📩 In Today’s Email

• TL; DR - The nights you skip are the nights that shape you.

• The Deep Dive: The Season of No Witness - a cinematic walk through the lonely Saturday nights where reinvention actually happens.

• The Read: A marsh girl, a murder mystery, and the quiet brutality of growing up alone in Where the Crawdads Sing.

• The Stream:  A bold, stylish outsider classic: Frankenstein, revisited with fresh eyes of master monsterer, Guillermo del Toro. 

🤿 The Deep Dive - The Season Without Witnesses

On Saturday nights, Medellín, Colombia sounds like a city that never doubts itself.

I'm making a video about the nightlife right now. About how Medellín, quickly becoming the planet's "comeback city," is landing on all sorts of "top" lists, including Top 20 cities for nightlife, best party destinations, etc. No one will ever beat Ibiza, but Medellín is having its moment under the strobe lights.

The irony, of course, is that I'm in my studio, on a Saturday night, editing footage of the same city on the same night of the week, just outside my door. I can hear the whoops and singing, the moto engines buzzing like insects. I know the crowds are spilling everywhere on La 70, salsa dancers are spinning and boozers’ heads are spinning and all sorts of grown-up antics are happening in all sorts of places.

I'm documenting the party I'm not attending. Making content about the life I'm not living.

That's the trick, I guess. The performance of participation.

This is a city built for the extroverted, the social, the certain.

But most of my reinvention happens behind closed doors. The nights I don't go out. The nights I stay in and write. The nights the world just feels oh so big and I feel oh so small.

There's a particular ache that comes with missed invitations. At first, you feel noble. Disciplined. A monk in exile. But that fades before midnight. Certainly by one or two a.m. Those are the hours when willpower cracks and the loneliness begins to talk back.

No one tells you reinvention has a smell. It smells like late-night street food drifting in from a cracked window. It sounds like strangers laughing at jokes you'll never hear, making connections you'll never make. It looks like your phone lighting up with dating app notifications you won't answer.

It has a word, of course, an overly simplified word we all pretend to outgrow: FOMO.

And it feels like the cold metal leg of your studio desk against your shin, at once grounding you and telling you it doesn't care.

You are alone. And no one applauds you for it. Why should they?

Most people quit here. In the gap between Saturday at 11 p.m. and Sunday at 6 a.m. In the hours when loneliness stops being romantic and becomes a buzz at the back of your brain. A drilling. A feeling of something inside leaping out and yet… not. They tell themselves one night out won't hurt. That they will start Monday.

They're wrong on both counts.

I used to think loneliness was a sign something was off. Something was wrong with you. That if my life were on the right path, there would be no distance felt. I'd be out with my crew, my six-pack, my person, throwin' down Kid n Play hand and foot shakes. Forming my, what's the word du jour, "tribe"? Weaving myself right into the city's pulse like a politician walking a line of supporters, monkey bar handshaking from one to the next.

Truth is always more harsh than you expected: reinvention demands what I am calling, "a season without witnesses."

You can't rebuild your identity while performing for others.

I've spent months doing this. Years, honestly. Saturday nights with the notebook open (filled another one, got another one in) and my screens staring back at me. Fireworks exploding outside for some soccer victory. The throb of reggaeton climbing into my apartment like cripy smoke. Dating app notifications stuck at “30” for months. Either that's the app's limit, or I've been invisible to the algorithm for months.

These are the taxes they don't mention in motivational posts.

In your twenties, you pretend the FOMO doesn't sting, maybe as you are everywhere at once, maxing out the candle. In your thirties, you admit it stings a little bit. In your forties, you start to realize it may have saved you.

Because loneliness is rarely the result of isolation. It's the residue of whatever escape you are looking for. It's the grit that can make a pearl. Or a drunkard.

Once you decide to take a new tack, your old world won't fit anymore. You outgrow friends. You break routines. You stop showing up to the places you're expected.

People get mad. They take it personally. They should. Your circles shrink. They should. People assume your absence is a judgment on them. And maybe it is.

I've missed weddings. Birthdays. Entire friendships that belonged to an older version of me. I didn't want to be him anymore. Maybe I never was. And I didn't want to explain myself, even though I probably owed people that. Reinvention is partly courage and partly cowardice. Courage to claim who you're becoming. Cowardice to let who you were die quietly, without the hard conversations, without asking permission.

Because the people who love the old you will argue hard for him to stay. They'll insist balance is possible. That you can have both.

They're lying. Not maliciously. But they're lying.

You can't have both. Not during the build.

Not when the new you is still soft, still unfired clay, still susceptible to gravity.

So the nights get quieter. Your life narrows into a tunnel. You work without witness. Knowing there will. Never. Be. A witness. You'll succeed, and your reward is that no one will ever know how hard it was. Not your priest. Not your lover.

Maybe you can tell your dog. But they won't understand. You can tell a tree, as my grandmother used to say.

You make choices no one understands except the person you're trying to become.

And loneliness becomes a kind of low-grade fever. Persistent, but manageable. An ache you learn to walk with, like your elders learned to walk with theirs. The suffering the Buddha said comes with living.

But you learn to walk even so.

Here is a simple cure for loneliness, the only one I've found:

Go to sleep early.

Not meditation. Not journaling. Not the gym. Not calling someone and pretending to be fine. When you cannot be with people, the only remedy is this:

Sleep. The hard cut. The splice in the edit.

Because loneliness lives in the late-night hours. It prowls when the city is loud and you're quiet. It feeds on the gap between who you were and who you're becoming.

But sleep resets the reel. Fade to black. Cut to morning.

You wake up different. Nobody is lonely in the morning. Morning doesn't ask who you should be with, it comes with potential, and coffee.

It asks what you're building. It wants to help. Morning is annoyingly optimistic like that, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It asks what you're chasing, which version of yourself you're willing to serve today.

Maybe this is why most people never reinvent their lives, because they cannot stomach the season where no one sees them.

The weeks when nothing is glamorous. The months where nothing is confirmed. The nights where everyone you know is out there collecting their moments while you sit at the station waiting for a train no one believes in yet, chasing something you can't even explain.

Most people can't handle it.

That's not an insult, it's just true.

The loneliness will outlast your motivation. Then what do you do? It will cost more than you budgeted, then what will you do? And no one will thank you for paying it. Not for years. Maybe not ever. If you do it expecting thanks you are doomed from the get-go.

But if you can survive the invisibility, outlast the solitude, if you can sit with the fact that Saturday nights in Medellín will keep happening without you, that your phone will light up with lives you're not living, and the gap between who you were and who you're becoming might take longer than you hoped…

If you can do that and still wake up Sunday morning and get back to work…

Then somewhere down the line, the life you designed appears.

And people say you're confident. They say you got lucky. They say you're living the dream. They call it overnight success.

They never see the season that made it possible.

The season of no witness.

The long, unlit corridor. The Saturday nights where the city was loud and you were quiet and you chose the future over the moment, again and again, until the future became the present.

It's 10:47 p.m. on a Saturday. Medellín is just waking up.

I'm cutting to morning.

🌎 Visa Watch

🇵🇭 Philippines

Rolling out its new Digital Nomad Visa under Executive Order No. 86. One year in-country, extendable once. Multiple entries allowed. A warm, low-cost base entering the official list.

🇸🇮 Slovenia

Launching a one-year digital nomad permit on Nov 21, 2025 for non-EU workers with foreign income. Non-renewable back-to-back. Clean rules and Schengen access for anyone wanting a European chapter.

🇦🇪 UAE

As of July 5, 2025, the UAE has paused all new freelance visas. Renewals still allowed. Dubai stays strong, but not open for fresh freelance entries right now.

🇨🇴 Colombia

The Digital Nomad Visa remains available, but 2025 has brought stricter scrutiny and more discretionary rejections. Requirements unchanged on paper, tougher in practice. Have a backup plan.

🤓 The Read

Unfortunately for Marsh Girl Kya, “The Crawdads” are not some new band she gets to see, and crawdads don’t actually sing. But that’s about all she has in her early decades: silence, saltwater, and the long echo of a life spent alone at the edge of a swamp.

Kya grows up in the marshlands of coastal North Carolina. Her family falls apart in slow motion. Her mother walks out first, then the siblings scatter, then her father disappears into cheap swamp booze. By ten or eleven, she is surviving out there by herself, gathering mussels, trading with Jumpin’, and learning to read the landscape the way most kids learn a schoolbook.

The town calls her Marsh Girl. Sometimes worse. Barkley Cove is one of those places that likes its gossip tight and its outsiders labeled early. So Kya retreats deeper into the marsh. She studies feathers. She sketches shells. She builds her own world from tidewater and birdsong because the human one keeps slamming its doors.

I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Carolina coast has always felt like a myth to me. Shipwrecks. Lighthouses. The Wright brothers. Land that keeps changing shape. Reading Crawdads felt like tapping into that same restless coastline. It is part nature writing, part mystery, part Southern nostalgia. At times, it reads like two novels sewn together. The courtroom sections have the tone of a network TV drama that wants to be serious, while To Kill a Mockingbird was the cinematic version that actually pulled it off.

And yes, Kya is beautiful. Men notice. She notices them back. She even studies the praying mantis, the ruthless female who snacks on the male after mating. There is a very specific, almost scientific scene where she observes this.

Post-coital digestif, anyone?

What I took from the book is simple. Loneliness can raise you or ruin you. Kya chooses to let it raise her. She becomes her own world. Her own teacher. She had her own proof that she deserved better than what she was given.

And that is what keeps you in your seat long after the crawdads finish not singing.

That is what makes you stay for the encore. And the cornbread recipe.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - Frankenstein, by del Toro

Frankenstein has been done to death.

Done good, done bad, done great, done sorry. Every angle. Every era. Every misreading. And almost all of them miss the point.

The creature has been doubly wronged.

Once by the townsfolk.

Once by the interpreters.

People still argue about who the real monster is.

People still argue about who wrote it. Mary or Percy, or whether Mary wrote Percy’s poems, or whether the entire Romantic circle was one swirling cauldron of borrowed quills and borrowed thunder.

For the record, I believe Mary wrote it.

Mary Shelley. Eighteen years old. A genius surrounded by men twice her age who thought genius was something you performed in a salon, not something you wrote alone at night while they shot pistols at the moon.

But that’s the tragedy.

Frankenstein has been adapted so many times it’s hard to remember the original voltage. The threat. The tenderness. The loneliness.

Most adaptations gut it. Turn it into IP, and turn a creation myth into a costume.

Even Mel Brooks got his hands on it, and that was probably the last worthwhile mutation for decades. The rest blur together.

And in the future it will be done again and again.

All of them forgettable.

All of them missing the central wound of the book: what happens when you’re misunderstood by the world that made you.

Unless the “who” happens to be Guillermo del Toro.

Because he knows all this. He understands monsters because he's made them for decades. He understands loneliness because he's made art while Hollywood wanted him to make product. And he understands that the creature was never the villain.

The creature was the artist.

Brought to life by someone who didn't know what they'd made. Abandoned by the world that should have loved it. And forced to wander in the cold, articulate and furious, while everyone calls it a monster for refusing to die quietly.

Del Toro didn't adapt Frankenstein. He recognized it.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

If you enjoyed this, share it.

Ask Birdbrain GPT (Powered by Yours Truly, Rio)

See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.