Translate the Sarcasm
What are we really trying to protect?
Hello and welcome to the fourteenth edition of The Ferocity Letter, a softly fierce Sunday note for visionary women—and everyone who supports them.
My mission is to empower you to trust your intuition and communicate with presence, clarity, and resonance.
Every other week, I share field notes, practices, and words from women.
This week’s letter is about sarcasm. Is it ever the empowered choice for visionary communication? What sits beneath it? What are we really trying to protect? What’s more fierce - your wit or your vulnerability?
FIELD NOTES
sarcasm
/ˈsärˌkazəm/
The use of irony to mock, ridicule, or convey contempt. It typically involves saying the exact opposite of what you actually mean, often delivered with a specific, mocking tone of voice, exaggerated emphasis, or non-verbal cues like an eye roll.
“Small meanness,” are the words I remember.
It was 2013 and I was sitting cross-legged on my mat for the first weekend of a year-long yoga teacher training. Our cohort was introducing ourselves to each other by sharing a six-word memoir. Soft words like “kind,” and “tender,” and “curious,” and “seeker,” were floating out of our mouths.
But one woman used “small meanness” to describe herself.
She tossed those words down without shame, surprising us and daring us to see her as not only imperfect but (gasp) mean. It was a moment of truth telling and it made me think.
We all have this. It’s the voice of judgement that lives in our heads, and it can be cruel.
Sometimes, the voice judges others. We keep ourselves elevated (and thereby safe) by making a distinction between what they’re doing (wrong/bad) and what we’re doing (obviously right/good).
Sometimes, the voice judges us. We keep ourselves small (and thereby safe) by believing whatever fear is telling us about who we have the ability to become.
Sometimes, the voice is sarcastic. It sneers. It says the opposite of what we actually mean, rolling its invisible eyes. It mocks and ridicules.
I wanted to write a letter about sarcasm because I’ve noticed it pop up in professional conversations with intelligent women recently. And I’ve noticed how it can operate like a silent killer, dooming the chances of higher-level connection, generative thinking, sharing of new ideas, effective communication, and personal and professional growth.
And I do not want this to keep happening.
We have important work to do. We have a world to change!
My questions:
Is sarcasm ever the empowered choice for visionary communication?
Assuming we’re not making our living as comedians or satirists, is it possible to wield sarcasm to positive effect?
If we were to boil sarcasm down to its essence, what would it say?
What’s more fierce – your wit or your vulnerability?
Reasonable people could debate whether sarcasm can be a strong rhetorical tool. Clever wit is a sign of intelligence, certainly.
But when I find myself thinking or speaking with sarcasm, it usually has anger, grief or fear beneath it. I want a bad situation to be different but I can't change it. Sarcasm lets me feel momentarily protected. It creates distance between me and the thing that hurts. It gives me a brief feeling of relief when my conversation partner agrees and we laugh together, before I go back to feeling like I have no real agency. Or at least I’m not employing my true power in that moment.
When I hear others use sarcasm, I do often laugh — a truth revealed can be very funny, and comedy is powerful and healing. Mockery is quite life-giving when the subject of our ridicule is an oppressor, and political satirists play an important role in our society. But if the larger conversation over time doesn’t move in the direction of solving something, growing, connecting, creating, celebrating or contributing, we start to get the ick and we want to leave it.
If we employ sarcasm as a tool to connect with people, we must be prepared to surround it with messages that do something with the recognition our mocking has stirred.
Do you remember Michelle Obama’s speech from the 2020 Democratic National Convention? She delivered one line — and one line only — with sarcasm: It is what it is.
“He is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”1
She was mocking a very public statement made by President Donald Trump two weeks prior, when he was asked what was being done to control the COVID-19 pandemic as 1,000 Americans were dying each day, and he said:
“They are dying, that’s true. And you have — it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”2
The reason her line was so memorable is that the rest her speech—the entirety of it—was delivered with zero sarcasm. She had the credibility to use one sarcastic line to great effect because every other sentence invited people toward a larger future.
But the small meanness behind the overuse of sarcasm? I think it’s fear.
And the antidote to fear is love. The communicators I admire (and trust) avoid mockery and build their influence on love.
Just five days ago, Samara Bay’s TEDx Talk posted as an editor’s pick. It already has more than 14,000 views and climbing: “The One Thing Every Great Speaker Does (And No One Teaches).” In it, she reminds us:
“We’re in a well-documented global trust crisis, literally affecting life as we know it. No matter how much power any of us has, when we let the fear story run the show, we are part of the problem, not the way out.”3
And, she shares a secret to communicating with influence:
“Less fear, more love. And not love in the abstract. A mental model that orients us toward what we love about what we’re talking about, or what we love that is absent. In practice, this means when you focus on what you care about and who you are, instead of on how you’ll seem or if you’ll mess up, you show up totally different. We hear the care in your voice.”
Watch Samara’s talk. It is full of powerful insight for sounding, well, human.
Every communication choice we make either expands trust or contracts it. Whether we employ sarcasm or not, showing up with more love and care makes us fierce.
PRACTICES
The next time you notice an impulse toward the small meanness of sarcasm, get curious.
Pause. Ask yourself:
-What am I actually feeling?
-What am I hoping this sarcastic remark will accomplish?
-Is there another way to communicate the truth?
Translate the sarcasm. Write down your sarcastic thought, then translate it into the truth that lies beneath it. Notice how much more vulnerable (and useful) the translation is.
-For example: “Well, that was brilliant,” becomes “I’m frustrated because I think this could have been handled more thoughtfully,” or even “I feel powerless watching this happen.”
Find your agency. Complete these sentences:
-I tend to get sarcastic when…
-Underneath that sarcasm is…
-One thing I actually have the power to influence is…
WORDS FROM WOMEN
Sarcasm reveals what's happening in our minds, but these three writers remind us to pay attention to what's happening in our hearts.
ELIZABETH LESSER, Co-founder of Omega Institute and author of “Cassandra Speaks: When Women are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes”
“All my life I’ve toggled between being an activist—someone interested in healing and changing the world around me—and an innervist, a word I made up to describe the part of me that seeks inner change, inner healing. I’ve never regarded activism and innervism as mutually exclusive. In fact, one keeps the other in check. If we focus only on fighting what we perceive to be wrong out there, we miss out on the very real work waiting to be done within our own hearts and minds and lives. If we don’t look at our blind spots, our projections, our hypocrisies, we can end up doing what Friedrich Nietzsche warned against: “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzche said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”4
ANNE LAMOTT, American novelist and non-fiction writer, progressive political activist, public speaker and writing teacher.
“How did we become so filled with hate? This is not who we are. Hate is the worst emotion of all, second only to acute jealousy.
Certain people of late have caused a majority of us to experience derangement. Some of us have developed hunchbacks, or tics in our eyelids. Even my Buddhist friends have been feeling despair, and when they go bad, you know the end is nigh. Booker T. Washington said, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him,” and this is the most awful thing about it. Yet part of me sort of likes it, too, for the flush of righteousness, the bond to half of the electorate. Who would we be without hate? In politics, breakups, custody disputes, hate turns us into them, with a hangover to boot, the brown-bottle flu of the spirit.”5
GLENNON DOYLE, activist, author, podcaster, producer, philanthropist
“I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths. My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation, and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself. The goal is to surrender, constantly, who I just was in order to become who this next moment calls me to be. I will not hold on to a single existing idea, opinion, identity, story, or relationship that keeps me from emerging new. I cannot hold too tightly to any riverbank. I must let go of the shore in order to travel deeper and see farther. Again and again and then again. Until the final death and rebirth. Right up until then.”6
When women trust their ferocity, they remake the world.
Thank you for reading The Ferocity Letter.
I write these words to encourage and empower you—and because I need them, too.
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on sarcasm. Is it ever the empowered choice for visionary communication?
Until next time, trust your ferocity.
— Laura
Laura Lowery is an advisor to visionary women. A communications strategist, writer, and founder of Light Advisors—she partners with purpose-driven leaders to give voice to your vision, elevate your presence, and empower you to communicate with clarity and resonance. Learn more: lightadvisors.co
Michelle Obama, “Remarks at the 2020 Democratic National Convention,” August 17, 2020. Transcript published by CNN.
Donald J. Trump, interview with Jonathan Swan, Axios on HBO, August 3, 2020. Video available on YouTube.
Samara Bay, “The One Thing Every Great Speaker Does (And No One Teaches),” TEDxCulver City Talk, July 2026. Video on YouTube.
Elizabeth Lesser, Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 127–128.
Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. Riverhead Books, 2018, pp. 69–70.
Glennon Doyle, Untamed (New York: The Dial Press, 2020), p. 77.