We were lucky to catch up with Laura Mendiola recently and have shared our conversation below.

Laura , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

The biggest risk I’ve ever taken wasn’t jumping into something new — it was walking away from a version of myself I’d spent over a decade building.

I worked in the beauty industry for over fifteen years. Hair, makeup, weddings, full clientele, full reputation — I built that career from scratch. It taught me everything: timing, people-reading, intuition, pacing, energy, self-reliance. It was my world.

But over time, life piled up in ways I couldn’t ignore. I was separated but not yet divorced. I was in a relationship that drained more than it gave. My dad got sick and eventually passed. None of it happened in isolation — it was pressure from every direction, and the work stopped fitting inside it.

Wedding mornings and glam sessions started feeling like maintenance instead of expression. Not because I was ungrateful — but because I was no longer aligned with the identity I was performing.

So I did something that shocked everyone, including me:
I stepped out of the beauty world and into something completely different — a structured, non-entrepreneurial role with fixed hours, defined responsibilities, and external leadership. I needed routine. I needed containment. I needed space to reset my nervous system and think clearly again.

At first, it worked.
I liked the stability. The quiet. The reset.
Then the walls started closing in.

After fifteen years of working for myself, operating inside someone else’s structure started to feel like clipping my own wings.
My ideas were “too much,” my initiative was “overstepping,” and I felt my voice shrinking every day. It wasn’t the job’s fault — it just wasn’t mine.

The real risk came the day I realized staying would cost me more than leaving ever could.

I quit.
No backup plan. No safety net. Just a clean internal knowing: If you don’t walk out now, you’ll lose the part of you that actually builds things.

And the wild part — I wasn’t scared.
Fifteen years of entrepreneurship had trained me to trust my timing, even when the timing looked insane.

Two weeks later, I published my first blog. And everything clicked. Writing wasn’t a plan — it was the thing that had been trying to find me for years. The Eighth Gate was born because I finally stopped performing identities I had outgrown.

The risk wasn’t leaving a job. The risk was leaving the version of myself everyone knew me as.

Reinvention doesn’t happen when you feel ready.
It happens when you tell the truth and jump anyway.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I spent over fifteen years in the beauty industry building a solid reputation as a hair and makeup artist. I loved the creativity and the intimacy of working one-on-one with people, but eventually the work stopped feeling like expression and started feeling like maintenance. The misalignment wasn’t dramatic — it was quiet, persistent, and impossible to ignore.

I stepped briefly into a structured environment to reset and learned very quickly that I don’t function where my voice is decorative. I’m not built for clock-in, clock-out roles or for sitting quietly while decisions get made over my head. My creativity shut down, my instincts shut down — so I walked away.

That choice became the beginning of my real work.

I became a writer when I stopped trying to force myself into identities that required me to play small. Writing wasn’t a childhood dream or a long-term plan — it was the door that opened when everything else collapsed. I started publishing online, and people responded immediately. Not to aesthetics or branding — to clarity.

My strength has always been pattern recognition: psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual. Writing gave me a container to translate what people feel but can’t articulate.

I built The Eighth Gate as a place where those patterns are named cleanly and without performance. I write about discernment, identity, power, self-deception, and the moments when a life quietly reroutes itself. My work includes long-form essays, pattern analysis, personal resets, energetic blueprints, and narrative reframing.

Clients come to me when they’re stuck between who they used to be and who they actually are. They want accuracy, not comfort. Language, not motivation. Someone who can see the architecture behind their cycles and name it without softening the edges.

What sets me apart is simple: I don’t write from theory. I write from lived pattern recognition — years of entrepreneurship, high-intensity relational dynamics, and direct experience rebuilding a life that no longer fit.

I don’t tell people who to become.
I tell them what they’ve outgrown.

Everything else unfolds from there.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The biggest lesson I had to unlearn was the idea that enduring dysfunction was the same thing as being strong. That belief followed me through motherhood, relationships, work — everywhere. I’d tolerate things I should’ve walked away from because I thought loyalty made me a “good woman” and holding everything together made me a “good mom.”

That mindset kept me in dynamics that chipped away at my self-respect — relationships where I minimized myself, situations where I accepted emotional chaos as normal, and patterns where I became the regulator for everyone but myself. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t have the language for it yet.

The shift happened when I finally stopped romanticizing resilience and started analyzing patterns. Not spiritually — psychologically. Once I saw the narcissistic loops, the emotional inconsistency, the way survival-mode conditioning had shaped my choices — the spell broke. I didn’t just leave situations; I left the version of myself that tolerated them.

And as a mom, that mattered even more. My kids don’t need me to teach endurance. They need me to model discernment.

Unlearning that one belief changed everything:
how I work, how I love, how I write, how I choose myself without apology.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Yes, and it’s sharp.

My work is driven by the need to name what people feel but can’t articulate. I write about psychology, pattern recognition, emotional conditioning, narcissistic dynamics, identity shifts — the stuff most people live through but never examine.

It comes from experience.
I’ve been the woman who stayed too long.
I’ve been the mom holding the house together while unraveling internally.
I’ve been in relationships where clarity didn’t exist.

And I watched how those patterns repeat until someone finally calls them out.

That’s what I do now.

I translate what people sense but can’t verbalize. I map the mechanics of denial, projection, self-abandonment, intuition, and awakening in a way that cuts through the noise. Not in a self-help tone, not in a mystical performance — just clean, intelligent truth.

My mission is simple:
give people the language that shifts their self-perception. I don’t pull people out of their patterns — I name the pattern so clearly that staying in it becomes impossible.

Because once you see a pattern for what it is, you can’t unsee it — and your whole life pivots.

That’s what my readers come for.
Not comfort — clarity.
Not inspiration — accuracy.

And that’s what drives every piece I write.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theeighthgate.substack.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laura_mendiola_/
• Other: Payhip: https://payhip.com/TheEighthGate

  Medium: https://medium.com/@TheEighthGatebyLauraMendiola