Featured essay
July 1, 2025
📓 Confessions of an insecure overachiever
On the uncomfortable, oddly productive relationship between self-doubt and achievement—and the question the memoir grew out of.
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How to Feed
Your Soul
Essays about ambition, identity, creativity, relationships, and work—and the questions that tend to get louder once you finally stop moving long enough to hear them.
A newsletter by Sabra Meretab.
Start here
A few essays that capture the questions Sabra keeps returning to.
July 26, 2026
🍁 the beautiful abyss between seasons
On uncertainty, transition, and the strange bounty of not yet knowing what comes next.
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September 17, 2026
Sometimes you just gotta take it all apart
A warm, funny essay about dismantling an Xbox 360—and the curiosity involved in figuring out how anything really works.
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Recent dispatches from How to Feed Your Soul.
September 30, 2026Ask for the leave of absenceLead our tiny little army by communicating your needsAugust 28, 2026Dear Universe, please show your workon life, death and what comes next for my favorite atheistJune 21, 2026How did I get here?An interview with an old friend about tech and book writingMay 2, 2026👵🏻 Friday evenings with my grandmaA heaping spoonful of giggles with just a dash of deathFebruary 28, 2026📝 small steps for healingand how to fix the Earth-sized holes we sometimes carryJanuary 4, 2026A love letter to journalingAnd a gentle suggestion for your New Year's ResolutionsDecember 14, 2025To believe in yourselfAnd other preposterous ideasOctober 5, 2025You can change your mind as many times as you wantWhy I've rejoined the company I used to work forAugust 22, 2025The architect of opportunity3 lessons from someone who created impact across generations
Browse the full archive on Substack 
The bigger picture
A few threads running through the writing.
Ambition & Achievement
Insecurity, external validation, burnout, and the identities we quietly build around being good at things.
Meaning & Reinvention
Transitions, intuition, sabbaticals, career pivots, and the slow work of figuring out what comes next.
Creativity & Curiosity
Writing, making things, journaling, and the underrated discipline of paying attention.
Love, Life & Being Human
Relationships, family, memory, humor, and the quieter parts of building a meaningful life.
Why “How to Feed Your Soul”?
Sabra spent a long time getting very good at feeding a résumé. How to Feed Your Soul is an ongoing experiment in paying attention to the other stuff: curiosity, relationships, creativity, intuition, meaning, and whatever makes a life feel more alive from the inside.
There are no five-step formulas here. Mostly stories, questions, the occasional existential spiral, and whatever Sabra is trying to understand that week.
And then there's the book
Many of the questions Sabra explores in How to Feed Your Soul sit at the heart of her forthcoming memoir, Insecure Overachiever: A Story of Ambition, Burnout and the Courage to Change Course.
The book goes deeper into the story behind those questions—from Stanford and Silicon Valley to burnout, self-doubt, sabbatical, and the long process of figuring out what she actually wanted once she finally stopped moving.
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New essays arrive through How to Feed Your Soul—usually when Sabra has found a question she can't stop thinking about.