Out Loud This Week

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to all our new subscribers! I’m Carla, Sharp Skirts founder, and every Wednesday I send you… something. Usually it’s a nifty little roundup. Last week it was one post I wrote because I was on vacation in the Florida panhandle. And this week, because I seem to have caught something during said travels, it’s a slightly rambling discourse fueled by antihistamines. Life is a cabaret.

I’m pondering 3 happenings for Sharp Skirts these days: lunch in Austin, a mixer in Dallas, and a fall workshop. That’s a lot! But momentum, she is with us. And I don’t want to lose it. Stay tuned for more info. However, on that note…

One thing I’ve been struggling with since I started laying the groundwork for Sharp Skirts was to hurry. That I need to be doing something every minute of every day to build this thing, and if I’m not, I’m doomed to fail. That, however, is hustle culture [shudder] and I’m not falling for it. It’s the way of the tech bros and holds no reward for me. While I am busting my butt to set up income for me and my family, I’m applying a level of patience to Sharp Skirts that I haven’t before. There’s a lot to think about in building any business, and I am doing such things. But I’m also attempting to build a movement and that’s a little different.

The wonderful book Let This Radicalize You emphasizes the importance of self-care and mutual aid in activism and finding your own personal place in movements.

“Our goal should be interdependence: to be part of a community where rescue is viewed not as exceptional but as something that we owe each other.”

This sentiment seems especially apt after the horrors of last weekend’s floods. As I said in the Statesman interview Sunday, “We have lost power governmentally, and so we have to find it within ourselves.” Let’s give ourselves the space to do so.

If you need a little more encouragement in that department, You Are Not Behind is a pithy little set of reminders that you’re right where you need to be.

And I liked this quote from the book Thunder Songs, essays from Sasha LaPointe, about how the media has ignored scores of missing indigenous girls and women over the years:

“I take my story; I pick it up and move it. I drop it right in the center of a white cul-de-sac, with manicured lawns and prize-winning roses.”

I love the idea of dropping our stories in places that feel intrusive to others, forcing them to listen to them. It’s a tough hurdle to navigate as women because we’ve been so conditioned to be small and quiet. But that’s where our experiences carry the most weight, after all—in places of discomfort and tension.

This week, once the drugs wear off, I’m challenging myself to drop a story where it doesn’t belong. Y’all do it too and tell me what happens.

“During Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, artificially blackened teeth were considered fashionable among those who wanted to mimic the genuinely decaying teeth of a monarch who consumed too much sugar.”
You think you know where this examination of ‘the brutal aesthetics of MAGA’ is going but then it takes a surprising little turn.

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