I’m traveling this week and taking a break from Substack. But thanks to the Substack autoscheduler, I can still be here in your inbox! Every day this week, I’ll share a favorite read from a fellow Substacker. May they inspire you as much as they inspire me.
I first discovered
through their incredible guest post on SmallStack. I subscribed to For the Birds, and since then, we’ve orbited each other like two planets at opposite edges of the solar system, slowly drawn closer by mutual gravity until suddenly, we’re exchanging emails and speaking the language of friendship. All my interactions with Sarah have been like that. She writes with such human tenderness, I can’t help but feel seen.A favorite quote from a recent post:
Too often, I think we think our choices look like this: pie-in-the-sky peacefulness, or fist-in-the-air cancellation.
What about the squishy gray complicated middle space between them? To be sure, it’s not as photogenic as the other two. It’s the space where you look at hard things and bad choices alongside the people who create or make them, and you grapple with what to do about such common human contradictions.
(And no, I don’t mean separating the art from the artist. What I’m talking about here involves a bothness, not faux compartmentalization.)
I’m not sure cancel culture is life-affirming, I finally say to M, and it feels like a lightbulb moment, a brand new kind of thought, one that both startles and excites me. It comes on the heels of decades of wanting to send everything that’s ever harmed me straight to the gallows.
You are such a great planet, Robin.