Not All Pain Has a Purpose | Marisa Renee Lee

0:00Jonathan Fields: So there's a piece of advice you have probably heard at your lowest moment. This is happening for a reason. Find the lesson. Make it mean something. My guest today has built her entire career on grief and healing, and she thinks that advice is often just wrong. In this conversation, you'll discover why she named an entirely new kind of grief, one with no end date and no cultural script until now. how identity in essence pull apart the moment everything you built your worth on just disappears. We'll talk about why refusing to acknowledge pain is exactly what turns it into suffering and how hope works less like a feeling and more like a discipline.

0:42Jonathan Fields: Practice hardest on the worst days and finally, what it looked like to hold her family through a loss most of us can't imagine and keep believing anyway. Our guide is bestselling author and grief expert Marissa Renee Lee, author of Waiting for Dawn. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project, and we'll jump right in after this short break.

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3:32Jonathan Fields: If you want to try it, head to tanasi.com and use the code GOODLIFE for 25 % off your first order. That's T-A-N-A-S-I.com and use the code GOODLIFE for 25 % off your first order. You share something that in your new book, which is fabulous, by the way. Thank you. You share something that kind of runs directly counterintuitive to pretty much every wellness and self-help edict. And it's this idea, and you state it pretty directly, that you pretty much refuse to urge people to make meaning out of their pain. That you won't promise that it has a purpose in sort of a genre where, you know, quote, your message is your message.

4:20Jonathan Fields: It's basically gospel. This is a genuinely radical thing to say. So take me into this. What do you actually believe about pain and meaning? And why do you believe that the popular story is just wrong? So it's interesting. And I think there are people who know me and know my work who might think, oh, is that hypocritical? because this is the girl whose mom gets sick with breast cancer and she starts the breast cancer charity. And then mom dies. And a decade later, she's writing a book about her and the terrible pregnancy loss that she also encountered. And then girl gets long COVID and now she's a long COVID advocate.

5:05What is she talking about? Make it make sense. And the thing that I will say about myself is after just a lot of reflection and thoughtfulness, I've come to realize to things. One, for me, when it comes to healing, I have a bias toward action, you know, whether the action is going to EMDR therapy, which I started last year, or, you know, starting a charity or a new project to try and help solve a social problem. And every time I look at the things that I have done, when I've been in pain, they've also been rooted in anger, honestly, not in like a desire to make meaning, but in like a deep rage.

5:50You know, most recently when I got sick, I recognized immediately not only how horrible it was to be in pain every day and, you know, to have long COVID and be suddenly disabled and this and that, but I realized how much worse it must be for so many other people. You know, I have economic privilege. I have health system privilege. You know, I think about all the things I had to learn when my mom was sick. My husband works in public health. My best friend is a doctor. Like, you know, I have all sorts of relationships and connections that I could leverage. I can afford to do things out of pocket if they're going to help me feel better.

6:26Like I understand medical research studies. And then I just, I know all of these systemic inequities that exist in the world. And so when I put those two things together, like I just, I get angry and then I feel a need to do something. So that's like Marissa's sort of personal story. And the reason why I don't want to push people to make meaning out of their pain is because I don't think that you can get meaning out of every single painful experience. And when I wrote that, I wasn't thinking as much about myself as I was about people like my aunt who's in the book you know my aunt she's my mom's baby sister she had six kids she has two left and of the two that she has left one is incarcerated and one is living with ALS and you know when I think about her and everything that she's been through in the last 20 to 25 years I'm like you can't make that make sense for me and even and I would say actually especially for me as someone who identifies as deeply religious, I don't think it is reasonable to push her to make meaning from like one horrible tragedy after another.

7:47I mean, this woman has lost three of her children just in the last decade. And it just like, that's just, that's just horrifying. Like, there's nothing okay about that. You know, I think about other friends of mine, And it's always the child loss. You know, there's this amazing woman, Nelba Marquez Green. I don't know if you happen to follow her on social media, but she lost a child in the Sandy Hook massacre. And I hear her speak about her grief, and we've had a chance to connect personally a bit. And I don't think I have the right to do that. I don't think it's fair. I think it creates undue pressure.

8:24And I think some of it ties back to the fact that, you know, when we encounter, particularly like in our culture, in our, you know, Western American society, when we encounter people who are dealing with something that, you know, seems unimaginable, we almost want it to have meaning so that, you know, if someday that thing that we don't even want to think can happen to us does happen to us, you can put a little bit of a positive spin on it. And I just don't think that's fair. I don't think it's appropriate.

8:58Jonathan Fields: Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting, right? Because I often wonder if it's so much more about our discomfort when we see people close to us suffering. Yeah. Yeah. And so we want to have this overlay that says there's meaning in here. How many times have we heard some version of this isn't happening to you, it's happening for you, which is kind of the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I've always graced over that. They're in a better place. Right. It's like, you know, the people who said that to me when my mom died, I was like, you could be in a better place. Like, I was big mad. Yeah. And, you know, and that's not to say that every source of suffering or every source of pain that we can't actually find meaning in many different things.

9:37Jonathan Fields: But from what I hear you saying, if I understand it, it's basically saying the fact that you have pain does not mean that automatically there is the potential for meaning in that. There may or may not be, but if there isn't and you can't find it, there's no shame in you. Exactly. That shame piece is a big part of it for me because when I was at my sickest, some days I was too weak to take a shower. Or if I was able to take a shower, I might have to rest for four to five hours before that became something I could do. You know, if I could do only two things in a given day, it was get my toddler ready and off to school and put him to bed at night.

10:23And like, I might not do a single other thing in between. And thinking about trying to find meaning or make meaning from this place where like I had no capacity for that. You know, I was just trying to survive. And I think there are a lot of people who are dealing with really horrifying and devastating situations who are just trying to get through the next hour or the next day and having them feel shame or guilt or like they are doing something wrong because they haven't turned it into a new business or, you know, a cute little Instagram post or whatever. Like that just makes me makes me crazy.

11:03Jonathan Fields: Yeah. Yeah. So if we were to take this down to sort of like something specific, if somebody is joining us right now and they're in the middle of something genuinely hard, wrenching, maybe a diagnosis, a divorce, a loss, and they're already carrying the pain of that experience along with probably some level of societal generated guilt for not being able to, quote, find the lesson in it or handle it the right way yet. What do you want them to hear? What I want you to hear is that that is okay. And the most important thing for you to do right now is figure out what you need to be okay. Like that is all that matters when you are like face down in the dirt, trying to figure out how to navigate X, Y, or Z thing.

11:52Like what is going to make it even 1 % easier for you? That's all I care about.

11:59Jonathan Fields: I want to pause just so anyone joining us can really let that land. It's a real invitation. You introduce also this interesting concept you describe as gray grief, which kind of feels instantly recognizable the moment you name it. You probably get a sense for what we're talking about just because of the name. But take me deeper into it. What is gray grief and why does the fact that we don't really have any language for it actually make it even harder to be with? So it's interesting. In my first book, Grief is Love, I really wanted to make sure that the definition of grief that I came up with wasn't connected to solely the physical loss of somebody.

12:46And so it was, you know, grief is the repeated experience of learning to live in the midst of a significant loss. And I felt like that could apply, you know, to my infertility, to pregnancy loss, you know, to someone navigating divorce, etc. And then I got sick. And I became the loss. And when everything about, you know, my life, my work, my family, my identity, it all just was lost overnight, I needed new language. And my editor, you know, I had a contract to write a different book, actually. And she said one day, you know, I want you to sit down and write about what does it feel like to be sick and to, you know, wake up every single day in pain.

13:32And as I started writing about it, it was this like, experience of moving through fog, because I didn't know what exactly I was going to need. I didn't know what was going to make me feel better. I didn't know how long it was going to take. I didn't know who was going to be able to help me. It was basically just one unknown after another. And where we live in the Hudson Valley, we live at the top of a hill. And when fog rolls through, you can't see down the driveway. And that was the image that just kept coming up for me. And I think when you find yourself in a place of deep pain and uncertainty, like you need some language to describe what you're going through so that ideally you can help convey the experience to other people who will show up and support you and try to help you as you navigate through that.

14:25And that's what I wanted to try and do with great grief.

14:28Jonathan Fields: I mean, that lands really powerfully. The image of fog also. So we've all been in that moment where you're driving or you're just somewhere and all of a sudden it descends upon you. You feel like you're in the clouds. You can't see, you know, like 10 feet in front of you. But a big quality of that, I think, is often we don't know when it's going to lift. And I feel like that's a big part of what you're describing here. It's like grief is it's the grief of things that are highly uncertain, but also they're still happening with no known end. and kind of no cultural script for how to hold it. Does that land as accurate?

15:05100%. And then the other thing that I wanted to capture with great grief, and again, this image of the fog is you don't know when it's going to lift, but it does lift eventually. And I wanted to also remind people and frankly, like remind myself that just like the great moments in life are impermanent, you know, these horrible, really hard moments are impermanent too. You know, I would say like six to eight months ago, I couldn't have this conversation that we're having right now because it was too hard to breathe. And so, you know, recognizing that you can go from not being able to see 10 feet in front of you to blue skies at some point, I think is also just important for people to hold on to.

15:55Yeah.

15:56Jonathan Fields: I mean, it's like you just said six months ago, you wouldn't be able to say that. And it's one of those things that I think anybody who's experienced any, even a smaller version of this, you know, like little G great grief, right? It is really hard to wrap your head around the fact that this is not the permanent state of being when you're in the middle of it. Like it's the invitation, you know, you offer the invitation in a really powerful and compelling way. And you're sort of like in a different space six months ago. But for somebody who's listening right now, who's in it, or maybe who just recognize themselves in your description, maybe for the first time, what do you say to them about how to be in that, but also how to in some way, even the slightest way, believe this invitation you just offered, that this is not the forever state?

16:49Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of how to be in it, you know, the first thing that I want to give people permission to do is experience whatever feelings come up for you. You know, one that I have had to get comfortable with over the years is anger, as I've mentioned. You know, another one is just like really deep sadness and depression. Like I absolutely should have been on an antidepressant in the fall of 2024 when this was at its worst. but I was so deep in it that like I couldn't even see that as something that would help me if that if that makes sense it's only in hindsight that I'm like oh my god like that was that was really bad and there were days when I would spend hours crying and you need to let yourself have those moments of acknowledgement because otherwise it's sort of insincere to grab onto any form of hope So let yourself acknowledge how bad it is.

17:50And then when it comes to believing that it's going to get better, for me in those times, I had to reach for other arbiters of hope because it wasn't like there was anything in my personal story that would allow me to latch on to, I know I'm going to get better. And so when I shared about my long COVID publicly, there was actually a young woman who was following me on social media because my writing on grief had helped her cope with long COVID. And she was basically at the end of her healing journey. And so knowing that this young woman, this young mother had been in a wheelchair at the beginning of her illness and now is hiking with her kids on spring break.

18:36I still get emotional about it. We've become dear friends. And it was just so important for me to like, know that Anna was there and that she's just about fully healthy now. And so like, this is going to be okay, like, you're gonna figure it out, it's going to be okay. And then the other thing I would say is, you know, you might find your arbiters of hope in other parts of your story. my husband and I it's took us five years to become parents and it was five years of just grief and disappointment and heartbreak and you know just awful one failure after another but we have our kid and he is absolutely the most perfect kid for us and so some days you know I would just like pull up his birth announcement and remember that you know you don't know how the story is going to end.

19:30And it can be really, really dark today. And it can get better at some point in the future.

19:35Jonathan Fields: Yeah. I think finding those arbiters, you know, it's almost like the exemplars of people who are have enough similar to us, but are a little bit further down the road. But I also wonder if part of what you're describing here is there's something even to the simple act of naming it of just saying, yes, this is it. And I'm in it and like saying, like this is true. This is real. It sounds bizarre like that that would actually make a difference, but I feel like it often does. Oh, it makes a big difference because I will tell you, I spent the first I'm trying to think how many months would have been about five months of my illness living in the land of denial.

20:15I didn't want to name it. I didn't want to claim it. I didn't want it to be true. And so I acted as though I was just dealing with, you know, a couple of disconnected symptoms, not a system wide problem. And it took me traveling to Greece to teach a writing retreat in the summer of 2024. And I was walking around the hotel where the retreat was, and I couldn't breathe. And I've never in my life experienced any issues with my lungs, never had any asthma, anything like that. I ended up being rushed to a pulmonologist over there. My larynx was over 70 % blocked. And it turned out I had severe asthma in both of my lungs.

21:00And I got on a plane home the very next day. And that's when I was like, you know, denying your reality does not help. Like you need to name it. You need to own it. You need to say that it's true and that it's real. And that's the only way you're going to get better. But it was process.

21:21Jonathan Fields: And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

21:48Jonathan Fields: relationships, location, health, and more. So if you've got a reinvention story you'd love to share, just tap on the link in the show notes and give us a quick summary. And who knows, you might just end up on the podcast. Excited to be inspired by your stories. Good Life Project is sponsored by Drip Drop. So living in Boulder at altitude and very dry mountain air, I learned pretty quickly that hydration here is not optional. It is survival. I used to just kind of push through it. Headache, fatigue, the flat sluggish feeling by mid-afternoon. I chalked it up to a long day. Turns out it was almost hydration issues.

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25:25Jonathan Fields: And if it's not the right fit, you can switch anytime because doing the real work on your life, the work we talk about on this show every week, sometimes means bringing in somebody trained to help you do it. See the reviews, see what stands out, see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com slash goodlifeproject. That's betterhelp.com slash goodlifeproject. One of the other things that you explore, I think it's really interesting, is teasing out this distinction between, tell me if I'm getting this right, identity and essence. And you went to Harvard and you built this incredible career on your intelligence, your competence and being the most capable person in the world.

26:06Jonathan Fields: And suddenly, the most basic things are a struggle for you. Take me into this. And I also want to add, this is in the period where I was pretending like this wasn't happening. So I just honestly, like I just completely lost control of my mind and lost my intelligence, which is, you know, it's like a common neurological side effect of long COVID. You know, they call it brain fog. And there are all of these different components of it and ways that it can show up. You know, for me, I have honestly taken for granted being a fast processor and like quick synthesizer of information and ideas my entire life.

26:54You know, that it works really well on Wall Street and in the White House and with my clients. And I didn't know what it felt like, frankly, to like not be fast and like very intelligent. And I even like struggle calling myself intelligent and like feels arrogant, you know, but like the facts are what they are. I went from being, you know, somebody whose brain worked one way and all of a sudden, it just didn't work like that anymore. And it was everything from like feeling a slowdown in my reading comprehension, which as a writer, that's like unfathomable to, you know, I would be on a call with a client and say, okay, you know, like they share a problem.

27:38And, you know, I'm like, okay, I have like three things that I think we should talk about or like that we should have as next steps or whatever. And I would get through thing one and thing two has just disappeared. And it might not come back for like a day or two. It's not like, oh, it popped out of my head. It'll be there in five minutes, like a day or two, or it may never come back at all. I was leaving my car door open overnight and like draining the battery. And then the next day being like, why isn't my car starting? Like, hello. So once I finally was able to acknowledge that this was a problem and that something was going on, I then had to grapple with these questions of like worth and identity.

28:24You know, if you had asked me a couple of years ago, you know, do you derive your self-worth from your intelligence? I would have said no. Like that's just like too like shallow. You know, I, yeah, I absolutely, I would have been like, no, no, definitely not. Definitely not.

28:40Jonathan Fields: You don't want to be the person who says that. Yes. And I would have been a liar because I absolutely did. It turned out. And not only did I derive some of my worth from it, but, you know, like you said, like I built a career around it and people are, you know, they, they trust me to help them solve big social problems based on how my brain works. And that brain doesn't work the same anymore. And it was, I mean, it was terrifying because again, no one could tell me when I was going to get it back, how to get it back, what that was going to look like. I just had to like wait and pray. And that was the strategy.

29:17um and in the meantime i started asking myself you know is that really where you want to get your worth from um because when you have these things that you've taken for granted just disappear and you realize how quickly they can go away it's like no i don't want to get my worth from something that can vanish in the span of a week of having a virus like that's terrifying And so I started asking, you know, like, okay, what does worth really mean? And so many of these questions that I asked in this season brought me back to my mom. And, you know, I'm 43 now. She died at 49. And so I'm like her peer at death, which is just a really difficult thing to wrap my mind around.

30:06And I thought about her funeral and the things that people, you know, oftentimes a lot of people who I didn't know would say to me after she died about her, you know, her kindness, her generosity, you know, how warm she was, how helpful, things like that. And I was like, that's where I want us all to get our worth from, from like who we really are as human beings that is separate from, you know, these other attributes that may be great, but also can go away.

30:37Jonathan Fields: yeah i mean and and i guess there there's where the distinction between what is that deeper essence and what's sort of like the layer above it is this thing we call identity that yeah that tends to be more shifting more malleable more subject to sort of you know like whatever's happening to us or around us but there's a deeper essence if i'm getting this right that is the like the real enduring you. But we derive so much status and often income and adoration and all these things from often the surface level thing that we believe that that is our essence until it falls away. And then we're like, wait, what?

31:18Yeah, you believe that you are the identity that you have built out in the world until you lose that identity or you lose elements of it. And I, you know, As I was putting this together, I had folks who I'm friends with and in my family who've gone through a divorce and have talked about how much they realized their identity in the world was connected to being married and being partnered and not being a single mom and all of this stuff. And how when that changes, you have to make a commitment to changing as well. Yeah.

31:56Jonathan Fields: Yeah. So, so if somebody's joining us and they're, they're, they're struggling with something deeply and a part of what they're moving through right now is effectively stripping away all of these indicators of who they thought they were. and but they didn't they didn't drop into the realization that you dropped into which is there's something beneath it like what's the invitation here for somebody to to like what's a question they can ask themselves what's an invitation to start to say to help them explore what's on like what else like what's real here so the thing that i asked myself uh and that i would invite is what do you want people to say about you at your funeral and i put that there was like sort of a sub bullet to that you know what what do you want to leave your child like in terms of how they view you what they view as your core values if you also happen to be a parent um because when i thought about that you know i don't i don't care so much if my son thinks that i'm smart you know right now he doesn't even think i have a job because i work from home you know what i mean like so like i don't care about that as much but i want him to know, you know, the values of kindness and respect and generosity and, you know, joyfulness, like those are the things that I want him to always be able to connect to his mom.

33:22Jonathan Fields: Yeah, I love that. As you're describing that question popped into my head was something like, when I think about what I would want my kid to be proud of about me, what would it be? Something like that. But it's kind of the same thing that you're saying here. It's stripping it down to the basics yeah yeah you know it's like getting beneath all of that stuff you make another really interesting distinction um and it's it's sort of like this distinction between pain and suffering and i've been fascinated by this for a long time you know like pain is a broken leg suffering is walking around on that broken leg um yeah and you say that suffering is I hate to use the word choice here.

34:07Yes. Yes.

34:09Jonathan Fields: Because it sounds almost harsh on the surface. But take me deeper into this, like tease this out for me. Okay. So to the point just on the word choice, I do think it's really important to acknowledge and recognize that, you know, in this country, particularly right now, there are a lot of people who are suffering, and they didn't choose that suffering, but that suffering has been forced upon them by, you know, generations worth of systemic inequalities and all sorts of other challenges. And so, you know, I always think it's important to call that out, because that connects to the other half of the work that I do in the world.

34:49But in terms of pain versus suffering and the choice, you know, again, I, I mean, really, I go back to myself in the first handful of months of this illness. I knew that I was in pain. I knew the pain was really severe. And I knew that it was happening in multiple places. And I caused myself more suffering, both short term and long term by refusing to connect the dots and like by frankly by refusing to listen to my gut which was like you you may not want to have this long COVID thing because who the hell wants to have that but that's what's going on here and so instead of like fully acknowledging and owning it and dealing with my health from like a system-wide perspective I said oh you know I'll go see the neurologist for this.

35:48And like, I'll go to an ENT for that. And I'll, you know, I was just like grabbing at random things. And I absolutely made the situation worse. I mean, Jonathan, the pain was so bad at one point. I wear a night guard when I sleep because of course I ground my teeth. And I woke up one morning, and a piece was missing. And I had been in horrible pain that night. Like I had actually woken up at some point in the middle of the night and was like already crying. Like that's how severe the pain in my head was. And I realized like, oh, I must have bit a piece of this off in my sleep. Like that's like horrifying and terrifying.

36:30And still, I refused to fully acknowledge the problem. And I just I want people, you know, when you are faced with some massive uncertainty, you know, some big life change that you do not want to be in the middle of. I just want to encourage you to acknowledge that you are actually in the middle of it, whether you like it or not, and figure out what you're going to do to help yourself, like whatever the action is going to be. And I just, Jonathan, like, I cannot describe to you the extent to which I just didn't want to have this thing. And it was a combination of, you know, who wants to have something that nobody, you know, not nobody, that very few people fully understand.

37:17No one has like a perfectly clear and direct path forward to like full healing and recovery that you know, by nature of its name alone, like long COVID, like it's going to be a long time. And so it is hard to sit with pain, but it is only when I have made myself sit still and really reflect on what is happening that I've been able to figure out what I really need to do to get better.

37:48Jonathan Fields: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, does it make sense to you? Like if I said, pain is information, suffering is what happens when we refuse to receive that information, whether by running or distracting or by making ourselves too busy to feel it, does that, that tracks? 100 % because the other thing that I know now, but I also refuse to acknowledge that because this goes for emotional states too, not just the physical side. The last thing that I ever wanted to become was a sick mom, having been raised by one. And so like that was the other part of the resistance. Like it wasn't just about the illness itself.

38:31It was about an illness period.

38:35Jonathan Fields: And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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41:31Jonathan Fields: The kind of thing that transforms your morning routine without you even fully realizing it. That's what good design does. And Kohler has been doing it, refusing to accept that every day has to be ordinary for over 150 years. Discover Kohler smart toilets at Kohler.com. So if somebody is sort of like in this moment where they're like, oh, this is landing in a way that I'd rather it not. I'm sorry. Which, by the way, is like will have been me at different points in my life, will be me in the future. We are human. It doesn't matter how many times we hear this. We're going to default to our patterns.

42:08Jonathan Fields: In your mind, what's like the smallest possible version that this someone could try this week? Like they're in pain. They're running from it. It's like the first minute or two minutes when they're just like, what does it actually look like to sit with it and just like the very first step in? So I think it varies from person to person. But what I would say is, like, what is going to allow you to quiet your mind? You know, for some person, it might be, you know, they're dealing with something that is overwhelming on the emotional side. And so the thing they need to do is go for a run to like, kind of begin to quiet the mind and, you know, sit with it, even though obviously running is the exact opposite of sitting.

42:54For me, because, you know, I was so weak in those months, again, something I refuse to acknowledge, I would sit on my porch. And we just have like woods all around us and just sit there for 10 minutes and not do anything, you know, not mess with my phone or check social media, not respond to the text not even like write even though i write multiple times a day some days just sit there and in that quiet you know i started to hear like you have some you have some deeper challenges here and if you really want to be well mentally and physically you're gonna have to face them. Yeah.

43:44Jonathan Fields: You, just a few minutes ago, you also mentioned something that I don't want to skip over. You brought up a little bit earlier in the conversation, but I feel like we need to dive a little bit deeper into this. It was this idea of becoming a sick mother. And you write about this. You write about how long COVID made you into kind of like the thing that you had feared most since childhood becoming a sick mom because you had a sick mom. And you watched your mom go from fully capable and alive to disabled in what felt like minutes, you know, when you were just 13 years old. Tell me about what it was like to be that daughter and then what it meant when you found yourself feeling like you were slipping into living your version of a similar story.

44:33Yeah, that was not fun. um in terms of what it was like to be that daughter and you know i only realized this as i started this you know processing and you know dealing with my own illness and questions around motherhood i never wanted to admit all that was lost to her illness and then ultimately illnesses because it felt selfish. And also, I mean, let's be honest, this was the 90s of 30 years ago. We didn't have language for most of this stuff. But I realize now that it would have been perfectly appropriate for anyone in my family to grieve the experience of mom going from healthy, overachiever, Sunday school teacher, working full-time, jazzercise, PTA, all the things, two disabled in a matter of months.

45:32She had multiple sclerosis, but it took them three and a half years to diagnose it. And so the combination of like, feeling like it would be inappropriate to be angry or upset or, you know, any of those things, because mom is still here. Mom is still like working really hard to be a great mom. And she was a great mom. And now that I'm in this place where I have this deep understanding of grief and loss and uncertainty and healing, I'm like, no, like, like, it was okay to be upset, but I never let that happen. And so part of what I struggled with was realizing like, oh, there was a lot of grief in that situation that was mine and that I was absolutely entitled to.

46:19And then I'm sure my mom would have agreed I was entitled to that I never experienced. And then there's also just like the fear around what sort of impact is this going to have on my child? Because, you know, you're a parent as parents, like we know that everything that we do or don't do good and bad, like it's going to have some impact. But when something happens that you're like, oh, this has the potential to like really negatively impact how they live and how I am able or unable to take care of them. Like that just feels so shitty, frankly. And then when you add to that, in my case, my mom went from sick to sicker to dead.

47:07And I am now in the decade that she never made it out of. And so it was just, it was, I mean, it was a lot, like it's stuff that I am still processing. I was diagnosed with PTSD last summer and have been spending some time in EMDR therapy, just working through a lot of stuff related to my childhood and adolescence. And I just didn't want any of that for my kid. I didn't want it for me. I didn't want it for my husband. And so I had to really start to do work around separating my story from her story. Like our stories are always going to be connected. But just because that is what happened to her, that doesn't mean that that's what's going to happen to me.

47:53But it's it's active work.

47:55Jonathan Fields: Yeah, I would imagine it's even as we have this conversation, like this is probably like going to be a practice that you use through a lot of your life. I mean, it's like the unprocessed grief and fear from watching your mom's illness was sitting underneath everything. And then your own illness was the thing that finally forced you to kind of stop running, not just from your own illness, but also from this unprocessed grief. And so healing wasn't just about overcoming what was going on with you. It was about integrating everything. Does that land? Exactly. Exactly. And I realized in that, I think we all have an inclination to want healing to be something where it's like, okay, this is the problem.

48:36This is the pain. I'm going to go through these steps. I am reducing my suffering. I'm doing a good job. And then we get to the end and we're good. But that's just not how it works. There's always going to be another thing for better or worse, I've learned.

48:50Jonathan Fields: You write about hope also. And we touched on hope a little bit in the beginning of a conversation, but you write about it more of like hope is like ruthlessness. Yes. The way you define it, I haven't really heard that before. Not optimism, not, hey, things will work out. You got to believe me, but ruthlessness. So let's dive deeper into this. What is hope actually in your mind? And what does it look like in practice when everything just feels genuinely hard? So the key word there that you just said is in practice, because I think we tend to keep hope in this space with like optimism and, you know, fairy tales and rainbows and Christmas and all sorts of like lovely kind of intangible positive things.

49:43and I just don't believe that that is what hope is. Like I view hope as a disciplined practice that becomes most important when you are like face down in the dirt or waking up in the middle of the night crying because you were unconsciously like in so much pain or not being able to breathe in another country on the other side of the world from your family. Like those are the moments when you have to figure out how you're going to believe that things are going to get better than whatever they look like today. And then the thing that I uncovered in doing the research for this book that just made me so happy, the commitment to the ideology of hope and like the belief that circumstances can be improved actually leads to you taking actions to improve those circumstances.

50:38So it's like this mutually reinforcing concept, but it has to be tied to action. And you have to really believe it. Like, I don't, I don't think it works if you are, if you're in a place where, you know, you're only going to believe in hope when you're having the good day. Like you need to believe in hope on the days when you can't get out of bed and, you know, Netflix pauses and is like, are you still watching Emily in Paris, Marissa? Like those are the days when you need the hope the most.

51:14Jonathan Fields: So somebody's joining us and they're at a really low point, maybe on the floor doing the ugly cry, which is a part of the experience for so many people. It sounds like what you're inviting is this idea that maybe like even the step before the first step is this idea of finding it somewhere in your heart, in your mind, this belief that feeling different is possible. Not necessarily inevitable, but like there's a, there's a, like the door is just cracked open enough that you can believe that it might be out there for me. Like you don't have to buy in like 100 % like this will be. But does that land or are you saying like, no, we actually have to go further than that?

52:02No, if you can, in that like darkest of places, believe that this situation, you know, whatever it is, has the potential to improve. You may not know exactly how it's going to happen or when it's going to happen or what it's going to look like. Like, you know, I am over two years out from getting COVID for the very first time, ironically. And, you know, I still can't do like a normal workout. When I got sick, I realized I like I couldn't pick up my kid. Like it was too hard and would cause like horrible chest pain. And like now he's four and a half and he's a bruiser. So like I don't think I can pick him up anymore.

52:47Sure. And so things are still challenging and it's been over two years. So I'm not saying that if you commit to hope overnight, things are going to get better. Like, no, that's not how it works. I'm saying if you can find within yourself the strength to commit to hope, you know, identify your arbiters of hope, whoever they may be or whatever they may look like and give yourself permission to just believe that things can get better, like you will start to take the actions to make things better.

53:24Jonathan Fields: It goes back to what you and you just named it again, this this idea of arbiters of hope, like, can you find people whether you know them or not, but they're out there in the universe, that in some way, share enough of what you're going through now who are either, if not on the other side, like, clearly, there's a trajectory forming for them to move out of where they are, where you can look at that and say, well, if they can, maybe me too. I think for so many people, that can be incredibly powerful. But then there's also a lot of people who look at them and say, yeah, but they're not me and they don't have my life.

54:01Jonathan Fields: They don't have my history. They don't have my health. They have a wild level of support or resources or privilege, whatever it may be. um and that's that's the person i get concerned about because um like we look at that person and it's there can be a tendency culturally to look at that person and say like you you gotta snap out of it man like you're making this worse for yourself yeah and i i have more empathy and compassion for that person and like what i would encourage them to ask is, you know, what is the one thing, if it's only one thing that I have that I can rely on in this moment? And the other thing that I think is important to say is like, and this is one that's always a little bit tough for me to talk about because it's so recent, you know, there are times when the thing that you hope for still isn't like the most ideal thing.

55:04And the example that I'll give for this is, you know, my aunt who I talked about at the beginning of the show. 2023, one of her kids, my young cousin, Amani, she went missing. I remember my husband and I came out of getting our kids first haircut, which I thought was going to be the most traumatic experience of the day, to be honest. and I had a text from another cousin saying that you know our younger cousin who had a baby like four or five weeks prior she'd had dinner at my aunt's house on Sunday and now it was Thursday and she hadn't been seen since and nobody could find her and instantly you know I can still see myself in the parking lot of the hair place I was like oh like she she's probably dead and I I like had to sit with that thought in my mind.

55:58And, you know, as the situation continued to unfold, did the practical things I could to support my aunt, you know, sent groceries and, and meals and, you know, helped pay for help and was doing those kinds of things. But then we just reached a point where investigators really weren't doing much. You know, like the sheriff hadn't even met with my aunt and my cousin had now been missing for over two weeks. And it was just like, we have to do something. I don't know anything about missing persons cases except for from TV shows. But like, I am a get shit done girl. And so like me and my friends and my other cousin, we developed a nationwide PR and communications and public engagement campaign to find my cousin.

56:43Now, when we did this and, you know, my aunt was on Good Morning America and ABC Nightly News and Fox and all the things, you know, I had to say to her, I had to prepare her for like hard questions. Like she's not somebody who's used to being in the public eye in that way. And so, you know, I had to talk to her like people are going to ask if like she just ran away and like abandoned her children. People are going to ask you if like you think she's going to be found alive. Like and like it was it was awful. And my aunt was as pragmatic as I was about the situation. And so as we launched this campaign, the only thing that I could hope for was to give my aunt the closure that she deserved.

57:31Like she deserved at minimum to be able to like bury her kid. And so we launched on a Sunday. By Friday, they found her body. And two weeks ago, her husband was convicted of murder. So it's not always like pretty or tidy or like happy endings, but hope does work.

58:02Jonathan Fields: I mean, I'm sorry for all of that. And part of what you're describing also sounds like finding clarity around what it is we're actually hoping for. Yes, yes, yes. you know because and it's going to be just very different for every person and every situation and and like landing on something where that feels in some way shape or form even the slightest bit attainable for us yeah yeah like when you know when we took my mom uh off active treatment for cancer and MS, like the hope was that she would have as much fun as possible for however much time we had left. And she wanted to die at home. Like that was that those were the only hopes.

58:54And she there were like lots of parties. And she died at home like a couple days after her birthday party.

59:04Jonathan Fields: What do you hope for now? What do I hope for now? Gosh, it's so funny. When you asked that question. I actually did not think about myself. I thought about our country.

59:19Nationally, I hope that we can figure out how to rebuild our country together and take better care of one another. There are a lot of people who are really hurting out there right now, And it just, it kills me. And then for myself, I hope that I will reach a point in my physical health where I am even stronger than I was before I got sick. No marathons or anything like crazy. I'm not one of those people. Maybe I can lift more weight, like do a couple pull-ups, like that kind of thing.

1:00:01Jonathan Fields: Yeah. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle. In this container of a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Oh, joy. Like joy, laughter and joy. Like I just feel like it's hard to have a good life if there's no joy. Thank you. You got it. Thank you. So let's talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from this conversation. One thing that I'm really sitting with is how much permission Marissa gives people to just simply not find meaning in their pain and how that isn't resignation, it's honesty. A few things I also don't want you to lose, this concept of gray grief, that kind of fog-like grief with no end date and no name until she gave it one.

1:00:54Jonathan Fields: the line between identity and essence, the parts of us that can kind of vanish in a week versus the parts that can't. And pain is information. Suffering is what happens when we refuse to receive it. If you're carrying something right now that doesn't have a tidy solution yet, maybe let this be your permission slip. You don't need to make it something meaningful. You just need to figure out what would make it maybe 1 % easier, more gentle on you to be in it today. And hey, before you leave, next week we're sitting down with Dr. Niobe Way to talk about why so many of us feel lonelier and more stifled than ever, even when we're surrounded by people, how that takes root at the youngest age, and what decades of research say is actually driving it, and most importantly, the simple shift and words to make a change.

1:01:47Jonathan Fields: Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes. And do me a quick favor, if you haven't already, share this episode with just one person who needs to hear it or watch it or both. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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