04: What do you want to say? Who are you saying it to?
Happy September!
If you're new: I use this space to explore creativity, art, storytelling, writing, design, tech, UX and the intersections between them—whatever that means. I personally know those connections are what rev me up, and so, let’s see what happens!
What am I trying to say?
Speak. For your two lips are free. Speak. For your tongue is still your own .… Speak whatever must be said.
—Faiz Ahmed Faiz
In 2019, I hired a business coach to help me build a business strategy so that I could become a better and more effective business person and build a more sustainable and profitable business. As is true for many things, it didn’t go the way I expected. Rather than taking me through a 5-step formula to success, our sessions seemed more like therapy. I cried A LOT during each of them. I didn’t realize at the time how much I needed to acknowledge that running a business was hard, lonely and—because I was in charge of defining everything and I always tend to do things off the beaten path—overwhelming. In hindsight, the coaching was just what I needed, and I sit at this computer, writing to you all with a much better sense of all the things. But I bring this all up in order to discuss the origins of this newsletter.
One of the few tangible and tactical things my coach encouraged me to do was write a newsletter.
“Just once a month,” she said. “Don’t make it complicated or hard. Just do it, and send it.”
I’ve struggled for two years to follow that advice. I struggle to follow it right now. What a miracle that this newsletter is going out for the third time in 2021! The reason I struggle is that there are so many things I could write about. I could just send a monthly update about my business. I could just send out some links to things I like or a picture of me somewhere. I could share snippets from creative projects. I’ve also scribbled drafts for things like:
My “Batman/Bruce Wayne” lifestyle, which is basically how I explain how I try to balance my professional career goals with my personal creative goals. It’s also coincidentally, what my business coach told me I should write about in my newsletter, and I said, “Sure, sure. I’ll get to it.” And well, here we are now more than two years later.
There was the moment earlier in the year when I watched my mother struggle with an interface. I wrote in a draft, “Suddenly, I became acutely aware of the cause behind so many of my relatives and the world’s digital illiteracy. Technology for the last 10 years has been about creating a frictionless experience. But we makers, creators and experts have come to interpret frictionless to mean ‘thoughtless.’ Rather than framing an action that requires the user to understand it before they react to it, we constantly put people in situations where we want them to act/react before they understand why they are doing the action. My mother sees a button and just understands that she needs to push it rather than what it is even for or why she should push it at all. In fact, our whole information-delivering world seems predicated on this disjointed nature of illiteracy.”
I have oodles of these scribbles in digital and tangible notebooks. But the real, honest-to-god truth is that it’s not in my heart to complete them at all (or as of yet). My head recognizes that these are topics that are interesting and would probably be interesting to you. My head recognizes that they fit the creative/personal/product/tech brief of this newsletter, and that if I could just finish them then I’d be on my way to a) more followers, b) passive income or c) a more defined brand. And I love talking about these things. If we ever meet again in a future that allows for spontaneous IRL conversation, I’d ramble off on them. But for the purposes of this medium, I just can’t do it. These messages all exist as half-formed things, and that’s what they generally remain: half-formed.
It just ALWAYS seems to come back to what I consider to be the two defining questions that drive all communication no matter the type:
What do you want to say?
Who do you want to say it to?
If you can answer these two questions—whether you are a person, business, marketer, politician, poet, influencer, storyteller—then you can effectively communicate and create content for anything because you a) know your message, b) understand your audience and c) can accurately decide on and utilize the medium through which you connect A (you) to B (you all). In fact, when I'm in doubt on any project, I'll take a step back and make sure I can answer them.
This was also the crux of a lot of my business confusion back in 2019. I had a lot of information to digest from others on how to be a successful business person, but none of their methods mattered because they didn’t help me build the business or person I wanted to become. Once I was truly, baldly honest with myself about why I’m even here in consulting/product land and what I wanted to give to it and achieve with it was I able to construct the business strategy I currently use. Until I knew the heart that energizes my actions, I could do tactics all day but to no effect. And really, if you are going to sustain or do or speak anything, then you must care about it. And if you care about it, it’s probably because there is something meaningful you want to impart to a specific segment of others.
But does it speak to you?
Anyway, I’m here in the desert much like I was when I sent my first ever newsletter. Even when away, the world and all its moving parts still are present—masks indoors, signs on trails warning of drought, fire hazard reminders, acknowledgements from passersby about how weird everything still is. I’ve been thinking about how the universe never promised us a future of “perfect comfort.” That the the universe has only ever promised that change happens, and that change is something you can never anticipate 100%. That if we humans could so drastically change how we exist on this planet over the last two hundred years, it was naive to think everything else would stay the same—as if we could change our part of the world but keep the rest separate in its own unchanging little bubble. How the Joshua Tree I’m walking around in today isn’t like it was a decade or even a century ago. And even if we weren’t facing climate change, there would still be change and that change would be uncertain.
Overall, I anticipate that we will have to do a lot of changing in the coming years, and I’d like to be up for that task rather than afraid of it or give into despair. And well, stepping into change—whether it’s chosen or a consequence—is something I can practice in my life.
Anyway I realized that of all the many things I could say this is what I really wanted to share, and so here I am completing and sending this newsletter to you—finally. I hope it speaks to you.
Cheers,
Sarah
Reading, Listening, Watching
One of my favorite anthologies is Campfire Stories: Tales from America’s National Parks. I know the creators who are the founders of the sabbatical program I did back in 2018. It made me excited to visit more national parks, and it also introduced me to this idea that people have been experiencing our changing world in many different ways for a long time. It’s really beautiful to read about historical accounts of how the people of the past experienced those parks in ways we are not able to now.
This week I read this article from Buzzfeed News on the collective anger that is bubbling everywhere because our 2021 reality just isn’t what we hoped for. It made me think about how one of my favorite quotes from The Artist’s Way is something like: “anger is a sign that something needs to change.” And while there are many things we can’t control, we can control how we choose to (re)act in a situation, and that is usually the thing we must change.
Snowflower and the Secret Fan is probably one of my favorite books of the year. It’s very emotional though; I cried a lot toward the end. What made it so meaningful was that it reminded me how most of human existence has been at the mercy of forces larger than the individual—cultural, natural, political, etc. It made the alien-to-modern-eyes world of 1800s China so real, and it reminded me how all of us struggle to live meaningful lives and deal with disappointment as we grow and age. I also read My Brilliant Friend, which I felt was a very similar coming of age story about two friends except set in post-WWII Naples. It also lacked the harrowing chapter on the historical Chinese cultural practice of foot-binding.
The quote at the top of this newsletter comes from a poem I first heard in the very funny, heart-warming British comedy We Are Lady Parts—about a girl with stage fright who joins a punk band. Oh yeah, they’re all practicing Muslims, too. The scene is below; and immediately after (or before I forget), Amina (our protagonist) tells Saira (who recited the poem), “I’m afraid [to go onstage].” Saira responds, “Feel the fear, and do it anyway.”
Reminder: I have a book!
My talented friends stylized quite a few photos, and I want to show them off. You can also read an excerpt here.