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

by Shauna Niequist

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. I wanted to whisper across the table, “It’s different than you think—time is different, plans start to look different, nearly every single thing looks different through my midforties eyes than what you’re seeing through your fresh, bright, twentysomething eyes.”

They’ll find out soon enough, like we all do, and a know-it-all Debbie Downer with crow’s feet isn’t going to tell them anything before they learn it on their own. I remember all the people I didn’t listen to, people who were older than me, people who tried to tell me about loss and uncertainty and the pain of watching your precious plans turn to dust in your hands. “Sounds terrible,” I murmured, hoping to distance myself from whatever bad juju they might be spreading on me. Because I had a plan. Didn’t we all? I don’t have their beauty or their skin or their ease, but what I coveted, up there on the rooftop, was their years—not in terms of skin or fine lines, but in terms of actual math. They’re at the beginning of so many things, and I’m in the rough and ugly middle, plenty of regrets and scars and mistakes, months and years I can never get back. But also, everything led us here. Could it have been any other way?

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.

Picture yourself on the ocean floor after all that falling, having left behind your successes and triumphs, your ego and shiny self, your deal-making and false assurances. At the bottom of it all, there is love. “What you do,” I told my friend as we sat in the grass, “is you stay there on the bottom of the ocean for a while. And little by little, you begin to build a little shelter for yourself, built on a foundation of love. You build with a prayer and then maybe a poem. You build a window and a door and a roof out of love and honesty and compassion. You ask the wisest people you know, and the kindest. “You reread the words of Jesus and the Psalms. You trust that love will hold it all together, and over time you realize that this tiny shelter you’ve built around yourself suits you much better than those grand institutions ever did, because this one was built out of pain and loss and disillusionment, forged by confession, prayer, longing. Once you build this shelter, you bring it everywhere you go.” This is the process of a lifelong faith. Born again. Again. Again. You won’t have to unravel and rebuild in such a comprehensive way every time—it seems to me that most people have several faith disruptions over a lifetime. But there are smaller quakes along the way too, and what a gift we would give ourselves if we could normalize this process. The Christian tradition is inherently in motion—a people walking through the wilderness, a Savior walking the road to Calvary, an ongo...

Watching her marked me. It made me unafraid of the journey of faith—to expect it, even. She showed me during those years that faith is something you tend to, something you nurture, something you dismantle and rebuild, something you wrestle with because it matters that much to you. And watching our church’s elders marked me too. It would have been easier, maybe, for them to insist on appearances, on business as usual. But they didn’t. I’m sure they had to answer hard questions about it from time to time, and I’m so grateful they were willing to care for our family in that way—it was the harder choice, but the better one. We have regular conversations these days with our kids about the process of faith, not just the fact of it. We tell them it’s something that changes over time, something we have to tend to. We talk with them in age-appropriate ways about how doubt is a part of faith, about how questions are normal, about how our faith stretches and expands inside our hearts over time, about how it’s not the same in every season.

I came to believe I didn’t deserve goodness anymore, but after years, after so much therapy, after writing hundreds of thousands of words, tears dripping down my face and neck as I typed, I began to understand, really understand, that 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.

I feel this truth reverberating through my life, because bricks and glass crumble and crack without that scaffolding from time to time, and human hearts crumble and crack too without deep work and intentional care. We only heal by investing in the difficult and ugly work, even if it isn’t pretty, even if it looks like a mess for a while.

Over time, all the pain—both physical and emotional—started to chip away at me, started to make me believe there was something wrong with me, that I wasn’t deserving of goodness or healing or wholeness anymore, that I had done something to bring about all this wreckage. But that’s not true. Pain and loss are a reality of life for all of us, and they’re not punishments or referendums on our fundamental worthiness. Life breaks us, and then we put ourselves back together, a little stronger each time, a little braver each time, a little freer each time. And goodness and peace and second chances and joy are not only for the unbroken. They’re for all of us. They’re for me. And they’re for you.

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. And then I push back from my spot at the window. I stretch or write. I do dishes and reach out to friends. I practice forgiveness and practice peace.

Maybe what makes a day good or valuable or worthwhile is not what you accomplished, what work you did or thing you fixed or task you checked off a list. Maybe there are other metrics—pleasure, connection, caring for someone, learning something new, experiencing delight. Increasingly, when I think about how to measure a day, a season, a life, I’m committed to different metrics, to abundance instead of scarcity, to care instead of competition, to meaning instead of measuring. If all you value is work, then productivity is the metric. But if you can shift out from under the weight of that, then the world refracts against itself like a kaleidoscope again, again, again. Not what did you make, but what did you heal from? Not how far did you go, but how hard did you fight to be free? And you will start to see that time is worth something different, and minutes and hours are ticked out differently—for joy, for play, for another chapter of a book, for setting up for a dinner party with a friend, or for another hour at the table.

The narrator in me is desperate for resolution, but the plot is still unfolding, as much as I want the story to be over, to catch my breath, to have a still moment to look back over the last few years and decide what they were about. But I don’t have a second to decide what it was all about—I’m still in the deep waves, still just trying to gulp some air before the next one hits. Because I still haven’t learned—not after all this pain, not after all this chaos, not after all this loss and heartache and confusion—that we don’t control the story as it unfolds. If you want to be in control of a life story, write fiction. Get a dollhouse. Puppets maybe. But our stories, our living-and-breathing, flesh-and-blood, toss-and-turn-all-night, hit-the-snooze-seven-times lives don’t ever fit into the formats we’ve chosen, and I guess I haven’t learned that yet—and not for lack of opportunities. This is a stubborn one for me: Life doesn’t follow us. We follow it. We run after it, fight against it, catch up to it, make sense of it, get used to it—but it happens to us, not the other way around.

We learn to grab joy and delight when we can. We learn that we don’t control plotlines, even though we forget sometimes. We learn that every good thing takes time and work and patience. We learn to be suspicious of overnight success or magic solutions. We learn to ask for help, to ask for space, to ask for second chances. We learn how tough we are, and how beloved. We learn to keep going, because all the times we thought we couldn’t take one more step, we did. What’s the option? We kept going then, and we can keep going now. It isn’t pretty, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that there’s a lot more to life than pretty.

We’re strong and we’re not. We make progress and then we falter and we show up anyway. We show up anyway, again and again and again, and when we tell the truth about what we’re carrying, it makes us feel less alone and less stuck, and when we show up anyway and tell others about what we’re carrying, it makes everyone feel less alone and less stuck.

And as we watch them, younger than us but largely the same, we’ll see how desperately serious they are about things that don’t matter, and how many things they’re in danger of missing just the same as we missed them—how often we bickered when we could have been dancing, how many miles we carried our fear like it was the responsible thing to do.

When you’re old, you realize that most of the things you’re worried about are actually going to happen, whether you worry about them or not. 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.

I’m old enough to realize we don’t get everything. 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. I’m probably never going to be a ballerina or a chef or a cast member on SNL—I think those ships have sailed. But there are still a lot of ships in the harbor, to extend the metaphor. There are a thousand places on this earth my eyes have never seen. There are people who will change my life, somewhere down the road, whom I haven’t even met yet. There’s work I’ll do that I can’t even imagine right now.

There are meals to savor and faces to fall in love with. There are sunsets to watch like movies and songs to dance to in the kitchen—maybe this kitchen, maybe six kitchens from now—who knows?

I’m more aware of the darkness, and more grateful for the light.

One story doesn’t define me. One story doesn’t define you. I’m going to write a dozen more at least, and they’ll be stories about raising teens and getting older. There will be stories about New York, and wherever life leads after that. About half the things I said I’d never do are now things I’ve done, so I’m done making predictions. What I see down the road—possibility, hope, beauty. I don’t know any more than that. Loss, I’m sure. Struggle. But I’m not afraid of those things the way I was before. I have a lot more close-up experience with them, and we get through. That’s what I know—we get through.

On my way back to my in-laws’ house, I drove past our old house and drove through the church parking lot—something I hadn’t done since the last time I was there with my family, more than three years earlier. I drove slowly, soaking it in, absorbing it. I know that building, that parking lot, those walls and floors and ceilings as well as I know my own face in a mirror, and it felt right to bring myself back to it, to breathe it in, to lower my defenses long enough to allow the flood of memories to rush back in, many of them so good, so meaningful. Something shifted on this visit, the longest stretch of time I had spent in my hometown since moving three years ago. I was able to see my hometown and our church and our old friends and our family as a part of my story, not segmented, not cut off with a hot knife, severed and cauterized. My hometown is my history. Our old church is my history. I claim it all, include it all, hold it all in my heart. I saw my high school friends and my childhood friends and my cousins. People I’ve worked with, cried with, raised babies with. And I’m keeping them with me, part of the whole cloth of who I’ve been and who I’m becoming.

It was go time, game-face time—all the sports metaphors. And a funny thing happened: for the first time in my life, I couldn’t call up that energy. I couldn’t command the adrenaline to start firing. I wasn’t sad or depressed or checked out, but I was calm and tired, and this was the weird part—I couldn’t use my anxiety to spring myself into work and focus. I couldn’t, and that had never happened to me before.

Even good work is work, and it takes its toll. I was so excited about the forward motion inside me that I failed to consider the emotional miles I was covering, the energy expended.

One thing I have learned though—you don’t have to know the reason; you just have to trust what’s in front of you. Whatever was causing this intense exhaustion didn’t really matter. What mattered is that it was real, no matter the root cause.

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.

His friend said, “Is she a grower? Is she a person who’s willing to learn, willing to listen, willing to get it wrong but make it right? That’s what marriage takes. Marry someone who can and will grow.” Aaron is, categorically, a grower. He’s always learning, always asking questions. He’s brave enough to admit when he’s wrong and to learn how to make it right. All these years later, I can see with greater and greater clarity how wise that friend’s words were: marriage is about a lot of things, but one of the most central is a deep willingness to grow together—toward one another and for one another.

Thinking back to that first fundamental question—are they a grower?—we haven’t gotten it all right, by any means, but we are growers. They say that the traditional wedding gift for your twentieth anniversary is china, but I think rebirth is an even better gift.

A few years later, here I am, realizing home isn’t singular, that you don’t lose one, but rather your world and your heart expand with each new home and new set of experiences, each new self and new street. The old ones stay, precious and tender, unlocked occasionally by a bite or a moment. And the new ones make your heart bigger and bigger, and your world bigger and bigger. New York is my home. And Chicago is my home. And Aaron is my home. And more than anything, I’ve learned the hard way what it means to come home to myself, deeper than a city, deeper than a circle of relationships or shared history, deeper even than a family or a partner. Underneath all the other layers of identity and belonging, beneath all the attachments and expectations, all the longing and unbelonging, all the chaos and loss and change, I found my own self, my own home.

It seems that in some small way that silly dress brought a moment of lightness to my neighbors, and that’s worth something. It made me think about all the years I kept myself hidden, camouflaged, in neutral colors and the most boring possible things in order to not draw attention to a body I don’t approve of. But what if another phenomenon is unfolding entirely? What if my willingness to be seen, just as I am, with my kooky new hair and my flamingo-colored dress, isn’t about me, but it’s a freedom and a lightness I offer to the people around me?

There’s a flag that means yes. And that same flag is the one used in a regatta to tell the sailors that the racecourse has been changed. Yes, and also—the path you planned has now been altered. Oh, I feel that in my soul. Yes, and change course. Yes, and the future is different than you anticipated. Keep going, but keep in mind that all your plans and preparations just went out the window.