Sarah Sapora
Sarah Sapora is a writer, inspirational speaker, and the organizer of body inclusive personal growth events and self-love retreats around the world. Sarah uses her voice to make personal growth relatable to the nearly 70% of American women considered plus size. Online, her tight-knit community includes hundreds of thousands of “80’s and 90’s kids” searching for self-love and wellness free of diet culture. Sarah’s guiding principles of radical vulnerability, self-accountability and tolerance have solidified her reputation as someone who “talks about the hard stuff” with humor and heart. She lives in Las Vegas, NV with her 110lb “lap dog” Eliza, and loves cowboy boots, meditation, cooking, and crochet.
Instagram: @SarahSapora
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
All the damn time. If you don’t experience Imposter Syndrome at some point, are you really pushing yourself to do something different? I find that self-doubt is a natural part of stretching oneself professionally. Especially when you have created new ideas and are the one standing on the box in the middle of the square trying to educate and inspire people to think differently! Being different is beautiful but can really suck sometimes - and, yes, I’m a grown woman who used the word “suck” in a sentence.
I take feelings of Imposter Syndrome as a few things. One, it’s a sign that I am onto something - I’m getting nervous, which means I’m putting my “idea balls” on the table and anteing up. Second, it becomes an opportunity for me to build more self-trust in myself. Self-trust in one aspect of my life can fortify how I feel about myself in other buckets, so any investment that I make in my own self-love can only help make professional leaps in the long run!
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
I will give it a chapter. I’m a bit brutal… Truthfully, though, I’m worse with audiobooks. I know in the first few minutes of listening to a voice if I want to commit to that voice for 10 hours. Even if the topic is really awesome, if the voice is hard for me to listen to, I’m out.
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
Rural. In a heartbeat. I live in a city now and I find the concrete stifling. Sky and space makes my soul feel free and gives me room to breathe. For the last two years I have rented a small cabin in a tiny town in Montana. I haven't had the luxury of it being a vacation - I’ve worked the whole time - but the level of connection I feel to myself there is unparalleled. I feed horses. I smell the grass. I watch the weather roll in. There is nowhere my thoughts can hide when I am somewhere like this - it’s very bare and revealing.
Is there another profession you would like to try?
I am fascinated by words and would love to be a political speechwriter. Fun fact - this was actually what I thought I might do when I was younger and in college before, of all things, I ended up studying music. There are a number of things I think I could have been good at - for example, I would have been a great elementary school teacher or therapist. But if I could snap my fingers and *poof* experience a magical change of career – it would be something that never requires me to be on social media and something that facilitates me being outdoors.
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
There are formal definitions here, of course, so I will share my perspective. To me, a writer is in service of something else - a product, a brand, an idea that has been proliferated. An author creates something new or iterates something in a way that has not been done before. This is not a dig on either - simply to differentiate between the two. I have spent much of my life writing for other brands - when I do that, I adopt their values, their tone, and their priorities. As an author, my focus is on what I create!
There are times that I can switch from one gear to the other in the same piece. For example, if I am working on a chapter of my book that contains both memoir/story and teachable portion, when I flip into storyteller mode I am full-on author. The energy flows through me. The words come to life. I hear what I put on the page as I create. When I work on sharing facts that educate or teach, I find it's more task-oriented; I am more easily distracted when I write. Also, when I’m in “author-mode” I am more likely to crave ice cream because I’m probably working on a sticky topic that compels me to wear fuzzy sweatshirts and dive into anything self-soothing and comfortable.
