"Explore the places where you kept yourself ignorant."

Natalie Goldberg's words apply to both our personal and creative lives.

Winter 2022 on the University of Saint Francis campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The sun reflecting on the pond with the juxtaposition of the barren deciduous trees reminds me that all of life involves shedding the old and embracing the new —both loss and gain.

So what is the grace, and what is the suffering? Before I nearly gave up on living, I focused solely on the grace —the hope, the light, the redemption. After Auggie was born and I hated who I’d become and wanted to die, I focused exclusively on the suffering —the pain, the loneliness, the struggle. Where we find grace is the intersection between our hope and our fear.

It’s a sunny day in winter, which is saying a lot when you live in northern Indiana and seldom get a glimpse of it for months on end. I just sat down and thought, What is there to say that I haven’t already said? I know I haven’t exhausted the depths of what I have learned this past year, both through life experience and from reading on subjects, like trauma and relationships and nonviolent communication. But my mind has been void of new insights.

Then I glance up at my cork board —also an inspiration board —and I notice something I typed up and printed last fall. The importance of its message stems from the way it both encourages and challenges me in my personal growth and in my development as a writer.

Here it is:

Explore the places where you kept yourself ignorant. Why did you protect yourself from the world? Juxtaposing the painful truth of genocide with the pop you were drinking at an all-day barbecue intensifies both. It’s okay to let the world be big and painful. It’s all happening at once. In the middle of it, you are searching for your salvation —don’t you think there’s some of that in your urge to write? Grace can’t be found outside the truth of suffering. Go all the way in when you write…Name your blindness and give it light.¹

As I begin to revise the first draft of my memoir, I realize that much of what I am writing involves these strange blind spots that resulted from a very controlled upbringing and black-and-white thinking. Everything was either/or, good/bad, right/wrong. I learned from a young age to compartmentalize my experiences, both within myself and of others, into tidy categories. That way, everything could be explained and understood.

I could not tolerate the tension of ambivalence I often felt.

At first, my parents protected me from the world. But even until about four or five years ago, I kept myself ignorant in so many ways. It was easier for me to use theology or philosophy or psychology to convince myself of what must be done, or why something had happened. I was one of those people who could recite a verse from the Bible whenever something senseless had happened, and my interpretations of those experiences ended up in cliches, like, Suffering has a purpose, or God will give us the grace we need to get through.

It’s not that these are necessarily incorrect, but that they are incomplete. I wanted solutions to human suffering. I wanted meaning. When Sarah was born and I wrestled with my own unanswerable questions, I still settled upon tough conclusions that I believed generalized into one thing: The hard thing is usually the right thing.

At the time, my Catholic faith was my only lifeline. I needed to touch the Divine, and I was often consoled by the Psalms or comments from friends about what an inspiration our family was. Eventually, when we moved and I gave birth to three babies in four years, all of these were stripped from me. I could not be comforted by any single thought or dream or hope or prayer.

Here’s where I am now, as I attempt to untangle what influenced my life to the point where I almost lost it: There is more mystery in life than there are explanations. In order to truly accept this, I have needed, on a daily basis, the reminder that I kept myself ignorant. I protected myself from the world. I hid behind my blind spots.

Revising this type of book is an ugly process, because you’re literally putting your most intimate thoughts and experiences on the page for anyone to tear apart. It’s not like writing fantasy or sci-fi. It’s different when you are relaying your own story of hardship and why it matters to the greater populace. You have to go back and ask yourself the questions that Natalie Goldberg posed:

Where did I keep myself ignorant?

Why [and how] did I protect myself from the world?

Where are my blind spots?

These are not easy questions to answer honestly, because they require a stark admission of certain gaps in my worldview or the tone of my story. One critique of my first draft was that it held a defensive posture. “No one needs to apologize for existing,” she told me. “Your story is unremittingly bleak.”

Maybe that’s what previous acquisitions editors meant when they told me my writing was too “heavy”? I could not accept the word heavy, because it was too vague and unhelpful. But “unremittingly bleak,” because I am constantly “apologizing for existing”? That’s far more specific, albeit hard to hear.

Even though it felt humiliating to receive this message, I reflected on it for a few days and realized the kernel of truth in it: that I do have blind spots, that I did omit important and powerful key memory pieces that would paint a richer picture of the true tug-of-war at play in my life —not the either/or, not the sentimentalizing of suffering or woe-is-me portrayal, but instead the suffering and the grace. The darkness and the light.

Grace can’t be found outside the truth of suffering.

So what is the grace, and what is the suffering? Before I nearly gave up on living, I focused solely on the grace —the hope, the light, the redemption. After Auggie was born and I hated who I’d become and wanted to die, I focused exclusively on the suffering —the pain, the loneliness, the struggle.

But both are present everywhere, always. I’ve come to believe that some seasons of life we wear those rose-colored lenses, and other seasons we can’t see past the tunnel of darkness. But there’s always light peeking through the dismal nights of our souls, and there is also some type of loss when we are celebrating a new thing —because change involves both, and life is nothing more than a revolution of one change after another. All of life involves both shedding the old and embracing the new.

Where we find grace is the intersection between our hope and our fear.

1. Natalie Goldberg from her book, Old Friend From Far Away, p. 193. (Emphasis mine.)