Award Winning Author Sarah Gailey on Writing, Vulnerability, Building a Career

In this conversation, Thorn Coyle speaks with Sarah Gailey, a Hugo award-winning author, about their creative journey, the impact of chronic illness on creativity, the balance between vulnerability and professionalism in writing, and the importance of grounding practices. They explore the concept of magic in writing and how personal experiences shape their narratives, ultimately emphasizing the themes of interconnectedness and liberation in their work.

You can connect with Gailey at https://sarahgailey.com/
And you can support this podcast at https://www.patreon.com/c/ThornCoyle

Transcript

0:24

Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Magic, Creativity and Life. Today I am pleased to be talking to Sarah Gailey. Gailey is a Hugo award-winning and best-selling author of speculative fiction, short stories and essays. Their nonfiction has been published by dozens of venues internationally. Their fiction has been published in over seven different languages and their most recent novel, just Like Home, and most recent original comic book series with Boom Studios, Know Your Station, are available now. You can find links to their works at sarahgailey.com. Sarah, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled to be talking to you. So the question I always start off with is, what are your creative roots? Like, were you a creative child? What forms did it take? Were you always a writer? Were you doing other things? What was that like for you? You know, I think if I had to find like the taproot of my creativity, it would be the back room of the independent bookstore where my mom worked when I was growing up. She would show up to go to work and they would sort of put me in this back room, which just had piles and piles of miscellaneous craft supplies, many of which were in hindsight, trash. But I got full access to that. And basically the rule was, you know, don't destroy anything and stay kinda out of the way and you can make whatever you want to make. And so I would, I would just sit down in the middle of this pile of debris and in that I saw infinite possibility. And it didn't occur to me that there were limitations on what I could do and what I could make. So I would just kind of go. And that's sort of how I've approached creativity in every aspect of my life ever since is as if everything around me, whether it's, you know, intentionally made to foster creativity or just garbage or, you know, pain or whatever is there to be part of this boundless horizon of possible creation. And as long as I don't get in too much trouble, I can do what I want with it. And of course, the definition of what too much trouble means has shifted quite a lot over the course of my life. can imagine. Yeah, I really love that and appreciate that. You know, I often talk about the fact that I'm an animist and I believe all children are animists. You know, the world is just a living, breathing place and we interact with it. doesn't matter if it's a stuffed animal, a crumpled piece of paper, a leaf on the sidewalk, right? And your creative process of taking whatever is around you and allowing yourself to be in a of creativity, no matter what the conditions are, to me speaks to that living relationship with the world around us. And I just think it's terrific that you're still doing that. And I know both you and I, and if you don't want to talk about this, that's not an issue, but I know both you and I have struggled with various chronic illnesses, injuries, that sort of thing. And of course, whatever pain or trauma any human being goes through. And the fact that you are able to bring that to your creative process feels significant to me because it's something I do as well. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that, if you're willing to talk about it. absolutely. mean, first of all, I really appreciate you bringing up the animistic kind of angle on this because I think that's absolutely where my ideas of creativity and of source come from, you know, that anything can be a creative partner because... you know, there are some things that I look at, you some objects to me are dead objects, which is always very sad. It's like this object, like the soul in it has been suffocated out. But even those, it's like this, the sadness that I feel seeing the death of this object can become a creative partner to me. And that's how I feel about the pain and chronic illness that I deal with. I sometimes On days when I'm not being my necessarily best, evolved self will view my pain and disability as a creative opponent. You know, it's like this thing is standing between me and my creative goals and I get really frustrated and sad and angry. But on days when I am able to tap into the self that I think is my truest and most honest self. I can look at that pain and exhaustion and, you know, even the stiffness in my hands as a creative partner, sort of challenging me to find the creativity required to do what I want to do. Mm-hmm. And there are also times when I need to let that anger and sorrow be the creative partner, but I find that that's a more difficult creative partner to work with. Yeah, I mean, I'm similar. And of course, some days I have also have to adapt to my conditions, right? So some days I can put in what I consider to be a full day's work. Some days I can work one hour, you know, and that's also part of the creative process for me. And there's something about the anger and frustration you're mentioning that resonates with me too. And the ways in which that I'm able to bring that to the creative process is through poetry, through essay writing, things like that. And of course, through political action or social justice action outside of what we might consider to be the creative process. But it also brings to mind a different question which is how honest are we as creative people in our work? How much of ourselves are we willing and able to bring into our creative work? Because that's a tightrope, a balancing act that I think every artist and creative person has to confront at some point, is what do we keep aside and what is private and what seeps into our creativity, what informs and enlivens our creativity, and how fully are we showing up for that. And I'm not talking about, you know, sharing all of our most private information. I'm talking about what informs our characters, what informs the world we're building, you know. So I'm wondering if you have thoughts about that too. I really have, I think of a quite mixed perspective on this. On the one hand, whenever I'm talking to new writers who are actively seeking the answer to this question, I will tell them, you know, please don't feel that you have to strip all of your skin off in order to write a good story. It's okay to maintain a sense of yourself as something that doesn't have to bleed. for creative achievement because we sort of tend to fetishize vulnerability in ways that can be really damaging and really scary for new creatives. On the other hand, I don't take that advice myself at all. I find that the best work I make for me personally happens when I get really, really honest with myself. And this is something that confronted me last year. It really stared me right in the face and said, you have forgotten this about yourself because I was struggling with this draft of a book. I had been grappling with it for like five years. I rewrote it over and over again. And then I found out that someone very close to me in my personal life had been kind of manipulating me and being dishonest with me and using my own mental illnesses against me in a really frightening and awful way. And that that had been leading me to ignore a lot of things about my own life and to not look at things honestly and to not reckon with them honestly within myself and within my work. And once I cracked through that understanding and realization and returned to this work and rewrote it again, It came out completely different and it felt like it was on fire coming out of me. It wasn't a struggle anymore. It wasn't this what on earth is holding me back. I didn't have that feeling like, you know, like someone had like strapped chains to me and was standing behind me holding them. All of a sudden I could just sprint through this work and it was very open and honest and vulnerable. And so, I mean, I feel both ways. I feel both of these things in a really true duality of perspective is that it's vital to be open and honest with yourself as you are working, even if you're not telling the reader everything that you understand about yourself. right. Well, and it strikes me as you're talking that there's a level of safety we need in order to create as well as a level of bravery, right? So those are intention, right? Because if we feel unsafe, it does impact our work. As you were saying, it was really hard for you to do this work. Well, I think some part of your subconscious didn't feel wholly comfortable, right? And then when those blockages were taken away, things started flowing again. And I've had those experiences as well. I tend to be very publicly private, which might surprise some people because of some of the things I've written about, right? But I choose what is the purpose for this thing I'm revealing, right? Yes. going to reveal it. I'm not revealing it to bear my soul to you. I'm revealing it because there's a larger point or a larger purpose I'm making. And it's the same with my fiction, right? Stuff comes out through my characters in bits and pieces. You know, like I write some characters with chronic illness. I write queer and non-binary and trans characters. You know, I write characters who are passionate about social justice. That's all part of me showing up to the page honestly. But there's a lot I hold back and do not share because it doesn't feel necessary or good to me. Yes, I tend to approach truth and honesty and vulnerability of my work as sharing truths of the self, but not details of my life. You know, it was very funny when I went through this whole thing last year, it included a really significant breakup. a lot of colleagues of mine, I found out didn't even know that I had a partner. Because I don't talk publicly about the detail, the individual details of my life. The way that I walk through the world is private to me, but the things that I hold in my heart as principles and the things that I find to be true about human nature, I will talk about in public and in my work quite openly. And so I always feel like I'm being a lot more open than I am. I'm like, what, you guys know everything about me? And people are like, we don't even know for sure if you have a middle name. Yeah, yeah, I get that. I am really, really similar. That's funny that we both approach things in that way. Like I am not posting photos of my loved ones on social media. You know, I am not even naming people. And part of that comes from my genuine, you know, desire for a certain level of privacy. And part of that comes from early on, I had stalkers. You know, and so it's also a it's a safety thing too. But there was also something there was a phase on the Internet where I that I used to call the hyper confessional blogosphere. And I always had discomfort around the kind of bearing of heart, soul and life that was going on in ways that didn't feel helpful to me. And in contrast, Lately, the thing I do find helpful is more people saying, hey, I actually have this mental illness and here's what life is like for me. Right. Or here's what it means to be actually neurodivergent, not just what the DSM tells us. Or here's what life is like as a trans person. Right. So that sort of sharing I do find enriching and helpful. And again, I think I'm just back to creative tension, right? And creativity requires a certain level of tension. We have to be pushing up against a yes and a no simultaneously, I think, for a third thing to arise in the creative process. And it's all or nothing that I think undermines a lot of longevity in creativity, right? If you're always hiding everything, it's hard to have longevity. If you're always spilling your guts and you know the whole bleeding on the page, which I hate that phrase, whenever it comes up I'm like, you don't have to bleed on the page, right? Too much of that also I think undermines longevity. where's the, you know, creativity arises from tension, but so does health, you know. Mm Well, and I think I think that the best creative work, the creative work that I appreciate and admire the most holds that tension as being worth celebrating and exploring and understands that the mess of that tension is where things get interesting. I'm not I mean, I also am like, I'm fundamentally opposed to black and white. thinking about the world because I think that it's kind of drives like a fascistic perspective on good and evil and right and wrong and know yada yada my little soapbox that I'm trying so hard not to climb up on every second of the day. But like I think the more that we in our creative work not only accepts the tension but admire it and roll around in it and understand that it doesn't always feel good and that that mess is where the real, the vital fluids of life are located. I think the more that we sit there, the more we broaden our ability to think in complex ways and love each other in complex ways and love each other in our complexities and love ourselves in our complexities. I think that's where real joy starts to come from and actual real love. Well, and we're back to you as a child creating things out of garbage, right? You're literally creating things out of a mess. And here now you're talking about emotional mess, physical mess, mental mess, right? I love it. And for me, that messiness of creation is where two things happened for me. One thing is I need a practice, a daily steady practice to keep grounding myself in the middle of the foment of creativity and the foment of the world at large. And I want to find the magic that exists in that messiness and draw that forth and live with that and create with that. So that brings me to my next question is, Are there practices you do or rituals you do, whether it's brewing a cup of tea before writing or, you know, doing meditation or going for a walk, you know, is there a steady practice that helps keep you grounded and centered and able to create no matter what is happening in the world? If you had asked me this a year and two weeks ago, I would have had a ready list of answers for you, including a morning walk, in which I looked at the changing state of nature in my neighborhood and, you know, watching these hatchling redtail hawks become fledglings and then coming home and making a cup of tea and eating a clementine and lighting a candle and I had all these rhythms that were keeping me creative no matter what was happening in my life. And then this huge upheaval happened almost a year ago today as we're recording. And all of my rhythms and routines vanished. I ended up traveling for three months and so I was staying, know, and I was sleeping in a different bed every few nights. And then I came home to a completely different life. And I've moved twice since then, including right now I'm sitting in the middle of a half unpacked living room recording this. And my creativity has exploded in this last year. I have been full of stories and pitches and concepts and I've written a ton. I've developed an editorial perspective for a project that I'm launching next year that is going to be a publication. And I have no rhythm and it's so stressful and exhausting as someone who really thrives in grounded routine. I've been living in the chaos and one of the things I want desperately for myself right now is to develop a new kind of routine because the routine I had before was, I think, damaging me creatively. I had this rhythm. and this routine that was designed to, as I said, to make it so I could continue producing creative output no matter what was going on in my life and in the world. And the result of that was that I was treating my inner artist like a machine in a factory. And so the rhythm that I want to find in this year to come, which I'm sure will be so easy and relaxing, given the trajectory of things right now. I want to find a routine that instead of like priming the machine for output, I want to find a routine that sits down my inner artist and says, how can I care for you today? Whether, and that, that might mean I don't do anything. That might mean no work gets done, or it might mean I'm really excited to create. Let's go. Let's, you know, let's let it run. Mm-hmm. have no idea what that looks like and I'm frightened to find out but it's the kind of fear that has a lot of excitement underneath it. That's interesting. I mean, I do have steady daily practices that, you know, they do shift and change, but they're important to me to keep me grounded. But right now, with my writing, I am exploring different processes, right? I'm slowing down a little bit. I'm deepening. And in that way, you know, kind of leveling up as well, right? I'm expanding my sense of creativity and what that means and kind of putting a bunch of compost in the soil and digging around and letting things shift and change. So I appreciate that, too, the change. But the question it brings up for me is something I see and hear a lot of people struggling with, which is You know, you're a professional writer. I'm a professional writer, right? This is our work. This is how we feed ourselves. So in the midst of change and adjustment and yes, saying some days no work gets done, we're not producing machines, we're not creativity machines, but we're also not sitting around hoping the muse shows up. Right? So that's another tension. So how are you exploring that tension as a professional writer, full-time writer, who's also shifting your patterns and allowing yourself more grace and room? I have to tell you, it is not easy. Especially right now, I'm in that place of having realized that I need to make a change and that I need to slow things down. But there's still contracts, there's still deadlines. The conveyor belt in the factory has not stopped moving yet. And I'm like, okay, but I need to change how I interface with this. entire process. What do we do? So one aspect of that is I have great communication with every member of every team that makes my work possible because I'm working in traditional publishing. I work with teams of editors and marketing and sales professionals and publicity professionals who are thinking about my schedule. two years from now. And when we get on a phone call to say, you know, where can we send you? What can you do? What are you going to be available for? What's the calendar for the next couple of years? I am able to say, hey, things are starting to break over here. I need to change how we do this. And I'm extremely fortunate to get to have those conversations. So in terms of, you know, on a high level career, question of how do we reckon with the fact that this is a job even as things need to change. It's really about communication with the team for me on an internal level. Fuck if I know. I have no idea how to slow this thing down. I've been trying for years now to figure out how to go from, you know, instead of The question being, I at 100 or am I at zero? I've been like, OK, how do I get down to 75? And so what I'm going to try and do is I'm trying to really approach this as a project of its own, a creative project that deserves as much attention as I give any novel I write. And that creative project is, how do I change the way I do things? Yeah. And that's the only thing I can think of to try and actually get this thing turned around. Yeah. For me, what I try to do is cultivate an internal sense of spaciousness because things go awry when I tighten up and things start to, it increases tension, right? And that is not helpful long-term. know, tension is great in short bursts, right? Yes, I need to hit. this deadline, yes, I need to finish this short story, that sort of thing. But overall, tension can become that kind of excessive tension can become debilitating. So cultivating internal spaciousness helps me. And then also realizing days when I need to work an hour or not work at all means that the following day, I get a ton done. because I allowed myself that space, right? I can get two days worth of work done in a few hours sometimes if I have allowed myself the downtime, right? Whereas if I'm always pushing myself, I get into a process of what I call diminishing returns, where I'm actually less and less productive, to use a dirty word. than I would be if I just said, you know what? I'm taking the day off today, or I'm only doing this one thing that's gonna take me an hour. Mm hmm. Yes. Yes. Well, and I mean, even if even if the next day you don't get twice as much done, being one day behind can't be the margin that we're working on it. can't be if I'm one day behind on this project, everything's going to fall apart like that. That's just often not reflective of reality that I find that's often for me reflective of anxiety. Yes. And also if it is reflective of reality, then reality has to change, which is painful and scary and hard as it so often is in any circumstance. But sometimes I find that I just need to accept, okay, well, if something's got to give, then it's got to give. Yeah. Again, back to longevity. know, what is the healthiest process that's going to help us have a long-term relationship with our creativity? I definitely believe that's true. mean, the other thing I do is I heavily pad all my projects and deadlines. Right. So I build in a large amount of padding into every project. Mm-hmm. have to, you know, as a person with a chronic illness, as a person who's had a brain injury, it's just what needs to happen. And as a consequence, I am overall healthier and happier. It's, I find myself setting myself up with a lot of padding upfront. And then as I, as I eat away at the padding, I can feel the way that I'm starting to stretch myself a little too thin. And so having that padding upfront becomes doubly useful because there's like, I kind of think of it like, you know, when you're driving on the freeway and there's those runaway truck off ramps that are like, it's like a big uphill with heavy gravel. And the idea is that if the brakes fail on a large vehicle, they can use that to slow their momentum and not, you know, crash and, and horribly kill everybody. And I'll feel that padding wearing away, kind of similar to like the, the way that a runaway truck gets onto that off ramp and starts slowing down, even as it's kind of out of control. And I'll be going, hmm, I'm losing off ramp here. I'm losing this extended stretch of gravel that is there to keep me safe. So I need to figure out how to slow down. I need to figure out how to not go through all of this kind of protective, insulation that I've put into my schedule. And it's very useful to feel that sense of, this is starting to go too fast. This is starting to feel out of control. This needs to change. Mm-hmm. Yeah, for me, I can feel an internal speeding up. And that's my cue to say, take a breath, slow down, what actually needs to be done, and what is my actual capacity to do something today. And what is actually important, what is not? actually important, right? There are so many things when we get into that sped up spiral or, you know, we're losing the padding and we need to slow down condition. Some things can feel important that really are not, right? So it also helps me to adjust my perspective and my expectations. You know, this is something that comes up for me in crisis situations. I kind of end up being the point person often in my groups during a crisis moment because the way my brain is structured is such that I can make decisions in moments of crisis. And so I get, you know, to kind of step into that role. And you end up really understanding what is urgent and what is important in those moments. And so when I start feeling like everything is an emergency because I'm overbooked, because I've committed to too many things and I'm feeling like, you know, I have that internal speeding up and I have that everything is so important and I have to get it all done. I will sometimes take a step back and say, okay, triage. If I needed to drop everything right now, what could drop? without anything falling apart. And the reality is most of it. Most things will be okay. Other people can step in and handle things. Other people can help. Life can change. And again, it'll sometimes be painful and uncomfortable, but also you're not gonna die from it. This again, you know, I found this out last year when I ended up doing this three months of travel. My life had been structured with no wiggle room, no margin for error. Everything was so important all the time. And then a big thing fell apart. And my life was so much more expansive than I realized. And I had all this space to be a disaster and go ask people for help and be in a state of upheaval. And honestly, I think that it changed the way I approach work and life in the time since because I'm just aware that there's so much more room than I thought there was. Yeah, similar thing happened to me with burnout and my health crises. I had found myself years ago, I would sometimes be, you know, walking down the street thinking, wow, it would be kind of nice to just get hit by a car just enough to put me in the hospital, not bad, but just enough to put me in the hospital so I don't... have to be responsible for all this stuff. I mean, what a, that is not, that is not good. That is not good. I and I think 75 % of the creative people I know have had that exact thought. What if a bus just tapped me? Just a little, again, just enough so that you're in the hospital, everyone has to be nice to you. Everyone has to be understanding. But you're not, you know, you're not broken. Yeah. Yes. yeah. So when I realized I was having that thought, more often than it was good, I was like, OK, right. I really need to shift my ambitions. I need to shift the amount of work I pile on myself and I need to slow down way more than I want to. Right. And that helped me once my health improved and my burnout lessened, that helped me keep track of the perspective I want to have on work, on creativity, on business, on relationships, on everything else, right? Well, because if you, if you boil down the, wish I could just get gently hit by a car thought, really, what it really boils down to is I don't want this. And we, in many things in our lives, we don't get to be in choice, but in our creativity, we often get to be in choice. And it's, it's very sad to realize. that you don't want the creative life that you have. But it's also what if you can accept that, if you can say, you know what, I don't want this thing that I have right now, then you get to change it. And I just, keep coming back to this change is so scary. It's so scary. It feels like you're dying, but you're not. Well, and then it's liberating, which you've already talked about in this conversation, right? You went through this terrible experience that was crushing and diminishing you. You kind of in a way lost everything and that liberated you enough so that things really started flowing and flourishing again. Completely. Completely. Well, and the most liberating part of it was the thing that felt most like death, which was the loss of the future that I had understood myself to have. And I think that's what's so scary about change is that if you make real, real change, then you lose the future that you understand to be stably and certainly in front of you. when you lose that future every other future becomes possible. had a few months where people would say to me, okay so where are you gonna live? And I would say I have no idea because I could go anywhere. I could be anywhere. I could do anything with my life. It was terrifying. It was petrifying. But also what incredible freedom. I think that that you know, again, to like, bang these pots and pans together that you and I have been playing on this whole time. It's about accepting that those two things are true at the same time that that liberation is very scary and frightening and painful, and also expansive and freeing. Those those two feelings can exist about this at the same time. great. Thank you for that. Yeah, the sense of liberation from, know, in the, I'm doing this long magical working with a group of people right now of bringing us from the tower card into the star card. And so we've been going through all the cards leading up to it. And, you know, the tower card, it gets struck by lightning. Everything's falling apart. All the old structures are crumbling. The two figures, are falling through the air into the unknown. But that leads them into the star, which can be an invocation of hope and flow and creativity and possibility and all of that, right? So the tower feels horrible. But if we can look at the liberation part of it and if we can look at, well, When the field is decimated, what is possible to plant anew? What new growth is possible? What new things can we build now that we've cleared the rubble? Or even as we're clearing the rubble, we can be building and clearing simultaneously. And we can look at that on every level, globally, in our home communities, in our personal lives, in our creative practice. Mm hmm. Yes. Well, and that's, you know, this this thing that I sometimes wish for, for loved ones of mine, which feels really terrible to wish for, is that I will sometimes wish for them to go through the kind of self confrontation that leads to self acceptance. And, you know, there's like, there are some practices that consider this like abyss work. Mm-hmm. diving deep into the pain and the chaos and the suffering of your own existence in order to come out the other side transformed in some way. And there are people who I know who I feel like are constantly standing on the lip of that, who are standing on the parapet of the tower and looking down and you know, their toes are curling and their fists are clenched and they're going, no, no, no, no, no, I really don't want to fall. And every now and then I'll look at them and go, if you would just... jump, you would find that you would find the star on the other side of it. And yet it'll be scary and it'll change you and change feels like dying. Change feels wretched and you'll lose things and you'll also find things including like a self that you love and can care for and celebrate on the other side. and I don't want them to be scared and I don't want them to hurt but I do want them to have that change. Yeah. Well, that change and transformation you're talking about is the roots of the word magic to me. And I know that you and I probably have different relationships with that word magic, but magic shows up in your writing all the time, Gailey, right? I mean, you've written even two books with magic in the title, right? Magic for Liars and When We Were Magic. And I'm wondering if you want to talk about why it was important for you to write books that have magic at the core, including, you know, it's the magic of like when we were magic, you know, that's the part of that magic is the magic of the acceptance you're talking about, right? What are your thoughts on that? I mean I write about magic in such a different way from from how I experience Magic the magic that I write about is the magic of you know fantasy It's like you you think I wish that this egg was a cactus and then the egg is a cactus and that's not unfortunately not the magic that I experienced in my real life although I would have so many more cacti if I mean, someone very smart once told me that magic is the intersection of breath and will, and I certainly don't disagree with that. I think the way that I encounter magic in the world is as a stubborn disbelief in coincidence, an absolute attachment to significance, and also a listening to the self. Mm-hmm. to the things that my body tells me are significant in the world. Like right now I'm looking at my window and I, this is one of my favorite pieces of magic in the world is I'm looking at the sun falling through the leaves on this tree and the way that the leaves move in this very slight breeze. And I can see language in that. And to me that's magic. But I don't write about that type. of experience explicitly in my work because I think it's so internal and I think a lot of readers are very shut off from the ability to recognize that language. So I tend to write that kind of magic into my work as a kind of as a journey that the characters are moving toward. My characters tend to start very clenched. and very internal and very critical. And I try to move them toward the ability to see that language and to accept significance and to disbelieve in coincidence. And sometimes they don't get there and sometimes they do. When we were magic is a little more hopeful and so the characters move toward. that a little more successfully, whereas in, for example, The Echo Wife, that's a story of someone intentionally turning away from these ideas and this openness and saying, I want to stay in the closed system that I understand. Great. Well, and all of that though, both reflects the world around us and humans in our world and what is possible, right? So we're either rejecting possibility or learning to embrace possibility. Yes, and either way the possibility is there. I think that's, I think that is also part of how I experience magic and part of why I'm not particularly defensive about my experience of magic is because I'm kind of like, well, whether, you know, whether you buy into it or not, whether, whether you say the way that the light moves through these leaves is significant, or you say it's just light through leaves, who cares? Okay, the light is still moving through the leaves. Like, the thing is still there, whether other people choose to see the language in it or not, the possibility still exists. And it'll exist whether or not I'm capable of experiencing it as its fullest self. Which I, it just gives me a a great deal of hope for what's possible in the experience of being alive. Wow. And that, what you just said, feels so true to me in so many areas, including, you know, ourselves, right? And our self-expression and whether other people want to police our self-expression or our self-identity or not, you know, the opinion I have of the light through the leaves, as you said, does not change the light through the leaves, right? And someone's opinion about myself or my books or anything else doesn't change the reality of myself or my books. It's just another opinion. Yes, exactly. mean, I, I use they then pronouns, there are people in my life who I choose to keep in my life, even though they don't particularly engage with the fact that my gender is not part of a gender binary. And part of how I'm able to do that is by going, okay, well, I am who I am, regardless of how much you are capable of engaging with that. And so instead of feeling diminished by their inability to understand the language of self that I have given them. I know that I am still the person who I am. Now sometimes, again, sometimes I'm not being my best, most elevated self. And sometimes I want to say, fuck you, you don't get to talk to me anymore. But even when I feel that way, I still am the self that I am. And the thing you said about possibility existing in the self, whether we engage with it or not, it f- that really just, moved something inside my chest to consider that and to consider all the people who I know and love who have so much possibility in them that is there waiting for them to reach into it. And just, just knowing how much potential exists in every single person gives me more and more hope for, you know, the eventual, eventual liberation of all living beings and the insights that can move us toward better mutuality and better understanding and better interconnectedness. Getting me quite emotional. Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes. So to close, this has been amazing, Gailey I have one final question. You can answer it however it feels right to you. Currently in your life and in your creative process, what is your why? Oof. I mean, we've been talking about it this whole time and we really, I do think that we really kind of stuck our fingers into it just now. My why is deeper understanding, interconnectedness and liberation. That is the deep project. And often I'm I'm moving toward that project by saying things are not tidy, morals are not neat, people are not definable. We have to exist with each other in the truth of our realities and natures and mess in order to do anything. Please look around you. That's really the heart of it. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. Well, thanks again for being here and thanks to everyone listening. Again, I've been talking with Sarah Gailey and you can find their work at saragailey.com. That's S-A-R-A-H G-A-I-L-E-Y. And as always, you can find me at thorncoyle.com, T-H-O-R-N-C-O-Y-L-E. Wishing you all a great day.