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

by Shauna Niequist

We carry around our whole selves—our past and our parents, our loves and our limitations, our dreams and our grocery lists and our wounds.

two core myths are being handily dismantled in the face of this pandemic: first, the myth of control, and second, the myth of independence.

It’s about learning to stand alone, leaving behind the identities you believed you could never live without.

I guess I haven’t learned that yet. I wrote that sentence because I wanted us to have a common language for what it means to be a learner, a beginner, to be curious and make mistakes and get back up. To ask questions and figure it out as we go.

Not knowing something already doesn’t make you bad or dumb; it doesn’t mean you failed. Not knowing something doesn’t mean you’re falling behind or fundamentally flawed. It just means there’s more to learn.

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.

We find the courage to change when we feel loved. It unlocks our ability to move forward and grow.

I’ve been training all my life to pretend I’m fine and have let my body suffer for it.

Resilience is, simply put, getting back up. It’s getting back up, not just after the first fall, but the ninth and tenth and seven hundredth.

Resilience is feeling your exhaustion and choosing to move forward anyway. Resilience is watching your lovingly made plans fall to dust in your hands, grieving what’s lost and making (yet another) plan.

“let go or be dragged,”

You are allowed to love tiny, daily, ordinary moments in your life. You’re allowed to feel wild joy for the simplest and smallest of reasons.

I’m learning to choose myself instead of giving the best of myself to people and relationships and institutions. Loyalty to myself. Belonging to myself. Looking for joy just for myself. I need a disproportionate amount of care right now, and the one who is responsible for that care is me. I can’t assume that someone else will do it; it’s my responsibility to create a rhythm for my life that nurtures me, that brings me joy, that allows me to flourish, even given the weight of things I’m carrying.

Anger makes us feel like we’re in control again, because loss is, at its core, loss of control, or the myth of it anyway—I

In your pain and suffering, you twist reality around your own wound and you see the whole world through the lens of your pain.

We’re responsible to help create a world that values questions more than answers, that celebrates learning and not just knowing, that sees failure as a part of the process of success.

Pretty and thin matter more than smart and kind, because those first things are the ones you can observe through a screen—and who has time anymore for boring and unsexy things like thinking and morality? I say that not to shame us but to encourage us to change course. We don’t have to live like this. We can dismantle and rebuild. And we must.

I am allowed to heal. I am allowed to be happy. I am allowed to do work I love, to celebrate, to feel joy and delight, to laugh. I’m allowed to invest in my own healing, allowed to protect myself, allowed to tend lovingly to myself in all sorts of ways.

You put up with ugly and loud for a while because you’re committed to preserving something of great value.

We don’t get an unlimited number of do-overs or fresh starts. There are some options that do, at some point, close for good.

The best teachers, she said, are not the ones who arrive at 6:00 a.m. and leave at 6:00 p.m. The best teachers are the ones who go to museums and take art classes and go to the park and throw parties, because when you do all that living, you have something to bring to the classroom. You’ve learned something about yourself or about the city. You see patterns and metaphors. You have stories to tell and experiences to offer.