Dear Nadia, I am struggling with the world’s weight. I know it’s not mine alone to carry, but every bit of bummer-news is like an assault on my heart. How can I serve the world when the world’s condition is so heavy?

-Kathryn

Dear Kathryn,

Do you remember that early video game Tetris? Shapes fall from the top of the screen, and you rotate them so they fit together. When you get it right, a whole row disappears. It was oddly satisfying.

That is, until it inevitably sped up. Then the strategies I used before quickly failed me. The shapes would fall quicker than my brain could figure out how to rotate them. I’d panic, make bad choices, spin them the wrong direction—until I was buried under stupidly stacked shapes.

When you said every bit of bummer-news feels like an assault, that’s the image that popped into my head.

Because it feels like news isn’t informing us as much as it’s landing on us right now.

I used to be able to take each individual shape that fell and maybe place it in context, manage the truth of it so I didn’t feel buried. And the next one would drop and I’d try and do the same. But now that shit is falling on us at dizzying speed and there’s just no chance of managing it all.

So yeah Kathryn, the world feels heavy right now, and like it’s burying us under its stupidly stacked shapes.

It may be a lie that tender people are especially prone to believing: that if I really loved the world, I’d be able to carry it.

But none of us can carry it all, my friend. And yet each of us can carry a bit. Something. A mountain, or a morsel; a whole community or just a wee corner of the world that fits our hands.

None of us are equipped for all of it—but each of us is equipped for some of it.

My best friend lives in the Twin Cities and told me that last week, ICE was setting up in the parking lot behind a Lutheran church, not realizing the quilters were there that day. The women confronted them, asking if they were proud of what they were doing - and suggested that, if so, they should go set themselves up in front where more people could see them.

They left.

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So maybe serving a heavy world doesn’t mean absorbing its full weight. Maybe it means setting down what isn’t ours, and lifting the one small, specific thing that is. Tending a body. Telling the truth. Making enough soup to feed yourself—and pouring a little extra into a jar to drop off for a neighbor. Showing up to a demonstration even if you’ve never been to one. Loving fiercely where your feet actually are. Taking a video of anything you see that’s unjust, even if your hands are shaking. Resisting despair and all its empty promises.

That won’t save everything. But it will save something. And that is how we keep going.

May God guide us all to know what is ours to do; activists, grandmothers, lawyers, clergy, teachers, children, and of course, quilters.

In it with you,

Love,

Nadia

p.s. I commend to you this song by the luminous Ahlay Blakely.

I sing this sometimes with and for the women inside the prison. But on the day before my mastectomy, on my final Sunday with them before my medical leave, they insisted on encircling me with this song, and of course I just totally lost it and was teary mess.

p.p.s. I’d love to hear what you guys are doing. Is there a piece of this heavy world that fits into your own hand - and if so, tell me about it!

I recently discovered We Don’t Waste - the take food that would normally be thrown out for not being perfect, and packages it up to be used (for free) by folks who need it. They have an app for volunteers so if you a have a free afternoon you just log on to see what needs doing and sign up! I have a warehouse shift this Tuesday for a couple hours to load pallets and I suspect it will be just what I need to fend off despair another day.

-Susan

Dear Nadia, there is so much beauty and love and miracles in the world. I am going to look for them today. Sending you healing love.

-Kathy

Dear Susan and Kathy,

Several months after my first memoir was published, I discovered a website I had not previously heard of: Goodreads.

A book-centered social media platform for readers? Wild.

Now, what you need to know is that I had made a rule for myself not to read reviews of my book. Not because I didn’t care—but because I cared entirely too much. A good review would make me prideful; a bad one would make me despair. No good was to be had either way.

But when I saw Goodreads, I thought, I wonder if my book is on here.

It was.

And so were the reviews.

I couldn’t have prevented my sweet little hand from clicking on them if Idris Elba himself was standing there offering me cash and chocolate not to do so. I clicked. And then I scrolled.

It was like a relapse.

Most of the reviews were four and five stars. Did I read those? Um, no. I scrolled right past them until I found the one- and two-star reviews—and I read every single one. After all, the five-star people are clearly undiscerning. But the one-star people? They know things.

Within an hour, I called my editor and told her I was pretty sure I should stop trying to be a writer.

Why do we do this? Why does a single negative comment outweigh a hundred affirmations? I used to think it was just because I’m neurotic. And I am. But social psychologists have a name for it: the negativity bias.

Our brains are wired to keep us alive, not happy. When something feels threatening (physically or socially) we get a rush of cortisol and adrenaline. This was useful when we needed to remember where the saber-tooth tigers were. It was also useful when our belonging to the group was at risk. Humans cannot survive alone.

But now, bless our hearts, we get the same neurochemical dump from comment sections and streaming news services as we used to get from wooly mammoths.

Same hardware. Completely unregulated software.

For some reason our brains just don’t have the same urgency around compliments and thank you notes.

While pleasant things involve some oxytocin and serotonin, the impact long term is not the same. Plus if you’re anything like me, you ruminate on the negative shit more than the positive and it sort of calcifies in my brain like plaque.

So if you are having a hard time finding the good in people, I wonder if this, in part, would be why Susan.

Don’t get me wrong, people suck. They do. We do. We seem to have a perverse inclination toward the cruel and selfish and find endless ways to demonize others while valorizing ourselves.

There’s little sense in pretending otherwise.

But bless our little paleolithic hearts, but people are also all we’ve got, my friend.

And sometimes—astonishingly—we are heroic and tender and hilarious. We do unbelievably kind things for one another. I wish I knew the actual ratio of good to bad we put into the world - not what it feels like, but what it is. Because I suspect the good still outnumbers the bad.

And if that’s the case, then I think our friend Kathy is onto something.

There is so much beauty and love and miracle in the world.
I am going to look for them today.

As so many of us are taking social media apps off our phones, and realizing that consuming “news” all day – and by news I mean, media accounts of the very worst things people are doing to each other every minute of the day across the globe, is not in fact good for our spirits or mental health, then the question becomes, to what do we give our attention?

Perhaps this is the spiritual question for this new year. To what and to whom shall we give our attention?

I’m not a new year’s resolution kind of gal, but I got up this new year’s morning and thought maybe it IS time for a resolution, but the kind that is collective, not personal.

A Collective Resolution for the year of our Lord 2026.

(Maybe this is just for you and me Susan, but here we go…)

Whereas we find ourselves in a time in which it is increasingly difficult to see the good in people, and

Whereas people suck but are also unspeakably beautiful, and

Whereas we all, for reasons of still having ice age brains, are more easily impacted by the negative than the positive even if the later far outnumbers the former, and

Whereas we are exposed to content that rewards the loud, the divisive, and the alarming (even when those things may distort reality), and

Whereas we live in an economy in which our attention is our currency, and

Whereas we can no longer afford the cynicism about each other which keeps us numb and scrolling, and

Whereas we are still hunter gatherers who need each other to survive,

Therefore,

Be it resolved that:

We the people of 2026 will look for beauty.

We will write down the good things about each other.

We will call our friends just to tell them what we love about them.

When it is we who suck, we will admit it and move on.

We will refuse to be manipulated into believing that we do not need each other.

We choose attention as an act of love—and of resistance.

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(I am deeply indebted to my big sister, Barbara Lehr, for all our conversations and her insights about attention")

Dear Nadia. What if I start crying and never stop?

-Jeff

Dear Jeff,

Yesterday I was back in my occupational therapist’s office. I’d had several brief, sudden, intense bursts of pain at my surgical site the day before, and my thoughts went bleak.

What if I have to have another surgery?

What if this pain keeps coming back?

What if it never leaves? I’d probably just end up addicted to painkillers and scoring dope in the alley behind my house.

I didn’t say any of this out loud, but she could tell I was worried that something was wrong.

So, as she has many times before, she looked me in the eye and said—again, with a gentleness I will forever be grateful for:
“That is normal. I promise. You just have to tell your brain that these pains are not a sign of tissue damage. They are a sign of healing tissue damage.”

Jeff, for most of my life I’ve tried to hunch my emotional shoulders and protect whatever was wounded inside me. When I was younger, that might have been wise. But now it’s pointless. A couple of years ago an interviewer asked me why I so often write about things that made me cry. My best guess is this: for most of my life, I would rather die than show weakness. Crying—especially crying in public—felt like standing naked in front of flamethrowers.

But now… now it still feels like I’m naked, but my tears extinguish the flames.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know why grief’s delivery system is so wildly inefficient, why it seems to drop off all its packages at once, regardless of when they were shipped.

When sadness shows up, it puts its foot in the door and waves in all its friends. We don’t get to control the guest list. Compounded emotions like grief are wildly unpredictable. And humbling.

Yes, there is more bad news in the world than any of our nervous systems can handle—never mind our hearts. And that doesn’t even account for our own bespoke sorrow. But collapse is not what crying does. Crying releases pressure so collapse doesn’t happen.

So if you feel like you need a good cry and are simultaneously terrified that if you start you’ll never stop, let me look you in the eye and, with all the gentleness I can muster, say to you: that is normal. I promise. You just have to tell your brain that emotional release heals rather than harms—even if it feels awful in the moment.

This week I learned that tears caused by emotion are chemically distinct from tears caused by, say, wind. Emotional tears literally contain cortisol. Crying gets that shit out of our system. How lovely. Which makes me think now is a perfect time to stop fighting them and let our bodies do what they’re already offering to do: help relieve us.

I hope you agree.

And please—hand me the tissues.

In it with you,

Love,
Nadia

Related posts:

.

How do I remain a compassionate caregiver for my 89 year old mother who never once (not once) cared for me when I was ill, or broken-hearted, or bereft? How do I continue to spend 45 hours a week making sure that she is treated with dignity and decency by a horrible, elderly-hating Medicaid system that is just waiting for her to die and decrease the surplus population? How do I not self-medicate in my usual loathsome ways when she calls me fourteen times a day, and her Medicaid care manager, ten? How do I do this while getting older myself?

Where is God in all this?

Asking for a friend. 🙏🏻x

Dear Elissa,

When I was a kid - the youngest of three - I was known to shout “that’s not fair!” when my older siblings got to do something cool that I wasn’t allowed to do.

My mother’s response was always the same: “Nadia, LIFE isn’t fair”. An answer that sounds cruelly unsatisfying in a 8 year old’s ears.

But she was right. Life isn’t fair, which still makes me want to pound my raging little fists into a 1970s Formica table.

It’s true, Elissa. The imbalance of care you are carrying is, in no ways, fair.

But maybe it’s helpful to remember how unfairness cuts in more ways than one.

It is also not fair that you have the therapy hours, the tedious self-awareness, the creative life, and the long-term reciprocal love that perhaps your mother never had.

I’ve found myself thinking about you a lot over the last few days. I picture you as a girl; bereft, broken, unmothered in any satisfying sense of the word. And I keep wondering what river of circumstance and serendipity carried you all the way from there to here, from then to now, from her to you.

You asked me how do you keep giving care to an elderly mother who never once gave it to you, but I’ve been wondering how the hell you’ve ALREADY been doing it.

What unlikely waters can carry an ill-prepared girl that far?

From unmothered girl to imperfect caretaker.

Those waters, Elissa, are God’s resistless grace.

Dark and churning, calm and pitying.

A power higher.

Doing for us what could never happen if left to bootstraps and good character.

There is no fair trade between deserving and receiving to be had in this life (which feels inexcusable), but what there is instead, is so much grace.

The un-earnable, unbidden, unnoticed gifts of grace have somehow carried you here, and they will somehow carry you on.

When I was in labor with my son, I fought every growing wave of pain, my body tightened against each contraction trying foolishly to stop what cannot be stopped. Until finally I surrendered. I lay in a warm bathtub and with each contraction, I whispered to myself, “float”. I closed my eyes and surrendered, allowing my laboring body to buoy in the water until the pain subsided. Because you can’t float if you’re fighting.

So, Elissa, maybe the answer to both your questions of HOW do I do this and WHERE is God are the same: in the waters. Carrying us through girlhood and grief, resentment and redemption, Medicaid and mothering, recovery and dishes.

If it helps, please know that I too am trying to float more and fight less. And when that fails, I sometimes pound my now arthritic fists on the table. (But Formica, God bless, is nowhere in sight).

Love,

Nadia

is an award winning writer. She takes on herself, her family, the creative life and (delightfully)….cooking. Her latest book, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create is available now. You can find here her on Substack at .

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Where to find me this Summer and Fall:

Aug 3 - Denver, CO - Montview Presbyterian - preaching

Aug 10 - Denver, Co St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral - preaching

Aug 15 - Sioux Falls, SD - RED STATE REVIVAL

Aug 22 - Columbus, OH - RED STATE REVIVAL (waitlisted)

Aug 23 - Charleston, WV - RED STATE REVIVAL

Oct 3-5 - Rhinebeck, NY - Omega Institute Women’s Gathering (limited spots available)

Coming Soon:

Oct 6 - Philadelphia, PA - RED STATE REVIVAL (tickets not on sale yet)

Oct 16 - Missoula, MT - RED STATE REVIVAL (tickets not on sale yet)

COME SAY HI!

Dear Nadia,

Do you have uncertainty? I LOVE Jesus, but my faith is wobbly at best. Is your faith ever wobbly?

-Donna

Dear Nadia,

How do we increase our faith?

-Jason

Dear Donna and Jason,

For most of my life I thought that the only physical exercise that “counted” was going for a run, or working out at the gym - those sorts of things. And there were times in my life I would do just that for 30 minutes a day and then be sedentary for 23 ½ hours.

But I have started wearing a fitness tracker and am stunned to see how on days I don’t “workout” I still walk 10,000 steps a day just living my life. Just doing things like housework and grocery shopping – things I never thought counted as “fitness”.

So Donna and Jason, you probably have a lot more faith than you realize.

Because when it comes to spiritual fitness – sometimes in our lives we can hit the God Gym so to speak, and sometimes we just can’t and in those seasons, try and trust that there are a lot of spiritually unassuming parts of our lives that have an element of faith to them and that those parts really do add up.

Here’s an incomplete list:

If you dream about a good future for your children, that’s a form of faith.

If you are moved by the faith of your ancestors, that also counts.

If you have doubts – that is also a form of faith because at least you’re still engaged in the question.

Do you hold those you love in your heart when they are suffering? And even ask God to come to their aid? Faith.

Do you, as you say, LOVE JESUS? …totally counts.

Do you see the inherent dignity of other human beings – also faith.

Have you asked someone to pray for you because you just can’t pray right now? Faith.

Is there a feeling of gratitude for anything at all in your life - I mean AT ALL? That’s a kind of faith.

Here’s a good one: do you ever complain or tell God off? In the Bible, that’s called a lament – and you know what? It’s a form of faith.

All of that is to say, all the faith you need is already there no matter your thoughts and feelings at any given moment.

My own faith morphs and shifts into things that my Sunday School self would never recognize.

I guess I just no longer think of faith as intellectually assenting to theological propositions, or as regularly confirming in myself that I believe all the wildest stories in the Bible are literally, factually, historically accurate. Faith functions in my life as something closer to gravity than ideology.

So, as I’ve been known to say, if you are straining to touch a faith that feels out of reach and judging yourself for falling short please know this: God always puts all the best shit on the bottom shelf.

I promise.

So maybe your prayer for today doesn’t need to be Lord, increase my faith, but Lord increase my awareness of what faith already looks like in my life.

In it with you,

Nadia

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p.s. - what counts as faith in your own life??

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Red State Revivals Update:

Birmingham, Jackson, Louisville, Des Moines and Atlanta are all sold out.

Some tickets are left for St Louis, Lincoln, and Dallas. Grab ‘em soon.

Look soon for announcements about: Salt Lake City, Boise, Phoenix, Charleston SC, Raleigh NC!

Dear Nadia,

Why does life have to hurt so much?

-Gemma

Dear Gemma,

I’ve typed and deleted so many starting sentences to this answer.

The first one was:

When I was 13, every single thing hurt.

Then I deleted that and wrote this: When My friend Rachel died I would stare into the middle distance for what must have been hours, as if there was something a few hundred feet away that held some kind of fucking answer, but none came.

I struggled with exactly how to begin my reply to your question, not because there are so many betrayals and losses to choose from (a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of disappointments - sometimes in other people, sometimes in the world but mostly in myself), but because I know life hurts but I do not, in fact, know why.

I’ve yet to come across an explanation for “why does life have to hurt so much” that does not, to my own ear, sound cruel, facile, or delusional. And frankly, Gemma, the more I think about it, the more I would advise you to avoid anyone who tells you they do, for they will surely try and sell you a utopia, a narcotic or a closet organizer. I’ve fallen for all of those at one time or another and can report back that none of them help.

The fact is that life just hurts. No one gets out of here unscathed.

And maybe there is no satisfying “why” to be found no matter how much we grope around for one.

But there is some wisdom available to us, and it has helped me (once I stop being pissed off because “helpful wisdom” is almost never what I want to hear). But here’s some anyhow:

Some hurts are optional. I’m not saying all of them, just some of them. That’s what I have found, anyhow.

Here’s a short list of avoidable hurts from my own life:

The shitty feeling I get when I continue to take things personally that have nothing to do with me.

My corrosive unwillingness to accept that what happened in the past is unchangeable.

My disappointment when someone doesn’t meet an unspoken expectation I have of them.

The betrayal I feel when I allow myself to be hurt by the same person over and over because I won’t accept who they are.

Every single time I compare myself to others.

And here's a big one:

Hangovers. Hangovers are optional suffering.

The other thing I want to say Gemma, and I am leaving this for last because I am scared I won’t say it right, but here goes: If nothing hurt in life, I think we’d all be boring as hell. Seriously. Also I don’t think we’d be very compassionate. I suspect that all art would suck and I know for sure we’d not be as funny.

I’d love to say that maybe all the hard times are behind you but we both know that’s not how this thing works. So I will say this: I hope your experience of being hurt sharpens your awareness of small kindnesses and little mercies, rather than obstructing them. I hope that love, when offered, feels all the more precious and worthy of cherishing because your heart has known it’s opposite.

I’m sorry for whatever ugliness you’ve had to endure, Gemma. But may the ugliness allow the beauty to be seen MORE clearly and not less.

It’s not an answer to why life hurts, just an answer to how we get through it without the hurt winning.

In it with you.

Love, Nadia

Related posts:

Joseph

Short answer:

Dear Joseph,

None of this is intellectually tenable. So that struggle you find yourself in? You can take a break from that. Also I find the word “personal” to be kind of bullshit too. Like I can find my “Personal Lord and Savior” in my contacts somewhere between my “Personal Assistant” and my “Personal Trainer”. This, my friend, is not something you need to buy in to in order to have faith.

You need not muster up any feelings of “closeness to God”, and you need not intellectually assent to theological propositions. Maybe faith isn’t about the intellect or even “feelings”. Maybe it's about a deep knowing. And I suspect that if you can quiet down all those church-y messages you received, you might, in the moments between your breaths, in the moments between your doubts, be just barely still enough to know that God is.

Love,

Nadia

Long answer:

Dear Joseph

As a schoolgirl I was taught to believe that certain formulas were reliable; 1 + 1 will always equal 2. This was provable and beyond questioning. 

And then I’d go to church where we were taught to believe all this Christian stuff in the same way we believed in math.  When argued correctly, we could use human reason to prove the absolute truth of the Christian faith. All the stories in the Bible and, more importantly, all the doctrine the church made up were also reliable, provable and beyond questioning.  So having faith meant approaching the Bible and the doctrine and teachings of Christianity with as much certitude and unwavering confidence as I would simple math.   And one would never dream of doubting arithmetic.  I mean, if mathematics was the sort of thing where sometimes 1 + 1 = 2, if mathematics was the sort of thing where you know,  2,000 years ago 1+1 = 2 but with the changes in culture it just simply no longer does…well, then all of Mathematics would be up for grabs. 

By the time I left the conservative church I was raised in, I no longer believed that only Church of Christ members were “going to heaven”, or that women were spiritually inferior to men, or that God created this wild diversity of humanity but was only “pleased” with the small subset that happened to be devout Christian heterosexuals who went to church and never used swear words. This also meant that I did not believe in that whole “God loves us very much but will send us into a lake of burning fire to be tortured for eternity if we are gay or allow women to pray out loud when men are present or if we have sex before we are married.”

But when I walked away from THAT I was also walking away from the only world I had ever known: worship, hymns, retreats, camps, potlucks, devotionals, prayer, plus also: grape juice & crackers each Sunday.

It took me years to realize that the symbol system and stories and music and language and practices of Christianity formed me in ways that I could not escape by simply no longer going to church, Joseph.  But they formed me in ways that transcended the strident certainty of the Church of Christ. So I would pray without realizing I was doing it, and would be moved to tears by hearing a hymn in a movie score without wanting to be, and when my roommate would find the wallet she thought she’d lost I’d say “call the neighbors” without realizing she didn't know the Bible like I did and wouldn’t get the joke. My life had been inflected by faith from the time I was growing in my mother’s belly and to have only negative feelings about Christianity was to also have some negative feelings about my own being.

So, Joseph, I left the church of my childhood for reasons of self-preservation, but I returned to the faith of my childhood for reasons of self-love because there were little pieces of me back in there that I eventually could see and love and well . . . I wanted them back.  Leaving Christianity felt like a way to save myself but eventually, reclaiming some aspects of Christianity felt like a way to love myself.

Not sure if that all makes sense, Joseph and I do not know your story. But I can hear your desire to try and figure this all out, so if I had any advice for you it would be to know that you do not have to strive for something that is already woven inside of you. Whatever is there, whatever knowing, whatever love for lost things and loaves and fishes, whatever prayer your grandmother taught you that you kind of want to also teach your own children, whatever comfort in the mystery, that is faith, my friend. And it is enough.

So yeah, I believe in God and even the resurrection. But not in the way I believe in math.

I believe because, as The Hold Steady song goes,

She crashed into the Easter mass with her hair done up in broken glass
She was limping left on broken heels
And she said, "Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?

And I believe because it is in me to do so.

And I believe because I have borrowed the faith of others.

And I believe because of how bonkers all the Bible stories are not despite how bonkers all the Bible stories are.

And “I believe, help my unbelief”.

And I believe because:

Jesus sought me when a stranger

wandering from the fold of God.

And I believe because yesterday I saw this flower:

And I believe because I have experienced it all to be true and am unconcerned whether or not it is fact.

So, thanks for asking. And I hope your faith finds you and that you welcome whatever shape it takes and that you refrain from thinking it isn’t enough.

Be gentle with yourself, Joseph.

Love, Nadia

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Question for you: What does “having faith” mean?

Related post:

(click above to hear me read this to you!)

Dear Nadia,

I’m 76 and have been hospitalized for 4 weeks with meningitis. It has been a humbling experience. I’m finding myself wondering why me and if God is with me.

-M.S.

Share The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Dear  M.S.,

My sister Barbara is visiting me right now, and today at breakfast, as sisters do, we spoke of suffering.

She’s uniquely qualified to speak on this as a dues-paying member of two clubs nobody wants to join: the mothers of killed sons one, and the diagnosed with breast cancer one. The fuckery of the fact that her membership to the second club started two months after the first cannot be overstated.

This morning, my wise, loving, big sister reminded me of the most helpful thing anyone said to her about suffering. At the time, she was unknowingly in the final days of the “before” of her life’s bright and terrible “after” when a friend, who herself was living with cancer, said to my sister that she (like you) struggled with the question, “why me?”.

Friend, it is normal to scan our lives for causal factors when life turns to shit. Christians do it. Buddhists do it. New Age folks do it.

We ask our own version of the same thing: Did I maybe do something to deserve this?

A hidden sin, or an unknown karmic debt.

What in all the power of negative thinking brought this upon me?

“Why me?” is as human a question as any I have heard, but that doesn’t mean it’s helpful.

We tend to quietly ask something similar when bad things happen to other people, (not out loud, of course for that would be horrible of us), like, how much processed foods did the recently diagnosed indulge in? Were they careful, were they prepared, were they being good when the bad thing happened? We MUST know because we must, above all things, assure ourselves that we are safe.

Our sweet little broken-ass human brains look for evidence of blame and deserving like they are our salvation itself.

It’s understandable. We must keep the chaos monster at a safe distance through any incantation or elimination diet or piety available. Because it’s terrifying to allow for the possibility that if it happened to them it could happen to us - and equally terrifying to admit that we do not, in fact, have the power to control the universe. Which brings me back to my sister’s friend, who said the most helpful thing.

“I stopped asking why me,” she told my sister, “and started asking why NOT me?”

M. S., I know you already know this, but I’m going to say it for my own sake. These are not words that ever belong in the mouth of anyone but ourselves.

But for my sister, there was no “fuck cancer” coffee mug, or vapid little “everything happens for a reason” comment, or any other Purpose Driven drivel that did for her what the question, “but why NOT me” did.

Because realizing there was no satisfying answer to why NOT me helped her realize there was also no satisfying answer to why me.  And this led her to radical acceptance of what is (not endorsement, mind you, but acceptance).

Life is capricious, M.S. - in a moment everything can change. I wish I could tell you here’s what to do to avoid that. Or here’s why bad things happen to good people, or here’s why good things happen to absolute bastards, but there are no honest formulas to be had. Not really.

All I know is that your ill health in this moment is no more a punishment than my for-the-time-being good health is a reward.

So, I wish you joy and good healing, M.S. I wish you freedom from the tyranny of “why?” questions. I wish you long lists of things you love about yourself. I wish you pleasing memories. I wish you belly laughs and pain-free napping and every good thing life has.

p.s. I’ll (to the best of my ability) get to the 2^nd part of your question - the theological one, is God with me in my suffering in the next couple days.

Until then…

In it with you,

Nadia

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How do you grieve without losing your mind?

Signed,

A Reader

Dear reader,

When I answered my phone on a Friday morning in August 2021, and my sister said “someone killed Henry” (her son), my mind rejected the words. I knew what they meant individually; I knew what “someone” meant and what “killed” meant and what “Henry” meant. But together they were indecipherable.  

So I said, “no.”

Reader, I’m not sure how many times in a row I said no, but it was many, many times. No is the only response my mind had to the words Someone and Killed and Henry all in a row. So my mind grabbed the biggest NO it could find, placed it between her hands and pushed to try and keep the three impossible words out.

But it didn't work.

Then, a couple days later, when I was trying to pack to fly to where my nephew had been living so Eric and I could clean out Henry’s apartment for my sister, my mind could no longer tell me what to put in a suitcase. My mind had done really well up until then knowing how many shirts to include, and what size travel toothpaste is allowed, and where my toiletry case is. But this time she failed. I failed. I am a seasoned traveler and I packed for shit that day.

I guess one way to think of it is that I had lost my mind. But another way is this: my mind had to take to the skies, it had to go circle the globe and then dig itself a hole in which to rest in order to ever come back to me.

So, sweet reader, how do you grieve without losing your mind?

You can’t.

The poor thing is undergoing a prolonged software update. Because it had understood the world one way – as one in which nephews aren’t shot to death and that world doesn’t exists any more.

It had a way of understanding a world in which your best friend doesn’t suddenly betray you, or a world in which other people have cancer but not you, or a world in which your husband still loves you, and that world doesn't exist anymore.

So if your mind doesn’t remember to pack underwear, or how to keep showing up for work, or the name of the person who cuts your hair, try and just be gentle with it. It will come back, but it and you will be changed.

No one escapes this, my friend. Which sucks, but is a comfort…because you’re not alone in the madness. And we who have also lost our minds with grief will overpack for you. Just in case. Maybe not underwear, but you know what I mean…

Love, Nadia

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Dear Nadia,

How do I guard against being a bitter and mean old lady.

- A reader

Dear Reader,

When I was younger, I never ate dark chocolate. I thought it was for fools and idiots. Why in the world would anyone CHOOSE dark chocolate when smooth, creamy, delicious milk chocolate is available? I scoffed.

But then life happened to me, as it does to all of us. My pallet matured, I suppose. I tasted things that were bitter and they started to seem pleasing to me. Arugula (with a bit of goat cheese), coffee (with a bit of cream), broccolini (with more than a bit of salted butter).

I found these combinations to be compliments to each other. One making the other stand out by their contrast on the tongue.

Bitterness in foods is a delight because of how it works within an entire world of flavors and texture.

But in humans, there is no butter to make bitterness palatable. We aren’t broccolini, baby.

You know this already or you wouldn’t be asking how to avoid it.

So, sweet reader, my question back to you is this: how kind can you be toward yourself? Could you maybe, even though it’s super cringy, place your hand on your heart and ask it “What hurt you? And how can we move on together?”. Because no one is born bitter. Bitterness happens when the pain and sorrow of life overtake us so much that in defense we beat life to the punch. Because assuming everything is shit and always will be is less vulnerable than having our hoped dashed again. Better to just not hope at all and then make everyone in our lives suffer us. But reader, I am hopeful. Defiantly so. There are a million forms of shit out there, it’s true. But what is also true is that there are always more forms of love. So let’s you and I refuse to reverse the math on that.

There is more love than shit if we dare to look.

Foods to love. Dogs to love. People to love. Sunrises to love. Pizza to love. Little jagged pieces of our hearts to love. Quirks of others to love. Literature to love. Bad jokes to love.

What would you add to this list, reader?

We will all start there.

Love, Nadia  

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