This is me trying

Dear Reader,

Today's newsletter started with a question I've been circling for years: What do we lose when we work so hard to make ourselves make sense?

In my profession, I know how to sound like I know what I'm doing. But there's a profound grief in being misunderstood by people you were trying to make it easier for.

In the distance between intention and interpretation, the whole thing can bend. What leaves my mouth with care can arrive on the other side as something sharper, thinner.

Too often my words come laced with suspicion. I try to explain where I'm coming from and they think I'm hedging. Or trying too hard. Being too intentional can somehow translate into being disingenuous.

I have always been the one who tries. Smoothing the edges, folding my language into something easier to receive. Not because I want to sound smart. I just want to be known.

Still it warps. Something tender is mistaken for calculation, paraphrased in ways that sound like a stranger. My articulation (self-assuredness tucked inside self-deprecation) sticks, while the meaning disappears. Because coherence and warmth can't live within the same sentence.

I once left a meeting, feeling quietly proud of how I had held the boardroom. In the elevator, a senior colleague turned to me and said, "You came off a little cold." It was 82 degrees out and I was quietly dehydrating under a linen-blend professionalism.

It's been called over-functioning. I call it fluency in keeping other people comfortable — often at my own expense.

Now and then I imagine doing the opposite: there are days I fantasize about being breezy and unapologetic (everyone who knows me can stop laughing).

But I grew up adding disclaimers. "I think that..." "I just feel like..." I remember a loved one once snapping: Why can't you just say the thing?

I thought I was.

Even now, after years of softening what I mean to make it land cleanly, people still assume I'm holding something back.

Some days, it feels like I am writing in chalk on the sidewalk before it rains. The words are there, clear and careful. Then they're gone. Misread, stepped over, dissolved.

What people don't see is how much labor goes into that sentence before it is uttered. How many revisions I've done mid-thought.

That's why it stings. That my polish means performance. My language is too layered. It is perceived as an obfuscation of sincerity. As if precision isn't its own kind of generosity.

This is the quiet heartbreak of being a communicator: you can lead with care and end up being filtered through someone else's shorthand. Maybe it's the big words you swallowed in high school or the hunger for nuance. Or, like so many women, you speak with conviction and are dismissed as too much.

I'm learning, reluctantly, that meaning is only half mine. Clarity itself is not a shield.

I've watched people speak bluntly and be celebrated for their "directness." I've watched others fumble a point. Meanwhile, I'm over here writing emotional footnotes in real time.

But it turns out, resonance isn't always the reward. I will keep speaking in the tone I've carved, not borrowed. Even when it doesn't echo back the way I had hoped.

Here's what I found along the way:

• Assume the best in others, even when it's tempting not to.
• Most people don't remember exactly what you said, but they remember how they felt when you said it.
• The goal isn't to win the conversation — it's to stay intact inside it.
• And finally: it's okay to clarify. Again. And again. And again.

Sometimes courage is just saying it — out loud, on record, without flinching. The honest shape of what it has taken to be heard.

This is me trying, and meaning every word.

🌸 Pressed Blooms

• "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" — Ludwig Wittgenstein
• "Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so, to make it true." — Salman Rushdie
• "Much unhappiness has come into the world because of the bewilderment and things left unsaid." — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art." — Susan Sontag

In the end, maybe communication is just two people confidently misunderstanding each other at the same time. Thanks for reading.

Feel free to forward to a friend who speaks your language.

Until soon,

Sarah

soft power strategist / daughter of florists / fan of deliberate edits.