Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

by Shauna Niequist

This is what I’ve come to believe about change: it’s good, in the

way that childbirth is good, and heartbreak is good, and failure is good.

By that I mean that it’s incredibly painful, exponentially more so if you fight it, and also that it has the potential to open you up, to open life up, to deliver you right into the palm of God’s hand, which is where you wanted to be all along, except that you were too busy ...

If you dig in and fight the change you’re facing, it will indeed smash you to bits. It will hold you under, drag you across the rough sand, scare and confuse you.

I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything’s easy. I believe that loss and emptiness and confusion often give way to new fullness and wisdom.

I’ve learned the hard way that change is one of God’s greatest gifts and one of his most useful tools. I’ve learned the hard way that change can push us, pull us, rebuke and remake us. It can show us who we’ve become, in the worst ways, and also in the best ways. I’ve learned that it’s not something to run away from, as though we could, and I’ve learned that in many cases, change is not a function of life’s cruelty but instead a function of God’s graciousness.

don’t spend time with people who routinely make me feel like less than I am, or who spend most of their time talking about what’s wrong with everyone else and what’s wrong with the world, or who really like to talk about other people’s money.

The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be. It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being.

Share your life with the people you love, even if it means saving up for a ticket and going without a few things for a while to make it work. There are enough long lonely days of the same old thing, and if you let enough years pass, and if you let the routine steamroll your life, you’ll wake up one day, isolated and weary, and wonder what happened to all those old friends. You’ll wonder why all you share is Christmas cards, and why life feels lonely and bone-dry. We were made to live connected and close, as close as we all were for those few days in Alameda, holding one another’s babies, taking turns stirring whatever’s on the stove. So walk across the street, or drive across town, or fly across the country, but don’t let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do list. Good friendships are like breakfast. You think you’re too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired. In the same way, you can try to go it alone because you don’t have time or because your house is too messy to have people over, or because making new friends is like the very worst parts of dating. But halfway through a hard day or a hard week, you’ll realize in a flash that you’re breathtakingly lonely, and that the Christmas cards aren’t much company. Get up, make a phone call, buy a cheap ticket, open your front door.

Sometimes we have to leave home in order to find out what we left there, and why it matters so much.

Sometimes we get so tangled up in our own perceptions of ourselves, what we think we’re good at and what we’re not, that we lose perspective, seeing only our failures and bad habits. I can give you a top ten list of why it’s hard to work with me or crazy-making to live with me, and especially in difficult seasons, it’s almost impossible to remember that feeling of being great at something, or the feeling of being proud of yourself.

I don’t believe that God’s up in heaven making things go terribly wrong in our lives so that we learn better manners and better coping skills. But I do believe in something like composting for the soul: that if you can find life out of death, if you can use the smashed up garbage to bring about something new and good, however tiny, that’s one of the most beautiful things there is.

Life hands us opportunities at every turn to get over ourselves, to get outside ourselves, to wake up from our own bad dreams and realize that really lovely things are happening all the time.

we’re all yearning for something.

I know there are some artists who create around the clock, who feel art coursing through their very veins, who can go without sleep and food and human interaction for days while they revel in the rich universe of their own minds. But I think those artists are very rare, or maybe that they’re fibbing. I think for most of us, it’s hard work, fraught with fear and self-consciousness, and that it’s much easier to make dinner or mow the lawn or reply to emails.

But every once in a while, when I write, I feel that feeling of a thousand slender threads coming together, strands of who I’ve been and who I’m becoming, the long moments at the computer and the tiny bits of courage, the middle of the night prayers and the exact way God made me, not wrong or right, just me. I feel like I’m doing what I came to do, in the biggest sense. That’s why I write, because sometimes, every once in a while, I feel entirely at home in the universe, a welcome and wonderful feeling. I could cry at that feeling, because it happens so rarely. Doing the hard work of writing makes me feel like I’m paying my rent on a cosmic level, doing the thing that I can do to make the world a little better decorated. Writing wakes me up, lights me on fire, opens my eyes to the things I can never see and feel when I’m hiding under the covers, cowering and consumed with my own failures and fears.

Get up. Create like you’re training for a marathon, methodically, day by day. Learn your tricks, find a friend, leave the dirty dishes in the sink for a while. This is your chance to become what you believe deep in your secret heart you might be. You are an artist, a guide, a prophet. You are a storyteller, a visionary, the Pied Piper himself. Do the work, learn the skills, and make art, because of what the act of creation will create in you.

full life is not the same as a full calendar.

But I know better than to think for even one

second that I deserve you, Henry. You’re all the best parts of life. You teach me and push me and wear me out, and you delight me and make me laugh so hard I cry. I don’t know how I ended up with a kid like you, but I’m thankful every day. You know this already, because I tell you every day, but I love you with my whole heart. When you were first born, and I was so totally overcome with the way I felt about you, that’s what I whispered to you, and it’s as true today as it ever was. I love you with my whole heart.

Another reason to close your browser when you’re feeling stuck creatively is that your stuckness makes you vulnerable to the myth of the makeover, that if you just do or buy a few new things, you might stop being your

terrible self all the way around.

My inbox will tell you that the world is full of writers who don’t write, painters who don’t paint, dancers who don’t dance. They want me to tell them something, ostensibly a secret something that will get them up and moving again, creating again. My reply is always a disappointing one: I don’t know what to tell you. Sit down, knees or buns. But then I tell them something else, too: do it for the feeling you’ll have when you’re done. Making art doesn’t have the instant payoff that most things in our modern lives do, but like all things that really matter, the big payoff is invisible and comes much later.

Anything can happen in a year. Broken down, shattered things can be repaired in a year. Hope can grow in a year, after a few seasons of lying dormant. I didn’t like who I was or how I was living a year ago, but I didn’t know any other way to do it.

There is nothing worse than the middle. At the beginning, you have a little arrogance, loads of buoyancy. The journey, whatever it is, looks beautiful and bright, and you are filled with resolve and silver strength, sure that whatever the future holds, you will face it with optimism and chutzpah. It’s like the first day of school, and you’re wearing the outfit you laid out last night, backpack full of perfectly sharpened yellow pencils. And the end is beautiful. You are wiser, better, deeper. You know things you didn’t previously know, you’ve shed things you previously clung to. The end is revelation, resolution, a soft place to land. But, oh, the middle. I hate the middle. The middle is the fog, the exhaustion, the loneliness, the daily battle against despair and the nagging fear that tomorrow will be just like today, only you’ll be wearier and less able to defend yourself against it. The middle is the lonely place, when you can’t find words to say how deeply empty you feel, when you try to connect but you feel like thick glass is separating you from the rest of the world, isolating and deadening everything.

People joke about the seven-year itch, and they ask, with various euphemisms, how you keep the spark alive after the honeymoon is over. I’m sure there are as many answers to that question as there are married couples, but I’ll tell you something that we’ve found. You know what’s really, really sexy eight years into a marriage? Apologies. Nothing has connected and reconnected us more than honesty, than taking responsibility, than seeing the damage we’ve wrought and working hard to make it right. Around our house, apologies are sexy. The best gifts we can give each other this year are apologies and acceptance, gifts we should have been giving one another all along, but forgot for a season, in the midst of hurt feelings and tangled conversations. So here we are: saying we’re sorry, letting go, accepting, listening closely for the first time in a long time.

This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us. An oyster, a sliver of moon, one new bud on a black branch, a perfect tender shoot of asparagus, fighting up through the dirt for the spring sun. New life and new beauty are all around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be seen.