Sabbatical Letter #1: Writing As An Act of Love
Note: This series originally took the form of a newsletter to friends on my sabbatical travels from April to July 2026.
Dear friends,
I’ve been chewing on what container might best hold this sabbatical season. What might best hold my updates to friends as well as my writing practice? Should they even be the same container? How many containers can I keep up maintaining well?
In the short five days I’ve been on the road, lovely friends have dropped me a texts to ask how I’m doing — but I’ve been finding that there’s simply too much to say, bursting the seams of Whatsapp messages and Instagram stories. Some of my favourite memories are long emails to my sister when we went to university on opposite sides of the globe. I want to go back, again, to writing as an act of love.
By design, email seems to be the mode that is best able to hold this space. Being closed yet expansive, I have more freedom to go deeper, but with recipients from different parts of my life, I need the discipline of clarity, too. Thank you for receiving these words.
Why the Sabbatical?
In this Finding Common Ground podcast episode, Kuik Shiao-Yin gives this definition of the arts, and it’s one of my favourites: “The arts is about going deep into trying to make sense of ourselves and this world, and then trying to express it in form — so that others can see, hear and touch what we are making sense of — and respond.”
As a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist. There wasn’t any deeper meaning at that point beyond it seeming cool — but now, in a different way, I am still digging, whichever hat I choose to wear — writer, curator, doodler, meaning-maker — sifting through the meaning of things, collecting artefacts and finding connections to see how they form a deeper story.
So that’s what I’m doing this season — time (six months, specifically) to go deep, make sense, express. Tangibly, it’ll take the form of unhurried time with loved ones, unhurried time to get in touch with the land, unhurried time to walk, unhurried time to think, create and write.
In a time where things seem to be changing so fast and yet we as a human race seem to be making the same mistakes over and over — I also wanted to step back for a while after almost a decade as a UX designer to rethink what this part of myself might look like.
Love,
SH