If you’re not doing *this*, I honestly don’t know what to tell you

It’s time to act on the assignment you’ve already been given (and here’s why)

I’m typing from the comfort of my living room, laptop propped on a pillow, steaming earl grey and egg nog to my right, and – uncharacteristically – ANOTHER HUMAN IN THE ROOM. 

My houseguest is someone I’ve hired many times over the years. 

Sophia was randomly assigned as my coach in a writing community I joined five years ago. I was working on a saucy divorce memoir about those messy early years of, as my current boyfriend calls it, “hackin’ butts and bein’ a slut.” 

Trust me, no one is as disappointed as me that the book never made it to the shelves of your local independent bookstores. Fifty thousand words of salacious stories about me and my friends surviving COVID exclusively on hand-rolled tobacco, naked forest bathing, MDMA and doomed polyamorous love affairs. 

But I digress. 

The writing group assignment kicked off an unexpected, multi-year coaching relationship I didn’t know I needed. I kept going back to Sophia with random assignments, the biggest of which was providing oversight and accountability in the facilitation of my mastermind, Power. 

Sophia was the person I called anytime I needed to negotiate an awkward group dynamic, walk someone through a difficult period of business, or whatever came up. When you’re working with people being loud and visible on the internet, a lot comes up! For two years we planned every call and every retreat together, well over a hundred hours of programming, always debriefing after. She taught me how to be a person who can hold clients through enormous risk and vulnerability as they grow their businesses. Even though she isn’t involved in the program much anymore, it still has her signature all over it. 

But today she’s at my house, and I get to be the coach as Sophia brings her project to the world, Fat Joy Creation Lab. 

For thirty minutes, I fired ideas at her about what emails to send, what words to say in them, which prospects to follow up with multiple times and how to make it not weird. I noodled with her email graphics in Canva, adding buttons, tweaking headlines and highlighting deadlines. 

It was day two of her promotion, the birth of something that has been gestating for more than two years. The baby had barely taken its first breath. 

When she got to my house at 10:30am, fresh pastries in hand, she already had three applicants. 

“I think this might be real,” she said, with all that hope and fear and “what if” in her eyes. I just nodded along, so excited to see her project get off the ground. 

Hours later, the two of us tapping away at our laptops on my couches, her whole body suddenly perked up. “OMG, I just got an email. Do you know [respected industry leader in the fat liberation space]?”

“Totally!” I said. It was someone I took classes from years ago. I know her work well and read her newsletter for years.

She read the email out loud, blinking back tears, me chiming in the whole time going, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” We sat in our chairs stunned. This dream that Sophia had years ago – to create an incubator-slash-mastermind exclusively for fat folks to bring their projects to life in a welcoming, liberatory space, alongside people who share their lived experience – it was happening. Like, for real.

And someone important understood exactly what it was, who it was for and why the offer needed to exist, a respected authority in the space not only got it, she wanted to talk about joining.

In that moment, inside of one email from someone who’s opinion matters, all the work felt worth it. All the leaps of faith. All the late nights Sophia spent editing podcast episodes, writing pitch emails, crafting the next Substack, figuring out which software to use for this or that, the TWO YEARS AND TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH she spent producing her “top two percent” podcast, Fat Joy with Sophia Apostol. 

What a gift to experience that together. To have watched someone patiently and persistently bring their work to the world for years, and then get to sit next to them the moment a critical piece clicks into place and they say to themself, “Fuck me. This is real. I actually did it.” 

WOW.

It reminded me why people start businesses, why we sweat and bleed and lose sleep bringing our creations to life. I got to remember what it feels like when you finally – FINALLY! – shoot your shot and watch it shoosh straight into the basket. Nothing but net! 

Holy hell, what a feeling. 

Look, I know the economy is not so good right now. People aren’t spending like they were in 2020, when the stimulus checks were flowing and the political situation was hairy but sort of okay, comparatively speaking. At least people were a lot less scared. 

This email is a reminder to you that people like Sophia are still out there, taking risks, bringing dreams to life, doing important work in the world, and getting paid for it. A song leader friend sold out her international event in days. My friend Maegan filled her retreat without sending a single promo email. I just signed up for a dreamwork class based in Jungian psychology – the creator has enough demand to be offering for the third time in twelve months, to sixty people per cohort!

None of those people are huge brands. They’re just people, mostly working on their own, or with one other person. 

I hope 2026 is the year you listen and act on whatever assignment that little voice in your head has given you. 

A lot of people go around wishing for clarity, waiting to be told what to do, but ignore all the little ways life is constantly nudging them toward the thing they’re supposed to be creating — that idea that won’t leave you alone, the whispers you hear in the dark, the “makes no sense but sounds so right” voice asking you to make wonderfully inconvenient moves.

Maybe your project will be a huge money-maker, or maybe it won’t. But when you listen to the whispers of destiny nudging you to move in a certain direction, certain cosmic forces start to line up in ways that you could not possibly predict. 

You get more nudges. 

You might end up totally different from where you started (ask me how I know!) but that place too might be somewhere wonderful. 

I just hope you share it with me when your moment comes.

XOT

Tarzan Kalryzian [she/they]
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P.S. 

If the nudge includes, “Get my damn website up already,” I hope you sign up to Carolyn Leasure’s 5-Day Get Your Site Together Challenge (sponsored link). Carolyn’s work is amazing! She also designed Sophia’s Fat Joy Creation Lab sales page. Both have my firm stamp of approval.