8 Comments

Love this! The translator idea is spot on. I think the "messenger" could be another important aspect. Someone needs to hear it from you because of your specific identity. Maybe it's something about your experience, your demographic background, your circumstances, or even your geographic location that might make something resonate differently than if the exact same message was coming from someone else. I'm still trying to grasp this idea myself.

Also 'Forks' was brilliant! "That's my freaking boy right there!" :-)

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Yes it seems like a combination of all of those (and more) that makes something either resonate or not at all. So many times I've 'heard' something over and over, until the 'right' person says it in just the right way, and it suddenly hits. And 'Forks' was the best. 'I wear suits now' :)

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I love the idea of being a translator. And there’s an art to translation- some things get lost and other things get added- and that’s the beauty of it:)

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What a nice addition. I hadn't thought through the mechanism but I think you're right, that's how it works and indeed that is the beauty :) Thank you!

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Good pep talk. Especially love the way you explain it in terms of being a translator, that we all create a unique bridge for someone who is stuck in their understanding of something to cross over onto the side of comprehension and clarity using our specific form of access.

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Awesome! I was hoping to get that across but it's an 'old' idea for me (meaning I've been thinking about it for a long time) so I wasn't sure if I could get the nuance across. So, good to hear it lands :)

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Ideas take time to marinate it seems, and sometimes we have to put them out multiple times before they take a form that lands. Good you stayed with that one.

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Very true. 'Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.' — James Baldwin

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