Everyone has a day, or week, go sideways. What happens when life hits the blender - and it goes on for years? Shauna Niequist has a lot to offer because she’s lived it. Her latest book, I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet, covers a time in her life when Every. Single. Thing. was, as she says, tossed in the blender. Family. Vocation. Faith. Sense of belonging. And then, also… menopause. Shanua has the rare gift of being able to inspire while never getting saccharine, to be honest without overexposing, to impart wisdom without being preachy. She came ready to talk and even if you feel like you know her through her previous books, Cold Tangerines, Bittersweet, Bread & Wine, Savor, and Present Over Perfect, we promise you - you are going to discover a whole new side to the amazing Shauna Niequist Shauna’s site: https://www.shaunaniequist.com/ Shauna’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/sniequist/ Episode link: https://www.tmstpod.com/episodes/48-shauna-niequist-thriving-after-life-goes-in-the-blender Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6uFlQPrp0NvBiJkmw6DpXl Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
Shauna Niequist on Thriving After Life Goes in the Blender
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. Welcome to another episode of tell me something true. This one, uh, I, I love every episode I really do. And for different reasons, this was one of those that I expected to, I was really looking forward to and I expected to be great. And it was. Better than that. For me, it was one of those that hit me right.
[00:00:32] Where I needed to be hit when I needed it. And it was such a gift. Uh, so we all have those days, right. When things go a bit sideways and then sometimes it's a string of days, but the clouds part and the seas calm, all good. Sometimes it's months. And then there are those times when it feels like life has just hit the blender and it goes on not for days or months, but [00:01:00] literal years.
[00:01:00] And what do you do in those times? How do you keep going? And when it passes, how do you make sense of it? Shauna Niequist latest book is an offering to that end. It's called, I guess I haven't learned that yet. Amazing title and amazing story behind the title. And it's one of my favorite book covers ever.
[00:01:28] She covers a time in her life, in this book when everything like every single thing was tossed up in the air or in the blender, as she says, family vocation, faith sense of belonging, just to name a few things. And then also on top of it menopause. Awesome. Some books arrive right when you need them. And this one for me was that kind of book.
[00:01:55] She is a beautiful writer for one, but she has this rare gift of [00:02:00] being able to inspire while never, ever getting saccharin. To be honest, without overexposing and to impart wisdom with out ever being preachy. There are zero preachy words in this. Not a single one. You may know Shauna through her work as the bestselling author of cold tangerines, bittersweets bread and wine savor and present over.
[00:02:29] Perfect. She came ready to talk. And this was one of those conversations that, again, I didn't want to end cause I needed it so much. Far more than I expected to need it. And it's such a gift. I have a feeling it may hit you that way too. So don't forget. There is a Spotify playlist. For every episode we create, you can just get it for free by searching us up on Spotify.
[00:02:58] And if you [00:03:00] haven't become a paid subscriber yet, we hope you will do that or consider doing it. The financial support of all of you who get something out of these conversations is what keeps them going at free. It really, really does matter. And I also want to say thank you to everyone who has shared this podcast because.
[00:03:22] You love it. And you want to share it with friends or family or the people that you care about are the people that you generally want to nudge and say, oh, you might need this. The show is growing a lot. And we know it's because thousands of you have spread the word about things that we're doing. So thank you.
[00:03:40] Thank you. Thank you. We're coming up on a year of the show. It's been one of the steady. Gifts of me, of, of my life through this past year, one of the, uh, stable, steady, just good [00:04:00] feeling things, things that I look forward to things that keep me going things that don't change haven't changed when everything else has been changing a lot.
[00:04:13] So ready.
[00:04:16] Shauna Niequist: Here you go here, Shauna.
[00:04:18] Laura McKowen: Enjoy.
[00:04:29] It's great to meet you. Thank you. You too. Um, yeah, so I'm just going to jump right in. I thought I'd start by actually reading from the book in chapter 37, it's called bloom. You say the first couple of years of my forties were like living in a blender, lots of bad and lots of good, but all of it together, loud and fast.
[00:04:52] One thing after another, it should tell you something that moving to Manhattan of all places was a respite. That's how intense the proceedings [00:05:00] seasons had. So I figured this question might get us all in the same place. The book feels like you sharing about these blender years. I mean, it's about the whole of your life, but really these blender years, uh, with some wisdom, but also a lot of questions still and curiosity.
[00:05:17] So can you give us the cliff notes version of the blender?
[00:05:22] Shauna Niequist: Absolutely. Um, Well, I, you know, I don't want to say it all started with the 2016 election, but a lot of things did. Um, so, you know, uh, politically and culturally and in our churches, we were all witnessing and participating in. It increasing set of divisions.
[00:05:44] So that's happening to all of us. And for the, at the time I was working as a part of, um, a tour where large groups of women, largely Christian women were gathering together in cities. And it was my job to find a [00:06:00] common ground for all of us. And with each passing week in the fall of 2016, that got harder and harder.
[00:06:07] Then that next year, my husband and I experienced the hardest year of our marriage before, or since it was the first time in our marriage, it felt like. We both wanted really different things and they were mutually exclusive. We wanted to live different kinds of lives and we just sort of stared at each other, like, how do you ha who loses in this one and who wins?
[00:06:27] And what are the consequences? If you have one person who gets what they want and the other doesn't and is there a third way, but we can't find it during that time. One of the things that was unfolding between us was, um, I had. As a part of my family's church and had a lot of loyalty to it. And, um, my husband didn't want to be a part of it anymore.
[00:06:49] He wanted to be a part of a different kind of community and that tapped into every single loyalty identity. And then something really hat hard happened [00:07:00] at our church and with my family. And it's not mine to get into the specifics of it, but it was just another layer of. Some of the ideas and institutions and identities that I had been depending on for such a long time, it felt like, like I was a sailboat and I had, I was tied to the dock in a hundred different ways.
[00:07:21] And I liked it. I realized I, I like a lot of lines, you know, and one by one, the lines were thrown off and I think that's supposed to feel good. Right? Like Breda. Um, it did not feel good. It felt like being lost. It felt like. I was surprised that I even recognized my own face in the mirror. One thing that I didn't put together until much later is I was also in menopause without knowing it and menopause as I'm learning about it is, um, some people it's like a blip for me.
[00:07:52] It's like, Like a train wreck. Like I keep saying it's like a haunting, like every single part of how I [00:08:00] understand myself in my own skin stopped being that way. And so there were these major changes on the outsides of my life, my relationships, my connections, my loyalties, and then also on the inside, I was a person I didn't recognize.
[00:08:14] And so that's the blender that there's probably more, but those are the things I can think of. That's very well done.
[00:08:21] Laura McKowen: Got it. I'm so glad you brought that up about menopause because I just want to linger there for a minute, not to make this a show about menopause, but like that what you experienced as this sort of complete annihilation of who you understood yourself to be.
[00:08:36] Shauna Niequist: Well, and it's, it's like you're becoming a stranger to yourself. So you spend so much time and energy through your teens, twenties, thirties, forties. Trying to see who am I? Who, who is this spirit? Who is this body? What does she need? What does she like? What works for her? What are the ways to tend to her?
[00:08:56] You finally start to get the hang of, this is what this body [00:09:00] needs. This is what the spirit needs. And then all of a sudden, none of those things work anymore. And you're having to start that process over again with essentially a stranger. God, am I making it sound great? No, you're making it
[00:09:14] Laura McKowen: sound real good.
[00:09:17] You're just making it sound like what it is. And I we'll, we'll we'll keep going, but it's not all bad either. Of course. Like there's all, all kinds of chances for discovery and newness and all that. But when you're in it, it feels like absolute
[00:09:29] Shauna Niequist: chaos. So
[00:09:33] Laura McKowen: why Manhattan? Explain.
[00:09:36] Shauna Niequist: So, um, it is the F looking back, we knew we wanted to leave the Chicago area.
[00:09:42] My husband had spent his whole life in the Midwest and really wanted to live somewhere else. And so we did this whole kind of like Goldilocks process where we, I mean, there's only cities that you like to visit or towns that you like to visit. And then you start thinking about moving there and you're like, I don't know.
[00:09:57] Maybe we could do that. And so it felt like [00:10:00] we kept visiting cities and having this very conspicuous. Oh, I loved this for a weekend, but our life is not here. Like it doesn't. And there were, there weren't a lot of concrete reasons all the time. It was just like, This is not my bed kind of feeling. And it was hard.
[00:10:15] Um, and in the mean, right, at the same time, we developed this little tradition of going to coming to Manhattan in the summers. We had some friends who are a part of a church that we really love and the grownups or kids, our friends and the kids are friends. And we would just come every summer and Aaron would lead worship and I would preach.
[00:10:34] And. But we, it somehow never occurred to us. Like I think when you grow up in the suburbs of the Midwest, you're like, nobody moves to Manhattan. I don't know. What am I a Broadway stammer. Yeah. Um, and then a couple of our friends here, they were like, I mean, can we have this conversation? Like, it feels like it's right in front of your face.
[00:10:56] And we were. It was totally one of those things. It's like the [00:11:00] romcom where like the best friends look at each other and realize they've been in love forever. Like as soon as we opened our minds to, we were like, oh, oh, you've been here all along. And then all the things that had been stuck in all the other places, all the doors just like opened when you tapped on them.
[00:11:16] So we felt a real sense of like, Life is speaking pretty loudly to us. And it's not, I don't think life forces us most of the time, but it invites us. And this was like a clear Isabel invitation and there's also practical reasons. Um, we happened to find a great place to live with great schools for our kids.
[00:11:36] Um, My husband was able to get a graduate degree that he was really excited about. We have a handful of good friends here. We love live theater. I love good restaurants. My husband loves good coffee. You know, like all the things on the list. It's just been a great fit for us.
[00:11:51] Laura McKowen: When, when did it
[00:11:53] Shauna Niequist: happen? What year?
[00:11:54] November 28.
[00:11:56] Laura McKowen: It's so crazy because to move to [00:12:00] most people, don't move to Manhattan and midlife, right. It is a big deal. It's a thing it's a whole, and it's such a cool part of the story and the theme of the book, um, because you were forced to like be new brand new again, and then 2020 hits. It's interesting on like a spiritual level.
[00:12:19] I think that you were called into there. Yeah. You're rewriting the pandemic
[00:12:25] Shauna Niequist: out in the city. Well, and we actually did go just, you know, nobody knew what was happening in March of 2020. We went back to Michigan thinking it would be like they were going to close the schools here. We were going to gone for two weeks.
[00:12:37] Um, we have this tiny little cottage there. We'll stay there for a little bit. Of course, two weeks turned into five. And we were really afraid. I mean, our kids had only been here like less than a year and a half. And we were really afraid that once they got back to the Midwest, back to grandparents, they'd be like, this is home.
[00:12:55] And very quickly, they were like, um, this is fine, but when can we go home to New York? And we [00:13:00] were like, oh, it happened. So the, in, in a funny way, that really, it was really meaningful for us to see, like, this is their home now, when did you go,
[00:13:09] Laura McKowen: okay, I want to write about this. Like, or this is the next.
[00:13:13] Shauna Niequist: So I had been writing in a very frustrating, um, on and off and trying to figure out it was.
[00:13:23] And I, I always write a lot before I know what it is. I definitely like write my way into it, but I distinctly remember a conversation in the spring of 20. With my agent. Who's a good friend who I've worked with for a long time. And I remember it's like, I was kind of trying to like get out of it, like, okay, the world has the world is irrevocably altered.
[00:13:47] Publishing probably doesn't exist anymore. We live in the great beyond books don't matter, so I don't have to do this. Right. Um, and he was like, I have bad news for you. [00:14:00] Um, You went through and are going through the kind of change we are now all going through and it's your job right now to tell us what you've learned.
[00:14:14] And I was like, I don't want to do that. And then I took some time and I said, No, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I don't believe that we experience things so that they can be beneficial for other things for other people. But I do believe that what we experienced can be beneficial for other people if we want it to be.
[00:14:34] And so I thought, well, at the very least, what if this really difficult season that I've been through could be like a handhold or a lifeline for somebody else. It doesn't make it worth it by any means, but at least. Makes it a little easier for someone else. And that matters to me. I believe that our lives can be useful, that our stories can be useful, that what we experience can be useful.
[00:14:59] But I think if [00:15:00] you believe that God, for example, that God would bring hard things in our life, into our lives in order to give us something important to say on the other side, that's not a great God. That's, that's a, um, a God who uses. And that doesn't sound to me, um, like the heart of God as I understand him.
[00:15:22] Um, and so I think that sometimes people say that like, wow, you know, that feels like a bad God that doesn't square with the way I experience and have learned about.
[00:15:34] Laura McKowen: I love that I asked because it's, it's similar to, I heard Elizabeth Gilbert once say, please don't make your art for me. Like, don't do that.
[00:15:41] Don't make your art for me. Don't, don't try to help me like, make your art, cause that's what you need to do and make it honest and make it true and make it real and all of that. And then maybe, maybe it will help me. Maybe it will help a lot of people. I'm glad you said that. Cause it's like, it feels like one of those platitude things that [00:16:00] just feel.
[00:16:01] Shauna Niequist: Uh, no. When I was in really the most painful stretch, I had a couple of people say, you know, this is going to make a great book. And I was like, oh, shut your mouth. Like, it doesn't make a great life. How dare you value what I make over my broken heart and my. Deep grief, you know, um, we're not tools, we're humans and our experiences are not just fodder for someone else's reading pleasure.
[00:16:34] That's important to me. Um, the life I live is its own thing. And if I, if I offer something to other people, that's one thing, but it's not at X at the expense of, um, the human experience. Yes. Thank
[00:16:47] Laura McKowen: you. Why did you, why did you have the resistance? Why did you say I don't want to do that when your agent said, no, this is what you're going to do.
[00:16:57] What
[00:16:57] Shauna Niequist: was the resistance? Well, so I've [00:17:00] written five books now, and the first book was all about celebrating everyday life. And I loved writing. And then the second one was all about heartbreak and disappointment. And I hated every day of writing that book. And really, yeah. And this was kind of the same thing.
[00:17:15] The only thing worse than living through a really difficult season is having to write about it, right? Like, oh yeah, I can't. And I really, I got like really jealous of people who had jobs that were not related to like their inner life and experience. Like, let me go teach kindergarten. Like, I don't know, let me do something.
[00:17:34] My job. I was looking in the mirror so deeply, that was really hard. Not, not an easy way to live.
[00:17:52] Hi,
[00:17:53] Mikel Ellcessor: I'm Michael I'm the executive producer of tell me something true. And co-created the show with Laura? You know, we have one goal here, [00:18:00] put something into the world that helps all of us figure out how we can have a better week. We think the best way to do that is to keep the pod ad free. So all of the work goes toward making something that's useful for you instead of hustling to keep advertisers happy.
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[00:19:32] Laura McKowen: You talked actually a lot in the book about the writing process and now, and how that healed you and helped you. And I'm assuming that's always been the case. He said it has, but in this book a little deeper, a little differently. So I wanted to, I actually wanted to talk about that. My next question, I want to read again from the.
[00:19:48] So this is from energy in the air. The next day I woke up to my new morning routine. I began by feeling the unfillable feelings and thinking the [00:20:00] 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.
[00:20:11] I feel like I'm facing. So I'll stop there. It goes on, but I want to go through each 0.1 by one. So you said, I begin by feeling the unfillable feelings and thinking the unthinkable thoughts.
[00:20:25] Shauna Niequist: So my, uh, one of the things that I didn't even mention in that whole blender situation is that I had for several years had.
[00:20:34] Increasingly significant chronic pain in my neck and shoulders chiropractor. Couldn't figure it out and orthopedic couldn't figure it out. It wasn't like a spinal thing. It wasn't a muscular thing. It was definitely a mental, emotional thing. And a friend of mine who had struggled with chronic pain in a different way, recommended the work of Dr.
[00:20:54] Sarno. Are you familiar with him? Yeah. Oh yes. I am very familiar. Have you seen the documentary on. [00:21:00] It's amazing. No, so that's the first introduction I have. So my friend said, start with the documentary and then read his book. So it's called all the rage and essentially it's all of these people who have.
[00:21:13] Crippling, mostly back pain and they come and Dr. Sarno is a celebrated spinal surgeon and people keep coming to him and he's like, there is not a surgery I can perform to take this away. Like I there's nothing wrong with you on an x-ray. And somehow in his research, he stumbles upon this idea or not stumbled on it don't might sound like it was an accident, but what he discovers about this certain subset of people that he cannot help with surgery.
[00:21:40] Is that there's something in them that is unwilling or unable to feel the unfillable feelings and think the unthinkable thoughts and that when he teaches them and, and, and gives them space to do that, usually in the morning, over time, this crippling pain [00:22:00] subsides. And I was like, I will try anything. And so.
[00:22:07] And it helps me and I still do it. And it's not, for me. It's different for everybody. It's not that there are some like deep secret from my childhood or it's more like, The feelings. I feel about myself and my place in the world. Um, I'm failing, I'm disappointing people. I'm not good enough. I'm about to make a fool of myself.
[00:22:31] I know they're there all the time and I don't feel them. And so I just like put them just right into my neck and shoulders. And the more often I can stop and say, I feel afraid about this. I feel badly about the way I handled the situation. I've, you know, it's just a way of sort of reckoning. Allowing myself to feel all the things I don't want to feel.
[00:22:52] Uh, this person hurt me, even though I want to pretend it's not a big deal, that all those things, I practice that every morning to just sort [00:23:00] of let what's true inside me, come out. So it doesn't have to live kind of in my body.
[00:23:08] Laura McKowen: Oh, there's so much. How do you actually do that? Is it a thinking thing? Is it a writing thing?
[00:23:15] Is it a meditation? Is it all of those?
[00:23:17] Shauna Niequist: Um, sometimes it's a thinking sometimes I would say, uh, sometimes it's a feeling without writing and sometimes it's a writing and feeling. Um, and one thing I've learned in therapy, I have an amazing therapist and most of the therapy I had done previously in my life had been kind of the.
[00:23:39] The talk therapy. That's very interested in like your story and your patterns and kind of figuring things out. And I am really good at that. I'm really good at like mental function. Oh yes. Then I went to this new therapist and it was about just staying with the feeling of. Right. [00:24:00] So instead Enneagram seven.
[00:24:01] I am. Are you as well?
[00:24:04] Laura McKowen: Yes. Okay. We got it. We think our feelings yes. All day long. And we're like, we got it. We're fine. That's exactly right. I have the answer. I understand. Yes. I know the right thing to say. I know the right thing to feel. I've got
[00:24:16] Shauna Niequist: it wrong. And I do this because of this thing, because of this thing and mean because of how I was raised.
[00:24:20] And that's why I ended up, like, if I can organize it and understand it, it's going to somehow be resolved or, but what I'm learning to do is to just feel the feeling. And so that's what I do. I sit in the morning by myself. Sometimes I write and sometimes I just sit in the feelings, um, and let them sort of live in my heart.
[00:24:43] And then I sort of picture letting them leave my body. And it really helps me like shockingly a shockingly large amount. It really helps.
[00:24:54] Laura McKowen: You're making me like, almost want to cry right now, which I just do, which also barely ever happens, [00:25:00] really because yeah. I have a hard time crying for that reason. So this is, this is good.
[00:25:05] I'm hearing it at exactly the right time. Did it. So it helps with the back with
[00:25:09] Shauna Niequist: the back and neck pain did help and does help. And I practice it all the time everywhere. I'll do it on a flight. We'll do it on a subway. I'll just, um, I noticed, and I wonder if you notice this too, as a seven, um, I feel a feeling so fleetingly.
[00:25:28] Make it leave and then focus on something positive. Right. And I'm learning now to get back that initial feeling of pain or grief or anxiety and sit with it long enough to sort of think about it in terms of like metabolizing it. Like yeah. If you just let it into your mouth and spit it right out, it can never nourish you or change you, but, you know, but if you let it go all the way through the system, there you go.
[00:25:53] Um, and so I'm learning to not be afraid of that practice and it changes a lot. When did you start to do that? It was [00:26:00] fall of 2019. So we had been here about a year. And I noticed, you know, like with any big change, there's that sort of adrenaline. So like when we got here, you've got several months of like, just coasting by on like, how do we get groceries?
[00:26:14] Where do we live? How do we, how do we get the kids in school? There's it, it's there's enough newness and excitement. And then that next fall, I really crashed. I felt very depressed. I cried constantly while I was writing, I would sometimes cry so hard. I would throw up and I was like, hang on. I need some help.
[00:26:35] That's when I got this new therapist, that's when I read Dr. Sarno's work. And then later that fall was when a doctor told me that I was in full menopause and I had never heard that before. I had no idea. And so that sent me down a whole other path in terms of other ways to kind of address what was happening from a mental health standpoint, but yeah, fall 2019.
[00:26:58] Laura McKowen: Okay. Makes sense. [00:27:00] So continuing on this thread, you say second, after thinking the unfillable field, I can think about unfillable 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.
[00:27:18] I feel like I'm failing. I was so curious about the, I forgive the night. Wow.
[00:27:24] Shauna Niequist: Well, a couple of things. I would say if, if you had to boil down my entire spiritual perspective, this might be a little too narrow, but it might come down to forgiveness and gratitude. Um, forgiveness to me is the heart of my faith.
[00:27:43] Um, and it, the idea that I need to be forgiven, certainly, but also that I need to forgive other people and even just forgive the world for not being everything. I want it to be. And then gratitude the other side of that celebrate and be grateful for the world for all the things it is. But I was going [00:28:00] through the most ridiculous stretch of insomnia and some of what was so hard about that is I have been just a champion sleeper in my, in my life.
[00:28:08] I've just been at like, I could fall asleep, standing up. I can drink a cup of black coffee and fall asleep. Like I just, I'd never thought for a minute. And then all of a sudden. It was like, like my bed started becoming like, I would glare at it when I would come into the bedroom. Like you, I tried all that, the things I tried, everybody's recommendation, I'd all these little evening routines.
[00:28:30] And the nighttime just became like, Battlefield. And so I had to wake up in the morning and forgive the night because I would wake up so mad at it. So that's what I that's it. And then, you know, forgiveness in my experience. We want it to be a before and after, right? Like I forgave that person permanently and forever.
[00:28:53] And in my experience I've said before, it's like moving a piece of furniture across the room, and then you wake up the next morning and it went back to its old place and [00:29:00] you have to move it in. For a long time, that's just how it is. And so part of my morning routine was working on the process of forgiveness forgiving the night for not letting me sleep, forgiving the people who had wounded me, um, and forgetting myself again, that those unfillable feelings for me are almost always self criticism.
[00:29:21] And so one of the ways that I can release some of that pain mentally and physically is forgiving myself. So good.
[00:29:34] Laura McKowen: And then you say, then I make space for desire. What do I want? I want to heal. I want healing. I want to move through pain and leave it behind. I want lightness and freedom of spirit. Andrew. My beloved therapist encouraged me to set aside time every day to feel the sadness.
[00:29:48] I knew the power of the magic desk. That's your trading desk, but I forgot a couple of days. So I went back and wrote over the question. You say what's happening inside me? What's happening around me? [00:30:00] 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?
[00:30:10] Am I tending lovingly to myself and others? What do I need to walk away from or walk towards? And what requires my participation or voice? If we woke up every morning and tried to answer those questions? We would have a different life.
[00:30:26] Shauna Niequist: Yes. And I wish I woke up every single morning and asked those questions.
[00:30:31] And in some seasons I did almost a little, much, a little bit. It's like a mini once a week. Yeah. Once a week, you know, did he, I can't remember. Did he give us, you know, he just, he just encouraged me. Those were my questions. He encouraged me to set aside time for pain. Like he kind of said, okay, I know, you're afraid to live all day, every day in the pain, and you want to run away from it, but then it blindsides you.
[00:30:59] And [00:31:00] that doesn't work either. And he said, what if you create a safe space every day, you're at your desk, it's a good space for you. You feel like you're kind of protected and, and you just spend a certain amount of minutes facing all the things you don't have to live in that place, but you have to get there a little bit every day.
[00:31:16] And so now one of the things I've been doing. And again, that list is admittedly aggressive, but if someone were to even spend five minutes and if the two things you were to think about first thing in the morning were pain and desire. What hurts and what do I want? I think, especially for. We don't allow ourselves to really consider what hurts or what's not working or what left a bruise or what's too heavy, but then also desire.
[00:31:43] What am I longing for? Who am I jealous of? And what does that say about what I want in my life? What's missing those kinds of questions. I think five minutes on pain and desire. Reorients us pretty quickly.
[00:31:57] Laura McKowen: I love that we can maybe marry my art to [00:32:00] like ideas because at night, one of the things I was taught was to do a fearless and a gratitude list.
[00:32:07] These are the things I'm afraid of today. Right now, these are the things I'm grateful for like five, 10 things. It takes two minutes to five minutes and sometimes I'll write longer, you know, because you get, you get going on something, but it really. Clears my mind before I try to go to bed. And if you woke up and wrote what hurts and what do I desire?
[00:32:27] Shauna Niequist: Like
[00:32:29] Laura McKowen: if I think I'm going to try it, I think I'm going to have a new morning, new evening and morning routine.
[00:32:34] Shauna Niequist: Well, and the gratitude thing, I do that in the evenings as well. I find that I can, I do pain and desire in the morning, and then I do gratitude in the evening. And that rhythm kind of works for me.
[00:32:46] Laura McKowen: Yeah. Yeah. Gratitude easy at night because there's something about being tired. And kind of worn thin where I can access it. I can feel it the energy slower. And uh, yeah. And then the [00:33:00] morning that the hurt and desire, I like it. Okay. We're going to finish through this little part. This was just. And this is one of my favorite parts of the book.
[00:33:09] So you say I kept writing, kept asking questions, kept making space for grief, forgiveness, pain, and desire. I kept walking willing spring to come around me and inside me, you wrote this in like the late winter, early spring. And then there was a moment later when I was walking up the stairs to our apartment alone hand on the wobbly Bannister, mine, mind churning after so much grief, so much.
[00:33:33] So much bleeding. I don't want this to be my life. I felt that click of acceptance, something inside me said clear as an audible word, I can live inside this life. I can make myself a home in this story. People make it through all kinds of things and I can make it through this. I can. And I am. Can you just talk about that?[00:34:00]
[00:34:00] Shauna Niequist: You know, I mean, what we're talking about is acceptance. We're talking about like hello to here. These are the terms, this is what's on offer. But for those of us who have had the tremendous luxury of being, being mostly in control of our own choices, when your life has been changed in some really difficult ways by other people's choices, um, It's difficult to come to terms with that.
[00:34:25] It's difficult to accept that when some of the choices, when we feel like your own body is sort of working against you, um, when. The life that you thought you were going to lead is no longer available to you. And I love our life in New York. I love it so much, but I had a very clear picture of what I wanted.
[00:34:44] And it was a farmhouse in the suburbs of Chicago with all my best friends and my cousins and my extended family. Having dinner at the kitchen island three nights a week. That's what I wanted. And I had it.
[00:34:56] Laura McKowen: I had it we're in that life. Like that's what I [00:35:00] think is so, so different. Yeah. About your, what you wrote about is that you were in this life that you really wanted, like all in
[00:35:08] Shauna Niequist: 100%.
[00:35:10] Yes. So it wasn't like,
[00:35:12] Laura McKowen: I mean, things exploded and things caused you to you to change eventually, or to make this move eventually. But like you were in that life, it's like a reverse. Process in a way it
[00:35:23] Shauna Niequist: is. But I think a lot of, you know, I have a really close friend who went through an unexpected divorce and she felt a similar set of things.
[00:35:31] This is the future I wanted. And another person's decision took it away from me. And, uh, I would friend who lost a business this year that he had founded. And, you know, anytime whether it's the economy or an individual or your body or a diagnosis or whatever, I think there's that impulse to. Why can't I control this because we're able to control so many other parts of our lives.
[00:35:57] And, um, it took me a [00:36:00] really long time to come around to making peace with this just is what it is. And I'm strong enough to make something beautiful even out of the life. I didn't necessarily choose.
[00:36:14] Laura McKowen: Yeah. And you described that soft click of acceptance. So, well you say I can live inside this life and then you say I can, and I am like, you're already in it.
[00:36:24] You're already here. I'm going to be where I am. Yes.
[00:36:29] Shauna Niequist: I'm not going to fight it. There's another chapter in the book where I write about the phrase, hello to here. And it's have you read, um, in the shelter. I love it so much. Oh no, you'll love it. Um, but that's a phrase that he uses all the way through. Um, hello to here.
[00:36:47] Hello, to pain. Hello, to loneliness. Hello, to joy. It's just a way. It's another way to use language, to talk about being present to what is as opposed to escapism or fantasy or numbness or [00:37:00] pretending. So hello to here. This is the story of my life and I get to invest in it and make it beautiful or rail against it and miss it while I'm doing that.
[00:37:11] That's the choice we all have
[00:37:13] Laura McKowen: all the time. All the time. Yeah. Cause there stays. I want my life and whenever I read about acceptance, Something in my heart, just it's like when Cheryl strayed wrote like acceptances, a small quiet room, there's an, and you wrote, it's like a soft click. It's a, do you still find, do you feel like acceptance is still like a practice, like forgiveness?
[00:37:38] Like, okay. Gonna move the chair, the chair across the room again today, or is it a little.
[00:37:43] Shauna Niequist: It is a little different that that moment did feel a little bit like a before and after I'm not entirely, I would say it's like maybe meet in the middle. Um, it's not as daily as forgiveness, but it it's, it's not, you know, a magical moment.
[00:37:59] Laura McKowen: What [00:38:00] has been the reaction? What how's this book coming out? Been how I have to imagine, because it is different than what it's a big deal. Like what you wrote about a lot of. It's a very, I mean, it's been received very well, but it's a very, it's a very tender book, but it's very, very honest and very, I don't want to say vulnerable.
[00:38:24] It sounds not right, but like, it's, it's like you let us into your
[00:38:27] Shauna Niequist: heart where you scared to publish
[00:38:31] Laura McKowen: it. And what does it feel like? Yes.
[00:38:32] Shauna Niequist: I was scared to Polish it a hundred percent. Um, it had been a long time since I had published anything. Um, I had been. Really really hurt by, um, in, uh, a handful of different times on social media.
[00:38:48] So I was really, um, like sensitive and gun shy about sharing anything at all. I had a total meltdown, like a month before I turned the book in where I said, once [00:39:00] again, like, oh, I'm sorry. Not, I can't finish it. Like, I can't turn the whole thing in like this isn't how do I give back the check? You know? Um, it just felt too hard.
[00:39:10] Um, yeah. And so I was very nervous and then, um, right away the responses were really different than I thought. And they were notably personal and there were people talking about their connection to. People are not saying like, wow, it's beautiful. Or I love your phrasing or the imagery. And that, it's nothing about that.
[00:39:35] It's this made me think about my life, this connected with this part of what I grieved this put words to. And that feels very, very meaningful to me. And, and it's, it's a little, it's less congratulations and more, oh my goodness. I'm there too. Yes. And you can't mean, you know, with the writing process, you start something so long.
[00:39:58] Before, [00:40:00] and then it's in production for so long and you're writing it for so long and then it's being printed. And then the world changes a hundred times. You can never anticipate into which moment a book is going to land
[00:40:12] Laura McKowen: and you can't divorce the environment in which a book is born from the book. It just becomes part of the, it becomes part of it.
[00:40:19] Right. That's absolutely out of your control. Yeah. This landed, I think, at a beautiful. Like very
[00:40:26] Shauna Niequist: necessary time. I think it did. And I take absolutely no credit for that. It's just, I can't, I could never have predicted it. And I'm super grateful for that. That means a lot to me. Well, I,
[00:40:40] Laura McKowen: um, I want to be mindful of your time.
[00:40:42] I want to talk about the, the last chapter, which is my favorite. It's called still. Yes. I'm going to read the last few lines. I still say yes to life is still say yes to creative work to the church, gathered to [00:41:00] storytelling and hospitality, to living with an open heart. I still say yes to risk, to adventure, to diving into the wreck, to making something beautiful from loss.
[00:41:10] I still believe in Jesus Christ in the power of the table, both the Eucharist, and also take out around cramped. Uh, cramped apartment table. I still believe in forgiveness. Laughter pizza for breakfast, dancing in the kitchen. I still say yes to second chances staying out too late, watching the sunset, like a movie, holding hands farmer's markets, taking the long way home.
[00:41:34] Is the world still beautiful still? Yes. Do our stories still matter still? Yes. Am I still hopeful? Still? Yeah. Well, I trust people. Will I trust God? Will I trust myself still? Yes.
[00:41:51] Shauna Niequist: Yes. Yes.
[00:41:55] Laura McKowen: It's so good. It's so the reason it's so good and [00:42:00] felt so good to me is because this isn't, um,
[00:42:07] there's a lot of pain in the book. There's a lot of grief. There's a lot of confusion and frustration and sadness and sorry. And it's still like, this is what we, this is the message that I need. And I think the world needs now is you're not saying this from a, I'm not saying this from a naive or innocent place.
[00:42:31] It's like you went through a lot of fires and still yes, like still. Yes. I, I still want to be here. I still love the world. I still love God. I still, yes. I imagine in my mind, this came out like in one whoosh, like at the a hundred
[00:42:48] Shauna Niequist: percent. Yes it did. And I think that, you know, the other part of it is, you know, there's the, the pain and the willingness to still hope.
[00:42:56] Some of it too, is this book. I was [00:43:00] writing it real time during a season where I was changing so quickly. Like I didn't, I can't keep talking about like, not being recognizable. Um,
[00:43:13] I became a little bit detached from the idea of like really fixed identity. This is who I am. This is who, I'm not, this is what I wear. This is what I don't. I was like, I don't know who knows. And I don't want to be bound by that anymore. I just want to like keep moving forward and deciding, like, it's not as much about me and my identity.
[00:43:31] It's more about how I walk in the world and experience the world. And then right at the very end of that whole process that I was living through and walking through, I was like, There are a handful of things that will always be true about me. Um, and these are them. So there's a lot that's changed, but there's a handful of things that have haven't and I'm going to carry them with me into whatever the new season is.
[00:43:55] And whoever this new woman is, they'll still be a handful of things that will always. [00:44:00]
[00:44:01] Laura McKowen: I want everyone to read this book. I think, especially, um, I mean, my, the people who listened to this are women mostly of our age. There's a there's men out there too. And there's a, there's, there's a whole audience. A lot of people in midlife, I'll say that.
[00:44:17] And this is like the biggest gift to midlife. It should be like, oh, you're here you you're 45. Okay. Here's your birthday present from, from God
[00:44:27] Shauna Niequist: ranch on his book. I love that.
[00:44:31] Laura McKowen: Oh, thank you. I could talk to you for a really long time. I feel
[00:44:35] Shauna Niequist: just the same way.
[00:44:43] Laura McKowen: Alright, thank you so much for being with us today. If you want more TMS T head on over to TMS T pod.com. And become a member members get access to the full uncut versions of these conversations. [00:45:00] Previews of upcoming guests invites to join me for members only events and access to our members. Only community where I hang out a lot, we decided from the beginning to make this an independent project, we don't have sponsors and we don't run ads.
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