I wanted to be an architect from the time I was about twelve. I liked making things for myself: a stand for my TV and PlayStation, a desk, even the drafting table I used in high school. If I built it, I could make it fit what I needed. I went to Saunders, a trades and technical high school in Yonkers with an architecture program, and then to NYIT to study architecture. For a while, I thought I knew where I was headed.

Baseball had been part of my life even longer. I started when I was about five or six and played until nineteen, including travel teams. There's a coach I met when I was about eight who I still call Coach today. School, practice, bus rides, hanging out with the team—that was one of my first experiences of belonging to something and showing up for it regularly.

When I stopped playing in college, I wasn't as active anymore and gained about forty pounds. I started working out and trying to eat better, learning a lot from YouTube. I didn't really know what I was doing, so it took roughly two years to lose fifty pounds. By then, working out had become part of my day. I was learning how to keep working at something even when getting better took a while.

School was harder to figure out. About two and a half years into architecture, I left to study physics at City College. When that wasn't going anywhere either, I had to choose between another school and another major or going back to finish what I'd started. I returned to NYIT and graduated with my Bachelor of Architecture in 2017.

I still liked making physical models and going back and forth between the model and the design. Preparing the files and figuring out how the pieces fit were part of making something I wanted to build. But finishing the degree didn't make me want the career. Working around construction and engineering, I kept looking for something I could enjoy spending my days doing.

Trying things out

During those years, I started reading more. A book assigned in a class interested me, so I followed its references to other books, and those led to more. My interests spread into health, psychology, business, and storytelling. Reading and journaling became regular habits alongside working out. I was learning about more things than I knew what to do with yet, but I kept coming back to them.

The journals also made it harder to ignore when I wasn't doing anything with what I was thinking about. Once, looking back over about three years, I found the same crush, the same problems, and the same uncertainty about my life. My New Year's resolution was to find a new problem. I knew there would always be something to deal with. I just didn't want to write about the same thing the following year without having tried to change it.

Some of that trying started with things I already enjoyed. I liked making drinks for cousins and friends, learning from videos and putting something together for people. That led to a mixology course, then a bartending job. I met my girlfriend at that job, and that relationship was part of my life while I finished college.

I had kept the weight off for a while, but toward the end of the relationship I started gaining it back quickly. After we broke up in 2019, I worked on losing it again. This time I lost seventy-five pounds in nine months using keto and intermittent fasting. People kept asking how I'd done it. I had learned so much from other people online that making videos to share my own experience seemed worth trying.

In 2020, I started Keto is the Worst. I spent about a year working on it without much growth, and then it began to gain traction. My TikTok had around twenty-six thousand followers when I stopped. By that point, I had learned to record, edit, explain things, and make videos people wanted to watch. But I didn't want to keep doing that work, handling the comments, and making those particular videos for the long haul.

Stopping was hard to make sense of when it was finally growing. It took time to be okay with a project having run its course. I didn't know then how much of what I'd learned would turn out to be useful elsewhere.

A few blocks from work

After that project, I took an electrical-engineering design job. My first salsa studio was a few blocks from the building. I'd always wanted to learn salsa, and now I could walk to a class from work. That made it easier to finally start.

After the breakup and then lockdown, I had been trying to get back into being social. Some friends had families or weren't going out the way we used to, so I was doing a lot of it alone. Classes gave me somewhere to go regularly. My next studios were within walking distance of work, too, and the people I met through salsa gradually led me further into the dance scene and toward Dominican bachata.

That connection mattered to me. My parents were born in the Dominican Republic, but I was born in New York and grew up in the suburbs. I don't speak Spanish. I had Dominican music, food, and family around me, but sometimes felt less connected than relatives who grew up in the Heights or DR, or who were closer with my grandparents. Baseball had been one way to connect with that part of myself. Now I was finding another, with more to learn than I'd realized.

In May 2024, I went to a Dominican bachata festival near Barcelona. People I recognized from New York were there. We ended up having dinner and spending time together, and I got to know people I'd already been dancing around for months. I had gone by myself, but I was starting to build relationships that went beyond recognizing someone across a room.

I wanted to come back the next year. Being around people from different countries who were so involved in Dominican bachata made me want to get better before I did. Back in New York, I took practice more seriously, got a mirror, and eventually started recording the last song of my sessions. I was back to something I knew how to do: work at it regularly and learn a little more along the way.

Giving it a real attempt

I lost my job in July 2024. While looking for another one, I kept dancing and learning, including teacher training in the Dominican Republic that August. I was beginning to think about what I could contribute, and I wasn't excited about returning to the work I'd been doing. The salaries and time off I was finding didn't seem to leave much room for the life I was starting to enjoy.

I spent New Year's in Amsterdam, where I went to another Dominican festival. I remember feeling grateful that three steps and a tap had brought me there. Dancing had given me a way to travel, meet people, and take part in something I wanted to understand more deeply. Coming back at the beginning of 2025, I wanted to commit to it.

I'd heard people on YouTube talk about committing to something for ninety or a hundred days. I decided to put out a dance clip every day for a hundred days. I was already practicing and recording; now I would share it consistently. The filming and editing I'd learned through Keto is the Worst gave me a starting point. Some of the lights were even the same.

Posting that regularly helped me stop making each video such a big deal. I could share something, put the phone down, and keep going. The habit was familiar by then: baseball practice, working out, reading, journaling, and now dance. I keep studying the music and working on how I respond to it because there's still so much I want to learn.

What those years gave me

As I build Tres Golpes, I can use things that once seemed like separate attempts to figure my life out. Baseball shaped how I practice and teach: work on the basics, then use them in something closer to a scrimmage, where you have to respond. Making models taught me to build something, see how it works, and adjust it. Making videos gives me a way to share what I'm learning with people who might find it useful.

I still get to be a learner in all of this. Dancing connects me more closely to Dominican culture and to people around the world who appreciate it. Through classes and socials, I can help someone else learn to dance, reconnect with that culture, or meet people they want to spend time with. I get to share something I love and see someone enjoy it with me.

For years, I kept trying things and wondering whether any of them would turn into something I wanted to stay with. Looking at what I'm doing now, I can see how much I brought from those years. The work, the habits, even the projects I stopped have given me something I use here. Being able to put that together around music, culture, and people finally feels like what I had been looking for.