New Orleans is saying Goodbye
Cafe Sbisa, open since 1899, locked its doors this summer. Coquette served its last plates in June. Johnny Sánchez and Habana Outpost both chose Cinco de Mayo, of all days, as their final service. Every few weeks another name we know, another patio we loved, another corner of this city's story goes quiet. And every time, I feel it in my chest the way you feel it when a neighbor moves away.
Because here's what those closures actually are. They are proof, in real time, that business is not easy. Not here, not anywhere. The margins are thin, the summers are brutal, the costs keep climbing, and the people behind those doors gave everything they had.
So the question I keep sitting with is this... why are so many of us still choosing it?
Why, in a moment when the risks are written on storefront after storefront, are women, especially women in their forties and fifties, walking away from stable careers to build something of their own? I keep reading about it. Women leaving professions they spent decades mastering to do something completely different. Not a lateral move. A leap. Toward the thing that actually brings them joy.
I don't think it's recklessness. I think it's clarity.
I heard something recently that I haven't been able to shake. The idea was simple... nobody wants to hire the workaholic anymore. They want the person who spends her free time painting, dancing, making, creating. Because that person hasn't burned out her imagination. That person still has a spark to bring into the room. Creativity is not the hobby you squeeze in after the real work. Creativity IS the asset. It always was.
That truth is a big part of why I opened a Studio Shakti New Orleans in the Marigny. But let me be honest about what came before it. For 17 years, I taught belly dance in every corner and park of this city... renting rooms, clearing out my dining room, borrowing floors, hauling my speaker to whatever space would have us. There was no business plan. There was only a belief. A belief that I needed to dance, that other women needed to dance, and that we all needed a place to love our bodies out loud. The studio came later. The belief came first.
Because movement, art, and gathering are not luxuries we earn after the grind. They are how we survive the grind. They are how we stay whole enough to keep building at all. Holistic wellness can't be an appointment you keep once a month. It has to live inside the daily rhythm of your life, or the life eats you alive.
And no... I couldn't quit work and just travel. That's not my story, and honestly, it's not most women's story. We have responsibilities, mortgages, people who count on us. But in December, I did quit my job of 18 years. And I replaced it with five. Five that I love. A strategy practice, an editorial platform, a dance community, a cultural krewe, and a creative studio. Ones that feed each other, and more importantly, ones that feed me.
People hear that and think it sounds like more grind, not less. It's the opposite. Being multidimensional is the leverage. When one business slows, another carries. When one door closes, four more are already open. The woman with one revenue stream is at the mercy of every storm this economy throws. The woman with five interconnected ones has options, and options are the whole game.
So this letter is for her. The woman who is tired... not of working, but of working on things that give nothing back. Of filling a well they cannot drink from. The one who has been told her whole life to pick a lane, stay in it, and be grateful. The one who walks past a shuttered restaurant and feels both the grief and, quietly, the pull.
You don't have to do it the way I did it. You don't have to open a studio or start five businesses (I fully admit I did this on a bonus level). But you are allowed to build a life where your creativity is the engine and your wellness is not negotiable. A life where the through line of who you are... for me, culture and community... is also the through line of the work you do. You are allowed. You always were.
New Orleans keeps saying goodbye. But this city has never once stopped saying hello. New doors open here every single day, and behind so many of them... a woman who chose it anyway.
I truly believe that's who keeps this city alive.
With love and intention, a second line in my step, wherever the rhythm carries me,
Karlita
Karla Marie “Karlita” Cochran
In the Spotlight 504 New Orleans
