I’m not on a mountaintop.
I’m on the same road as you — just a few miles up.

Let me tell you who’s saying all this — and why I think I earned the right to.

The name

Solrac is Carlos, spelled backward. It isn’t a marketing trick. It’s the name I gave the version of me I had left behind — the fearless one, the one I was before the world told me who to be. This whole thing started as my long way back to him.

The kid

I was born in Miami Beach in 1961, to a Cuban family that had just lost a country. We landed in Queens when I was a few months old — a Cuban kid learning how to be cold. We came back to Miami when I was nine, and Miami has been home ever since. I grew up between two worlds and, for a long stretch, was fully at home in neither.

The years I only existed

Here’s the part I don’t skip. I spent decades existing. I chased the things you’re supposed to chase and wore the face you’re supposed to wear. I had a first marriage that ended. I had a lot of quiet years where I was present in body and absent from my own life. If “if only I would” is a whisper, I knew it by heart. I’m not writing any of this as a man who figured it out early — I’m writing as one who found it late, and is still walking it.

Five bad days

Then came the diagnoses. Cancer — five times. Hodgkin’s. Prostate. The fear that comes free with all of it. And a stretch of sarcoidosis, for good measure. People call me a five-time cancer survivor. Here’s how I actually count it: in all of it, I’ve had five bad days. Not five bad years — five bad days.

Bad moments? More than I could number — fear, anger, a few trips into the dark. A bad moment is going to come; that was never the fight. The fight is whether you let it linger into a whole bad day. Five times, I lost it — five days I was angry, or scared, or low, and let it own me start to finish. Every other time, I caught the moment before it became a day.

That’s the win. Not that the fear never came — that I never let it stay. I was not given a body that betrayed me. I was blessed with one that is, and remains, resilient.

What carried me

What carried me wasn’t grit. It was a source. My faith — God, as I understand Him — is where I get the decision to live, and get it again on the days I can’t find it myself. And it was Angelica. We married in 1992. She has been my first reader, my truth-teller, and living proof that the second half of a life can be better than the first. My daughter Nicole is the ripple I’m proudest of.

Now

These days I speak, I write, and I say one thing every way I know how: stop existing, start living. Make a decision. Take consistent action. I’m not a guru. I’m a man who wasted enough years to know exactly what they cost — and who found, late but not too late, that the whisper was never whether I could.

It was whether I would. I would. So I did.

Your turn.

It’s time to LIVE.