Author: Sarah King

Stop Saying “Amazing” — What Real Encouragement Actually Sounds Like

Posted on 31 August 2026by Sarah King

OK so let me start by saying something that is going to sound a little harsh and I am saying it with full love: if your go-to response to everything a young person does is “amazing!” or “that’s so good!” or “you’re incredible!” — you are not actually encouraging them. You are making noise in their direction. And young people, especially the ones who are perceptive and tender and already halfway convinced the world is full of people who don’t see them clearly, they know the difference. They feel the difference, even when they can’t name it.

I have been working with young people long enough to know that encouragement is one of those words that gets used like it’s simple. Like it’s just the act of saying nice things. But encouragement and empty praise are not the same thing. They don’t do the same thing. They don’t land the same way. And if we genuinely care about the young people we are walking alongside, it’s worth slowing down long enough to understand what we are actually doing when we open our mouths.

This is not a post about being mean. It’s not about withholding warmth or becoming some kind of strict feedback machine. It’s about being real. Because real is what builds real things. And young people deserve to be built up with materials that will actually hold.

The Empty Praise Problem

Here’s the thing about empty praise. It feels great in the moment. For both people, honestly. You say “amazing!” and the kid smiles, and you feel like you did something good, and for about thirty seconds everyone feels warm and fuzzy. But here is what empty praise is quietly doing underneath all that warmth: it is teaching young people that approval is random. That it has nothing to do with what they actually did. That the bar is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

When everything is amazing, nothing is. That’s not a motivational poster. That’s just math.

Think about what it feels like to receive praise that you know you didn’t earn. Maybe you turned in something sloppy, you know it was sloppy, and someone gushes over it like you hung the moon. There is a moment — maybe quick, maybe uncomfortable — where something doesn’t add up. And you file that information away. You start to understand that this person’s enthusiasm is not calibrated to reality. Which means their encouragement is not a compass you can actually navigate by.

Now multiply that by weeks. Months. Years. A young person growing up surrounded by indiscriminate praise learns, consciously or not, that praise doesn’t mean anything. And worse — they don’t develop a reliable internal sense of when they have actually done something worth being proud of. Because the external signal is so scrambled, it never helps them build the internal one.

That is the real cost of empty praise. Not that it’s annoying, though sometimes it is. But that it hollows out the feedback loop young people need to develop genuine confidence. Confidence that isn’t dependent on someone else cheering — confidence that comes from knowing themselves, knowing their own capacity, and trusting that they can read the room accurately.

What Specific Encouragement Actually Looks Like

Specific encouragement is not complicated. It is just honest and it is awake. It means you are paying attention — not just registering that a young person exists and did a thing, but noticing what they actually did and naming it back to them in a way that means something.

Let me walk through some of the things worth noticing, because it’s not always the flashy stuff.

Effort. Effort is huge and wildly underacknowledged. We love to praise results. We love to say “great job” when something is finished and good-looking. But effort is what happens in the middle, in the messy part, when it’s hard and uncertain and the result isn’t guaranteed yet. When you notice a young person putting genuine effort into something — sticking with it, trying a different approach, choosing to try at all — naming that is powerful. Not “amazing,” but something like: “I watched you try that three different ways and you didn’t give up. That took a lot of patience.” That tells them something true about themselves that they can actually use.

Patience. This one is especially worth naming because young people are often told they’re impatient in a corrective tone, but rarely told when their patience is showing up beautifully. When a kid waits their turn gracefully, or stays calm in a situation that’s frustrating, or works through something slowly without melting down — that deserves to be named. Specifically. “That took patience and you showed it.” Two sentences. It lands.

Courage. Courage in young people does not always look like bravery in a dramatic sense. Sometimes it looks like raising a hand when they’re not sure of the answer. Trying something in front of other people. Telling the truth when it would have been easier to stay quiet. Apologizing. Being the only one who did something kind in a moment that cost them something socially. When you see courage show up in those quieter forms, naming it is a gift. It tells them: I see what that cost you and I want you to know it mattered.

Improvement. This one is important and also delicate. Praising improvement means you were paying attention before. It means your encouragement is longitudinal, not just a snapshot. When you say something like “this week I noticed you’re doing this differently than you were at the start — you’ve really grown in this,” you are doing several things at once. You’re confirming that effort over time produces results. You’re demonstrating that someone is tracking their growth with them. And you’re tying pride to a process, not just a moment. That is gold.

Responsibility. When a young person steps up and owns something — a task, a mistake, a role — and follows through on it, that deserves real specific acknowledgment. Not just “good job” but “you said you’d handle that and you did. That’s what responsibility looks like and it matters.” Because a lot of young people don’t get to see responsibility modeled well. When they practice it and it gets named, they start to understand what it feels like to be someone who keeps their word. That is a life skill that outlasts every gold star.

Persistence. Different from effort in that persistence is specifically about not quitting when quitting was tempting. When a young person comes back to something after failing at it, or keeps going after a rough day, or chooses to try again after being embarrassed — naming that is meaningful. “You came back and tried again. That’s persistence and it’s not easy.” Simple. True. Sticks.

Kindness. This one especially needs to be named because kindness is often invisible. We notice unkindness loudly and immediately. But when a young person does something quietly kind — includes someone who was being left out, says something gentle when they could have said something cutting, offers to help without being asked — it can slide right past without acknowledgment. And when it slides past consistently, kindness can start to feel like something that doesn’t register. Naming it tells a young person: this part of who you are is seen and it’s worth something.

The Manipulation Problem

There is another version of this conversation that we also need to have, and it’s about manipulative praise. Which is its own beast entirely.

Manipulative praise is praise that’s deployed strategically, not to build someone up but to manage their behavior. It’s the “wow you’re SO good at cleaning up, I just know you’ll clean up right now” approach, where the compliment is bait with a hook in it. Young people see through this faster than most adults expect. And when they do, they don’t just distrust the specific praise — they start to distrust the person delivering it.

There’s also the version that’s paired with comparison. “You’re so much better at this than so-and-so.” That is not encouragement. That is using someone else as a baseline in a way that either makes the young person feel superior at another person’s expense, or sets up an anxiety around being dethroned. Neither of those things builds anything healthy.

Real encouragement does not have an agenda other than the young person’s actual growth. It is not a lever. It is not a tool for compliance. It is an honest reflection offered with care. When it comes from that place, it lands completely differently.

Why Honesty Is Not Cruelty

I want to address the pushback I can already hear, because I know some people read posts like this and think — but what if I’m too critical? What if I discourage them? And that concern is legitimate. There is such a thing as being too harsh. There is such a thing as a critical environment that chips away at a young person rather than building them up. That’s real and worth being careful about.

But here’s the thing: the antidote to harmful criticism is not indiscriminate praise. The antidote is honest, kind, specific attention. It’s the discipline of noticing what’s actually true and naming it with warmth.

You can be honest without being brutal. You can skip the gushing without going cold. You can say “that part was really hard and I saw you push through it” instead of “that was absolutely perfect” when it wasn’t perfect and you both know it. Honesty and care are not opposites. They live best when they’re together.

And when something genuinely is excellent? Say so. Fully and without hedging. The word “amazing” is not banned from the vocabulary. It just needs to be reserved for when it’s true, so that it means something when you use it. When a kid does something that genuinely blows you away, the authentic response to that — the wide-eyed unguarded “okay that was actually incredible” — hits completely differently than the baseline noise of everything being incredible all the time.

This Also Applies to Adults, By the Way

Just going to park this here briefly because it applies to us too. Most adults did not grow up receiving specific, honest encouragement. Most of us were shaped by a combination of vague praise, direct criticism, and a lot of silence in between. And we carry that forward, often without realizing it. We either over-correct into the everything-is-amazing zone because we don’t want anyone to feel what we felt, or we under-correct into near-silence because we didn’t learn the language of noticing and naming.

Neither of those serves the young people in our lives well. And the work of actually learning to give real encouragement — to slow down, pay attention, and name what is true — is something that can be grown. It’s a practice. You do not have to have been raised with it to offer it. You just have to be willing to be intentional.

Which, if you’re reading a post like this, you probably are. So there’s that.

A Few Practical Things Worth Trying

Because I know some people want the actionable stuff, here is a loose framework that is not a formula. Treat it as a starting point, not a script.

First: watch before you speak. Let yourself actually observe what a young person is doing before you comment on it. Give yourself a moment to register what you actually saw, instead of just reflexively responding with something warm. The pause is where the specificity lives.

Second: name the behavior, not just the person. Instead of “you’re so responsible,” try “you finished what you said you’d finish and that’s what responsibility looks like.” It’s a small shift but it grounds the quality in something they did, not just something they are — which means it’s something they can do again.

Third: let it be proportional. Small wins get warmth. Real growth gets named clearly. Genuinely impressive stuff gets your honest, unreserved reaction. If everything gets the same level of response, nothing is calibrated and none of it means anything.

Fourth: don’t be afraid of silence. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do after a young person does something meaningful is just be present with it for a second. Not immediately filling the air with praise. Just letting it sit and then saying something real. Silence that holds space is not the same as silence that ignores.

Fifth: let them tell you first. Ask a young person how they feel about what they did before you tell them how you feel about it. “How do you feel about how that went?” is not a dodge. It’s an invitation for them to start building their own internal assessment, which is the whole point. You can add your honest observations after, but letting them speak first means they’re not just reflecting your reaction back at you — they’re building their own voice.

The Bottom Line

Young people are not fragile enough to need constant applause and they are not tough enough to not need to be seen. They need both honesty and warmth, delivered at the same time, by people who are paying attention enough to mean it.

Encouragement is not just making someone feel good. It is giving someone accurate information about themselves, delivered with enough care that they can receive it and use it. That’s it. That’s the whole job.

Effort matters. Patience matters. Courage matters. Improvement matters. Responsibility matters. Persistence matters. Kindness matters.

And none of those things need to be called amazing to be worth noticing. They just need to be noticed.

Go do that.

Ten Ordinary Things That Made This Week Slightly Better

Posted on 26 August 2026by Sarah King

I want to be clear upfront that this is not a gratitude journal post. I am not going to tell you to count your blessings in that slightly passive-aggressive wellness-influencer way that makes you feel guilty for being tired. This is not that. This is me, mid-week, sitting with a [hot beverage of choice] and realizing that a handful of completely unremarkable things had quietly kept me from full system collapse, and that maybe that deserves a moment of acknowledgment.

Not a ceremony. Just a moment.

Because sometimes the week is not dramatic in the big cinematic sense. Sometimes it is just heavy in that low-grade, cumulative, chronic kind of way where nothing is catastrophically wrong but everything costs a little more than it should and by Thursday you are running on fumes and stubbornness and whatever was left at the bottom of the snack drawer. You know the week I mean. You have lived that week. Probably recently.

And in those weeks, the big stuff does not save you. The grand gestures, the major plans, the things you were supposed to be looking forward to. Those feel far away. What saves you, weirdly, is the small stuff. The background-noise stuff. The things you almost do not notice until you stop and go, oh. that actually helped.

So here are ten of those things from this particular stretch of days. Some of these are specific. Some are intentionally vague because honestly you can probably fill in your own version and it will be just as true. I have left a few spots marked with brackets so I can update them before I hit publish, because as much as I love you all, I am not committing to specifics while my brain is still buffering.

Let’s go.

1. That One Song on Repeat

You know the one. There is always one. This week it was [song title / artist] and I cannot fully explain why it hit the way it did except that it did, in the chest, at the right moment, which is really the whole job description of a good song when you think about it.

Music does this thing where it does not ask you to be okay. It just sits beside you in whatever the current emotional weather is, and sometimes that is more useful than anything else anyone could offer. I had it on loop for probably longer than is socially acceptable. I do not regret it even slightly.

If your week was a lot, go find your song. Put it on. Turn it up to whatever volume your neighbours can technically tolerate. Let it do its job.

2. Coffee / Tea / Whatever Your Morning Anchor Is

Look. I am not here to debate the beverage. Whether it is coffee, tea, some elaborate matcha situation, or just very cold water because you are the kind of disciplined person I will never be, there is something about the first intentional sip of the day that functions almost like a ritual reset button.

This week my [coffee / tea / morning thing] was good. Not fancy. Not from anywhere special. Just hot, the right strength, consumed while the house was still quiet, before the day had opinions about me yet. And that fifteen-minute window where I just existed with a warm mug and no agenda was worth more than it had any right to be.

Small. Ordinary. Held something important together. Moving on.

3. The Weather Did Something Nice

[Personalize with specific weather moment: a sunny afternoon, the first properly cold morning that smelled like fall, a good rain, a dramatic sky at sunset, whatever actually happened this week.]

I have a theory that humans are not as evolved as we think we are and most of us are still basically just responding to sunlight and temperature like very complicated houseplants. A good weather moment can shift an entire day and we act like that is embarrassing to admit. It is not embarrassing. It is real.

Nature showing up and doing something beautiful or satisfying or even dramatically appropriate for the mood is a gift. Accept it. Say thank you. Go back inside.

4. Finishing a Thing

There was a task on my list this week. It has been on the list for longer than I am going to tell you. It was not a big task. It was actually kind of a small task. And yet somehow it had achieved this heavyweight villain status where every time I saw it I felt vaguely guilty and quietly overwhelmed, which is the special cruelty of undone small tasks. They punch above their weight.

And then I did it. It took [significantly less time than expected / approximately twenty minutes / one phone call / whatever applies]. And when it was done, it was just… done. Off the list. Gone. The psychological weight it had been silently exerting just evaporated.

Not joy. Relief.

Which is its own good thing. If you have a task like that sitting on your list right now, and you know what task I mean because it immediately came to mind when I said that, go do it. It will not be as bad as the dread made it feel. It never is. That is the infuriating magic trick undone tasks pull on all of us.

5. A Message from Someone Who Didn’t Need Anything

Someone sent me a message this week just to say something kind. [Personalize: a check-in text, a voice note, a compliment out of nowhere, someone remembering something specific you said.] They didn’t need a response. They weren’t asking for anything. It was just a reaching out because they thought of me.

I did not realize how much I needed that until it arrived.

There is a version of connection that is purely transactional and most of us swim in that version pretty much constantly, especially online. And then occasionally someone just thinks of you and tells you, and it is such a small thing and it lands so heavily that you have to sit with it for a second. You have to let it be real instead of immediately moving on.

If you thought of someone this week and did not say so, maybe go say so. It costs nothing and lands somewhere.

6. A Room That Was Just Quiet

I have sensory processing stuff. Noise is not neutral for me. It is a resource expenditure, a constant low-level tax on my system that adds up across a day in ways I do not always notice until I am suddenly at capacity and slightly feral and cannot explain to anyone around me what happened because nothing happened, I just ran out.

So when a room is quiet, genuinely quiet, I notice. And this week there was a stretch of time where [the house was empty / I had the space to myself / the usual noise just wasn’t happening], and I sat in it and I did almost nothing productive and it was extraordinary.

Quiet is not boring. Quiet is not laziness. For a lot of us, quiet is medicine. We are not being antisocial or difficult when we need it. We are just refueling the way our particular systems refuel.

I got some this week. It helped more than I can properly quantify.

7. Something From Outside

[Personalize with a specific small nature moment: a bird you noticed, a walk even a short one, sitting outside for ten minutes, the way the light came through the window, a plant you have been watching.] This one is intentionally open because the outside-world thing that matters is different for everyone and also I want you to think about yours while you are reading this.

But there is something about even brief contact with the non-manufactured world that does something to the nervous system that I cannot explain scientifically but have experienced enough times to trust completely. We are not meant to be entirely indoors and entirely on screens and entirely inside our own heads, even if that is sometimes what the logistics of a week require.

Something from outside came in this week and it was good. That is all.

8. Food That Actually Felt Like a Thing

Most of the time food is functional. You eat because you need to eat. You eat whatever is fastest or cheapest or requires the least executive function to produce, which for a lot of us on the spectrum or with chronic fatigue or just with a relentlessly busy life, is a significant portion of meals. No shame. Just reality.

But this week there was a meal. Or a snack. Or a specific thing. [Personalize: someone cooked something, or you made something, or a craving got satisfied, or a food from a memory appeared.] And it was not just fuel. It was actually good. Good in the way that makes you slow down and pay attention and have a moment with it.

Food as comfort is not a weakness. Food as pleasure is not indulgence. Sometimes a really good [thing you ate] is a legitimate form of self-care and I will not be accepting rebuttals on this.

9. A Book That Had Good Timing

I was reading [book title / or general description: a novel, a collection, something comforting, something that just happened to say the right thing] and there was a paragraph. You know the kind. The paragraph that makes you stop and read it again because it said something you had been carrying around without words, and now there are words, and somehow that makes it smaller and more manageable and also somehow more real at the same time.

Good books do that. They have impeccable timing in a way that feels slightly supernatural and probably isn’t, but I choose to receive it as a small grace anyway.

If you are not currently reading anything, I am not going to lecture you. But if there is a book you have been meaning to pick up, this might be the week to pick it up. The timing might be better than you think.

Proverbs has something to say about wisdom and words landing right but I am also just going to say: the right sentence from the right book at the right moment is its own kind of small miracle and I am grateful when I get one.

10. Rest That I Actually Took

This one is last and it is the most important and it is the one I fight the hardest.

I rested this week. On purpose. At a time when I could technically have been doing something productive. And instead of spending the rest time performing rest while actually anxiety-scrolling and mentally cataloguing everything I was not doing, I actually… rested. [Personalize: napped without guilt, watched something brainless, lay down in the quiet room from point six, sat outside from point seven, whatever actual rest looked like this week.]

This is harder than it sounds. There is a particular cruelty in how our culture has decided that rest must be earned, that it is a reward for sufficient productivity, that lying down in the middle of the day means something is wrong with you morally or motivationally. That is a lie. A particularly sticky and socially reinforced lie, but a lie.

Psalm 23 literally has “he makes me lie down in green pastures” in it. As in, sometimes God has to make us. Because we will not do it on our own. Because we have internalized the idea that stopping is failure and going is virtue and the whole thing is backwards and exhausting and we pass it on to each other like it’s wisdom when it is actually just a shared wound.

I rested. The work did not disappear. The world did not end. My body thanked me in the quiet way bodies thank you when you finally do the thing they have been asking for, which is by just feeling slightly less like a building that’s been condemned and slightly more like a person.

Good enough. I’ll take it.

That’s The List

Ten things. None of them are impressive. None of them would make a highlight reel. A song. A hot drink. Some weather. A finished task. A kind message. A quiet room. Something from outside. A good meal. A book with good timing. Rest I actually took.

The week was still a week. It still cost what it cost. I am still tired in the ways that carry across days and don’t fully resolve overnight. That is all still true.

But these ten things happened too. And they held something. And I think they are worth writing down, not because gratitude is a magic trick that transforms everything into fine, but because small things matter. Not-catastrophic moments matter. The ordinary stuff that quietly keeps you functional and human and even occasionally glad to be alive, that matters.

If you had a week like mine, I hope you can find your version of this list. It doesn’t have to be the same ten things. It just has to be real.

Music matters. Quiet matters. Rest matters. Kind words matter. Finishing one small stupid thing on the list matters more than it should and exactly as much as it does.

Go find yours.

[Sarah’s sign-off goes here as she prefers to end it.]

Complicated Happy: Another Summer at Camp

Posted on 26 August 2026by Sarah King

There is a word I keep reaching for when I try to describe what camp does to me, and I cannot find it. Happy is too clean. Grateful is too polished. Healing is too linear. What I actually feel is something that lives in the cracks between all of those words, something that does not fit on a greeting card or in a two-sentence Instagram caption.

Complicated happy. That is the closest I can get.

Because here is the thing nobody tells you about joy when you live with depression: joy does not cancel depression out. It does not show up like a health pack in a video game and top your meter back to full. It shows up alongside the depression, sometimes in the same moment, and you are standing there holding both of them like two things that should not fit in the same hand but somehow do. You are laughing and you are exhausted. You are present and you are grieving. You are exactly where you want to be and you are also, quietly, somewhere far away inside yourself.

Camp is where I learn to hold all of that at once and not drop it.

Every Year I Wonder If I Should Go Back

I am going to be honest with you because that is what this blog is for. Every single year, as summer gets closer, there is a version of me that starts building a case against going back to camp. She is very convincing, this version. She pulls up all the evidence. The fatigue that does not respond to sleep the way it used to. The sensory load of a camp environment, which is not small if you are autistic and running on a nervous system that has opinions about noise and crowds and schedule changes. The loneliness that can live inside community, which is its own particular cruelty. The grief that does not go on vacation just because you did.

She makes a solid argument. I will give her that.

And then I go anyway.

Not because I have heroically defeated the doubt. Not because I prayed it away or talked myself into some sparkling certainty. I go because something in me, something that sits deeper than the anxiety and the fatigue, just knows. It has been right enough times that I have learned to trust it even when the rest of me is voting no.

Faith is part of that, if I am being completely transparent. I do not think I always know what is good for me. I think sometimes the thing I need is exactly the thing I am most tempted to avoid. Proverbs 3:5-6 gets quoted a lot and sometimes it gets quoted to death, but it is still true. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. I have leaned on my own understanding enough times to know its limits. My understanding would have kept me home more than once. My understanding would have cost me so much.

So I pack the bag and I go.

What Camp Actually Feels Like When You Are Running on Empty

I want to be careful here because I am not going to glamorize it. I am not going to write the version where I arrive and the music swells and the sun hits the water just right and suddenly everything is fine. Sometimes that moment happens. But even when it does, it is one moment inside a much longer, more complicated experience.

Camp when you are chronically fatigued is a logistical negotiation that runs constantly in the background. You are calculating. How much energy did I spend this morning. What do I need to do this afternoon. Can I find ten minutes of quiet somewhere without disappearing on the people who need me. Am I pushing too hard or am I using my health as an excuse to pull back when connection is what I need most. That last question is genuinely hard to answer and I do not always get it right.

Camp when your nervous system is on its own program is a sensory negotiation that also runs constantly. Certain sounds. Certain lights. The kind of busy that has a specific texture when fifty things are happening at once and all of them want a piece of your attention. I have gotten better at managing this. I have also gotten better at being honest about it instead of just pushing through until I crash somewhere inconvenient. Progress is not the same as solved. I will take progress.

Camp when depression is in the passenger seat means you can be surrounded by people who genuinely care about you and still feel, in some quiet corner of yourself, alone. I think people who have not experienced depression sometimes struggle to understand this. They see you laughing. They see you engaged and useful and contributing. They do not see the thing happening underneath, the low hum that does not turn off, the effort it takes to remain present, the way you have to sometimes consciously choose to stay in the room with your own life.

But here is what I know from enough summers: the laughing is still real. The engagement is still real. The low hum does not cancel those things out. They exist at the same time, and somehow the real stuff is worth showing up for even when the hum is loud.

And Then There Are the Kids

Okay. Here is where the complicated happy starts to tip in a direction I can actually name.

I love mentoring young people. I have loved it for as long as I can remember. There is something that happens when you are sitting with a young person, just genuinely present with them, not performing or advising or trying to fix them, just with them, that I cannot describe as anything other than sacred. I mean that word sincerely and without embellishment. It feels like being allowed into something holy.

Kids at camp are in this in-between space. They are away from home. Away from whatever the school year did to them. Away from the version of themselves they have to perform for their regular life. Camp has this weird permission structure where it is somehow okay to be a little more yourself than usual, a little more honest, a little more willing to try something embarrassing in front of other people. That permission structure is fragile and it is worth protecting, which is part of why I am not going to share specific stories or moments here. Those belong to the kids they happened to. They are not mine to spread around the internet.

What I can say is that every summer, something happens, probably several somethings, where I get to see a young person land inside themselves a little more solidly than they arrived. Not because of anything dramatic I did. The mentor is not the hero of anyone else’s story, and I am deeply skeptical of the version of this work where the adult gets to center themselves in what is supposed to be the kid’s experience. But I get to be present for those moments. I get to be a small, consistent, non-dramatic piece of an environment where growing is possible.

That matters to me in a way that goes bone-deep.

I think it is because I remember being a young person who needed to be seen. Who needed an adult to look at them and not flinch, not manage them from a distance, not project a version of them that was more comfortable. Just look and see what was actually there. I did not always have that. When I did have it, it changed things. I know what that is worth because I know what it costs not to have it.

So when I get to be that person for someone else, even in a small way, even in a way they might not remember in twenty years, I feel something that I can only call purpose. And purpose, it turns out, does not need conditions to be meaningful. It does not wait until you are rested or sorted or no longer carrying the weight of your own hard stuff. It shows up in the middle of all of it and says this counts.

It counts.

The Belonging Problem

I want to talk about something that I think gets underexamined in the narrative around community and belonging, which is that belonging is not always comfortable and it is not always continuous.

Camp gives me belonging. That is genuinely true. There is something about returning to the same place with overlapping groups of people, about having history with a community, about being known in the shorthand way that only comes from time, that provides something my everyday life does not always have. When I walk into that space, there is a part of me that exhales in a way I did not know I was holding.

And also. Belonging can be lonely. Being part of something can feel, some days, like watching it from just slightly outside the glass. Like everyone else found the frequency and you are almost on it, almost, but there is a hum of static that does not fully clear. I do not know how universal that feeling is. I suspect it is more common than people say because saying it out loud feels like ingratitude, and nobody wants to seem ungrateful for community when community is what everyone is supposed to want.

I am saying it because I think the incomplete version of belonging is still worth having. The glass-edge feeling does not mean the belonging is fake. It might just mean you are autistic and human and carrying things and sometimes all of those together create a little static. You are still in the room. You are still real to the people in it. The static is yours, not evidence that you do not belong.

I am still learning to believe that last sentence. Some summers I am better at it than others.

What Camp Does Not Fix

Camp does not fix my health. Camp does not fix my depression or resolve my fatigue or tidy up the grief I carry or answer the questions about the future that I do not have answers to yet. I come home from camp and those things are still there, waiting in the hallway with their coats on like they never left. Because they did not leave. They do not work that way.

Camp does not fix loneliness, not completely. You can leave a community experience feeling more alone than when you arrived, and I have had that happen, and it is its own particular sucker punch when it does. You geared up for connection and connection was real and then you drove home and the quiet of your own space felt louder than before. That is real. I am not going to pretend it does not happen.

Camp does not make me more neurotypical. The sensory stuff and the social processing stuff and the way my brain moves through a crowded, high-stimulus environment are not going to be different next summer. I will adapt. I have a decade of adaptations logged. But I will not be fixed, because I was not broken. I am just running different software on hardware that did not come with a manual, and camp environments were not designed with me as the primary user.

And yet.

And yet I go back. And yet it matters. And yet the complicated happy is real and worth it.

The Moments That Sneak Up On You

There is a specific kind of moment that happens at camp that I have started to recognize and guard like a small treasure. It happens when I am not looking for it, which is probably the point. It is the moment when something is funny and I laugh for real, not the social laugh, the real one that comes from somewhere unexpected and surprises me on the way out. It is the moment at the end of a long day when I sit down somewhere and realize I am, right now, exactly where I am supposed to be. Not in some cosmic pre-determined destiny way, just in the simple present-tense sense. Here. This. Enough.

Those moments do not require everything else to be good. They arrive in the middle of tired. They arrive in the middle of complicated. They arrive in the middle of the low hum. And when they do, they are not saying that everything is fine, they are saying that something is good, and something good, right now, is what we have.

I have learned to take that. To not require it to be more than it is. To not poke at it and ask why it cannot last longer or be bigger or come with fewer conditions. Just take the moment and say thank you.

Psalm 118:24. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Not the week. Not the season. The day. Sometimes just the hour. Sometimes just the moment on a log by the water at the end of a long one, when something small is genuinely, uncomplicated-ly good.

I am learning to rejoice in the hour. The moment on the log. The real laugh that surprised me.

That is not nothing. That is so much more than nothing.

Why I Keep Going Back

I go back because purpose does not wait for perfect conditions and neither should I. I go back because there are young people in that space who deserve consistent adults, and I can be consistent even when I am also complicated. I go back because somewhere in a camp environment, every single summer, something happens that I could not have predicted and could not have engineered, something small and true and lit up from the inside, and it is worth all the tired and all the static to be there when it does.

I go back because community, even imperfect community, even community that leaves me feeling a little outside the glass some days, is better than the alternative. I know the alternative. I have lived it. The glass-edge feeling is its own kind of belonging and I will take it over nothing.

I go back because I think this is part of what I am for. Not in a grandiose way. In a quiet, specific, deeply personal way. This is part of how I am wired and what I care about and what feels true when I am doing it, even when I am doing it while tired and somewhat falling apart at the seams. The falling apart at the seams does not disqualify me. Sometimes it might even be the thing that makes me useful, because young people can smell pretending from three miles out and a mentor who has clearly seen some things and is still here is a different kind of message than a mentor who has everything together.

I go back because the complicated happy is still happy. Because joy that sits beside pain is not lesser joy. Because belonging that has static in it is still belonging. Because purpose that shows up in the middle of grief and fatigue and depression is still purpose, is maybe even more purpose because it showed up anyway.

Because I am still here. Still showing up. Still going back.

And that matters. The young people matter. The real laughs matter. The moments on the log matter. The exhausted, complicated, faithful, lit-from-the-inside yes matters.

It all matters. Every complicated, imperfect, beautiful bit of it.

See you at camp.

When the Puzzle Has No Picture on the Box

Posted on 26 August 2026by Sarah King

I want to talk about the version of faith nobody puts on a coffee mug.

Not the faith that moves mountains. Not the faith that shows up in testimonies where everything fell apart and then God did this incredible thing and now look how beautiful life is. I love those stories. I genuinely do. But they are not the only story, and for a long time I thought they were supposed to be my story, and when they weren’t I assumed something had gone wrong with me specifically.

Spoiler: it hadn’t. But we’ll get to that.

This post is for the people sitting in the middle of something that doesn’t resolve. The long middle. The season that should have ended by now according to every sermon you’ve ever half-listened to on a Sunday when you were tired and the pew was hard and you were nodding along hoping God would grade on a curve. I’m writing it because I have lived in that middle for longer stretches than I care to count, and I still believe, and those two things coexist in me in a way that is sometimes violent and sometimes quiet and almost never clean.

So let’s talk about it.

Nothing Is Fitting Together Right Now

When I say nothing fits together, I mean the specific kind of falling apart where you can’t point to a single disaster. There is no boss fight with a clear health bar. There’s no cutscene that explains the villain’s origin story. It’s just… everything feels slightly wrong, slightly off, slightly not what it was supposed to be, and you can’t explain that to someone who asks how you’re doing because it would take three hours and a whiteboard and you’d still end up crying in a Tim Hortons parking lot at 11pm not totally sure what you’re even crying about.

I know that feeling. I know the specific brand of exhaustion that comes not from one hard thing but from a thousand small things that refuse to add up to a coherent narrative. Chronic stuff piling on top of neurodivergent stuff piling on top of grief stuff piling on top of the day-to-day stuff of just trying to be a person in the world, and none of it is dramatic enough to justify how heavy it feels, and that makes it worse somehow.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you’re supposed to have faith.

Cool. Great. Super helpful. Thank you.

I’m not being glib about faith, I’m being glib about the pressure we put on it. The expectation that faith is supposed to function like a game cheat code. Enter the right sequence of belief and suffering, everything unlocks. Life renders correctly. Peace loads in properly. But that is not how it works, and deep down most of us know it isn’t how it works, and we feel guilty that we know it, because shouldn’t we believe more? Shouldn’t we trust more? Isn’t the problem that our faith isn’t strong enough?

I’m going to say something that took me a long time to say without flinching.

No. That is not the problem.

The Honest Version of Faith Is Messier Than the Brochure

I am autistic. I have chronic health stuff. I live with depression in waves that don’t always warn you before they come in. And I have genuine, real, bone-deep faith in God. Not performative faith, not social faith, not the kind you maintain because it would be awkward to stop. Real faith. The kind that has survived enough of my own worst moments to prove it’s actually load-bearing.

And I want to be very honest with you: faith has not cured my depression. It has not untangled the complicated parts of my neurology. It has not made the unanswered questions answer themselves. God has not showed up in a burning bush and given me a five-year plan with bullet points and a timeline.

I used to think that was a failure on my part. Like I was doing faith wrong and everyone else had the strategy guide and I’d missed some critical side quest that would have unlocked the peace of mind DLC.

What I think now, and what I’m still learning, is that faith was never supposed to be the thing that removes the pain. It’s the thing that’s present inside the pain. That’s different. That’s actually a completely different function and it changes everything about how you hold it.

The Psalms are full of people who are not okay. Genuinely not okay. Ugly crying at God, asking where are you, why have you forgotten me, how long is this going to last. These are not people who have lost their faith. These are people using their faith to be furious and frightened and honest and hold onto something in the dark at the same time. That’s the whole thing. That’s it right there.

You are allowed to be not okay and still believe. Those are not opposites.

Unanswered Questions Are Not a Faith Malfunction

Here’s the one that took me the longest.

I have questions that have not been answered. Not small questions. Not background-level curiosity. I have questions that live in my chest and press against my ribs when I’m trying to sleep. Questions about why certain things happened. Questions about what certain seasons of pain were actually for. Questions about people I’ve loved and things I’ve lost and whether any of it makes a shape I’ll ever be able to see.

And for a really long time, having those questions felt like a problem. Like evidence that I wasn’t trusting enough. Like I was a bad Christian because a good Christian would have peace about it by now. A good Christian would have received some revelation in quiet prayer time that explained it all. A good Christian’s faith would look like a tidy Pinterest graphic with a verse on it.

I’m over here looking like a dry erase board someone wiped in a hurry. Still got ghost marks of every question that didn’t get answered. Still a little smudged. Still trying to read what’s there.

But here’s what I’ve come to: the Bible is not a book about people who had it figured out. It is a book almost entirely populated by people who were deeply confused, frequently terrified, often actively arguing with God, and sometimes straight-up wrong about what was happening. And God worked with them anyway. Through them anyway. Despite them, sometimes.

The faith was never about having the answers. The faith was about who you were oriented toward while you didn’t have them.

I don’t have a lot of things figured out right now. My life is not a coherent narrative at the moment. The puzzle pieces are on the table and honestly some of them look like they came from a completely different box and I cannot figure out how the picture is supposed to look. But I know who I’m talking to in the dark. And that is not nothing. That is, I think, actually the whole thing.

Depression and Faith Living in the Same House

This part is important and I need you to stay with me.

Depression lies. That’s the fundamental fact of it. It is a liar that speaks in your own voice, which is what makes it so effective. It tells you that you’ve always felt this way. That you’ll always feel this way. That you’re alone, that the silence means absence, that the darkness means nothing is coming.

And depression will also lie about your faith. It will tell you that your inability to feel God right now means God isn’t there. That your numbness in prayer means prayer isn’t real. That the fact that you’re not experiencing peace is proof that you don’t actually believe, or that belief doesn’t actually do anything, or that you’re broken in a way that’s too fundamental for anything to reach.

I need you to hear this: that is the depression talking. Not reality. Not God.

I have been in seasons where I couldn’t feel anything spiritual. Where prayer felt like talking to a wall. Where church felt like watching a movie in a language I used to speak and suddenly couldn’t remember. And the temptation in those seasons is to conclude something has fundamentally changed. That faith is gone. That belief has been revoked.

But feelings are not facts, and the inability to feel faith in a depressive episode is a symptom of the depression, not a referendum on whether God is real or whether you are loved.

I know that’s easier to say than to feel. I’m not trying to dismiss how real that numbness is. It’s real. It’s awful. It’s one of the cruelest parts of the whole experience, actually, that the thing that might comfort you becomes harder to access precisely when you need it most. That’s not fair. I’m not going to tell you it’s fair.

But I will tell you that I have come back from those places with my faith not just intact but sometimes somehow more honest. Like the decorative parts got stripped off by the difficulty and what was left underneath was the load-bearing stuff. Less pretty. More real.

Get help for the depression. Please. Faith and therapy are not competing options. Faith and medication, if that’s what’s needed, are not competing options. God is not going to be less impressed with you because you used the resources available. That’s not how this works.

When You’re Angry at God (Congratulations, You’re in Good Company)

Can we just normalize this for a second.

I have been angry at God. Not vaguely annoyed. Not spiritual-crisis-in-a-journal-entry-I’ll-look-back-on-fondly. Furious. The kind of anger that sits in your chest and doesn’t have anywhere useful to go. Angry at things that didn’t make sense. Angry at things that hurt. Angry at the silence. Angry at the way certain prayers seemed to go nowhere while other people’s seemed to get answered immediately and you’re over here filling out the paperwork for the third time and nobody’s picking up the phone.

I used to feel guilty about that anger. Like it was evidence of bad faith. Like God would see the anger and decide we were done.

What I believe now is that the anger was itself a form of relationship. You cannot be furious at something you’ve written off. Indifference is the real sign that a relationship is over. Anger means you still care what the other person does. Anger means you still believe they have the capacity to affect you. Anger at God means you still believe in God enough to be mad at them, which is, if you squint at it, a form of faith.

I’m not theologizing my way around pain. I’m not saying anger is the goal. I’m saying it’s okay. It’s allowed. You’re not being struck by lightning for feeling it, and your faith is not automatically invalid because you feel it.

Tell God. Yell at the ceiling if you have to. Say the unpolished version. Say the version that doesn’t sound like a prayer, the one that sounds like a fight. See what happens when you stop performing okayness for an audience of one who already knows you’re not okay.

In my experience, that’s when things get real.

The Part Where I Don’t Tie It Up Neatly

Here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to end this post with a turn. The part where I tell you that after all the struggle, here’s what I learned, and here’s the lesson, and here’s how God brought it together and now it all makes a beautiful shape. Because I’m not there. This season is not resolved. The puzzle is still on the table and the picture is still unclear and I am still, some days, genuinely struggling to hold all the pieces of my life at the same time.

And I still believe. Both of those things are true at the same time.

I believe in a God who is present in the confusion and not just on the other side of it. I believe that faith in the dark is not lesser faith, it is just faith stripped of the easy stuff, the nice feelings, the clear answers, the confirmatory moments. What’s left when all that’s gone is something you can’t fake. You either have it or you don’t. And I have it.

Not the polished kind. Not the kind that photographs well. The kind that’s been dragged through some things and still keeps showing up.

If you’re in the middle right now, I want you to know: you don’t have to have it figured out to have faith. You don’t have to feel okay to believe. You don’t have to understand the shape of what’s happening to trust the one you believe is holding it. Those are not requirements. They are not the price of admission.

The price of admission, as far as I can tell, is just showing up. Even when you’re a mess. Even when you’re angry. Even when you’re numb and confused and the pieces aren’t fitting and nothing makes sense and you’ve got more questions than you started with.

Just show up.

That’s enough. You’re enough. The middle is not the end.

The confusion matters. The questions matter. The anger matters. The faith that survives all three matters most of all.

Peace. Even the complicated kind.

I Made Them Up. They Taught Me Everything.

Posted on 26 August 2026by Sarah King

I want to tell you something weird about writing fiction.

The people I invent — the ones who live entirely inside my head and on the pages I am perpetually rewriting at two in the morning — have taught me more about actual living humans than most of my real-world interactions have. Which says something either about the quality of my fictional characters or the mystifying complexity of actual people, and honestly I am not sure which one it is.

Probably both.

I have been chewing on this for a while now because someone asked me recently why I write. And the obvious answers are there — I love story, I love language, I have things I need to say and this is how I say them without screaming into a parking lot. All true. But the answer that surprised me when it came out of my mouth was this: I write because it is the only way I actually understand people.

That landed weird for both of us.

But I meant it. And the more I sat with it afterward, the more I kept finding evidence everywhere in how I think, how I observe, how I handle the baffling tornado of human behaviour I encounter on a daily basis. Writing fictional characters has been, without exaggeration, the most significant empathy training I have ever undergone. More than any book on psychology. More than any well-meaning workshop on perspective-taking. More than most conversations.

And I want to try to explain why.

First: The Problem with Real People

Real people are chaotic. They contradict themselves constantly. They say one thing and do another. They hold values they violate without noticing, and then they hold guilt about the violation that they also refuse to examine. They love people they treat badly. They treat people well out of motives that are not entirely clean. They are generous in one area of their life and absolutely withholding in another, and they do not experience these as contradictions because they are too busy just living.

When you are on the receiving end of a person — when you are their friend, their kid, their coworker, their person — the contradiction lands as confusion or hurt or frustration. You cannot see the full architecture. You only see the wall that just hit you in the face.

I have spent a significant portion of my life being confused and hurt by people I loved, in ways I could not articulate or understand. Some of that is my autism doing its thing — the part of my brain that processes social cues and unspoken emotional subtext does not exactly run on the latest operating system, and I have had to learn a lot of things manually that other people absorb by ambient exposure. But some of it is just… people are hard. People are hard for everyone.

Fiction is where I figured out how to look at the architecture instead of just the wall.

You Have to Know Why They Do It

When you write a character — a real character, not a cardboard cutout villain or a flawless protagonist — you cannot just make them do things. You have to know why. You have to build the whole basement of motivation before a single word of behaviour shows up on the page, or the behaviour reads flat and unbelievable and your readers will clock it immediately and put the book down.

So you ask the questions. Why does this person lie? Not what do they lie about — why is lying the tool they reach for? What did they learn, early, about what happens when the truth comes out? What did the truth cost someone they loved? Why does this character give and give and give and then suddenly, in one specific context, become immovable and closed? What is that context protecting? What happened the last time they were open there?

You have to build the wound before you can write the scar.

And here is the thing — once you have trained yourself to ask those questions about fictional people, you start asking them about real ones. Reflexively. Almost without meaning to. Someone does something that hurts or baffles me, and instead of stopping at what they did, my brain has started reaching for why would someone do that. Not to excuse it. Not to make it okay. Just to understand the architecture.

That shift has been quietly enormous for me.

Contradiction Is the Point, Not the Problem

One of the biggest lessons writing has smacked me with repeatedly: contradiction is not a flaw in a character. It is the proof of life.

A character who is brave in battle and terrified of one specific conversation. A character who is ferociously loyal to a group and completely dishonest within it. A character who loves deeply and still makes choices that damage the people they love, not out of malice but out of fear or need or a wound that never got properly looked at. These contradictions do not make the character unreliable or poorly written. They make the character true.

Real people contain multitudes and the multitudes do not have to harmonize. I know people who are spectacularly kind to strangers and genuinely difficult to their families. I know people who will fight fearlessly for justice in public and quietly rationalize cruelty in private. I know people who preach one thing with full sincerity and live another thing with full sincerity, and both are real. Both are happening in the same person at the same time.

Before I wrote fiction seriously, that used to break my brain. It felt like evidence that someone was fake, or a hypocrite, or not who I thought they were.

Now I understand it as: they are who they are, and who they are is complicated, the same as every character I have ever tried to write. The contradiction is not the lie. The contradiction is the person.

Secrets and What They Cost

Every good character has a secret. Not necessarily a dramatic one — not always a murder or a hidden identity or a double life, though those are fun. Sometimes the secret is a shame they have never said out loud. Sometimes it is a belief they hold that contradicts how they present themselves to the world. Sometimes it is a grief they never processed, or a decision they made that they have built their entire self-image on top of, load-bearing and invisible.

Writing secrets into characters taught me to see the weight of them in real people.

There is a particular quality to the way someone moves through their life when they are carrying something they have never said. A stiffness in certain directions. A subject they veer away from with a specific kind of casualness that is not actually casual. A defensiveness that appears out of nowhere when nothing obvious provoked it. I was not always good at seeing this. I am better at it now, because I have spent a lot of hours building fictional people and learning which architectural choices produce which visible behaviours.

This is not me claiming I can read minds. I absolutely cannot. I get it wrong constantly. But I am at least looking now, instead of just reacting to the surface.

And more than that — writing characters with secrets has made me more compassionate about the secrets real people keep. Because in fiction you know the full story. You know what the secret is and why they cannot say it and what it cost them to keep it and what it will cost them if it comes out. You feel the weight of it. You root for them even while you watch the secret do damage. And you carry that feeling into real life, where you do not know the full story, and it becomes easier to extend grace.

Loyalty as a Moral Complication

Oh, loyalty. The thing I find most morally complex in fiction and in life.

Loyalty is beautiful. It is one of the qualities I respect most deeply in people and that I try hardest to embody myself. But loyalty is also the thing characters — and people — use to justify staying silent when they should speak, protecting someone who is causing harm, choosing their in-group over the truth. Loyalty is the reason good people participate in bad things. It is the reason whistleblowers are so rare and so isolated when they do blow the whistle. It is the reason families cover for members who do not deserve covering for.

Writing characters in loyalty conflicts — where every option is a betrayal of something real and the question is only which thing you are willing to betray — has given me a framework for understanding some of the most painful patterns I have witnessed in real life. Why someone stays in a situation that is clearly damaging them. Why a person defends someone the evidence is stacked against. Why someone who knows a truth never speaks it.

It is not always weakness. Sometimes it is loyalty to a version of someone or something that they cannot let die. Sometimes it is loyalty to the people around that person who would be collateral damage if the truth landed. Sometimes it is loyalty to an identity that the truth would demolish.

When a character makes that choice in my fiction, I write it with full understanding of what it costs them. That understanding has made me slower to judge when I see it in reality.

Slower. Not completely non-judgmental. I am still a person, not a saint. But slower.

Mistakes and the Question of Goodness

The characters I find most interesting — the ones I return to, that I root for hardest, that haunt me when I am done writing them — are the ones who make genuine mistakes. Not comic mistakes. Not misunderstandings that get resolved in act three. Real mistakes: choices made from fear or selfishness or a moral blind spot that does actual damage to people they love and cannot fully be undone.

Writing those mistakes is uncomfortable. Because you have to be honest about them. You cannot let the character off the hook too easily or the story goes dishonest, and readers feel dishonesty in fiction the same way you feel it in a conversation — something is off, they cannot say what, but the trust is gone. So you have to write the full weight of the mistake. The damage. The consequences. The inadequacy of the apology. The thing that does not get fixed.

And doing that over and over has changed the way I hold the mistakes of real people.

Including my own.

A character who does a genuinely harmful thing is not automatically a villain. A character who does something I respect is not automatically a hero. Goodness in fiction is not a category — it is a direction. It is the question of whether someone is moving toward accountability or away from it. Whether they are willing to look at the damage they caused or whether they have decided it was necessary or someone else’s fault or not that bad really.

The same is true in real life. And having that framework — goodness as direction, not category — has been one of the most practically useful things fiction has handed me. Because it means I do not have to throw whole people away when they do something that hurts. And it means I do not have to accept ongoing harm from someone just because they also have good qualities. Both of those used to be harder for me than they should have been.

They Are Not Real People. That Is Exactly the Point.

I want to be clear about something: my characters are not based on specific real people. They are not romans à clef in disguise. The people in my life are not showing up fictionalized under different names — that is a thing I find both ethically murky and creatively limiting, because real people are too fixed, too themselves, and you cannot push them the way a story requires.

What I mine from real life is not people. It is patterns. The way a particular kind of fear produces a particular kind of behaviour. The way love and control can get so tangled that the person doing the tangling genuinely cannot tell them apart. The way grief that never gets named finds other exits. These are not specific people. These are things I have observed and felt and been on the receiving end of, distilled and rebuilt into someone new who serves the story.

The distance is important. Because in the distance, I can be honest in ways that would be impossible if I were writing a real person I actually know. I can follow the logic wherever it leads. I can let the character be wrong in ways I understand and right in ways that cost them. I can write the full complexity without protecting anyone’s feelings or my own relationship with them.

And paradoxically, the honesty I can access through fictional distance often illuminates real situations more clearly than staring directly at them does. It is the same reason you can sometimes only cry at a movie about something that has happened to you, not at the thing itself. The angle matters.

What God Has To Do With It

I think about the verse in 1 Samuel where it says that people look at outward appearances but the Lord looks at the heart. I have always found that both comforting and kind of terrifying, depending on the day. But I also find it instructive about what it means to really know a person.

Most of the time we only get the outward appearance. The behaviour. The words. The choices that are visible. The version someone has decided to present, edited for the audience. We do not get the heart — the full interior, the fear underneath the confidence, the love underneath the anger, the hope underneath the cynicism.

Writing fiction is the closest I can come, in my human limited way, to practicing looking at the heart instead of just the surface. It is not the same as actually knowing. It is not spiritual insight. It is craft and imagination and the discipline of asking why until I get somewhere that feels true.

But it has made me a more patient person. A more curious person. Less quick to conclude and more willing to stay in the question of what is actually going on underneath what I am seeing.

That is not nothing. In fact, for me, it has been quite a lot.

The Practical Upshot

If you are a writer, you already know most of this. You have felt it — the way your characters start talking back, the way a scene goes somewhere you did not plan because the character would never do the thing you had planned, the weird grief of finishing something and losing access to people who were never real but felt completely real to you anyway. You know the thing I am describing.

If you are not a writer but you are someone who struggles to understand people — and honestly, who among us is not, at least some of the time — I would gently, non-prescriptively suggest: try writing someone. Not a real person. A made-up person with a problem. Give them a contradiction. Give them a secret they cannot say. Give them something they want and something they are afraid of and watch what happens when those two things collide.

You might be surprised what you find out. About them. About the people in your life. About yourself.

Because here is the thing I keep coming back to: we are all the unreliable narrators of our own stories. We all have the parts we present and the parts we protect and the parts we have never looked at directly because we are not ready. We all contain contradictions we have not resolved and loyalties that cost us and mistakes we are still in the middle of deciding how to carry.

Fiction does not fix any of that. But it does give me language for it. It gives me a way to hold the complexity without demanding it resolve into something simpler than it is.

And in a world that is constantly telling us to sort people into clean categories — good or bad, safe or dangerous, worth keeping or worth discarding — the ability to sit with complexity feels like something worth protecting.

Story matters. Character matters. The question of why matters.

The people I invented told me so.

I Miss the Internet That Smelled Like Dial-Up and Dreams

Posted on 24 August 2026by Sarah King

There was a sound. If you know, you know. That horrible beautiful shrieking handshake of a modem connecting, like two robots arguing in a language made entirely of fax machines and regret. You’d sit there waiting for it to finish its little digital tantrum, and then. Then. You were in. You were on the internet. You, personally, had arrived.

I have been thinking about that feeling a lot lately. Not because I am nostalgic in a comfortable golden-haze kind of way, but because I keep bumping into the current internet and going what happened to you. Like running into someone you used to know and realizing they’ve changed so much you’re not sure the original person is still in there anywhere.

The internet I remember felt like a place. Not a product. Not a feed. Not a content delivery mechanism optimized for maximum engagement and minimum actual human connection. A place. Weird, janky, slow, full of Comic Sans and animated flames and guestbooks nobody signed except spambots and your one friend from three provinces over who you’d never meet in person but who somehow understood you better than most people in your actual physical life.

I miss that internet. And I also know it was kind of a disaster. We’ll get to that.

First, let me pour one out for the era of personal websites.

People had websites. Like, personal websites. Not profiles. Not pages on a platform owned by a corporation whose entire business model depends on selling your attention to advertisers. Websites. With their own domains, or hosted on those beautiful free services that gave you a tiny slice of server space and zero promises about uptime. You built something. You picked a layout from a template or you tried to learn HTML from a tutorial someone had posted and you made something that was yours.

It was hideous. I want to be clear about that. The design was almost always hideous. Tiling backgrounds. Guestbooks. Hit counters at the bottom that said something like “YOU ARE VISITOR NUMBER 00000047” as if that was a milestone worth celebrating, and honestly? It was. It absolutely was. Because visitor number 47 was a real person who had found your weird corner of the internet, read your page about your favourite band or your collection of poetry or your extremely specific fandom obsession, and they stayed long enough to count.

The graphics. Oh, the graphics. Animated GIFs that made your page look like it was having a seizure in the best possible way. Sparkling dividers between sections. A little envelope that flapped open and shut next to your email address. Stars that followed your cursor around the screen like digital confetti that you couldn’t turn off. And everyone used them. Freely. With complete commitment to the bit. Nobody was embarrassed. We were all just making things and putting them on the internet because we could and that was enough reason.

The pages took forever to load. You would watch them render line by agonizing line, the image at the top appearing in slow horizontal slices like a curtain being raised on a very small and chaotic theatre. If the person had embedded a MIDI file set to autoplay, you’d suddenly be ambushed by a tinny 8-bit version of an Evanescence song and you couldn’t figure out how to turn it off and honestly you were also kind of delighted about it.

Message boards. Forums. The lost art of the thread.

Before everything collapsed into social media timelines, there were forums. Boards. Communities built around a specific interest, maintained by volunteer moderators who took their jobs very seriously and had absolutely no business doing so, and yet everything more or less held together through sheer collective investment in the thing.

You had a username. You had a signature, sometimes with a little image, sometimes with a quote you thought was extremely deep. You built a post count over months and years. People knew your handle. You knew theirs. There were inside jokes that lived in those threads for years. There was history. There was context. When someone new showed up and immediately started being obnoxious, the community had tools to deal with it, because the community was a real social structure with norms and memory and a shared sense of this is our place and we’d like to keep it functional, thanks.

Some of those forums were genuinely the first places I encountered people who had the same niche obsessions I did. The specific kind of recognition you get when you find your weird. When you realize your particular flavour of deeply invested enthusiasm is not a personality flaw but a tribe membership card. That mattered. It still matters to me that it happened, even if I can’t go back and find those threads anymore.

And yeah. Some of those forums were also deeply toxic cesspools. I’m not going to romanticize the whole thing. Anonymity gave some people permission to be their worst selves and those people absolutely used it. Bigotry, harassment, pile-ons, the particular cruelty that emerges when a person feels invisible and consequence-free. That was there too. Early internet was not a utopia. It was just a different landscape, with its own particular failure modes.

But the failure modes felt more contained. They were in corners. If a forum went bad, you could leave and find a different one. The badness didn’t follow you home through your phone. It didn’t get fed to you by an algorithm that had calculated, correctly, that outrage keeps you scrolling longer than joy does.

Speaking of which. The algorithm. My nemesis. My cursed travelling companion.

Here is the thing I find genuinely hard to explain to anyone who didn’t experience the before-times: the internet used to be something you went to. You opened a browser. You had bookmarks. You navigated. You chose, imperfectly and chaotically, where your attention went. The internet was not in your pocket, summoning you. You had to go find it.

Now the internet is a personalized slot machine in your hand that has been engineered, by very smart people with very large budgets and access to more behavioural data than any social scientist in history has ever had, to keep you pulling the lever. It knows what makes you angry. It knows what makes you feel validated. It knows the difference between content that makes you feel good and content that makes you feel good enough to stay but bad enough to keep looking for something better, which is the sweet spot, which is the whole game.

And it delivers that content to you in an infinite scroll because someone A/B tested what happens if you put a “next page” button versus just letting the page go forever, and forever won, because we are mammals and mammals do not naturally stop foraging when the food keeps coming.

I am not immune to this. I want to be really clear that I am not standing here telling you I have escaped the machine. I have not escaped the machine. I have a complicated and embarrassing relationship with the machine that probably says things about me I am not ready to hear. But I can see the machinery now. I can see the gears. And once you can see them you cannot un-see them, and what they are doing feels very different from what that old dial-up shriek was doing when it connected you to a forum about your favourite fantasy series at midnight while your parents thought you were asleep.

That old connection felt like finding something. This one feels like being found. And not by anyone who particularly cares about you.

Let’s talk about creativity for a second, because this is the part that actually hurts.

People made things on the old internet. Weird things. Useless things. Things that served no purpose except to exist and be delightful to the three hundred people who stumbled across them. Fan fiction, yes, mountains of it, and most of it was not good, and some of it was genuinely remarkable, and all of it existed because someone had a feeling about a story or a character and needed somewhere to put it and the internet was a place where you could just. Put it. And someone would find it.

Flash animations. Pixel art. Web comics. Those deeply unhinged MIDI remix sites. The person who made a lovingly detailed encyclopaedia about a very specific piece of 90s television canon that has maybe eight hundred fans in the whole world, and they just made it, painstakingly, because they loved it and the internet let them.

Making things for the internet now requires a strategy. A niche, but not too niche. Searchable keywords. Engagement hooks in the first three seconds. A posting schedule. Awareness of what the algorithm rewards this week, because it changed since last month. Thumbnails that have been A/B tested. Hooks. CTAs. A Patreon, if you’re lucky. A brand, always a brand, even if what you’re making is pure personal expression, it needs to function as a brand or it will be buried.

I understand why. The economics are what they are. If you want anyone to see your thing, you have to play the game. But the game has a cost, and the cost is that the thing you made stops being just the thing you made and starts being content. And content is a product. And products are made for consumers. And somewhere in that pipeline the original joy of making a thing because you had a feeling about it gets processed into something more strategic and a lot less strange.

The strange was good. I want the strange back. I want someone to make an entire website about the geology of fictional planets just because they thought about it one afternoon and got excited. I want them to use a tiling background of little planets and an autoplay MIDI of the Star Trek theme and a hit counter at the bottom. I want it to be very difficult to navigate and very worth navigating anyway.

I am aware that I am aging myself. I accept this.

There is a version of this post that is just a grumpy elder yelling at clouds, and I know it. Every generation has their version of “things were better when I was young” and almost none of them are entirely right. The old internet had predators. It had misinformation that spread just as gleefully as it does now, just slower. It had communities that radicalized people. It had harassment campaigns. It had all the human failure modes that the new internet has, just at dial-up speeds.

And there are genuinely good things about the internet now. Accessibility tools that didn’t exist. The ability to connect with others who share your disability, your diagnosis, your specific flavour of neurodivergence, in real time, with images and video and actual voices. The capacity to organize, to fundraise, to find help fast when fast matters. Small creators finding audiences that would never have been findable before. Communities for people who are isolated in ways that the old internet also couldn’t reach, because broadband changed everything about who could participate.

I hold both things at once. The old internet was not better in every way. The new internet is not worse in every way. But something specific has been lost, something that I don’t have a perfect word for, and the closest I can get is intentionality without monetization. The feeling of making something or finding something simply because it was interesting and the internet was a space where interesting things could live without needing to justify their existence in clicks.

Psalm 90 says “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” I think about that sometimes when I’m in a scroll-hole and I’ve lost twenty minutes to content I wouldn’t have chosen if I’d been choosing. I wasn’t numbering those minutes. Someone else was counting them on my behalf and selling the data.

That’s a weird place to be. It’s a weird way to spend the one life you’ve got.

So what do we do with this feeling.

I don’t have a clean resolution for you. This is not a post that ends with “and here are five steps to reclaim your digital soul.” I am not a guru and I am not going to pretend the answer is simple when the structures that built the current internet are vast and profitable and deeply entrenched.

What I will say is that I have started trying to be more deliberate. Not perfect. Deliberate. I try to notice when I’m choosing to be somewhere online versus when I’m just there because a notification pulled me in like a tide. I try to make things sometimes, even badly, even just for me or the small number of people who read this blog. I try to remember that creating something real and imperfect and mine is a different act than consuming something that an algorithm decided I was statistically likely to engage with.

And sometimes I let myself miss the dial-up shriek. The waiting. The slowness that forced you to decide whether you actually wanted to be there because getting there cost you something. The hit counter at 47 that felt like an audience. The tiling background of stars that someone picked because they thought it was beautiful and that was the only reason needed.

The internet of everyone’s personal weird little planet encyclopaedias. The internet before it learned to find us.

I miss you, you chaotic sparkling MIDI-haunted disaster. You were something.

The weirdness mattered. The slowness mattered. The making things for no reason mattered. The finding your people in a forum at midnight mattered. The feeling of arrival mattered.

And if you’ll excuse me I have to go close seventeen browser tabs and think very hard about why I opened them.

How to Correct a Young Person Without Crushing Them

Posted on 19 August 2026by Sarah King

Let me tell you something I had to learn the hard way, because apparently I was not born knowing how to do this gracefully and neither was basically anyone else who works with kids or teenagers.

Correction is not the problem. Correction is necessary. Correction is, when you do it right, one of the most caring things you can offer a young person. The problem is how we do it. The problem is that most of us were corrected badly at some point in our lives, by someone who thought embarrassment was a useful teaching tool, or who was too tired and too frustrated to slow down and think about what they were actually communicating. And then we grew up and sometimes, without meaning to, we replicated the whole mess.

This is not a post about being soft. It is not a post about letting things slide or pretending bad behaviour did not happen. It is about being effective. It is about actually getting through to a young person instead of just making them feel small, which, spoiler alert, does not teach them anything except that the world is a place where big people use their power to humiliate small ones.

We can do better than that. Here is how.

First: Get Yourself Regulated Before You Open Your Mouth

This one comes before everything else and most people skip it entirely.

If you are in the middle of a hot spike of frustration, if your teeth are clenched and your voice has already gone up three octaves, if you are already composing the sarcastic takedown in your head, you are not ready. You are not in a state to correct anyone. You are in a state to discharge your own discomfort onto a young person and then call it discipline.

Take a breath. Take two. Walk to the other side of the room. Give yourself thirty seconds. This is not weakness. This is strategy. Because the goal here is not to express how frustrated you are. The goal is to actually change a behaviour, and for that you need to be the calmest person in the conversation.

Young people, especially teenagers, are reading your nervous system as much as they are listening to your words. If you come in hot, their threat response fires and their brain goes into defend-or-deflect mode. They stop listening. They either shut down completely or they go on the offensive and now you have a different, bigger problem. You brought a fight to someone who was not ready for one, and now you both lose.

Calm is not passive. Calm is authority. Come in calm, stay calm, and you have already done seventy percent of the work.

Private Is Non-Negotiable

I will say this clearly and without apology: you do not correct a young person in front of their peers. Full stop. Not for big things, not for small things, not when you are tired and it feels easier to just deal with it right there in the moment.

Because here is what happens when you correct someone publicly. They stop thinking about what they did. They start thinking about the people watching them. Every ounce of mental energy they have goes into managing how they look right now, whether they seem weak, whether people are laughing, whether they are going to survive the social damage of this moment. The actual content of your correction? Gone. It evaporated the second you made them a public spectacle.

You also hand them an easy out. Now the story is not “I did something that I need to think about.” The story is “I got humiliated in front of everyone and that was unfair.” And honestly? They are not wrong. It is unfair. You gave them something legitimate to be angry about and redirected all of that energy away from any genuine accountability.

Pull them aside. Step around a corner. Wait for a break. Say “hey, can I grab you for a second” in a tone that is neutral and not loaded with foreboding. Make it private. Make it between you and them. That is the only context where real conversation can actually happen.

Say the Behaviour, Not the Verdict on Their Character

This one is where a lot of well-meaning adults stumble hard.

There is a gigantic difference between “you lied to me” and “you’re a liar.” Between “that was unkind” and “you’re a cruel person.” Between “that wasn’t your best decision” and “what is wrong with you.” One describes what happened. The other declares a verdict on who they are as a human being.

Young people are not finished yet. They are literally in the middle of figuring out who they are and what kind of person they want to be. When you name a behaviour, you leave space for them to be someone who made a bad choice and can make a different one. When you name a character flaw as though it is permanent and settled, you close that door. You tell them the verdict is already in, so why bother fighting it.

“You were disrespectful in group today” is something they can work with. It describes a moment, a specific action, something concrete. “You’re disrespectful” is a label they now have to either accept or spend enormous energy rejecting, and neither of those responses gets you anywhere useful.

Stick to the what. Stick to the specific, observable, this-is-what-I-saw. That is what is correctable. That is what gives them something to actually change.

Be Clear About the Expectation, Not Just the Problem

A lot of correction stops at “that was wrong” and then kind of… trails off. Which leaves a young person knowing they failed something but not knowing what success would have looked like. That is like failing someone on a test you never told them existed.

After you name the behaviour, name the expectation. Not in a lecturing, bullet-point way. Just clearly. “When someone else is talking in group, the expectation is that you’re listening, not on your phone. That’s what respect looks like in here.” Simple. Direct. Now they know.

This matters especially for young people who have not grown up with consistent expectations around them, which is more of them than you might assume. Some kids have lived in environments where the rules changed depending on someone’s mood, where they were punished for things that were fine yesterday, where “respect” meant something totally different from what you mean when you say it. You cannot assume the expectation is obvious. You have to say it.

And say it once. Not three times with increasing emphasis. Once, clearly, calmly, and then stop talking and let it land.

Give Them a Moment to Actually Receive It

After you have said what you need to say, stop filling the silence.

This is so hard. Silence feels like things are going wrong. Silence feels like confrontation or rejection or that the conversation broke. But silence is often just a young person processing. They are taking in what you said. They are deciding how to respond. They are trying to figure out whether it is safe to be honest with you right now. Give them that time.

Do not rush in to soften what you said. Do not pile on with more examples. Do not start asking “does that make sense? do you understand? why are you making that face” before they have even had a chance to breathe. Say your piece, stop, and wait.

What comes back might surprise you. Sometimes when you give someone space and safety, they tell you something real. Sometimes you find out there is a reason behind the behaviour that changes the picture a little. Sometimes you find out they already know they messed up and they are embarrassed and they just needed to hear it said calmly without the world exploding. You do not get any of that if you are talking the whole time.

Drop the Sarcasm. All of It.

I know sarcasm feels clever. I know it is tempting when you are tired and frustrated to deploy that dry, exhausted “oh, wonderful, thanks for that” energy. I know some of us grew up in cultures where sharp wit was basically currency and biting sarcasm was practically a love language.

With young people in a corrective moment? It is a weapon. Even if you do not mean it as one.

Sarcasm requires a level of social and emotional processing that a lot of young people, especially younger teens or kids with different communication styles, are still developing. And even the ones who understand it perfectly know that sarcasm directed at them in a tense moment is contempt with a thin layer of plausible deniability. It signals that you find them ridiculous. That you are mocking them. That whatever respect you are asking them to show you, you do not feel you need to offer them in return.

It also tanks trust faster than almost anything else. And trust is the whole infrastructure here. If they do not trust that you are in their corner even when you are correcting them, they will not hear a word you say. They will just be waiting for it to be over so they can leave.

Be straight with them. Plain language, real tone, no performance. They can handle that. What they cannot handle well is being mocked by someone who is supposed to care about them.

Separate the Behaviour From Your Relationship With Them

This is the one that takes the most intentionality to actually pull off, but it is also the one that does the most good.

At some point in the conversation, either through what you say or through how you say it, the young person needs to get the message that this correction does not mean you have written them off. That you are addressing this because you care what they become, not because you are cataloguing their failures. That the relationship is still intact.

You do not have to say it in a big, formal way. Sometimes it is just the tone of the whole conversation. Sometimes it is as simple as ending with “alright, we good?” and meaning it. Sometimes it is checking in with them later in the day, normally, treating them like a person and not like a problem you dealt with. The signal that things are not broken between you two is enormously important, especially for young people who have experienced rejection or inconsistency from the adults in their lives.

A lot of kids have learned that correction equals abandonment. That when a grown-up is unhappy with them, the relationship is in danger. That is an exhausting way to live, and it means they spend huge amounts of energy managing your emotions instead of actually learning and growing. When you make it clear that you can hold them accountable AND stay in their corner, you change the equation entirely.

They can be corrected and still be worthy of your time and care. Make sure they know that.

What Recovery Looks Like

After a correction, a young person needs room to recover with their dignity intact. That means you do not keep bringing it up. You do not reference it in group. You do not let it become their label for the rest of the week. If it is resolved, it is resolved. You move forward.

This is not about pretending it did not happen. It is about not weaponizing the past. Every time you bring up an old correction unnecessarily, you teach them that mistakes follow them forever, that growth does not count, that you are keeping score. Which means they stop believing they can actually change anything, so why try.

If the behaviour comes up again, you address it again, fresh, calmly, the same way. But one instance does not earn them a permanent reputation in your mind. They are a person in process. Give them the grace to actually be in process.

And if they handle the correction well, if they acknowledge it or clearly try to adjust, notice that. Not in a big performative way, but notice it. A simple “hey, I saw you make a different call there, that matters” does a lot. It tells them the path forward is actually visible. That the effort to change is seen. That is not coddling. That is how people learn.

A Note on What This Is Not

This post is not about what to do when a situation involves something serious that requires other people, proper channels, or people with far more training and authority than a mentor has. There are situations that go beyond the scope of what this kind of advice covers and I am not touching those here. If something needs to go somewhere beyond you, let it go there. That is not failure. That is knowing your role and protecting the young person appropriately.

What this is about is the everyday moments. The phone-on-during-group moment. The tone-of-voice moment. The eye-roll, the cutting comment to a peer, the missed commitment, the small defiance. The stuff that happens constantly when you are working with young people because they are young people and they are still figuring everything out. Those moments are yours to handle, and how you handle them is one of the most significant things you do.

Because Here Is the Thing

They remember this stuff. Not always the specific words. But the feeling. Whether they felt safe with you. Whether you treated them like someone worth talking to honestly or like a problem to manage. Whether being corrected by you felt like something survivable or like something they had to armor up against.

The adults I remember as formative in my own life were not the ones who never called me out. They were the ones who called me out and still showed up the next day like we were good. The ones who were direct enough that I knew exactly what I had done, but calm enough that I did not feel destroyed by it. The ones who made it possible for me to hear them because they did not make hearing them feel like an attack.

That is the goal. Not perfection. Not always hitting the exact right words. Just: private, calm, specific, clear, and intact. Do those things and you are doing it right, even when it is hard, even when you are tired, even when the behaviour in question is genuinely frustrating and you just want to be done.

They are watching how you handle the hard moments. More than anything else, that is what they are learning from.

Private matters. Calm matters. Clarity matters. Dignity matters. The relationship after the correction matters.

Do the hard thing well. It is worth it.

Good People, Wrong Side: Why Your Neighbour Votes That Way (And Why You’re Not As Different As You Think)

Posted on 17 August 2026by Sarah King

OK so here is the thing that kept me up at 2am last Tuesday, which is a very normal and healthy thing that normal healthy people do. I was scrolling through a comment section I absolutely should not have been scrolling through, and I watched two people who I am fairly confident are both decent humans absolutely lose their minds at each other over a federal policy question. Not in a “we disagree and that is interesting” way. In a “you are a monster and I cannot believe you breathe oxygen” way.

And I sat there thinking: I know people on both sides of this. I know the human beings behind those positions. I have had dinner with them. I have watched them be gentle with kids, tip generously, show up when things got hard. They are not monsters. They are not idiots. They are not morally bankrupt or secretly evil or whatever story each side is telling about the other.

So how in the world do good people end up looking at the same country, the same problems, the same headlines, and landing on completely opposite sides of what to do about it?

I went looking for actual answers. Not hot takes. Not partisan talking points. The research. And what I found is both more complicated and more hopeful than the comment section led me to believe.

First: The Uncomfortable Starting Point

We have to agree on something before we go any further. Political difference is not primarily a sorting mechanism between good people and bad people, or smart people and dumb people. I know that is not a popular framing because it feels deeply satisfying to believe that your side is the thoughtful, ethical one and the other side is either malicious or confused. Both sides do this. Constantly. With great passion and absolutely no self-awareness.

The research does not support it.

What the research actually suggests is that political orientation is shaped by a genuinely complex web of factors, most of which a person did not choose and cannot easily change. Upbringing. Geography. Which community you landed in. What your economic reality looks like. What scares you most. What your gut registers as fair. What your faith community taught you about the world. What media ecosystem you learned to navigate first.

These are not small tweaks on a shared foundation. They are different foundational operating systems. And then we expect everyone to arrive at the same political conclusions and call it common sense.

Wild.

Moral Foundations Theory and Why This Is Not Actually New

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, spent years studying why people across cultures disagree about right and wrong. He and Craig Joseph first laid out Moral Foundations Theory in 2004, and Haidt kept developing it with colleague Jesse Graham through the 2000s. Their argument: humans navigate morality using multiple foundations, not just one. The list includes care/harm, fairness/reciprocity, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and (added later) liberty/oppression.

Here is where it gets interesting and uncomfortable in equal measure.

Graham, Haidt, and Nosek ran a proper study in 2009, published in the *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, and found that people who lean progressive tend to weight care and fairness most heavily. People who lean conservative tend to draw on a broader range of foundations simultaneously, including loyalty, authority, and sanctity alongside care and fairness. Neither set of weights is random. Neither is stupid. They are different ethical grammars that developed in response to different lived environments and different threats.

When a progressive person looks at a policy and asks “who does this hurt?” and a conservative person looks at the same policy and asks “does this threaten the structures and communities that protect people?” they are not asking different questions because one of them failed a critical thinking test. They are running different risk assessments based on different moral software.

This does not mean all positions are equally correct. It means that dismissing the other side as morally empty is empirically lazy. And I say that to both sides equally, with genuine affection and zero patience for whining about it.

Geography Does an Enormous Amount of Heavy Lifting Here

Canada is a big country. I know we know this. We say it constantly, usually when explaining to Americans why we are not a monolith. But do we actually think about what it means for political culture that someone who grew up in a small town in rural Saskatchewan has a materially different daily reality than someone who grew up in downtown Vancouver?

Not just aesthetically different. Structurally different. The institutions they interact with. The economic pressures they face. The infrastructure they depend on or don’t have access to. The sense of whether the federal government is a present force in their life or a distant abstraction that mostly tells them what to do with their land.

And this is not a vibe. Political scientists Jack Lucas and Zack Taylor tracked more than 4,000 federal ridings from 1896 to 2019 and found a durable, widening urban-rural split, with population density as the single strongest predictor of the divide. In the 2019 federal election specifically, researchers Speer and Loewen found the median population density of Liberal-held ridings was more than 38 times higher than Conservative-held ridings. Thirty-eight times. Economist Werner Antweiler ran the numbers too: every time population density doubles, Conservative support drops by roughly 1.7 points and Liberal support climbs by roughly 1.8 points.

When you live densely, you are constantly navigating collective resource problems. Transit. Housing. Shared parks. Noise ordinances. You are brushing up against difference daily. Your political instincts, unsurprisingly, tend to orient around collective management of shared space. When you live in a community where you manage your own land, your own water, your own everything, and the nearest government office is an hour away, your political instincts tend to orient around autonomy and the suspicion that centralized systems do not understand your life.

Neither instinct is wrong. They are both rational responses to genuinely different circumstances.

The problem is we have built a political system that mostly treats them as competing rather than complementary, and then both sides get to feel righteous about the other side’s ignorance. Fun for no one. Productive for no one. Great for political fundraising.

Class, Economic Reality, and the Fact That Not Everyone’s Stakes Are the Same

This is the one I think gets underplayed the most in polite political conversation, possibly because polite political conversation is mostly had by people who have enough economic stability to afford politeness.

Someone whose entire financial security is tied to a resource industry does not have the same relationship to environmental regulation as someone whose livelihood is entirely digital and location-independent. Both of those people can care about the environment. Both can also have wildly different opinions about the pace and cost of transition. One of those people is navigating an existential question about whether their town survives. The other is not.

Similarly, someone who has watched urban housing costs make homeownership unreachable has a very different relationship to property tax and zoning politics than someone who bought a house in the eighties and watched it become their retirement fund. Again, both can be thoughtful and caring people. Their stakes are just not the same.

I want to be honest with you here rather than dress this up with a citation that does not quite exist yet. I went looking for a clean Canadian study proving that economic precarity does not map neatly onto one party, and I did not find one solid enough to hang a claim on. So take this part as my own read of the situation, not settled research: precarious workers, in my experience, do not vote as a unified bloc, because they are not facing a unified threat. That is not inconsistency. That is triage. When political analysts are baffled that “working class voters” don’t all vote the same way, I think they are forgetting that working class voters are doing exactly that: triage, with limited information and limited trust in any of the options in front of them. Honestly? Relatable. I triage my emotional bandwidth every single Tuesday.

Religion, Community, and the Belonging Variable

I am going to say something that some people find uncomfortable. Faith communities are real communities. Not metaphorical ones. Not quaint holdovers from a pre-rational age. They are some of the most functional community infrastructure that exists in this country, and the people in them develop political priorities that are shaped by genuine communal values, not just personal superstition.

Now, do some religious communities develop political priorities I personally find troubling? Yes. Genuinely yes. And I say that as someone whose faith is not a performance or a cultural accessory. It is the actual load-bearing structure of my life. Some pulpits treat “faithful” and “politically obedient to one party” as the same thing, and use belonging itself as leverage: fall out of step with the congregation’s politics and you risk losing the community, not just the argument. That is a real and specific problem, and it deserves to be named as clearly as anything I say about the secular left. God and I talk about this.

I could not find Canadian-specific research measuring this the way I wanted to (most of the good work on religion and political identity is American, and I am not going to dress up a US study as a Canadian finding), so take this section as argument, not data. Here is what I believe the secular left often misses and the religious right often weaponizes: people who are embedded in religious community are responding to a real human need for belonging, meaning, and moral framework. When secular political movements dismiss that as ignorance or bigotry without engaging the actual values underneath, they do not win the argument. They just confirm to religious communities that the political left does not see them as full humans. And then everyone is surprised when rural religious voters do not respond warmly to being talked at like remedial students.

Both failures do the same damage from opposite directions. One treats belonging as disposable if you don’t already agree. The other treats belonging as conditional on agreeing. Neither is respect. Neither is community. Just control wearing a different coat.

Media Ecosystems and the Slow Divergence Problem

OK so this is the part where I am supposed to talk about social media algorithms and echo chambers and everybody nods sagely and then goes back to their extremely curated information diet. I know. I know I do it too.

But here is what I want to add to the standard media literacy lecture: the problem is not just algorithms. The problem is that even before social media, different communities had different media ecosystems. Local newspapers. Regional broadcasters. Radio stations with different slants. Church bulletins. Word of mouth. The information environment a person grows up in shapes what questions they think are worth asking, what sources feel credible, and what framing of an issue seems obvious versus suspicious.

By the time someone encounters a news story as an adult, they have already been trained by years of prior information exposure to read it through a particular lens. This is not stupidity. This is how brains work. We process new information through existing frameworks because it would be cognitively impossible to rebuild our worldview from scratch every time we read a headline.

The political left tends to be better at critiquing right-wing media bubbles and worse at noticing their own. The political right tends to be better at critiquing progressive institutional media and worse at noticing when their alternative sources are doing exactly what they accuse mainstream media of doing. Both critiques are partially valid. Both blindspots are real.

I am not both-sidesing bad journalism into equivalence. Some sources are more accurate than others and that is factually documentable. But the shape of the problem, the way information ecosystems create political sorting, that is symmetrical. And pretending it only happens to the other side is a very comfortable lie.

Education Does Not Mean What We Think It Means Here

There is a version of this conversation that goes: educated people vote progressive, less educated people vote conservative, therefore education equals political correctness and we should all draw our own conclusions. I find this version of the conversation exhausting and empirically sloppy in both directions.

But the correlation itself is real and it is documented right down to the numbers. Elections Canada’s own survey data shows turnout climbing steadily with education: 61 percent of electors with a high school diploma or less voted in the 43rd general election, compared with 79 percent of university graduates. An earlier Elections Canada survey found the same pattern by credential type: 69 percent turnout among high school grads, 72 percent among college diploma holders, 80 percent among university degree holders.

Turnout is one thing. Lean is another. A team extending economist Thomas Piketty’s research into the Canadian context, using Canadian Election Study data from 1965 to 2019, found something genuinely interesting: education and income pull in opposite directions here. Voters with university degrees increasingly favour the NDP or Liberals. Voters with higher incomes, regardless of education, increasingly favour the right. So “educated” and “rich” are not the same voter, and they are not voting the same way. That complicates the “education equals correct politics” story quite a bit, and I think that is worth sitting with.

Post-secondary education does not just teach critical thinking. It also immerses people in specific institutional cultures, specific social networks, specific career paths, and specific economic realities. Someone who went to university in a major Canadian city in the last twenty years was exposed to a particular range of ideas and entered a labour market that rewards certain kinds of credentials. That is a lot of variables that are not strictly about intelligence or knowledge.

Meanwhile, someone who did a trade apprenticeship and built a career in skilled labour developed real expertise, real discipline, real community knowledge, and real economic stakes that are not represented in most university curricula. Calling that person less equipped to have political opinions because they have fewer letters after their name is not a critical thinking position. It is credentialism dressed up as concern.

Smart people with different information and different stakes reach different conclusions. This is not a malfunction. This is the whole premise of democracy, which requires we figure out how to govern across those differences rather than waiting for everyone to agree with us.

The Identity Lock-In Problem

Here is where I want to get a little uncomfortable with everyone simultaneously, because this is the part that I think does the most ongoing damage.

At some point, political positions stop being conclusions we reached and start being who we are. And once something is identity rather than opinion, it becomes almost neurologically difficult to update. Yale’s Dan Kahan has spent years studying what he calls identity-protective cognition: the tendency of people to selectively credit or dismiss evidence depending on whether it lines up with the beliefs that dominate in their group. His research goes back to a 2007 study on risk perception and has been refined since, most notably in a 2017 paper that ties it directly to how people process misinformation. The finding that sticks with me most: the people most skilled at spotting scientific misconceptions in general are, on the issues that trigger identity-protective cognition, often the most polarized of all. Being smart does not inoculate you against this. If anything, smart people are better at building sophisticated justifications for what they already believed.

This is not a character flaw. It is a feature of being a social species that needs community to survive. But it means that once political affiliation becomes identity, both sides start doing something that is not actually political reasoning. They are doing identity maintenance. And the “evidence” they encounter gets sorted ruthlessly into “confirms my people are right” and “proves the other side is dishonest.”

I watch this happen on the progressive side with exactly the same structural mechanics as it happens on the conservative side. Different content, same brain process. The person doing it is usually convinced they are the rational one because their reasoning is invisible to them from the inside. This is true of me too. I try to catch it. I do not always succeed.

What This Actually Means, Practically, for How We Talk to Each Other

I am not going to tell you that all political positions deserve equal respect. That is not what I believe. Some positions cause measurable harm to people. That matters and it should not be waved away in the name of dialogue.

But I am going to tell you that if you cannot construct an honest, charitable explanation of why a good person might hold the position you disagree with, you are not ready to have the argument. You are just ready to perform it.

I want to be straight with you about one thing before I close: I went looking for a tidy Canadian study proving that hostility fails and being genuinely heard is what changes minds, and I could not find one specific enough to cite properly. What I can tell you is where Canada actually stands right now, because that part is solid. Researchers at UBC (Emily Huddart and Tony Silva) found that Canadians show moderate levels of affective polarization, meaning we feel a real gap between how we regard our own side and the other side, but we have not slid into viewing the other side as immoral the way some corners of American politics have. Their read is caution, not crisis. A separate 2025 survey from Digital Public Square found 55 percent of Canadians think polarization is getting worse and only 16 percent think it is getting better, with the average Canadian rating the country a 6.5 out of 10 on a polarization scale. And two thirds of us still self-identify as centrist, which does not exactly match the tone of Question Period. The Public Policy Forum’s 2023 report “Far and Widening” makes the case that our institutions and media are, in places, actively making the divide worse rather than mediating it.

So the caution is real, the fragility is real, and so is the fact that we are not there yet. That gap, the space between where we are and where the doom-scrolling makes it feel like we are, is worth protecting on purpose.

Faith communities have known something like this forever, by the way. You want to change someone’s heart? You start by being a safe person to be honest with. Then you earn the right to challenge. Then maybe, over years, something shifts. Most political activists have neither the patience nor the theology for this, and I say that with love and a very tired sigh.

The Canadian Specifics

Canada has its own version of this that does not map cleanly onto American political frameworks, which we sometimes forget because American content floods our information ecosystem.

We have real regional alienation with structural roots, not just vibes, and the urban-rural voting data above backs that up with actual numbers going back over a century. We have a French-English linguistic and cultural divide that shapes political priorities in ways that genuinely have no clean American parallel. We have Indigenous political realities that are neither left nor right in the partisan sense and do not fit neatly into the binary at all. We have immigration patterns and settlement geography that create genuinely different community compositions across the country.

When Western Canadian voters express frustration with federal policy, that frustration has historical and economic legs whether or not you agree with the conclusions they reach. When Quebec voters prioritize provincial autonomy in ways that confound English Canadian progressives, that is not irrationality. That is the product of a genuine historical experience of cultural threat. When new Canadians hold values that do not map onto either party’s assumptions about what immigrant communities believe, that is not a political anomaly. That is people being complex.

Our version of this problem is specifically ours and deserves more specific engagement than just importing American culture war frameworks and slapping Canadian flags on them. We keep doing that. We should stop.

The Actual Bottom Line

Good people end up on opposite sides of politics because they are running different software, built by different environments, shaped by different threats, weighted by different values, and filtered through different information ecosystems. Not because one side is good and the other is broken.

This does not make all positions equally correct. It does not mean policy doesn’t have real winners and losers. It does not mean we smile politely at harm and call it dialogue.

It means the story we keep telling ourselves, the one where our side is the thoughtful, caring, rational humans and their side is the confused or malicious obstacle, is doing enormous damage to our ability to actually govern a country together. And governing a country together, imperfectly, messily, with ongoing conflict and negotiation and compromise, is the only version of this that has ever worked for anyone anywhere.

The comment section is not going to save us. The devastating ratio is not going to save us. The Facebook argument that ends with someone calling their cousin a fascist and spending Christmas separately is definitely not going to save us.

Understanding why someone who is not your enemy ended up somewhere you didn’t is not capitulation. It is the beginning of any conversation worth having.

Geography matters. Class matters. Community matters. Faith matters. Fear matters. Belonging matters. History matters.

And so does the hard, unglamorous work of staying in the room with people you disagree with long enough to remember they are people.

God help us…

God help us all…

Genuinely. We need it.

A note on sources: the research on Moral Foundations Theory, the urban-rural voting divide, education and turnout, and identity-protective cognition is drawn directly from peer-reviewed studies and Elections Canada’s own data. Where I could not find research specific enough to back a claim, I have said so plainly in the text rather than dressing up a guess as a citation.

The Letters From the Other Margot

Posted on 12 August 2026by Sarah King

I want to tell you a story.

Not a true one. Not mine. But maybe the kind that carries something true inside it, the way a geode looks like nothing on the outside until someone cracks it open and the crystals are just there, waiting, gorgeous, indifferent to how long they went unseen.

This is about a woman named Margot. And the letters she should never have received.

—

The first one arrived on a Tuesday in November, which is the most aggressively unremarkable day in the most aggressively unremarkable month, and Margot almost threw it out without opening it.

She almost threw out a lot of things. Her coffee when it went cold. Her horoscope before she finished reading it. Her marriage, eventually, though that had taken longer than the coffee.

The envelope was cream-coloured, the expensive kind, the kind that feels like it has opinions. Her name was written on the front in handwriting she didn’t recognize, but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that there was no return address, and the stamp was a bird she had never seen on any Canadian stamp before. A wren, maybe. Or something like a wren. She wasn’t a birder. She had meant to become one, once. She had meant to become a lot of things.

Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds the way business letters are folded, and the handwriting matched the envelope. Loopy and unhurried, like someone who wrote by hand every day and didn’t feel apologetic about the time it took.

Margot,

The lavender came up beautifully this year. I remembered you said you’d always wanted a lavender hedge, so I planted one along the south fence and now the whole yard smells like a promise. Theo helped dig the holes. His back is not what it was but he won’t admit that to anyone but me, so don’t tell him I told you. The girls asked about you at dinner. I told them you’re doing exactly what you were always meant to do. I hope that’s true. I hope you’re not lonely. Write when you can.

With love,
Cecile

Margot sat down at her kitchen table. She sat there for a long time.

She did not know anyone named Cecile. She did not have a yard. She lived in a fourth-floor apartment in a city that smelled like exhaust and old restaurant grease, and the only thing she had ever planted was a succulent she’d bought at the grocery store checkout and subsequently killed within six weeks. She was forty-three years old, divorced, childless by circumstance rather than choice, and her name was Margot, but her last name was Pellerin, and whatever last name this letter was meant for, it clearly wasn’t hers.

She put the letter in her junk drawer, on top of a dead battery and a takeout menu for a Thai place that had closed in 2019.

She thought about it for eleven days.

—

The second letter came on a Friday. Same cream envelope. Same bird stamp. Different postmark, smudged enough that she couldn’t read the city.

Margot,

I keep thinking about that summer we drove to the coast and the car broke down outside of Rivière-du-Loup and we sat on the guardrail eating gas station chips and you said that sometimes the wrong road is the one that teaches you where you actually wanted to go. I don’t know if you remember saying that. You probably don’t. You never thought you were as wise as you were. The lavender is drying now, hanging upside down in the kitchen. The whole house smells like something worth keeping. Come visit soon. I mean it this time.

With love,
Cecile

Margot read it twice. Then a third time.

Then she did something she couldn’t fully explain. She got out a piece of paper, her own paper, the cheap kind from the drugstore with the narrow lines, and she wrote back.

Not to Cecile. She had no address for Cecile. She wrote to herself, more or less. She wrote: I don’t remember saying that, but I wish I had. I wish I’d been the kind of person who said things like that.

She folded it up and put it with the first letter.

The junk drawer was getting sentimental.

—

By December there had been five letters. By February, nine. Margot had stopped trying to figure out who they were actually meant for, had stopped checking whether there was another Margot in her building, had stopped composing explanatory emails to her building manager that she never sent. She had started doing something stranger: she had started living inside them, the way you live inside a book you’re not ready to finish.

From Cecile’s letters, she had built a life.

There was a house. Old, probably, with a south-facing yard. There was Theo, who had a bad back and too much pride about it. There were the girls, never named, who asked about Margot at dinner, which meant they loved her, or at least were curious about her, which was close enough. There was a road trip. Gas station chips. A car that broke down in exactly the right place. There was lavender drying in a kitchen that smelled like something worth keeping.

There was a Margot who said wise things without knowing they were wise.

Margot Pellerin, sitting at her kitchen table in her fourth-floor apartment, read each letter the way you read Scripture when you’re desperate, which is to say, looking for yourself in it.

And here is the thing she didn’t tell anyone, because she didn’t have many people to tell things to anymore. Not since the divorce. Not since her best friend moved to Portugal with a man who made her laugh differently than anyone ever had before, and good for her, genuinely good for her, but still.

Here is the thing.

The life in those letters didn’t feel like someone else’s.

It felt like a door she had walked past. Not slammed. Not locked. Just walked past, because she was in a hurry, or because she was scared, or because she had told herself the next door would be better and then the next door and then the next, until she was very far down a very long hallway and she couldn’t remember which door it was anymore.

—

The tenth letter was different.

Margot,

I have to ask you something and I need you to answer honestly, because I think I already know the truth and I would rather hear it from you than keep pretending. Are you happy? Not fine. Not managing. Not building toward something. Happy. Right now. With your life as it actually is. Because I love you and that means I am allowed to ask the hard thing and you are allowed to answer without dressing it up.

The lavender is dormant now. It looks dead but it isn’t. I have to keep reminding myself of that on the grey days. I think you do too.

With love,
Cecile

Margot put the letter down.

She picked it up again.

She walked to the window and looked out at the street four floors below where two pigeons were arguing over something in a gutter and a man in a puffy orange coat was on his phone looking irritated, and the sky was the specific grey of February that makes you feel like colour was a rumour.

Are you happy.

She tried the answer she usually gave, the one she gave her mother on Sunday calls and her coworkers at the coffee machine and herself in the bathroom mirror on the better mornings. I’m good. Busy. Fine. Things are fine.

It didn’t fit in her mouth right now. It kept sliding off.

She sat back down. She got out her drugstore paper. She wrote, and this time she wrote for a long time, longer than she had written anything since the journal she kept in her twenties that she’d buried in a box she hadn’t opened since, and what she wrote was not a reply to Cecile because there was nowhere to send a reply to Cecile. What she wrote was the truth. The undecorated version. The one without the fine and the busy and the building-toward-something.

She wrote: No. I don’t think I am. I think I have been surviving so competently that I mistook it for living. I think I am very good at not falling apart and very bad at being joyful and I didn’t notice those were different skills until just now, sitting in my kitchen with a letter from a woman I don’t know who loves a version of me I’m not sure I ever became.

She wrote: I think I missed a door. I’m not sure I can go back to it. I’m not sure going back is even the point. But I think I need to stop walking so fast past all the doors I have left.

She wrote: The lavender looks dead but it isn’t. I have to keep reminding myself.

She folded the paper and put it in the drawer with the others.

Then she sat there in the quiet of her apartment and she let it be quiet without immediately turning on the TV or opening her phone. Just sat with it. The way you sit in a church even if you’re not sure what you believe, because the silence has a quality to it that the rest of your life doesn’t, and sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes the silence is the whole point.

Be still and know.

She’d always liked that one. The shortest version of it. Four words that somehow carry the weight of everything you can’t fix by moving faster.

—

The eleventh letter came in March, when the city was doing that ugly half-melted thing it does in early spring where nothing is clean and nothing is fully committed to being alive yet and you’re wearing your winter coat but you’re angry about it.

Margot,

The lavender is coming back. Little grey-green shoots at the base, you have to look for them. But they’re there. I took a picture but I know how you feel about me sending pictures on my phone, so I drew a small and extremely terrible sketch of the shoots at the bottom of this letter. The girls say hello. Theo’s back is worse and he’s finally admitted it to the doctor, which I consider a personal victory. Something is shifting here, I can feel it. Can you feel it there?

Write to me. Call me. Come. Do something. You’ve been quiet too long.

With love,
Cecile

At the bottom of the page was a sketch. It was, as advertised, extremely terrible. Little scribbled shapes that could generously be interpreted as plant shoots, or perhaps a very small family of green ghosts. It made Margot laugh, suddenly and without warning, the kind of laugh that startles you because you didn’t know it was coming.

She laughed at a letter meant for someone else, in her apartment, alone, and it felt like something cracking open. Not breaking. Opening.

She looked at the sketch for a long time. This woman, this Cecile, whoever she was, had sat down and drawn a terrible little picture of lavender shoots because she wanted Margot to see what she saw. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the whole motivation. I see something beautiful and I want you to see it too even though I can’t draw and I know I can’t draw and I’m sending it anyway.

When was the last time anyone had done something like that for her? When was the last time she had done something like that for someone else? Imperfect and earnest and completely undefended?

She thought about the drive to Rivière-du-Loup. She had never been to Rivière-du-Loup. She had wanted to, once, years ago, during a phase where she was going to drive all the way to the coast with someone she had loved and they’d never gone because there was always a reason to wait, and then there wasn’t a them anymore, and the trip stayed in the category of things she’d meant to do.

She opened her laptop.

She looked up lavender. How to grow it. What soil it needed. Whether it could survive a balcony planter in a city that got real winters.

It could. Apparently. With the right variety and decent drainage and something to protect the roots, which sounded like a metaphor she wasn’t ready to make yet, but there it was anyway.

—

There were no more letters after that.

Not in April. Not in May. Not in the whole long summer that followed, which was a good summer, warmer than usual, the kind of summer that makes you feel like the city is being generous with you on purpose.

Margot bought two lavender plants at the farmer’s market in June from a woman who knew every variety by name and had the dirt-stained hands of someone who meant it. She put them on the east side of her balcony. She looked up how to care for them. She did not kill them. She talked to them, occasionally, in the way you’re not supposed to admit to doing, because they were alive and she was alive and it seemed polite to acknowledge that they were sharing a small space together.

She called an old friend she’d let drift. She called her mother more. She went to Rivière-du-Loup in September, by herself, in a rental car, and broke down for exactly twelve minutes on the side of the road when the engine light came on outside of Trois-Rivières, sat on the guardrail eating the emergency granola bars she’d brought because she had packed for exactly this scenario, and thought, OK. Wrong road. Let’s find out what I’m learning.

The car was fine. It was a sensor glitch. She made it to the coast by evening and stood on a dock in the cold river light and looked at the water and didn’t feel happy exactly, not the clean TV-movie kind, but felt something true. Felt like herself. Felt like a self worth continuing to be.

She never found out who Cecile was. She tried, twice, half-heartedly, and turned up nothing. She entertained the theory that there was no Cecile, that she had somehow been writing the letters to herself from a part of her own mind that still knew what it wanted, which is the kind of theory she would have rolled her eyes at before, but which, now, she held a little more loosely. She didn’t need it to be true. She didn’t need it to be false. She needed it to have happened, and it had.

The letters lived in a shoebox now, not the junk drawer. She’d bought the shoebox at a dollar store because it had a picture of a bird on the lid. A wren, maybe. Or something like one.

—

In October she opened the shoebox and read all the letters through from the beginning, which she hadn’t done since she’d first received them, and then she read the pages she’d written in response, the ones she’d never sent anywhere, the ones that were just true.

She added one more page.

She wrote: I don’t think I lived the wrong life. I think I lived this one, which has been hard and lonely in places and not what I pictured, but it’s the one that brought me to that dock and those lavender plants and the phone call I finally made and the granola bars I packed for a breakdown I almost had on the highway, which, honestly, is some of the best preparation I have ever done. You can’t get to gratitude by pretending the pain wasn’t real. You can only get to it by going through the real thing and coming out still yourself on the other side.

She wrote: I don’t know who Cecile is. I don’t know who the Margot in those letters was. But I think she was trying to tell me something about what I still had time to grow. And I think the lavender is going to come back in the spring. I think I am going to keep reminding myself of that on the grey days. It looks dormant. It isn’t.

She put the page in the box. She closed the lid over the bird.

She went to make coffee before it went cold.

—

Memory matters. Identity matters. The doors we walk past matter. The ones we still have left matter more.

And lavender, it turns out, is tougher than it looks.

The Mess Comes First: Why Creative Work Almost Never Arrives in the Right Order

Posted on 10 August 2026by Sarah King

Can we just agree on something before I start? The idea that creativity flows in a clean, logical, beginning-to-end sequence is one of the most persistent and honestly kind of cruel myths that gets handed to people who make things. It sets up so many of us — writers, musicians, artists, people building weird little corners of the internet at midnight — to feel broken when our process looks like a crime scene instead of a flowchart.

Because here is what actually happens. You wake up at 2 a.m. with a line. Just a line. You don’t know what it belongs to, you don’t know if it’s a lyric or a sentence or a caption for something that doesn’t exist yet, but it is alive and it is yours and if you don’t write it down it will evaporate like it was never there. So you grab your phone or a receipt from your pocket or you scrawl it on the back of your hand, and then you go back to sleep, and in the morning you look at it and think okay but where does this go.

The answer, by the way, is almost never immediately obvious. Sometimes not for months.

And that’s fine. I am here to tell you that is actually, genuinely, completely fine.

The Fragment is Not a Failure

I have folders. So many folders. Documents that are two sentences long. Voice memos where I’m clearly half asleep murmuring something into my phone because my brain decided 3 a.m. was the ideal hour for creative transmission. Sticky notes in various states of illegibility. Screenshots of colour palettes I was never going to use right away but needed to save. A folder on my desktop called “STUFF” which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds and somehow still one of the most useful creative tools I own.

We treat fragments like they’re evidence that we didn’t finish something. Like a two-paragraph draft is a confession of laziness or inability. But what if the fragment is just the creative work arriving in the only form it could arrive in at that moment? What if the incomplete thing is actually doing its job?

Fragments are holding space. They are the bookmark your brain dropped before it had enough context to write the whole chapter. They are the first note of a song that isn’t ready to be a song yet. They are the sketch that comes before the painting, and the painting that comes before you understand why you made it.

The creative process is not a factory line. It’s more like… you know that mechanic in an RPG who’s always got seventeen side quests running simultaneously and she’s wandering the map collecting ingredients for one quest while accidentally triggering cutscenes for three others? That’s it. That is the whole thing. You are managing multiple open loops and occasionally one of them pings you at an inconvenient time and goes hey, I’m ready now, pay attention to me.

You gotta be ready to drop what you’re doing and pay attention.

Inspiration Has No Respect for Your Schedule

I want to talk about the specific cruelty of inspiration arriving at the wrong time. And I say cruelty with affection because I think it’s also kind of hilarious, in that way where the universe has a sense of humour that is equal parts annoying and magnificent.

You’re in the shower. You’re driving. You’re mid-conversation at a family dinner. You’re trying to fall asleep. You’re in the middle of a completely unrelated task that requires your full concentration. And then, like a cat knocking something off a shelf just to see what happens, your brain hands you the thing. The idea that fits perfectly. The bridge for the song. The turn in the essay. The website layout that finally makes sense. The solution to the structural problem you’ve been circling for weeks.

Right then. Right in that moment when you cannot act on it.

This is why I have learned to be relentlessly, almost embarrassingly committed to capturing things immediately. Not when I get home. Not later. Now. Because my brain, bless it, is not a reliable storage system. It’s more like a whiteboard in a coffee shop — things get written there, and then someone else’s idea gets written over it, and then the whole board gets erased, and you’re left trying to remember what was there before.

The capture system matters so much more than people talk about. Not because you’re going to use every fragment you collect. Most of them will sit there and never become anything, and that’s okay too. But you need the practice of catching things. You need to train yourself to reach for the notepad, reach for the voice memo, pull over if you have to. Because the ones that do become something later? You’ll be so glad you caught them.

Returning Is Not Starting Over

Here’s a thing that used to mess with me badly: opening an old draft and feeling like I’d gone backwards.

Like there was something shameful about picking up something I hadn’t touched in six months. Like I should have finished it the first time. Like the gap was proof of something failing instead of proof that I was a human person with finite energy and a life with approximately nine hundred moving parts.

But here is what I’ve actually learned from returning to things after time away: I am almost always better positioned to finish them later than I was when I started them. The distance is not a setback. It’s the whole process working exactly the way it’s supposed to.

You write the beginning of something when you’re feeling the feeling. You put it down. You live your life. You think about it sideways while doing dishes, while walking, while reading something completely unrelated. And then you come back and you see it with fresh eyes and you understand what it needs in a way you absolutely could not have seen the first time through.

This is not just true for writing. I think about this with website work too, which some people don’t think of as creative work but is absolutely creative work. I have gone back to design decisions I made months ago and completely understood why they weren’t working, when at the time I thought they were fine. The distance taught me something the closeness couldn’t.

Music does this too. You lay down a track and you’re not sure about it and you leave it. You come back. And now you hear the gap where something belongs, or you hear the part that’s overloaded and needs to breathe, and you could not have heard that when you were still inside the making of it.

The return is a skill. Treat it like one.

Structure is a Thing You Find, Not a Thing You Start With

Okay this is the part where I will probably step on some toes and I am at peace with that.

We are taught — in school, in a lot of creative writing advice, in productivity culture — that you should outline first. Plan first. Know where you’re going before you go. And look, I understand why that advice exists. It works for some people. Genuinely. If you are a plotter and an outliner and you like your map before you start walking, I am not here to tell you you’re wrong. You’re not wrong.

But there is a whole enormous category of creative people for whom that sequence is backwards, and those people have spent years feeling like they’re doing it wrong, and I want them to know they are not doing it wrong.

Sometimes you make the thing first and you find the structure inside it after. Sometimes you write three thousand words before you understand what the piece is actually about. Sometimes you record a bunch of sound and the song reveals itself in the edit. Sometimes you start a painting with a colour and the composition shows up later. Sometimes you build half a website page and only in doing it do you understand how the navigation should work.

Structure-after-inspiration is a completely legitimate way to make things. It is not lazy. It is not undisciplined. It is a different sequence that honours the reality of how creative material arrives — which is often raw, often formless, often burning hot in a way that doesn’t wait for you to make a chart first.

The discipline isn’t in the outline. The discipline is in doing the work of shaping the raw material once you have it. And that shaping? Sometimes that’s the hardest part of the whole process. Nobody gets to skip the hard part. We just find it in different places in the sequence.

Nonlinear Doesn’t Mean Chaotic (But It Might Look Chaotic)

I want to distinguish between nonlinear and chaotic because people use them interchangeably and they’re not the same thing.

Chaotic means no system. No capture. No returning. Just spinning and generating and abandoning and never actually landing on anything, which is genuinely exhausting and also not what I’m advocating for.

Nonlinear means the sequence isn’t fixed. It means the middle can arrive before the beginning. It means chapter seven might be the thing that tells you what chapter one is supposed to say. It means the chorus might appear before you have a verse. It means the website footer might be what you design first because it’s what you can see most clearly, and the header will come later when you understand the whole page better.

Nonlinear still has a system. It just doesn’t front-load all its decisions. It’s responsive rather than prescriptive. It follows the energy of what’s alive and ready rather than forcing every piece into a predetermined slot before it’s ready to go there.

And yeah, from the outside, it can look chaotic. The open tabs. The disconnected documents. The multiple half-finished things living alongside each other. The way you might bounce between three different projects in one afternoon because each of them wanted something from you in that window and you followed where the work was calling.

It looks like a mess. It frequently is a mess. But there is a logic underneath it, and that logic is the logic of what’s ready, what’s alive, what’s asking to be worked on right now.

I trust that logic more than I trust any chart I could make before I know what I’m making.

The Part Nobody Talks About: When Nothing Comes

We need to talk about the gaps. The dry stretches. The times when you sit down to create something and the lights are off and nobody’s home and you are sitting there with a blank document or a blank canvas or a blank track and feeling like you have been quietly unplugged.

Controller unplugged mid-cutscene. That’s the vibe. The game was going fine and then silence.

I have a complicated relationship with those gaps. I used to panic in them. I used to interpret them as evidence that the creative part of me was gone, broken, done, had packed its bags and moved to somewhere warmer without telling me. I would push and force and come out the other side with stuff that wasn’t good, stuff I made out of anxiety instead of out of anything real, and that stuff never helped anything.

What I know now, and what took me an embarrassingly long time to learn: the gaps are part of the process too. They are the fallow season. The compost stage. The loading screen between levels. Something is happening underneath even when nothing is appearing on the surface.

This doesn’t mean you just sit on your couch waiting for lightning. It means you do other things. You read. You live. You take walks. You let yourself be bored occasionally, which is incredibly countercultural right now but also incredibly necessary for creative work. You look at art you didn’t make. You listen to music you didn’t write. You go outside. You talk to people. You fill the well.

And then, often when you are least expecting it, the transmission comes back. Something fires. The folder labelled STUFF contains exactly what you needed. The fragment from three months ago is suddenly ready to become something larger.

I actually believe that about creativity the same way I believe it about faith: Proverbs 3:5-6 has never steered me wrong. Trust the process that’s larger than your immediate understanding. The path gets clearer as you walk it, not necessarily before. You don’t always get to see the whole map before you start moving.

Practical Things That Have Actually Helped Me

I don’t want to end this without saying something useful. Not a universal system, because I promised I wouldn’t do that and I meant it. But some things that help me navigate nonlinear creative work without losing my mind entirely:

Capture everything, curate later. Don’t try to evaluate fragments at the moment they arrive. That’s not their time to be evaluated. Catch them, store them, let them sit. The curation happens when you’re ready to work on something, not in the middle of the night when the thing first showed up.

Date your fragments. When you go back to an old note or a half-finished draft, knowing when you made it gives you context. Where were you? What were you going through? Sometimes that context tells you everything about what the thing is and what it needs.

Respect what’s calling you. If one project is alive and asking for attention, give it attention. Even if it’s the fourth thing on your list or the one you’ve been avoiding or the one that feels too big to touch. The energy that a piece of creative work carries when it’s ready is real. Don’t ignore it because it’s inconvenient.

Give yourself permission to start in the middle. You don’t have to write the introduction first. You don’t have to design the homepage first. You don’t have to record the first verse first. Start where the work is alive and work outward from there. The connective tissue can come later.

Return without apology. Old drafts are not failures. They are creative work in progress. Returning to something doesn’t mean you didn’t do it right the first time. It means you’re doing it right now.

Stop performing linearity. This one is the big one, honestly. So much creative paralysis comes from trying to do the thing in the right order so it looks correct to some imaginary observer. There is no imaginary observer. There is just you and the work. The order doesn’t matter. The work does.

The Thing I Keep Coming Back To

Creative work is trust. It’s trusting that the fragment matters even when you can’t see what it belongs to. Trusting that the gap will end. Trusting that the project you put down six months ago and picked up again this morning is worth the return. Trusting that the mess you’re making right now has a shape inside it that you’ll be able to find.

It doesn’t arrive in the right order because it doesn’t know what the right order is. And neither do you, not at the beginning. You figure it out together as you go.

The beginning matters. The fragments matter. The gaps matter. The returns matter. The chaotic 2 a.m. voice memo that makes almost no sense in the morning and is somehow exactly what you needed matters.

All of it is the process. The whole beautiful sprawling mess of it.

Start wherever you can reach.