🔥 Squirrels don’t wear watches.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it below.

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

I’ve always had a tumultuous relationship with time. My dad, a former Marine, was timely like his life depended on it — and me, a straight-A perfectionist, learned early that being late meant you didn’t care. That kind of training makes you efficient, sure. It also makes you chronically stressed and compressed, doing the math about whether there’s “enough” time to earn someone else’s approval.

Decades later, I still feel the pressure — and the shame. Not just around punctuality, but deadlines, too. The pressure to be on time, finish on time, perform on time hijacks presence. My focus shifts to output and obligation, and I lose the felt sense of presence. No space for art. No space for life — which is, let’s face it, unpredictable, messy, and nonlinear.

And I keep coming back to the same truth: squirrels don’t have watches or calendars. (I don’t know it’s always squirrels for me, but here we are.) They follow the sun. The season. Their own internal rhythms — nature pointing them towards their greatest good. That’s how I want to relate to time: to use it, not be used by it. To space things out. To move slower. To live inside time, not race against it.

I’m still trying to untangle this knot — it’s a big one. But the question I’m sitting with right now is this: What actually happens when I abandon my own rhythm to meet someone else’s timeline?

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.