🔥 Buy the big sunglasses.

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.

🎧 Listen to me read it — just the way I meant it.

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

Alex – my extremely handsome partner of 21 years – asked me to take his picture last week. He didn’t have any, and for some reason that had finally caught up with him. 

My art is language, his is photography – meaning he’s always been behind the camera, not in front of it. But that wasn’t the whole of it: he never liked how he looked in pictures.

I get this, because I used to feel the same. I didn’t hate how I looked. I just never felt especially good about it. I wasn’t a “hair and makeup” person. I picked out clothes based on functionality, not style. I didn’t really have a style, actually.

In retrospect, I can see that I didn’t really know who I was.

I’m fortunate to have a partner who values growth the way I do. Alex and I have both changed *a lot* in the last six years, since we finished having babies. The dust from that ten-year ordeal settled, and we found ourselves looking at each other – and at the mirror – like that Kurt Vile song: I woke up this morning / didn’t recognize the man in the mirror / then I laughed and said / “oh, silly me, that’s just me.” You get the point.

A couple years ago, I changed my hair. I’d always had long, heavy hair – but I realized that if it was short, and if I washed it the right way, it would curl naturally. Long hair was my default, what I “liked best.” But short hair is simply more…me. I can’t explain it. I just feel it.

I swapped the low-rise flare jeans I’d worn since I was sixteen with dark-wash boot cuts. That feels more me, too. 

The tattoos starting showing up about five years ago. I was the last person on Earth I ever thought would get a tattoo. When I showed my mom, she thought I’d drawn it on with Sharpie. Then I got two more. When my mom saw the leopard, she actually said, “What the hell is wrong with you?” Kind of joking, kind of not. I called it out (with love) and then went about my day because, by that point? I’d realized that letting out whatever’s inside is worth every goddamn ounce of the discomfort you feel when you allow other people to witness it.

If you’re paying attention to yourself, you eventually get to a point where you can’t be quiet anymore. And we’re there.

For Alex, it started with eye surgery that removed his need for glasses – thanks to the money I accidentally bumped into our FSA without realizing I couldn’t use it for last year’s charges. Then was the beard – only possible because COVID gave him the space to grow it out without comments from the peanut gallery.

Then the hat. That was a big one. (When did men stop wearing hats, anyway?) He looks damn sexy in it – mostly because of how much guts it takes to wear something bold like that. 

But you know what? He’s more himself than he’s ever been – and I like him even more because of it.

Maybe if you don’t like to be in pictures, it’s not because you don’t want to be seen – but because you feel incongruent. The way you look on the outside isn’t how you feel on the inside.

If this is you – it’s okay. We were stuck there for a long time, and I’m grateful we’re on the other side. It feels better over here.

I’m lending you my permission slip to change the way you look. Put on clothes that match your vibe. Cut your hair, buy the big sunglasses, carve the ink into your skin. Wear the shoes that pinch your toes if you feel like a goddess when those heels click against the floor. 

Because when the inside and the outside finally line up, the camera doesn’t feel like the enemy anymore. It feels like freedom.

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 — get in touch with me. I’d be honored to hold that space for you.