Standout Reinventions is where I document what starting over actually looks like from my move to Costa Rica, to the memoir I’m writing about it, and the conversations with creatives who’ve reinvented themselves too.
Have you ever done the brave thing, only to realize the hardest part wasn’t leaving, it was staying yourself once you got there?
Hady Méndez has reinvented herself more times than most people attempt in a lifetime. Twenty-five years in corporate tech and finance. Two years as a missionary in Bolivia, working with incarcerated women. A stint as a community school director in the South Bronx. An author. A speaker. And six months ago, at 56, she packed up her life in New York and moved to Madrid.
She’s not doing it to escape. She’s doing it on purpose, and she’s honest about how hard that is, even the second time around.
Highlights
Sometimes reinvention starts with a layoff, not a plan.
Hady was laid off from Slack in 2023. Instead of job hunting, she leaned into something she already loved.
“I decided to just start doing speaking engagements because I like talking... and then I never got a job. And finally, like one day I woke up. I was like, I don’t think this is happening. So I might have to start my own business and do this full time.”
Not every reinvention begins with a grand vision. Sometimes it begins with the thing that isn’t working anymore, and a slow realization that the old path isn’t coming back.
Grief can be the thing that finally moves you.
Long before Madrid, Hady left a stable corporate career to become a missionary in Bolivia, a decision shaped by losing her mother in 2008 and her sister in 2011.
“You gotta really live your life because you don’t really know how long you’re gonna be on this earth and you really have to make it count.”
Often times we don’t make huge life changes from a place of excitement. We change because of grief, or fear, or the sudden clarity that comes from loss. Hady received a nudge from the universe and decided to finally listen to it.
She thought she was going to Africa. She ended up in Bolivia. Neither was up to her.
Mission organizations assign you a location based on need, not preference. Hady spent weeks preparing for Africa before being reassigned to Bolivia at the last minute.
“You just have to be open because there’s gonna be lots of surprises, lots of things you’re gonna learn about yourself... you really have to just let some of the stuff happen and trust that it’s gonna work the way it’s supposed to.”
I know this feeling. When Anita and I started planning our move, we didn’t know where we were going to live. You can plan the leap. You rarely get to plan where you land.
Ministry isn’t about converting people. It’s about showing up.
In the Bolivian prison where she volunteered, Hady wasn’t there to preach. She was there to be present.
“Our ministry was just being there, being present to other people. It wasn’t really like, here’s the Bible and Jesus is gonna save you and convert tomorrow. It wasn’t like that. It was just, be with people.”
Reinvention often gets mistaken for a performance, something you convert others into believing. But often times reinvention is just about consistency. Showing up when you said you would, week after week, until trust is built instead of demanded.
Reentry is its own kind of culture shock.
Coming home from Bolivia during the holidays, Hady didn’t feel like she’d landed back in her own life. She’d forgotten how to do the things everyone else took for granted.
“You’re like, what the fuck is happening right now? ... I remember Uber got popular when I was gone. And I was like, what is happening with this Uber thing? Like everybody was taking an Uber.”
Nobody warns you about the return. You brace for the culture shock of leaving. Nobody tells you that coming back can disorient you just as much, because the place didn’t change, but you did.
Rebuilding your career can cost you, literally.
When Hady went back into tech after two years of mission work, she took a steep pay cut.
“I had to start almost from the beginning. So when I got that job in tech, I made about 65% of what I was making before I left.”
Reinvention rarely comes free. Sometimes the cost is financial. Sometimes it’s status, or momentum, or the years it takes to rebuild what you walked away from. Hady doesn’t pretend otherwise, and that honesty is part of what makes her story useful instead of aspirational.
The hardest part of moving to Spain wasn’t the paperwork. It was being othered in a new way.
As a Puerto Rican woman fluent in Spanish, Hady expected to blend in more easily in Madrid than she did in Bolivia. Instead, she found a different kind of friction.
“There’s a fine line between adaptation and assimilation. And I think as a Latina and a woman of color, that’s a triggering thing for me... what? I gotta give something else up? I was just othered my whole life. Now you’re telling me I gotta do it again?”
This is the part of reinvention that doesn’t make it into the highlight reel. It’s not just logistics and paperwork. It’s renegotiating your identity in a place that doesn’t already know what to make of you, and deciding what you’re willing to let go of, and what you’re not.
You don’t have to love it yet. You just have to keep showing up for yourself.
Six months in, Hady is honest that Madrid doesn’t feel like home. Not yet.
“It’s not home yet. And I feel like as a New Yorker, I’m gonna resist that for as long as I can. But it’s starting to feel a little bit more like I’m starting to settle in more.”
There’s no silver bullet, no button you hit to skip to the part where it all feels natural. Just time, and patience, and the willingness to stay in the discomfort long enough to find out what’s on the other side of it.
Closing Reflection
Hady has spent her life moving between worlds: corporate boardrooms, Bolivian prisons, a school in the South Bronx, and now the streets of Madrid. Each move asked her to let go of something. None of them asked her to disappear.
“Adaptation to me feels a lot like assimilating... that is something that I have fought very hard to not do.”
That’s the tension at the center of every reinvention story. You can change your zip code, your career, your routine. But the goal was never to become someone else. It was to finally become fully yourself, wherever you land.
If you’ve made a bold change: a move, a career shift, a creative leap, and you think your story could inspire others, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and tell us about your reinvention.
Thank you Tomesha Campbell, Norma Cardenas, and many others for tuning into my live video with Hady Méndez!
