We all have that one friend who we sprint to when we need a breakup text drafted, spruce up our vanilla cover letter, or edit a flimsy apology, because we know how much words carry weight. They're spells. Today, Lois Mac, THE word wizard who focuses on strategic communication layered with uncensored expression, comes on to help humans stop performing expression and start saying the damn thing.

Lois reminds us:

When you lose your words, you lose yourself. Lois built her entire identity around language, then moved to a small Costa Rican town after having her first baby, surrounded by people who spoke only Spanish, and the woman who always had the right words suddenly had none... what she couldn't have known then is that was entirely the point.
The creative elephant never forgets. When you're not saying the real thing, every piece of content, every project, every newsletter becomes a hostage to it; your creativity doesn't leave, it just sits in the corner, arms crossed, waiting.
Trying harder is a one-way ticket to the void. The void is a compass that shows up when you've drifted so far from yourself you're basically a human LinkedIn post, arriving not to destroy you but to say: come back to your actual voice.
Write the unsendable thing. A daily writing practice that's purely for you (no feed, algorithm, or audience) is where your public voice quietly gets built.
Presence beats vocabulary every time. Deep, juicy, family-level friendships are built on showing up, staying in the room after saying the wrong thing, and learning to laugh at yourself, not perfect sentence structure.

This conversation is for those in the middle of identity shapeshifting, multi-lingual multi-hyphenates, who need a permission slip to say the thing you've been swallowing. She gives us a gentle but firm reminder that the most radical creative act available to you right now is NOT the next launch, the next rebrand, or the next post — it's just being the person who's already here.

Connect with Lois:

Writing Wildly Retreats: a full writing immersion in the Costa Rican jungle where your most important writing finally gets to breathe (enrolling for June + Sept 2026, mention how you found it in the application!)
Creative Living App: the app that turns your instinct to consume into a desire to create
Sweet Talk

Connect with Chelsea:

🪐 Pitch Perfect Fall 2026 Waitlist
☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist: the thinking lab for the deep thinkers, world-builders, and curious visionaries who see futures that don't exist yet.
💻 Website
🍿Popcorn Club: Monthly meet-up to debrief TV, movies, and the zeitgeist
📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes
💌 The Art of the Ask Podcast
📱 IG: ⁠@chelseariffe⁠
🧵 Threads: @chelseariffe

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