Suleika Jaouad

He pushes me to be freer, to play, to improvise in a way that—

that often feels dangerous to me.

It makes so much sense.

Yeah.

That navigating and having control over –

What becomes public is a core part of feeling safe.

Yeah, it is.

And also that sometimes letting that control go also feels like its own kind of freedom and safety.

And I think so many of us have that, especially in this age of hyper-curated online personas.

It's like this fear of what would happen if people really knew me, if people didn't just see the perfect me.

tightly curated parts of who I want to serve up to the world.

But what if they saw the mess?

What if they saw the half-formed sketch

And so... One of my favorite lines, I don't have tattoos, but if I did, maybe I would tattoo this on my body somewhere, is the writer, the poet Muriel Rukeysen says, I'm going to paraphrase it, but what would happen if one woman told the truth, the world would split open.

And I think...

that as you know and as i've learned there's such power when you tell the truth when you dare to share um your unvarnished vulnerability and it creates a reverberation and um

And a deep sense of connection that sometimes allows people within that reverberation to tell their own truth.

You know, it's so interesting because, of course, it's the thing I'm constantly grappling with is how to return to my mom to not just be okay with the mess, but to resist trying to cover it up and to actually push into it and to realize that that's where the power and the energy is.

So, you know, I've been talking about reclaiming smallness.

And let me get a little more granular.