave you with this. If you came for wellness and design, those parts of me haven’t gone anywhere, and they’ll still show up in how I do things, in the details and behind the scenes. But this space, from here on, belongs fully to one thing: Puerto Rico and my quest to keep the thread from thinning. It’s the deepest, most demanding work I’ve ever taken on. It is exhilarating and emotional. And I suspect it will ask something of you, too. I thank you, with more gratitude than I know how to express, for being here to this point. As I move into what’s next, I hope you’ll stay, and if you don’t, I understand. You gave me a chapter, and I won’t ever forget it. For those of you who will keep going with me in this, like every chapter before it, is only the beginning.
Until next time, and Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you.
Bye.