Marisa Renee Lee: Making A Stubborn Commitment to Hope

Marisa: I am a deeply stubborn person. I was stubbornly committed to hope the entire time I was sick. I just promised myself, “This will not be forever. You will not always feel this way. You will find your way through this.” So that stubborn, persistent attitude was one thing that came up over and over again.

Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Marisa Renée Lee. She’s an award-winning author, advocate, and speaker, recognized for her work on grief, healing, and uncertainty. A Harvard graduate and a rabble-rouser of social healing, she formerly served as a deputy director in the Obama White House, and currently she is the CEO of Beacon Advisors, a social impact consulting firm. She’s best known as the author of the New York Times bestseller Grief Is Love: Living with Loss. And Marisa Renée Lee has written a new book, which is what we’re going to be talking about. It’s called Waiting for Dawn: Living with Uncertainty. Marisa, welcome.

Marisa: Thank you so much for having me. I always laugh a little bit at the “rabble-rouser.” A reporter used that when I was working for Obama, and I just have not been able to shake it. It always makes me laugh.

Tami Simon: I like it. A rabble-rouser in a pink office — my kind of person.

Marisa: Yes.

Tami Simon: To begin, Marisa, for our listeners who are meeting you for the very first time, give us a bit of a sense of what you mean when you talk about going through a period of uncertainty — what that means to you, and the period of uncertainty that you went through that you describe in your new book, Waiting for Dawn.

Marisa: I think of uncertainty as the persistent feeling of stress, or overwhelm, or both, relating to the unknown. These are seasons of change that we are just thrust into — things that we didn’t choose for ourselves, like a serious illness, a divorce, caretaking for an older parent, perhaps a challenge with your child, infertility. There are a lot of these moments that just inevitably come up for all of us in life, and I felt like we needed better language for talking about them, and more information to figure out how to live well in the midst of them. For me, what led to Waiting for Dawn and really digging into this topic of uncertainty was that a little over two years ago, I got COVID for the very first time, and it turned into long COVID. I am still dealing with the consequences of that viral infection.

Tami Simon: You write about how when we go through a period of uncertainty, it can change our very identity — who we think we are. We come out on the other side and we’re different. How would you say living through long COVID changed you in terms of your identity?

Marisa: The first thing I’ll say is there were elements of my identity that I absolutely had taken for granted — and didn’t realize I had taken them for granted until they disappeared. I have gone through life with the privilege of a certain level of intelligence, being a fast processor, being very good at synthesizing lots of pieces of information and data and helping others make sense of them. These types of skills served me well on Wall Street, in the White House, running my own business, and supporting my clients. And one day my brain just didn’t work the same. All of a sudden, I would be on a call with a client and I would say, “You know, I have three things that I think we should consider here.” In the middle of describing thing one, thing two would just completely disappear. I started burning food that I was making my family for breakfast and dinner — I had never done that before. I’ve been a proud home cook since I was a small child. I was leaving my car door open overnight. As I realized that I was no longer this sharp, fast, intelligent person, I had to own up to the fact that certain parts of my identity were frankly more superficial in nature.

I ended up making sense of that for myself by instead focusing on more immutable states of being. Like, what are the things that I want people to talk about when I’m no longer here? What are the traits that I want my son to inherit? Those things about us — I find they don’t really change. But my surface-level identity was absolutely rocked by this experience with illness.

Tami Simon: What about your essence identity — the part of you that seems to be true through it all, even the underground descent that you’ve been through?

Marisa: The first thing that came up for me when you asked that question is: stubborn. I am a deeply stubborn person. I was stubbornly committed to hope the entire time I was sick. I just promised myself, “This will not be forever. You will not always feel this way. You will find your way through this.” So that stubborn, persistent attitude was one thing that came up over and over again.

I would say the other things are just that I will always be a generous person. Even in this season of pain and uncertainty, I’ve wanted to share. I want people to know what’s happening in my life so that if they have a colleague, a friend, a family member who also goes through an experience with long COVID, they know that it’s real, and they know how to help them.

Tami Simon: In the midst of feeling what you describe as a type of gray fog — being in this brain fog — how would you recommend someone navigate who’s experiencing that right now? They’re in a period of uncertainty. It might not be from long COVID; it might be from some other overwhelming stress in their life. They notice they’re not functioning at their tip-top level. They’re compromised in some way, and they feel really bad about it. What would you recommend?

Marisa: I’ll say it as someone who’s lived through it. The research on grief and loss and uncertainty tells us that these experiences change your brain and make executive functioning more challenging. So I want people to treat themselves with gentleness and compassion. I want people to be honest about whatever it is they are experiencing.

I lived in denial for the first four to five months of my long COVID experience, and I caused more suffering — and I wish that I had been honest about how sick I was from the beginning. I think I would be in a better place today, if I’m being completely honest. And then the other thing I want to tell people: when you find yourself in this place where you don’t know what to do and life is unrecognizable, you have to ask for help. You can’t try to fix it all or do it all on your own, because it’s just too hard.

Tami Simon: You write about in Waiting for Dawn how not only did you learn to ask for help, but that you had to draw different boundaries in your life to care for yourself. And you tell a tremendous story about how you made the difficult decision not to take on someone in your extended family — an infant that needed care. I wonder if you can tell us that story, how you navigated through it, and what you think the lessons are for people.

Marisa: This was a really hard one. It’s still a hard one for me to talk about. It was a hard situation to live through and to write about. In 2023, one of my younger cousins went missing. She had dinner at my aunt’s house on a Sunday, and I got a call that following Thursday that no one had seen her or heard from her since — and she had just had a baby. She had a four-week-old child. We were all concerned and overwhelmed — what is going on here? Frankly, she was poor, Black, uneducated, living in the rural South, and I just felt like investigators weren’t doing enough to try to figure out what had happened to her.

At the time, my aunt was caring for my cousin’s two older children. My husband and I — our son is adopted, and we worked for five years to get to our child — and my aunt felt like, based on what she was seeing in terms of how we care for our son, that if my cousin wasn’t found alive, my husband and I should adopt this baby as well.

It was such an overwhelming and difficult period of time, and honestly the last thing I wanted to do was say no to this woman who I love and who has encountered tremendous suffering. At the time we didn’t know what had happened to my cousin, but if she had died, that would have been my aunt’s fourth child to die.

So I wanted to say yes, but I also felt this insistence in my gut that yes wasn’t the right answer. I told her I didn’t think that was a commitment my husband and I could take on at the time. She thankfully responded with understanding and compassion for the situation my husband and I were in, where we were also caretaking for his dying mother.

When I said no, I also promised her that I would use every resource at my disposal to find my cousin. With the help of some friends — again, asking for help — we launched a nationwide PR, communications, and public engagement campaign, and within a week, my cousin’s body was found. She had unfortunately been killed by her husband. He was actually just officially convicted a couple of weeks ago.

Tami Simon: And this decision that you struggled with but then knew was the right one for you — did you feel the ripple of that, now looking back and seeing what happened and seeing how making a decision that was right for you actually had positive repercussions you might not have expected? Not that that always happens.

Marisa: In the immediate aftermath of the decision, even though my aunt was supportive, understanding, and compassionate, I still felt terrible. But it also gave me the capacity to take on a missing persons search, which I knew nothing about. And now, almost exactly three years later, my aunt is able to fully agree with me that we both made the right decision. This child being with her has been really healing and lovely. I get the best updates and pictures and get to see how happy he is. And I know that even though it’s obviously hard for her — she’s in her 60s and she has an almost three-year-old — she’s happy, too. It’s been good for both of them.

Tami Simon: You write in Waiting for Dawn about how we’re all capable of living through devastating situations, but we need to identify a Sherpa and borrow their playbook — a Sherpa being a mountain guide. And Marisa, you’re our Sherpa for this conversation on living through uncertainty. I want to learn from your playbook. You’ve shared a bit about how a lot of stress and brain fog can set in as a result of that stress — it’s actually just a neurological response, and our executive function turns off. What about when we recognize we need to have different boundaries than perhaps we used to have? We don’t have the same capacities we thought we had at a different time in our life. What’s your Sherpa advice for someone who’s having that recognition right now?

Marisa: My Sherpa advice again goes back to honesty. When I finally reckoned with the fact that what I had was long COVID and I needed to deal with it, I took some time off from work. When I was coming back, I said to myself, “You’re not the same, and if you try to work in the ways that you have throughout your career up until this point, you’re going to do damage, and you are going to keep yourself from either fully healing or healing as quickly as you possibly can.”

So I made a list of the things that I can still do and the ways I can still contribute to my clients and the boards I sit on. I got rid of a couple of things that were on my plate, and I then wrote down the things I can no longer do. I reached out to each of my clients individually to share — and one of them ended up deciding to part ways. The things felt reasonable to me. I couldn’t take on a lot of back-to-back calls because at the time my lungs were so bad. I had severe asthma in both of them for the first time in my life, and I couldn’t have a conversation longer than 15 minutes without experiencing shortness of breath. I would say, “I’m happy to work hard on projects, but I can’t do quick, immediate turnarounds. I don’t have the energy or the mental capacity for that right now.” And they decided to go in a different direction.

It hurt. These were people who were also friends. But you have to be true to yourself first when you find yourself in one of these seasons. Self-compassion and putting yourself first isn’t selfish — it’s actually self-preservation, and I want people to understand that.

Tami Simon: You have referenced these periods of uncertainty as a season, and I’m curious — are you out of winter? Are we in springtime now? Where are we?

Marisa: I’m getting there. People usually ask, “Are you still in that season, or has dawn arrived yet?” I would say I am getting closer, for sure. I am feeling so much better than I was even six months ago, but I am still very limited in a lot of ways. I can’t pick up my child. I can’t really travel independently. I can’t drive on my own for more than 45 minutes to an hour. I can’t exercise or do a lot of different physical activities. I still spend about two hours of every workday resting, because I know that’s what my body needs to recover. At this point I feel like winter is starting to come to a close, but we’re not fully out of it yet. I’m in a new healing season — figuring out what I need to do to really fully regain my strength, both mentally and physically. But we’re getting there.

Tami Simon: Something you addressed in your book — did you have to, quote-unquote, “swallow your pride” in any way as part of this process? Tell me about that.

Marisa: Yes. Interestingly, I think the hardest place to swallow my pride wasn’t actually around work, but was around family life and my own personal independence. An example: I couldn’t take a bath because the heat of the water was actually really bad for my dysregulated nervous system. So some days I would either be sitting on the floor of our shower to bathe, or I would have to wait five hours before I could stand up to properly take a shower. I realized in the midst of that that washing my hair — I have these curls, it’s great, looks great, but it’s also a lot of work — I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have my arms up at my head for that long. Having to ask for help with these very basic things that I had previously taken for granted was really hard.

I am the cook in my house. My husband can cook, but it’s something that I love to do, that I’ve been doing since I was a child, and I was not able to do that most days because I couldn’t be on my feet long enough. I would forget to make something, I would burn something. Asking for help with just these very basic life tasks was very humbling, and I swallowed a lot of pride. Like, pride is gone — he left at least a year and a half ago.

Tami Simon: I’m curious how that alone changes someone. Just pride’s gone.

Marisa: I heard a sermon a couple of months ago and the pastor said, “If you are humble, it is impossible to be humiliated.” I have just been deeply humbled by this experience with illness, and I have decided to view that humility as a strength. I also just feel like I am so much more aware than I ever was before of the challenges that people with disabilities and bodies that function differently face. I am honestly amazed at how some of my friends in the disability community continue to function and show up for themselves and for others and for me during this period. I am honestly in awe of them.

Tami Simon: You mentioned, when I asked you about the essence of you — what hasn’t been changed by this long period of uncertainty about your health — a stubborn commitment to hope. In Waiting for Dawn, you define hope in an interesting way: as a feeling of trust. And then I’m going to read this quote: “Hope is trusting that something better is coming your way, and then doing whatever is necessary to make it so. My hope and my commitment to hope is ruthless.” That’s a really interesting use of the word “ruthless.” What does that mean — that your commitment to hope is ruthless?

Marisa: It means, first of all, no one can take it away from me. It is mine. And I will do whatever is necessary to create that better future — whether we’re talking about the work I do through my consulting practice to create a more just and equitable country and broader world, or my commitment to healing. Long COVID is still a new thing. There is a lot that we don’t know about it, and yet I am 1,000% convinced that I’m not just going to heal and get better, but I am going to be stronger, both mentally and physically, than I was before. I will not let anything get in the way of that.

The science of hope is something I was grateful to discover — my feelings and opinions kind of came first, and then the research actually matched up very well. When we open up our minds to the belief that things can get better, that then creates the space for us to start to see what actions are necessary to actually make it so. I have to do a lot of work to create the future that I am aiming for, but I’m going to do it. No one can take that away from me.

Tami Simon: Marisa, this quality — this ruthless commitment to hope — is something that really inspires me. I wish I had 100% of that. It’s something I’m trying to develop. I wonder if you could speak to that person who says, “You know, the truth is, when things get tough, I have a tendency to collapse. I give up. I don’t believe it’s going to work out. Some part of me just goes in the corner and collapses.”

Marisa: First thing: the collapse is okay. My commitment to hope isn’t something that occurs in isolation. There were also so many days — so many days — where I would spend five, six hours in bed, and at least half of those hours in tears. The number of times I was up in the middle of the night in such excruciating pain that even with all sorts of medications and sleeping aids, I still couldn’t sleep and would just be awake trying not to give in to despair.

I don’t want people to think that because they have those darker, harder moments, it means they aren’t also able to access the hope. I think you have to have those moments in order for the hope to be real. And if you are struggling to figure out how to transition from “This is impossible. I’m never going to be myself again. Things aren’t going to get better” — to get from there to a place where you do believe things can get better — I encourage people to think about who they can turn to as their own arbiters of hope.

I was very lucky. I shared that I was sick with long COVID on social media, and there was a young woman who was following me on Instagram because my work on grief had helped her make sense of her own long COVID journey. She was at the end of her healing journey and she reached out and offered help. I now see the same doctor as her, and she was a regular source of hope and real support for me when I was at my worst.

I also think sometimes we have to go back and look at different situations to feel that sense of hope. Whenever I am dismayed by the state of our country and whatever current insanity is coming out of Washington, I think about people like John Lewis and all of these amazing Americans who worked so hard for things like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act — which we know is currently being decimated, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t undo the harm. We have been in other hard places before. I want to push people to figure out what is going to work for them to feed their commitment to hope.

Tami Simon: You mentioned that doing whatever is necessary to make it so — it’s not just trusting that something better is coming your way, it’s doing whatever is necessary. Can you speak more about that action element?

Marisa: In order for that future to be created, you can’t just wait for it to happen. Your hope has to be grounded in your present reality, and then you have to take the actions necessary to create the future that you desire. As a practical example: you suddenly find yourself, after twenty years, laid off from your job. You’re depressed and overwhelmed and don’t know what to do. All of those feelings are valid. Hoping that you’re going to win the lottery is not a winning strategy. Hoping instead that you’re going to find your way to whatever is next in terms of employment — and then taking a first step, asking someone for help, putting together a new resume, or posting about some of your skills on LinkedIn — taking those kinds of actions that can actually get you to where you want to go. That’s how you make the difference.

And it’s so interesting — I didn’t hear about this story until after my grandfather died. He passed away in 2022. My family is originally from the South. My grandfather and grandmother believed that there would be better opportunities for their children and grandchildren if they could make their way north. They wanted to be a part of the six million Black Americans who came north during the Great Migration.

My grandfather found a new opportunity, and the night before my grandparents were leaving Georgia, the man who owned the farm where my grandfather worked showed up at my grandparents’ home with a couple of buddies and trace chains — these thick metal chains you use to attach a horse to a wagon. Obviously they were intending to beat him into submission and keep him from leaving. My grandfather met them at the door with a shotgun, and our family left the next day. Within a year they were in New York, not far from where I get to live today. When I think about that level of ruthlessness — especially for a Black man back then to even raise a gun to a bunch of white men — it’s terrifying for me to even think about. But he knew that there was better out there, and he was going to do whatever was necessary to make it happen.

Tami Simon: You use this phrase in telling that story — that we can draw on inherited hope — and I really like that. Sometimes people draw on the family traumas that have traveled through their line. But in using the phrase “inherited hope,” it’s like: what about the actions people took that allowed us to be here now? I found that tremendously inspiring. Now, your definition of hope — a feeling of trust — almost sounds to me like faith, like continuous action based on faith. I was wondering how you relate to that word.

Marisa: For me personally, faith and hope are siblings. I grew up in the Black church — a church that my grandparents helped start when they moved up to New York. I believe that faith and hope are things that can feed upon one another. Even if you don’t necessarily identify as a more traditional person of faith, I do think having some sort of spiritual connection to your hope and to that future that you desire can be helpful. For me, I found it through a number of sources — Christian texts, for one, and I am a daily Bible reader — and also through Buddhism and mindfulness.

Tami Simon: I want to hear more about that, and as our Sherpa, how that possibly can play an important role if we’re going through, as you call it, a season of real unwanted uncertainty in our life.

Marisa: One thing that kept me afloat throughout the worst of long COVID — and it comes up in different language, but it is both in the Bible and very much in Buddhism — is the sense of impermanence, and the fact that we’re all going to have these moments of pain. That is a big part of what Buddhism teaches, and the 23rd Psalm — the valley of the shadow of death. We will have these times where we feel like we are in valleys, dark places, all alone. But they are also impermanent. So for me, even when the present moment was painful, making a commitment to it — understanding that this hurts, this is terrible, and it is not forever — that led me, not always right away, but eventually, to a place of: okay, what can I do to make today a little bit better?

Because today is what it is. It may just be a day where I am going to spend six hours in bed watching Emily in Paris until Netflix asks if I’m still watching. That just might be all I can do today. Or I remember, Christmas was coming, and I was really depressed. I was really sick. I was having a hard time even getting around our house. I love Christmas — I am that Christmas mom — and I just felt like I couldn’t do it as well as I wanted to do it for my kid. We had just lost our dog of twelve years. So it was a hard time. I found myself one day just looking for fancy chocolate online. I wanted a treat. And that actually led me to not just the good chocolate, but the quote that the book leads off with — that is actually from a box of chocolate that a very depressed Marisa went looking for on the internet.

Tami Simon: I love that. One of the things you write about so beautifully in Waiting for Dawn is the unexpected terribleness of your dark passage. I mentioned already how finding that your brain doesn’t work quickly — how disturbing that can be in terms of your sense of identity. But the other thing you describe is how, right when you’re down, traumas that you’ve pushed away suddenly have the opportunity to surface — you’re vulnerable in a certain way, your normal defenses aren’t working, and before you know it, all of this underground material is in your face. Can you talk about that and how it relates to waiting for dawn?

Marisa: Oh man, that was the worst, and that was definitely one of the harder chapters to write. Unfortunately, when we are our most stressed and overwhelmed, things that we have ignored come back to haunt us. Whether it’s as simple as a headache that you’ve had on and off your entire life that surfaces when your boss is on you for something, or — the more extreme version for me — having to reckon with the fact that I had become something I don’t think I fully realized I feared until it happened: a sick mom.

I was raised by a sick mom from the time I was 13 until my mom died when I was 25. She was sick and just got sicker and sicker, and then was gone. I obviously knew that was a hard and stressful and uncertain time for me and my family. But some of it was just circumstantial — it was the ’90s. I wasn’t going to therapy. None of us were. It was just, “Mom is sick. We’re all going to do our best,” and you kept it moving. I also remember, even as a child, feeling like if I was upset about the fact that my mom was unwell, that was selfish — that was making it about me, when really this situation is about her. She’s the one that can’t get out of bed. She’s the one in the hospital. She’s the one in the wheelchair. So I just didn’t deal with any of it until I found myself in a similar situation.

Suddenly two things happened. One, I was forced to begin to process it — I won’t say that work is done, because I don’t think it is. And then the second thing — and this is not me trying to put a positive spin on it, because long COVID definitely sucks — I felt like in some ways I was given a new understanding of my mom and how hard she must have worked to continue to provide a really great life for me and my sister and my dad and our friends and family. Because I now know how much energy illness takes. Knowing how I received her love and care as a child, I just feel like I have a better idea of how much work she put into being a great mom.

Tami Simon: I wonder — when we’re in the underworld descent, when we’re in winter — maybe it’s designed in a way to be a period of inner work for us, because that’s what happens. We’re so susceptible; our psyche is so susceptible to things that wouldn’t necessarily surface when we’re in go-go mode. There’s no room for it. What do you think about that?

Marisa: I think that is a definite possibility. In the book, I discourage people from feeling any pressure around meaning-making when horrible things happen in life. And at the same time, there were obviously a lot of lessons during the worst of this long COVID season — otherwise there wouldn’t be a book. I decided at a certain point: I cannot change what is happening right now, so how am I going to try and use this, even if it’s just for me?

Tami Simon: Why do you discourage people from making meaning of terrible things that are happening in our lives?

Marisa: For me, it comes down to some of the people I have encountered who have, in my opinion, been called to suffer just so much more than I have. I don’t need my aunt — who has lost four of her six children, and of the two remaining, one is living with ALS and one is incarcerated — I don’t need her to feel like she has to make meaning out of any of that. All I want for her is to do whatever she needs to do to take care of herself so that she can take care of these children she’s responsible for. I’m fine if meaning-making is the direction some people want to go in, but I don’t want people to feel like that’s what they have to do.

It kept coming up specifically around women I am friends with who’ve lost children in tragic, horrifying circumstances. I just don’t feel like any of us has a right to tell them what they should do with that.

Tami Simon: It seems like it’s an advocacy position for you — advocating for people’s freedom to work with their pain in whatever way is true for them.

Marisa: Exactly. I think a lot of folks in our modern wellness industry, Instagram influencer, TikTok-y world — there does feel like there is a lot of pressure for people to take their worst, hardest, most uncomfortable moments and make them into something beautiful and meaningful, you know, lemons into lemonade. And I’m like, “No, it’s okay.” You can just have lemons and figure out how you’re going to live with them. Maybe you use the seeds to plant a tree. Or maybe you do nothing, and I’m okay with that.

Tami Simon: In my own experience of an underworld descent where I was confronted with a lot of really difficult material, I decided to take it on head on. Part of the reason I did was because I wasn’t functioning that well in the outer world, so I thought I might as well put my time and energy into this inner world work, because that’s what was present in my experience. Which brings me to my question. You talk about how part of it for you was realizing that the one thing you didn’t want to be was a “sick mom” like your own mother was — and here you were. I’m curious, in your Sherpa role, what suggestions you might have for those of us who are still working through disidentifying from being like one of our parents in ways we don’t want to be, and yet somehow seem to be mimicking anyway.

Marisa: I think the first step is being honest about it. I often encounter folks who share with me the things they wish weren’t true — whether it’s about themselves, their circumstances, or whatever challenge they’re facing — and wishing for something to not be true doesn’t make it untrue. I had to learn that the hard way. I really don’t think I can overemphasize the extent to which I not only didn’t want to be a sick mom, but really didn’t want to have this long COVID thing that half the country probably doesn’t even think is real, and nobody could tell me exactly what to do to fix it or how long it was going to take. I was so deep in denial that I got on a plane to the other side of the world with long COVID to teach a grief writing retreat, and I ended up having to come home early because I literally couldn’t breathe.

So start by pushing yourself to be honest about whatever it is you think you maybe need to work through. And then I think it’s the work of separating our stories. I realized I didn’t want to be a sick mom in large part because — not because my mom wasn’t a great mom, because there are a lot of people who will tell you she was — but I didn’t want her story. I didn’t want to get sick at a relatively young age and then just continue to get worse and be dead a little over a decade later. That’s what I didn’t want. What I needed to do was remind myself: yes, Marisa and Lisa share a story, and her story is not my story. Once I got clear about that, it gave me more freedom to figure out what I want my story to be, insofar as the pieces I can influence.

I needed to start by just accepting that my body was really sick, but that didn’t mean it was going to be that way forever. Think about how you can accept whatever these traits or fears are, while also separating your story from the origin story, and figure out what story you want to write instead.

Tami Simon: You mentioned towards the beginning, when I asked you what the essential qualities in you are, that you paused for a moment and said “stubbornness.” I wanted to ask you about something I think is closely linked, which is endurance — the ability to simply endure and wait for dawn, wait for the season change.

Marisa: For me, endurance is very closely tied again to the spirituality piece. I know that I can endure hard times partially because I know everything is impermanent. The best of times — when you’re singing and dancing with your friends at the Beyoncé concert — and the worst of times — when you’re spending half a day crying because you can’t stand up long enough to take a shower. It’s all impermanent, and it’s all a part of life.

I think the better we can get at assuming these periods of challenge and pain and grief are just normal, the easier it becomes to endure them. I think a lot of the challenge in our culture — predominantly white, Western, American, however you want to classify it — we don’t often encourage people to just endure in these seasons, and we don’t let people just have these messy, really hard experiences. Instead, we kind of expect you to pick yourself up from your emotional bootstraps and get through it behind closed doors. There’s something connected to shame there that I don’t think really helps people. So I want people to feel comfortable with the idea that these moments are just a normal part of life, and you can absolutely endure them. You can and you will.

Tami Simon: I want to end our conversation on one aspect of your work that I find so inspiring: this ruthless, relentless, stubborn commitment to hope, and then doing the actions that it takes. And if you can speak to that person who has one foot in hope and one foot in doubt — “Do I have a feeling of trust that things are going to work out? I don’t know if they’re going to work out. They really might not. And I’ve got these actions, and I’m doing them, but it still seems so far away.” I’m thinking of someone I know who sent out 400 job applications with cover letters and still hasn’t found a job. What could you say to that person to help them turn up the relentless commitment?

Marisa: The first thing I will say is: hope can absolutely, at times, be heartbreaking. The experience that came up for me as you were speaking was the process that my husband and I went through to become parents. I have an underlying health condition and knew that I wouldn’t be able to conceive naturally from the time I was in my 20s. So we started in 2016 on a path of egg donor IVF, believing it’s going to be expensive, it’s going to be challenging, but we got this. And then there was failure, and more failure, and more failure, and disappointment — and then it was our last shot in 2019, and it resulted in a devastating pregnancy loss.

We both spent nights, weeks, months thinking there was a good chance maybe this just isn’t going to work out. Our hope in that season was running neck and neck with our doubt. I always go back to that because it was five years of mostly disappointment and heartbreak — until it wasn’t. And this still makes me emotional. On some of my worst long COVID days, I would pull out my son’s birth announcement just as a reminder that you don’t know how the story is going to end until the story ends.

So I would encourage that person — 400 resumes and cover letters? First of all, I want them to know they are doing a great job. The second thing I’ll say is: in these dark seasons, you have to figure out what is going to feed your hope. Identify your arbiters of hope — whether from past experiences, family, friends — or consider taking a break. Sometimes you need a time out in order to continue to move forward. We had an entire year where we talked about and made plans, but didn’t take any concrete action steps around trying to get pregnant, because we knew we were burnt out and weren’t ready for another disappointment. Figuring out how you need to manage yourself in these moments is really important, and it’s different for all of us. So identify what that has to look like for you, and then grab it.

Tami Simon: Marisa Renée Lee. We’re talking about her new book, Waiting for Dawn: Living with Uncertainty. Thank you so much for your honesty, your humility, and your very bright light. Thank you.

Marisa: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.