Not All Pain Has a Purpose | Marisa Renee Lee

What if the kindest thing someone told you about your pain was that it didn’t have to mean anything?

Marisa Renee Lee has spent her career inside other people’s grief and her own. She’s the bestselling author of Grief Is Love, a former deputy director in the Obama White House, and now CEO of Beacon Advisors. Her new book, Waiting for Dawn, comes out of her own experience with chronic illness, and it argues against nearly every wellness cliché about turning pain into purpose.

In this conversation, you’ll explore:

Why Marisa refuses to promise anyone that their suffering serves a purpose, even her own family’s “Gray grief”: a name for the grief that has no end date, no diagnosis, and no cultural script The difference between identity (what you built) and essence (what’s still there when it’s gone) Why she calls hope a discipline, not a feeling, and what that looks like on the worst days How her family held onto hope through her aunt’s most devastating loss, and what happened after

If you’ve ever felt ashamed for not finding the silver lining in something genuinely hard, this conversation is your permission to put that pressure down.

You can find Marisa at: Website | Instagram | Holding Both Substack | Episode Transcript

Next week, we’re sitting down with Dr. Niobe Way to talk about why so many of us feel lonelier than ever even when we’re surrounded by people, and what decades of research say is actually driving it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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photo credit: Meredith Hauer

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Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] 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 and 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. 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 Marisa 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:09] You share something that in in your new book, um, 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, you pretty much refuse to urge people to make meaning out of their pain. Um, that you won’t promise that it has a purpose in a, in sort of a genre where, you know, quote your message, your message is basically gospel. This is a genuinely radical thing to say. So take me into this. Um, what do you actually believe about pain and meaning? And why do you believe that? Sort of like the popular story is just wrong.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:01:59] So it’s, it’s interesting. Um, and I think, I think there are people who, you know, know me and know my work who might think, oh, is that hypocritical? Because, you know, this is the girl whose mom gets sick with breast cancer and she starts the breast cancer charity and then mom dies. And, and, you know, 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. You know, like what? What is she talking about? Make it make sense. And the thing that I will say about myself is after just like a lot of reflection and thoughtfulness, I’ve come to realize two 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. You know, most recently when I got sick, I, 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:03:30] You know, I have 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. Like 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 Marisa’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 has been through in the last 20 to 25 years, I’m like, you can’t make that make sense for me.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:04:54] And even and I would say actually, especially for me, as someone who identifies as deeply religious, I, I don’t think it is reasonable to push her to make meaning from like one horrible tragedy after another. I 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-greene. 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, 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. And I think some of it ties back to the fact that, you know, when we encounter particularly like in our culture and 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:21] Yeah. I mean, it is really interesting, right? Because I often wonder if it’s so much more about our discomfort when we we see people close to us suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so like, we want to have this overlay that says there’s meaning in here somewhere. How many times have we heard some version of, um, this isn’t happening to you. It’s happening for you, which is kind of the same thing. Yeah. And I’ve always.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:06:43] In a better place that’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 getting big. Matt.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:50] Yeah. And, you know, and that’s not to say that that every source of suffering or every source of pain, that we can’t actually find meaning in many different things. But, but from what I hear you saying, if I, if I understand it, it’s basically saying, um, the fact that you have pain does not mean that automatically there is a, 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:07:18] Exactly. That that shame piece is a big part of it for me. Because, you know, when I was at my sickest, like 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 4 to 5 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. And 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:26] Yeah. So if we were to take this down to sort of like, um, something specific, if somebody is, is joining us right now and they’re in the middle of something genuinely heart wrenching, maybe a diagnosis, a divorce, a loss, and they’re already carrying, um, 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?

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:08:56] 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, like what is going to make it even 1% easier for you. That’s all I care about.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:21] Mhm. I want to pause just so anyone joining us can really let that land. You know, that’s it’s a real invitation. Um, you, you, you introduce also this interesting concept you describe as great grief, which kind of feels instantly recognizable the moment you name it. Like you probably get a sense for what we’re talking about just because of the name. But take me deeper into it. What is great grief, and why does the fact that, um, we don’t really have any language for it actually make it even harder to to be with.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:09:55] 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. And 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. Um, 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? And as I started writing about it, it was this like experience of moving through fog, you know, because I, 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. You know, it was basically just one unknown after another. And you know where we live in the Hudson Valley, we live at the top of a hill. And when fog rolls through, like 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. And that’s what I wanted to try and do with great grief.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:52] I mean, that lands really powerfully the image of fog. Also, we’ve all been in that moment where like, 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 ten feet in front of you. Yeah. Um, 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, 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?

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:12:27] 100%. 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, 6 to 8 months ago, I couldn’t have this conversation that we’re having right now because it was too hard to breathe. Um, and so, you know, recognizing that you can go from not being able to see ten feet in front of you to blue skies at some point, I think is also just important for people to hold on to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:18] Yeah. I mean, it’s, I’m, it’s like you just said six months ago, you wouldn’t be able to say that. And it’s, 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. Um, it is really hard to wrap your head around the fact that this is not the, like the permanent state of being when you’re in the middle of it. Like it’s, oh yeah, the invitation you offer the invitation are 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, you know, or maybe who just recognize themselves in your description, maybe for the first time. Um, what do you say to them about how to, how to be in that, but also how to, in some way, even in the slightest way believe this invitation you just offered that this is not the forever state.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:14:12] 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. Um, you know, another one is just like really deep sadness and depression. Like I absolutely should have been on 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 on to any form of hope. So like, let yourself acknowledge how bad it is. And then when it comes to believing that it’s going to get better for me in, in those times, like 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:15:43] And she was basically, you know, at the end of her healing journey. And so, you know, knowing that this, 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. Like, you know, I 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. Um, my husband and I, it 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’s going to end. And it can be really, really dark today and it can get better at some point in the future.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:58] Yeah, I think finding those orbiters, 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. And it sounds, it sounds bizarre like that, that would actually make a difference. But I feel like it often does.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:17:27] 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. I 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 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. Uh, my larynx was over 70% blocked, and it turned out I had severe asthma in both of my lungs. And 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. Um, but it was, it was a process.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:44] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Hey, so we’d love to share more midlife reinvention stories on the podcast, like the recent one from Sara Botton, who, after decades in her career then being pushed out as she neared 60, launched Oldster magazine to an incredible reception that even led to a book deal. We love inspiring stories that show how changes not only possible, but often incredible at any age. And it’s not just about work. It’s about 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. One of the other things that you explore, I think is really interesting is teasing out this distinction between, tell me if I’m getting this right, identity and essence. You’re like, and you went to Harvard and you built this incredible career on your intelligence and your competence and being the most capable person in the world. And, and suddenly, like the most basic things are a struggle for you. Take me into this.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:19:53] And I also want to add, this is in the period where I was pretending like this wasn’t happening. So. Got it. Um, I, uh, 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, I have honestly taken for granted being a fast processor and like quick synthesizer of information and ideas my entire life. You know, that it works really well on Wall Street and in the white House and with my clients and I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it felt like, frankly, to like, not be fast and, and like very intelligent. And, and I even like struggle calling myself intelligent and like, feels arrogant, you know, but like the facts are what they are. I, 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 slow down in my reading comprehension, which as a writer, that’s like unfathomable, um, to, you know, I would be on a call with a client and say, okay, you know, like they, they share a problem.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:21:18] And, you know, I’m like, okay, um, 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 a, 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. Um. 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, I then had to grapple with these questions of like worth and identity. You 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? Yeah, I absolutely, I would have been like, no, no, definitely not. Definitely not.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:20] Right. You don’t want to be the person who says that.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:22:22] 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. Um, 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, 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. And 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, 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:17] Yeah. I mean, 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. 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. Exactly. 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?

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:24:58] Yeah. 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, you know, friends with and in my family who’ve gone through a divorce. And I’ve talked about how, you know, how much they realized their identity in the world was connected to, you know, being married and, and being partnered and not being a single mom and, and all of this stuff. And how when that changes, like you have to make a commitment to changing as well.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:35] Yeah. So so if somebody 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:26:12] 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 subbullet 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:01] Mhm. Yeah, I love that. As you’re describing, that question popped into my head was something like, um, when I think about what I would want my kid to be proud of about me, what would it be? Um, 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:27:47] Yes. Yes.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:49] Because it sounds almost harsh on the surface, but, um, but but take me deeper into this, like, tease this out for me.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:27:55] Okay. So to the point, um, 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, um, to call that out because that connects to the other half of the work that I do in the world. Um, but 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 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 and like, I’ll go to an ENT for that. And, 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 grind my teeth.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:29:43] Um, 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. And 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. No 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, it is hard to sit with pain, but it is only when I have made myself sit still and like, really reflect on what is happening, that I’ve been able to figure out what I really need to do to get better.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:28] Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, does it 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 tracks.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:31:45] 100%? Because the other thing that I know now, um, but I also refuse to acknowledge then because this, 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, it was about an illness period.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:15] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:32:27] I’m sorry.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:28] Which 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. Um, 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’s like the first minute or two minutes when they’re just like, what is it actually look like to sit with it? And just like the very first step in.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:32:54] 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, for, 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 for 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 ten 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 going to have to face them.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:11] Mhm. Yeah. You just a few minutes ago, you also mentioned something that I don’t want to skip over, and you brought it 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, um, 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, um, 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. Um, 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:35:03] Yeah, 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 She never wanted to admit all that was lost to her illness and then ultimately illnesses. Uh, because it felt selfish, you know, to. And also, I mean, let’s be honest, this was the 90s. It was 30 years ago. Like we didn’t have language for like most of this stuff. Um, but I realize now that it would have been perfectly appropriate for anyone in my family to grieve the experience of mom going from, you know, healthy overachiever, you know, Sunday school teacher, working full time Jazzercise, PTA, all the things to disabled in a matter of months. She 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. 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 and that I’m sure my mom would have agreed I was entitled to, that I never experienced.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:36:56] 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. And 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. Um, 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, 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. Um, but it’s it’s active work.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:26] Yeah. I would imagine it’s even as we have this conversation, like this is probably like going to be a practice that we 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:38:54] Exactly, exactly. And I realized in that, you know, I think we all have an inclination to want healing to be something where it’s like, okay, you know, this is the problem. This 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 like, we’re good, but that’s just not how it works. Like there’s always going to be another thing. Uh, for better or worse, I’ve learned.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:21] You write about hope also. Um, and we touched on hope a little bit in the beginning of our conversation, but you write about it more as like hope as like ruthlessness.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:39:31] Um, yes.

Speaker 3: [00:39:33] You know.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:33] Um, the way you define it, I haven’t really heard that before. Not optimism, not hey, things will work out. You’ve got to believe me. But ruthlessness. Um, 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?

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:39:54] 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. And I just, 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, you know, waking up in the middle of the night crying because you are unconsciously like in so much pain, um, or, you know, 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. So it’s like this mutually reinforcing concept, but it has to be tied to action. And you have to really believe it. Like I, 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 a 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? Marisa. Like, those are the days when you need the hope the most.

Speaker 3: [00:41:43] Mhm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:44] So somebody joining us and they’re at a really low point, maybe on the floor, um, doing the ugly cry, which, you know, like 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. Yeah. But does, does that land? Or are you saying like, no, we actually have to go further than that?

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:42:32] No, I if if you can in that like darkest of places believe that this situation, you know, whatever it is, has the potential to improve you, 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. You know, I am I am over two years out from getting Covid for the very first time, ironically. Um, and, you know, I still can’t do like a normal workout. Um, 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. Um, 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. Um, 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:55] 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 is that 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. They don’t have my history, they don’t have my health, they don’t have my like, they have a wide 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.

Speaker 3: [00:44:56] Yeah. And I.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:44:58] 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 that I think is important to say is like, and this is one that’s always a little bit, um, 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. And the example that I’ll give for this is, you know, my aunt who I talked about at the beginning of the show, um, 2023, one of her kids, my young cousin Amani, she went missing. Um, 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 4 or 5 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, like, 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, like, had to sit with that thought in my mind. And, 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:46:51] 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, 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. Now, 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. The only thing that I could hope for was to give my aunt the closure that she deserved, like she deserved, at minimum, to be able to, like, bury her kid It. And so we launched on a Sunday. By Friday, they found her body. And, uh, 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:31] Mhm. 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.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:48:46] Yes, yes, yes.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:50] 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.

Speaker 3: [00:49:05] Yeah.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:49:06] Yeah. Like when, you know, when we took my mom, uh, off active treatment for cancer and miss, 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. And she, there were like lots of parties. And she died at home like a couple days after her birthday party.

Speaker 3: [00:49:33] Mm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:35] What do you hope for now?

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:49:37] What do I hope for now? Um. Gosh, it’s so funny when you ask that question. I actually did not think about myself. I thought about our country. Um, I nationally, I hope that I hope that we can figure out how to rebuild our country together and take better care of one another. You know, there are a lot of people who are really hurting out there right now. And it just, it, it kills me. Um, 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:20] Mhm.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:50:21] No marathons or anything like crazy. Like I’m not one of those people like, well, maybe I can lift more weight, like do a couple pull ups, like that kind of thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:31] Yeah. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:50:41] Oh, joy. Like joy, laughter, and joy. Like I just feel like. I feel like it’s hard to have a good life if there’s no joy.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:51] Mhm. Thank you.

Marisa Renee Lee: [00:50:53] You got it. Thank you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:55] So let’s talk about some of the big Aha’s and actionable takeaways from this conversation. One thing that I’m really sitting with is how much how much permission Marisa gives people to just, you know, to 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, this concept of gray grief, that kind of fog like grief with no end date and no name until she gave it one. The line between identity and essence. The parts of us that 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. 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 Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Kris 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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