Tiktok
When Poetry & Protest Collide in Your TikTok Feed
You know that feeling when your feed suddenly lights up with someone who feels like an old friend? That’s Sara Tascha (@sxthall) in a nutshell. Scrolling through her TikTok, you’re not hit with glossy product drops or trend-chasing chaos. Instead, it’s raw, typed-on-screen poetry snippets layered over moody jazz beats, or her soft-spoken voice unpacking microaggressions she faced at a coffee shop that morning. She’s not another influencer pushing an aesthetic—she’s a mirror held up to the messy, beautiful work of figuring out who you are while the world keeps demanding you pick a lane. Followers swear by her "mental health check-in" series, where she films herself journaling in bed, pajamas slightly askew, admitting, "Some days ‘self-care’ is just brushing my teeth and calling it a win."
Sara’s story isn’t the typical rags-to-riches reel. Born in Ohio but raised everywhere from Phoenix to Las Vegas (she jokingly calls herself a "West Coast gypsy" after 25 childhood moves), she grew up feeling perpetually out of place. In early interviews, she describes herself as the "goody two-shoes nerd" who’d hide in library corners writing poems to cope with isolation. That solitude forged her voice—both literally, as a model whose quiet intensity caught industry eyes, and creatively, through the poetry that now fuels her digital presence. Her Instagram (still @sxthall, despite the occasional typo in her handle) is a time capsule of scribbled verses and behind-the-scenes activism clips, like the one where she’s adjusting her mic backstage before a spoken-word set, humming along to the playlist on her cracked-phone screen.
What makes her TikTok stick? It’s the anti-perfectionism. While others chase viral dances, Sara posts unpolished moments: shaky footage of her re-recording a line because her cat jumped on the keyboard, or a video dissecting racial bias in fashion magazines while stirring a pot of burnt ramen. She’ll drop a hard-hitting poem about voting rights, then flip to a laughing voiceover: "P.S. I wore sweatpants to my last job interview. Still got hired. Priorities." Her signature move? Ending videos with a gentle, "Be kind to your weird little heart today," as if she’s whispering it just to you. It’s intimate without being intrusive, like overhearing a late-night heart-to-heart with your wisest friend.
Behind the poetry, Sara’s quietly built a legacy in racial justice—an 8-year grind with NAACP and ACLU that rarely gets the spotlight. She’s candid about the tension between this work and her creative life, once admitting in a now-viral clip, "I’m sick right now… only because I haven’t figured out how to balance it." When her friend Paige asked, "Who do you want to be?" Sara’s answer—*"I want to be both"*—resonated with thousands of commenters sharing their own struggles to merge passion with purpose. She doesn’t pretend to have it all figured out; instead, she posts screenshots of her chaotic Google Calendar titled "POETRY + PROTEST = PANIC??" with a shrug emoji.
Maybe that’s why her community feels so real. In a space saturated with curated personas, Sara’s the creator who lets you see the seams. She’s the reason comment sections under her videos fill with lines like, "This made me cry on the bus lol send help," or "You describe my brain but prettier." No grand manifestos, no hollow "girlboss" energy—just someone typing poems at 2 a.m., reminding us that showing up, however imperfectly, is enough. And honestly? That’s the vibe we all need.
