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

by Shauna Niequist

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...