I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working

by Shauna Niequist

Self-compassion is letting yourself off the hook, letting yourself be human and flawed and also amazing. It’s giving yourself credit for showing up instead of beating yourself up for taking so long to get there.

I thought I needed a great army of friends, eleven sets of dishes, six pairs of boots, and two thousand books. I thought I needed an institution, a board of directors, a cozy blanket of like-minded, supportive people spread all over the country who would have my back in a heartbeat. Turns out you need three sweaters, rent money, and five really good people. You need eggs and coffee. A Kindle account, a metro card, and one good umbrella.

There is gravity after all. There is a force that holds me. There is a central grounding of power, and that power is good. It is love. It is God. It felt like I landed for the first time in a long time.

And let’s also not forget counseling and therapy and medication and spiritual direction and retreat and a million other things we might receive to keep us company along the way. Let’s leave behind any remaining stigma or unhelpful stereotype about counseling or therapy—what a gift God has given us in counselors and therapists, our guides through the darkness, our wise companions as we wait for the dawn. Let’s build meaningful, supportive, honest scaffolding around one another as we struggle against life’s challenges, as we wait for the dawn together.

“I’ve been seeing worried parents for decades now. Parents worry, and kids are mostly fine. Just do this one thing: Be enchanted by whatever’s currently enchanting your child.”

One of the central jobs of a parent is to hold anything too heavy or hard for their child, and also, that’s just exactly what God does for his children, for us.

Prayer is acknowledging that we are not in control—but that someone is. There is a God who holds us, who holds it all, who is trustworthy and powerful, and who is more than strong enough to hold the enormity of our fear and worry.

Why have I allowed strangers into my mental living room and my mind and my heart? I’ve been putting more and more boundaries on my social media use. Some weeks I’ve been checking in on it only on the weekends, and I find that I love the days I spend without it. For too many years in my life, there were too many voices, too many opinions, too much screaming and experting and lecturing, and I’m reveling in the newfound silence that these breaks have yielded. And I’ve become much more conscious of the dangers of social media, realizing that over time we begin to internalize the cruelty and abuse we encounter there.

Cruelty and shame break us over time, and part of growth is choosing what we will and will no longer allow into our lives.

I’m responsible to protect my mind, my heart, my family. I can’t change anyone else. I can’t make them kinder or fairer or more measured or less cruel. But I get to decide which voices I listen to and which I don’t, and when to put down my phone and protect my own life.

Second, I forgive. I forgive the night. I forgive the people who have hurt me. I forgive the world for not being what I wanted. I forgive myself for all the ways I feel like I’m failing.

Hospitality is holding space for another person to be seen and heard and loved. It’s giving someone a place to be when they’d otherwise be alone. It’s, as my friend Sibyl says, when someone leaves your home feeling better about themselves, not better about you.

We need to see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices.

Hospitality is the antidote to isolation, and we need it.

But also, there’s so much we don’t know, all of us. And the world would be a healthier, more honest, safer place for all of us if curiosity were seen as a virtue, not a weakness.

I know how to get through days when you feel like your actual bones might be breaking under the weight of your grief. I know how to get through days when you count the hours till bedtime before you even get out of bed in the morning. I know how to get through.

I know to ask for help, drink water, double down on therapy and sleep. I know to get outside and be on the lookout for beauty, especially in nature, and to read poetry and cookbooks for comfort. I know that making soup keeps your hands busy and passes the time when you’re waiting for biopsy results. I know that a lot of things come around eventually, that relationships get repaired, that the hot sizzle of pain fades to an ache over time, that fresh air helps everything and sugar makes everything worse, at least for me. I know I’m not the only one who has been through hard things—far from it.

God is still good, still faithful, still kind. There’s

But God’s fundamental orientation toward us is love. He made us with love, watches over us with love.

Almost daily, I walk through the practices I’ve learned along the way—walk, pour it all out, look under the anger, sit with sadness, let go or be dragged, hello to here. Repeat as necessary.

We kept going then, and we can keep going now.

Because I’m playing the long game. We live in a world that loves flashy and fast and fake. But none of that lasts; what lasts is the long game. The legacy. The love that you build day by day. It’s about choosing to be present, today and then tomorrow and then the next day. It’s about getting up after a fall, over and over.

Hearts will break and bodies too. People will betray you. Systems will fail. Things you believed were impenetrable will crumble, and looking back all the signs were there, but there’s something about us that prefers blindness, especially where love is involved.