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

by Shauna Niequist

Because without realizing it, I had been wearing an expert hat for a long time—as a parent, as a writer, as someone who had lived in her hometown for a long time. I was the expert. The answer person. But I don’t have all the answers anymore. I have to ask for help or direction every single day, and you know what? I like it. We’re talking about curiosity and freedom, but under those things, what we’re talking about is self-compassion—treating yourself with the same care and kindness you’d show to someone you love.

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.

His faith was shifting, and so was mine—but for better or worse, my family loyalty was a higher priority to me than finding a church that matched my evolving spiritual perspective, and also, I wasn’t the one who worked there. I traveled a lot and had all the creative freedom and autonomy in the world—meanwhile, Aaron was working at my family’s church, feeling distinctly less creative freedom and autonomy. It’s all so clear now in ways it should have been then—one of the things I regret most acutely is my habit of seeing only what I wanted to see.

Aaron and I and our family were in a wilderness of sorts, having left behind something that had been stable and stabilizing for many years and now staring at a blank space where the future used to be.

The shifts feel tectonic right now. Maybe they always do, in every generation. But this is the first time in my lifetime that so many of us are distrustful of the systems that have held us stable for so long. And when we disconnect from those systems, we find ourselves profoundly lonely.

As with any trauma, there’s that super-weird side-by-side processing where you’re a shell, a ghost, where there is a cavern inside you where your heart used to be, where you can’t sleep and sometimes can’t breathe and can’t imagine having to live in this new, terrible world. You are amazed that people even recognize your face, because you know that what’s happening inside you is unrecognizable, that you’re so far off the map you can’t even imagine there are words or symbols to mark it. And then also, weirdly, right at the same time, you’re going to your son’s fifth-grade graduation. You’re talking and laughing and unloading the dishwasher. You’re going to therapy, reading, writing. You’re doing all the things that healthy people do to get through trauma and crisis.

I took my own self apart, bone by bone. I asked every question, ripped every seam, dismantled every assumption and agreement until it evaporated to dust. Where did I land? At the bottom of the ocean, somewhere behind Jupiter. I’m a tiny bird on a branch, a silver fish in the cold ocean. I am someone else and something else entirely. The crisis didn’t alter me. What came after did.

All of a sudden, I could see the water. I could see the extent to which I had built the architecture of my life on someone else’s identity.

But what I found, there in the darkness, there at the bottom of the cold ocean, there surrounded by the bits and bones of the self I used to be, was another self. She’d been there all along, but until now I never needed her. She was waiting in the wings, and all of a sudden, I needed her desperately. She is my next self, the one I’ve been waiting to be all along, without even knowing it. Thank God for her.

Staying felt cruel and unusual, like circling a cavern over and over, peering over the edge, looking at the empty space where your life used to be.

What does it mean to be a noticer when what there is to notice is awful and you’d rather look away? What if your beautiful/ordinary everyday life isn’t beautiful and hasn’t been for a long time? For a long time, “hello to here” was an easy thing to say, like throwing a party for all the lovely parts of my life: hello, hello, hello. But all of a sudden, it was hard to say hello. It was hard to look the reality of my life full in the face. Here was not a place I wanted to be, and certainly not a place I wanted to greet enthusiastically.

Hello to heartbreak so visceral I felt it bodily, in my chest. I learned to breathe through it like labor pains, to stay with it and draw deep into my lungs, fearless and present to it, like a contraction.

Little by little, I became free and I became tender; I was newly sensitized to the pain so many people have been living with and bearing witness to for so long, and also to the pain I’d been carrying for a long time, within my own heart and body. Hello to here.

I’m not saying I’m thankful for all the things that broke apart in life as we knew it before, but I like our actual lives better—the day-to-day parts. They’re lighter and more fun and more interesting. I know some things now, and I’m a lot less afraid of what might happen. I can make it through a lot. I know because I have.

The people I admire most are people who take celebration and memory making seriously. At my best, that’s who I am: a moment maker, a noticer, a person who celebrates the tiny goodnesses of our lives.

I’m also learning that it never helps to pretend everything’s okay. Putting on a brave face doesn’t help anyone. Just this week, I forced myself to tell the truth to a small circle of friends I trust like sisters. I told them all of it, all the way. That was difficult—and a little embarrassing. I wanted to give them a show-offy progress report of how swimmingly I was handling everything. I wanted to be the superstar of the darkness—I love it here. This is great. I’m nailing this. But I’m not. I need help. And I got the help and support I needed because I reached out in a super-messy way.

The twin callings on my life are storytelling and hospitality. In our family, sometimes we call them chatting and snacks. I gather people, create safe and restorative spaces for them, and tell the truth about who God is and what he does in our daily blood-and-guts, streets-and-sidewalks lives. Those are the things I’m made to do. Writing and gathering people bring me back to life, even when I’m sure they won’t, even when I desperately don’t want to do either. I learn over and over again that an hour of writing or a last-minute gathering can revive me in ways nothing else can. They bring about my own healing and a renewed perspective, right when I need it most. It’s very easy when you’re in the dark, when you’re longing for daylight, to stop practicing those things because everything feels hard and who knows if those things even matter anymore and nothing feels right and so you stop.

And that’s the point—it’s not about pillows; it’s about the freedom and joy that come with letting yourself reimagine almost everything.

He fell asleep quickly and slept hard and woke up all back to normal, but the extreme nature of the situation stuck with me the rest of the day. It wasn’t like because he was tired he felt things a little more deeply than he usually might; it was like tiredness truly made him think and feel and experience these very dark and sad emotions that were not connected to reality.

Walking through our old neighborhood or our town wasn’t an option anymore, and I began to feel a little bit caged. Being in New York, though, the city feels big and anonymous and even though I am surprised at how often we do run into people we know, there’s an expansiveness to walking in the city—it’s more than big enough for all of us to walk out our grief or fear or anxiety.

Maybe walking is the speed of the soul, the exact right pacing for our bodies and spirits and hearts and minds to reconnect, to dwell together again. The soul doesn’t thrive in absolute stillness because of what the body holds that needs to be worked out—that grief, that anger. But too high a rate of speed, especially over time, violates the soul, and it’s the walking that knits it back together.

They loved what moving taught them, what it brought out in their marriage, what it brought out in their kids. And all of a sudden, I started to see the smallness of that one perspective—the one that conflates staying put with responsible parenting. There are a million ways to be a responsible parent. There are a million ways to build a thriving marriage. There are a million ways to lead a meaningful life. But when you’ve lived only one way for a very long time, the messaging gets really loud, and anything different starts to seem suspect.

For so many years, I believed in the idea of place as identity. I don’t know about that anymore. I love living in New York, and at the same time, moving here showed me I could live happily in so many places, and that where I live doesn’t dictate who I am.

What this means is that it’s my job, literally, to go to art galleries and read poetry and go for walks and spend time with interesting people. It’s part of my work to read widely and learn new things and be curious and ask questions and wonder and doodle and dream, because living inspired is a requirement for rich creative work.

One of my goals is to be a person who is easily delighted, who can find great cause for celebration in a fig or a familiar face. If you need fireworks and perfection in order to crack a smile, you’re going to be disappointed over and over when life fails to be spectacular on command. I want to live with an extremely low bar for delight. It takes almost nothing at all—a good song, a ripe piece of fruit, a perfectly packed tote.

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. I’m learning to put myself in the path of joy and beauty. I’m making my life small and simple. I’m building a shelter for myself—writing, walking, reading, cooking. Self-compassion, simplicity, joy, rest.

Being in a new place has opened us up, shaken off patterns and assumptions, created space to make things up again—and I’m so happy about it.

The healthiest, most wholehearted people I know are the ones who have suffered, who have lost, who have wrestled, who have pushed back up to the surface.

When it comes down to it, it takes more bravery to be sad than to be angry, but anger is a way of self-protecting—an armor we sometimes choose when sadness feels too scary.

One way you realize you’re healing: For a while, what you’ve suffered is the biggest thing you can imagine. In your pain and suffering, you twist reality around your own wound and you see the whole world through the lens of your pain. For a time, what you’re facing really is the biggest, ugliest, cruelest thing that anyone could ever be allowed to experience. And then over time, as you fight to heal, as you move forward, one foot in front of the other over and over again, you begin once again to see other people’s losses as weighty and real—as real, even, as what you’ve lost. This is good. This is healing. Your pain is being rightsized—still real and still tender and still awful, but not the biggest, hardest thing in all the world. You start to have the emotional energy to offer to other people in empathy, seeing what they’re carrying instead of hoarding up all your resources for the cavern of your own loss.

In the New Testament, Jesus prays for his disciples, the group of people he loves, about four specific things: union, protection, joy, and sanctification. I wanted to pray for the people I love in the same way, so I tried doing it like one of Keller’s recipes. The first couple times I did it, I used the specific form Jesus did—union, protection, joy, and sanctification—and wrote out my prayers so I could be specific and detailed. It was very moving to pray for each of our kids, to entrust them to God’s care. I mean, I pray for my kids in general, but the pattern and the specificity were especially meaningful. I wrote about things that would bring joy to Mac, specific situations in which I want Henry to be protected from any harm. I prayed for Aaron, that he would have a strong sense of connection and support from me and from our community. The next couple times, I prayed while I was walking in the city—union, protection, joy, sanctification. After that, I started using my own words that get at the same things—instead of union, support; instead of protection, blessing; instead of joy, delight; instead of sanctification, Christlikeness. I noticed that I felt more connected throughout the day to those I was praying for.

After that, instead of praying in words and sentences, I closed my eyes and imagined a snapshot of each thing. For protection, I pictured Mac safe in our home. For joy, I imagined Aaron laughing at something one of our kids says—true delight on his face. For sanctification, I pictured Henry praying at bedtime.

A difficult situation came between us, and it brought out the worst in both of us. I’ve tried to fix it but can’t. And living with a broken relationship to someone I care about so much bothers me every day. It’s like having a splinter in your heel that you feel with every step. You never forget. You’re always carrying the weight of this broken relationship.

The more life I live, the more certain I am that movie moments only happen in the movies, but I also know that if things are going to be repaired between my friend and me, it’s only going to happen because we’re both humble and tender enough to drop our defenses, lay down our anger, and connect across the distance we’ve created.

Prayer is like yoga for our insides. My number one favorite kind of yoga is the kind that’s mostly breathing and lying down. But my second favorite kind is when you’re in a pose that’s really demanding, and for just a few seconds you trust your body and you trust your breath and your body becomes able in that moment to do things it wasn’t able to do before. It’s an amazing feeling. This is the sacred, interior version of that. When we pray for people with whom we have difficult or painful relationships, God works lovingly and powerfully inside us, rebuilding and restoring us, shaping us into the kind of people who forgive and repair and give second chances—the kind of people we all want to be but can’t always get there on our own. This is what prayer can do. This is what God can do.

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.

We’ve created a system where people who know nothing about us can broadcast their take on us, and if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that, you know it can do a surprising amount of damage.

I’m consciously creating more silence in my life. I’m reading more and more books and fewer and fewer tweets. I think we’re going to look back at this hot-take outrage machine and grieve what we lost along the way: Sober-mindedness. Willingness to let a story unfold over time. Wisdom. Perspective. Kindness toward our fellow humans.

Admit when your most tender or vulnerable times are, and discipline yourself not to open yourself up to social media in those moments.

I felt stuck to the point of caged, and it felt like my rage was squeezing us all, like a huge balloon inflating and flattening us against the walls of the already small space.

read whole novels in the night or go on weird internet deep dives or force myself not to reach for my phone and instead catalog all the worst things about myself or all the things I should have done but didn’t.

For so many years what saved me was community, connection, action. I’m an ultimate verbal processor, so talking has always helped. Being with people healed me. Talking things through and getting advice and wisdom, asking for help—those are the things that used to help so much. But all of a sudden, the only place where anything made sense was at my desk. I sat and stared and wrote and cried, and little by little I remembered who I wanted to be again. I wrote when I was afraid and when I was sad and when I was filled with rage. I cried until I gagged and drank one thousand cups of lukewarm tea, and I just typed and typed and typed, pouring it all out until the energy inside me subsided a little bit, until I could breathe again. I wasn’t writing anything amazing, by any means, but I was doing what I’ve always done—writing my way through the pain. It wasn’t about sharing the writing or connecting through it. It was about making sense of my life through words. It was about giving all the words a place to be outside my body, giving the pain and the fear and the suffering a place to be outside my body. It became the safest place in the world to me, my home base. When I had to do something hard—a phone call I knew would be difficult, a section of writing that felt tender—I came back to my desk. I could be powerful at the desk. I could say hard things at the desk. I could both protect myself and push myself at the desk. It became the place where this new self I was building, cell b...

There will be hard things ahead, but not these same things.

The next day, I woke up to my new morning routine. I begin by feeling the unfeelable feelings and thinking the unthinkable thoughts. 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. Then I make space for desire: What do I want? I want healing. I want to move through the pain and leave it behind. I want lightness and freedom of spirit. Andrew, my beloved therapist, encouraged me to set aside a time every day to feel the sadness. I knew the power of the magic desk, but I forgot for a couple days, so I went back and wrote out the questions: What’s happening inside me? What’s happening around me? What might I need to learn or unlearn or face right now? Am I offering deep kindness and forgiveness toward myself, deep kindness and forgiveness for others? Am I tending lovingly to myself and others? What do I need to walk away from or walk toward? What requires my participation or voice? I kept writing, kept asking questions, kept making space for grief and forgiveness and pain and desire. I kept walking, willing spring to come, around me and inside me. And then there was a moment when I was walking up the stairs to our apartment alone, hand on the wobbly banister, mind churning. After so much grief, so much wrestling, so much pleading—I don’t want this to be my life!—I felt that click of acceptance. Something inside me said, clear as an audible ...

We needed Easter this year more than ever, and also we see it with a little more clarity this year—life triumphs over death, indeed, but not always in real time. Life triumphs over death, indeed, but not in many of the ways we’ve been longing for.

It’s easy to want everything we do to be productive or valuable in an immediate way—like maybe I was going to discover some sort of profound but latent talent at forty-four years old and all of a sudden watercolor would be my life. That’s grind culture, hustle culture, productivity culture, that voice that tells us we are what we make, what other people can see, what we can monetize. I cannot monetize my watercolors. I can barely look at them. My kids even know that I’m terrible—they say, Oh, yeah, wow. I’m like, “Don’t oh, yeah, wow me.” I’ve been doing the oh, yeah, wow noises for nearly fifteen years. I know what it means. And I agree with them. These are horrible. And that’s the point. That there are spaces in my life that heal me and help me and don’t build or provide or create anything beyond that. Healing me is enough. Helping me is enough.

Doing something badly is humbling and sometimes it’s frustrating, and for those of us who are used to being experts, it’s categorically worth every second.

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.

Because it never was about the food. It never was about the dishes or the fancy kitchen tools or the complicated techniques. We just wanted to connect. This is how deeply the value of hospitality is planted inside us. Look how creative we’ve gotten.

There’s something there for me, embracing age in a good way, a new self emerging in all sorts of ways, and with that, a willingness or ability to let go of those other selves, the ones I used to be, the ones I was still hanging on to.