We were lucky to catch up with Sarah L. Yoon recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My entire art process centers around healing, and, as you’d expect, my work ends up being themed similarly. My most recent project is the I Am Enough coloring book. It’s a coloring book that’s full of affirmations and little additional encouragements written as asides. While I did create this book for anyone who needs support, the book started for my own sake.

Holidays were coming fast and I knew the season was going to be rough that year. I needed reminders of self-worth, safety, home, etc. so I drew them for myself. And as often happens with my work, the doodles turned into a full fledged project where I designed 36 coloring pages. I drew every page, wrote every word, and even designed the cover. I have resisted affirmations in the past. They seemed trite, redundant, cliche, but this project encouraged me to revisit them. Encouragements can be simple without being trite, persistent without being redundant, and shareable without being cliche. It all depends on how we use them!

If you end up with a copy of my I Am Enough coloring book, I hope you tune in to my new YouTube series, where I chat through each affirmation as we color together.

Sarah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started off primarily as a writer. I wrote for interior design magazines for around nine years and published a smattering of poetry as well. Around 2018, I started taking both my art and my mental health more seriously. This pairing made an impactful shift in my creative efforts. I worked hard to develop the skills I needed to share my vision, and I worked hard to heal enough to have a vision that was worth sharing.

Along the way, I have published two coloring books, several journals, a Project Recipe Book, and dozens of stickers and greeting cards. I take my work to events and craft fairs, all while trying to keep a cap on the number of projects I’m attempting to work on. If you’re anything like me, having a “Million Great Ideas and Never Enough Time,” keeping the number of ongoing projects down is tough!

At the core of it all, I create work that helps people feel seen and valued. Currently that looks like running therapeutic art times, working on commissions, developing a new coloring book, creating regularly for YouTube, and… well, a few other things that I’ll share about when it’s time.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

For creatives who are just starting to build audiences, I’d encourage them to keep a pulse on their mental health. Social media is a series of slot machines. We gamble away our time, our energy, and our emotional wellbeing in hopes of winning the algorithm’s approval. We feed our hard work into an app, creating free content for that app, even though most people receive far less than they’re worth in return.

Sometimes it works out. You’ll get likes, follows, and DMs with legitimate offers. If it makes sense to you to put in the effort, go for it. But if not? You have a choice, and you can walk away. Because sometimes it doesn’t work out. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing something wrong. It doesn’t mean that you’re boring. It says nothing about your worth. You can get more honest and constructive feedback about your work elsewhere, and you can get eyes on your work elsewhere, too.

At the end of the day, sure, use social media to you heart’s content. But whatever you do, please be wise about your investments.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

It is very hard for non-creatives to understand what success looks like for me. Yes, I want big sales and big contracts and big whatnot, but I’m a small creator. I will make work whether or not it hits trends just right. Instead, I celebrate finishing projects and learning new skills. These are relatively invisible things to celebrate–very few people will know how much work went into a project, or how difficult it is to finish art and put it out into the world, or how many skills I needed to add to my collection just to get from A to B–but they are extremely important to me.

When people celebrate these successes with me, I know that they’ve put their own time in. They know the joy and the struggle, and they get it. I greatly appreciate this relational side of support. It’s where creative people step away from the need to capitalize on every moment and instead we weave a community together.

I have run writers groups for over a decade, and the predominant need I’ve seen is connection. None of our projects have a “will financially succeed guarantee,” so we need people who value our courage. It takes courage for us to finish a piece, celebrate our accomplishment, and dare to share it as well as we can. This is the type of support that protects us from burnout and encourages a healthy creative process.

There’s a reason we run in packs, I suppose! It’s far more fun to spend time with fellow creatives, the ones who see and value the work, than it is to try and prove ourselves to people who have no framework for why we do what we do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sarahlyoon.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slywriter/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO9tCHLrqRi0DoCNHSnS68g
• Other: https://sarahlyoon.substack.com/

Image Credits

Sarah L. Yoon