Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

writing

Why We Need to Feel Our Grief

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“You’re going to feel some pressure,” the doctor murmured as he inserted the needle into my elbow. Turns out “some pressure” was the euphemism of the century. What I actually felt during the five-minute platelet injection was teeth-gritting, fist-clenched agony.

By the time the short procedure was over, hot tears were slipping down the sides of my face, along my hairline, over the edge of my jaw and down my neck, where they dripped one at a time, slowly and steadily like fluid in an IV bag, onto the white sheet beneath me.

Much to my surprise, once the tears started, they didn’t stop. Neither the doctor nor the nurse knew quite what to make of my silent but persistent weeping. The nurse thrust a fist full of tissues into my hand. The doctor advised ice, two Extra Strength Tylenol and limited elbow movement. And then they both fled, the nurse urging “take your time,” before pulling the door closed with a quiet click behind her.

I cried as I retrieved my purse from the hook and gingerly slipped it over the shoulder of my good arm.

I cried as I hurried through the waiting room, chin tucked, hair shielding my streaming eyes so as not to scare the living daylights out of the patients awaiting their own appointments.

I cried as I drove home, wrangling the steering wheel with one hand.

I was still crying as I tucked myself into the corner of the sofa, cradling my throbbing elbow with a cupped palm.

It was only then that it occurred to me that I might be crying over something other than my elbow.

Earlier that morning I had published the blog post I had written about my decision to quit book writing. As I’d sat in the orthopedist’s waiting room, I’d pulled the post up on my phone to read some of the comments that had begun to accumulate.

I didn’t expect any “big feelings.” Though I’d published the post about my decision that morning, I’d made the actual decision weeks before. Choosing to leave traditional book-writing and publishing was a decision that, after careful discernment, I believed in my heart was right and good. I acknowledged there was sadness – I even named it grief in the post – but mostly what I felt in the aftermath of the decision, and as I wrote the blog post about it, was relief, an unburdening.

Until, that is, the orthopedist’s needle pricked something else far beneath flesh, bone and tendon.

What began as a tearful reaction to unexpected physical pain crossed an invisible threshold. My tears at the sudden, sharp stab of the needle deep in the soft tissue of my elbow opened a portal of sorts into which I tumbled headlong, like a time-space traveler hurtling into an unfamiliar dimension.

The tears prompted by the unexpected jolt of searing pain opened the way to the sorrow and loss I had acknowledged in words but hadn’t actually allowed myself to feel.

Experts say that we Enneagram Type 3s are the least aware of and in touch with our feelings. Until recently I would have told you that I was a person who was very in touch with her feelings, thank you very much. But I am beginning to see this might not be entirely true. I am beginning to realize that just because you say you feel something and even name it publicly doesn’t mean you’ve taken the time and space to actually feel it – to wade into that sorrow and allow yourself to experience the confusing, uncomfortable, unkempt mess of it.

The truth is, it’s hard and deeply uncomfortable to feel, really feel, pain. No one actually wants to sit with and in pain. And yet, I believe the only path to true healing, growth and transformation is to do exactly that – to step into the pain, to stay in it and lean into it for as long as it takes. As so many wise people have said, the only way out of grief is through it.

After the emotional ungluing in the orthopedist’s office, I spent the rest of the week quietly and slowly reading through every beautiful, heartfelt, kind, loving, and encouraging email, blog post comment, Facebook message and tweet I received in the wake of my announcement about leaving traditional publishing. There were A LOT. (thank you!!!)

My inclination was to rush, to skim over these notes of kindness, empathy and compassion. I wanted to read through them fast, to get it over with in order to keep myself at arm’s length from whatever emotions might begin to rise to the surface.

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I read each message slowly and thoughtfully and responded personally to many of them. As I read and replied, I let myself receive and feel all the feelings – gratitude, love, joy, relief, regret, sorrow, fear, disappointment, grief. I stayed in the feelings, leaned into them – into their unruliness, into their stubborn refusal to be managed and contained.

It was uncomfortable and unfun to feel the real brunt of this loss. And yet, I believe it was an important and necessary step toward trusting in something that is, for right now, beyond what I can see.

Why I’m Quitting Book Writing

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I tried to think of softer, more sophisticated title for this post, but the fact is, I’m quitting book writing, and there’s really no other way to say it. Turns out, I wrote a book about the journey toward uncovering your true self, and along the way, I discovered my true self does not align well with my work. This is knowledge I think I’ve understood deep down for a long time, and yet, I’ve held on, clutching and grasping with all my might, unwilling and afraid to let go.

Until now.

The truth is, working as a traditionally published non-fiction writer is a rough sea to swim in if you wrestle with a desire for success and recognition, if you grapple with a longing for approval and affirmation or if you tend to fixate on outcomes. Plenty of writers are able to navigate a smooth, steady course through these tumultuous waters without losing their whole selves in the process.

As it turns out, I’m not one of those writers.

I’ve learned the hard way over the last ten years of writing and publishing that staying whole and healthy in this vocation is, for me, not a simple matter of willpower, nor is it a simple matter of surrender. It’s not about trying harder or surrendering more. Believe me, I’ve done both. I can muster every ounce of willpower and surrender six ways to Sunday, and the bottom line is still the same: working in traditional publishing is not good for me. My tendency to seek affirmation and validation and my desire for recognition and success can quickly veer toward addictive behavior if I’m not careful. It’s a little like an alcoholic working in a bar. It might be doable for a while, but in the end, it’s probably not a wise choice for a long-term profession.

Last fall, two months before True You released, I stood at the curb with Josie on the leash and gazed up at a large pine tree in my neighbor’s front yard. The tree was wrapped round and round with a thick vine that snaked from the roots up the trunk, fanning out along the limbs and branches. I saw that beneath the lush and vibrant vine, the tree itself was dying, its needles crisped brown, its branches brittle.

Not long after that late autumn walk, as Brad and I sat talking on the living room sofa, he offered a quiet observation.  “Your work as an author in Christian publishing has brought you more sorrow than joy,” he said gently, as the snow wisped outside the windowpanes.

I knew the moment the words left his mouth that they were true. I knew I was the pine tree wrapped round by the vine.

In that moment I finally acknowledged that the culture of publishing is not a place I thrive. I can’t separate my self – my whole, true self – from the platform-building, from the push to attract and attain more followers and subscribers, from the Amazon ranks. I can’t separate myself from what often feels like a relentless drive toward bigger, better and more. I can’t separate myself from wanting to be known, affirmed and recognized by the “right” people.

That winter afternoon, sitting on the living room sofa with my husband, I finally understood that I can’t unwind the vine. And honestly, I’m flat-out exhausted from trying.

This has been a hard truth to face. There are the logistics, for one. I was contracted to write another book, which means I’ve had to withdraw from that contract and pay back the advance I had received to write the book. That is hard.

But even harder has been the unexpected grief that’s accompanied this decision. It’s painful to acknowledge that the story I wrote for myself in my mind and in my dreams all those years ago didn’t write itself the same way in real life. There have been joyful chapters, to be sure. But there have also been many, many chapters full of sorrow, disappointment, bitterness, resentment, anger and frustration. There is heartbreak in recognizing and acknowledging that my dream did not turn out as I had imagined and hoped it would. There is grief in letting go of the story I’d hoped would be true.

But there’s also hope in knowing the story is still being written. As Emily Freeman writes in The Next Right Thing: “Just because things change doesn’t mean you chose wrong in the first place. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it forever.”

As Esther de Waal says in her book To Pause at the Threshold, “Our God is a God who moves and he invites us to move with him. We must be ready to disconnect. There comes a time when the things that were undoubtedly good and right in the past must be left behind, for there is always the danger that they might hinder us from moving forward and connecting with the one necessary thing, Christ himself.”

God is moving and he is inviting me to move with him. It’s time.

So I am sad, yes. But I also know, as Emily Freeman says, that I didn’t choose wrong. And I know this because of you. I am full of gratitude for you – the generous readers who have come alongside me – for your kind words, your emails, your comments, your hugs when we’ve met in person. I’m grateful for what you have taught me along the journey. I’m grateful for all the things I’ve learned – about myself, about life, about faith.

And I’m also full of expectant hope for what might be next. I’m confident that even though I can’t clearly see it yet, what’s to come will be different, but it will also be good. I know this because I know God, and I know that he is good.

For now I am content to continue my work at The Salvation Army. I am glad to do my small bit for an organization that does good work. Most of all, it feels good and right to do that work anonymously, without fanfare, without pushing for recognition or readers, without trying to attract attention, without trying to be known.

As Akiko Busch writes in her book How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, it’s time “to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power?”

I think it might indeed.

As I walked Josie along our favorite path a few weeks ago, I noticed that the branches of the white swamp oak were bare. The leaves that had held on through the long, hard winter had finally let go. Beneath the tree’s naked limbs lay its desiccated foliage, crumpled, ripped and bedraggled from months of hanging on tight through tossing winds and stinging snow.

Standing beneath the bare tree, I tipped my head back and saw that each branch and twig were crowned with a tightly curled bud. Over the dark days of our long Nebraska winter, the oak tree had been slowly, quietly working undercover, preparing new growth that has, I see now, begun to burst free.

First the letting go, then the unfurling. As is so often the case, the trees have shown me what I needed to see.

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I wanted to let you know that though I will not be writing books, I still hope, God willing, to write in this space. After months of discernment I was relieved to realize that writing is still life-giving for me. And so, if you’re still game, I would love to still meet you here from time to time and monthly via The Back Patio newsletter. I am ever grateful for you.

The Value of Doing Your Work Well…Even When It Goes Unnoticed

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Last June on our family vacation to Maui, I started my days on the balcony. Each morning before the boys awoke, I slipped into one of the plush hotel robes that hung in the closet, poured a cup of coffee, slid open the glass door and settled into a patio chair, my bare feet propped on the metal railing still damp with dew. I listened to the exotic cackles and calls of unfamiliar tropical birds, luxuriated in the humid breeze on my face and let myself awaken.

I loved observing the early morning buzz of activity taking place four stories below. As the rising sun painted the palm fronds golden, I watched the attendants in their crisp polo shirts and belted shorts navigate carts towering with clean, folded towels along the resort’s pathways, stopping to distribute neat stacks beneath the canvas cabanas.

Across the way, a shop keeper raised the metal shutter of the dive store, announcing with a clatter that they were open for business.

A gardener hosed down the concrete, while another attendant dutifully lined up the lounge chairs, one after the other in undulating rows alongside the curving edge of the pool.

My first morning on the balcony, I watched a trim, older woman bend low over the shorn grass and use a small straw hand broom to whisk spent blossoms and browned, crinkled leaves into a dustpan. When she completed one small section of the garden, she pushed her wheeled barrel to the next section and began again, crouching low over the ground, whisking and sweeping, leaving the emerald carpet of grass pristine in her wake.

Every morning of our week-long stay in Maui I sat on the balcony in my hotel robe, white mug in hand, and watched the groundskeeper in her neatly pressed uniform and her wide-brimmed woven hat, cord cinched under her neck, as she methodically tidied the garden. Every morning the grass was littered anew with spent blossoms and leaves, and every morning she set to work, crouching, whisking, gathering, disposing.

She moved like a Tai Chi master – slowly and fluidly, but with absolute precision. In the six mornings I watched her, she never missed a single errant petal or leaf.

The groundskeeper’s job was not glamorous, and I don’t want to make the mistake of romanticizing her work. It was back-breaking labor, done day in and day out under the searing Maui sun, undoubtedly for little more than minimum wage, if that. Yet in observing her carefully over several days, I could see from her scrupulous care and meticulous attention to every detail that she took pride in her work. I suspect few people noticed her or recognized the impact of her labor, but that didn’t seem to matter to her. What mattered, it seemed, was the work itself and doing it well. She was committed to her work, regardless of whether anyone noticed the results of her labor or not.

Seven months after our trip to Maui, I still think about the island’s fragrant air, its unceasing tropical breezes, the tumbling Pacific waves, the sea turtle that swam so close to me when I was snorkeling, I almost could have grazed its barnacled back with my fingertips.

Strangely, though, what I think about most often is the groundskeeper in her wide-brimmed woven hat, bending low, whisking and sweeping the lush garden clean.

How Counseling Can Help You Find Wholeness

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Late last summer I finally admitted to myself that I’d been struggling with low-level depression and discontent for a while, and so, I made the call I’d dreaded making. Honestly, I didn’t want to make an appointment with my counselor because I didn’t want to do the hard work I knew would be inevitable. I didn’t want to dig deep into past hurts, unpack my baggage, sort through the messy detritus of my life.

I’m glad I made the call. Though I was right — it has been hard to sit on the sofa and talk through my junk every other week — it’s been good…and necessary. Slowly my counselor has helped me name my disappointments and failings, my confusion and questions, my hopes and dreams. Slowly she has helped me begin to see that I can be me, even amid the demands and expectations of a book release.

As I wrote to my newsletter subscribers earlier this week, I’m not typically at my best when I am midwifing a book into the world. I worry a lot and try to control things that are beyond my control. The increased time on social media and the increased focus on numbers and outcomes isn’t good for my soul. I struggle to “come down” from the rev of constant interaction and communication. Over time both my body and my brain begin to hum with an agitated restlessness.

Beyond the busyness and hustle, though, releasing a book is also fraught with fear for me — fear that harkens back to the publication of my first book in 2014.

In spite of my best efforts, my first book, a memoir, was not a publishing success. In fact, it sold so few copies, the publishing house’s marketing board turned down my proposal for a second book, a decision based largely on the abysmal sales record for the memoir.

This was a major blow. Not only was I angry, bitter and disappointed, I see now that I was also deeply ashamed. In the aftermath of the book release, all I wanted to do was to hide. I daydreamed about quitting writing and publishing altogether and getting a job at the local greenhouse, surrounding myself with plants and flowers, thrusting my hands into damp dirt all day long.

Instead, I did the only thing I knew to how do at the time: I kicked my hustle into overdrive. I put all my energy into selling the book proposal to another publisher, and when that ultimately failed, I wrote a brand-new proposal for an entirely different book and started the process all over again.

I also focused on managing “my failure” (which, by the way, is like trying to manage outcomes, only infinitely more depressing). “You talk about your book’s supposed ‘failure’ an awful lot,” a friend, himself an author, gently pointed out. “You need to be kinder to yourself.”

I see now that publicly harping on my failure was my way of controlling it. If I acknowledged the failure publicly, if I deemed my book a failure first, I wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of others declaring my book – and me – a failure.

At the time I told myself I was calling a spade a spade. In actuality, I was trying to avoid the very real pain of disappointment, shame and sorrow that accompanies failure. I was trying to convince myself that I was naming, and therefore owning, my failure, but the truth is, I wasn’t naming it. I was shaming myself.

Even more detrimental was the fact that in refusing to acknowledge and process my failure, I refused the opportunity to let it teach me, to learn from it, and to allow it to shape me into a better version of myself. If I had truly looked deeply at my humiliation, shame, pain and sorrow, I would have seen there was a reason for it. I would have seen that my entire identity, my entire sense of self, was wrapped up in that book.

How Counseling Can Help You Find Wholeness

So as you can see, there’s been a lot to unpack with my counselor these last few months. There’s a reason I procrastinated making that initial phone call before finally picking up the phone late last summer. And yet, I know now more than ever that counseling has helped me heal in ways that’s allowed me to grow toward greater wholeness.

As I wrote in True You, the journey to wholeness and healing doesn’t begin with surgery or even with diagnosis. The journey to wholeness begins with admitting you are broken.

The phone call to my counselor was an admission that I was broken and in need of healing. And though it was difficult and often uncomfortable work, making that call and subsequently naming and shedding the shame and fear I’d held in my heart since my first book released in 2014 ultimately made way for a healthier book release this time around.

The truth is, sometimes we resist wholeness because, although it sounds lovely on paper, saying yes to the invitation requires a whole lot of hard work. But while saying yes to the invitation into wholeness is a risk, to be sure, it’s also the entry-point into a transformed life.

True You will be what it will be and go where it will go. I’ve done the work. I will continue to do the work. But I also know that my value as a human being is not defined by this or any other book.

Why It’s Critical to Separate Who You Are from What You Do

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There’s a tree in my neighborhood I pass nearly every day on my afternoon dog walk. It grows a few feet from the curb, and it’s beautiful – tall and stately, lush and vibrant with dark green leaves, even at this time of year, and a smattering of tiny orange berries dotting the greenery.

I’ve passed this tree hundreds of times in the last several years, but it wasn’t until recently that I saw something I’d never noticed before. The leaves and berries I’d long admired weren’t actually part of the tree itself. Rather, they were part of a large and intrusive vine which, over time, had snaked its way up the trunk and out along the tree’s limbs and branches.

What at first glance looked to be a beautiful and healthy tree was, in fact, an illusion. Not only was the vine obscuring the real tree that lay underneath, it was also, apparently, slowly draining the real tree of life. 

I stood in the street and stared up at the pine and the vine for a long time that day as Josie impatiently tugged at the leash. I noted the tree’s brown, brittle needles beneath the vine’s green leaves. I saw the way the vine’s heavy root had embedded itself into the tree’s bark — so much so that I could hardly discern one from the other.

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“Are you prepared to be other than your image of your false self?” Richard Rohr asks. “If not, you will live in bondage to your false self.”

Turns out, the pine and the vine hit awfully close to home. The hard, uncomfortable truth is that my identity is entwined with my vocation and profession as a published author.

There is a certain prestige that goes hand-in-hand with my job. And if I am brutally honest with myself, and with you, I can admit that I like this prestige. I like the approval, admiration, recognition and respect being an author automatically earns me.

And yet, I also know that what I do is not who I am. This identity of “author” is not my true identity. Being a “published author” is not my true self. It’s not the me God created when he wrote my name on the palms of his hands. Rather, as Rohr says, being a “published author” is part of my image of my false self.

“Basing identity on an illusion has profound consequences,” observes David Benning in his book The Gift of Being Yourself. “Sensing its fundamental unreality, the false self wraps itself in experience – experiences of power, pleasure and honor. Thomas Merton describes this as ‘winding experiences around myself…in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with being an author. It’s as good a vocation as any, and believe me when I say I am grateful for the opportunities writing and publishing books has afforded me. There have been many beautiful, life-giving parts of this journey — not the least of which is how writing has helped me grow in my faith — and I appreciate every single one.

But I also know that if I am honest with myself, being an author is also sometimes detrimental to my emotional and spiritual wholeness. I put a lot of stake – too much stake – in achievement, recognition and success. Over time, who I am has become wrapped up not only in what I do but also in how well I do it.

I have wrapped not only the experience, as Merton would say, but also the identity of “author” around myself, like a vine wrapped around the trunk of a tree. And at times, rather than sustaining me and giving me life, my vocation has held me in bondage, ensnaring me with its tendrils of “bigger,” “better” and “more.”

As David Benning acknowledges, “Anything that is grasped is afforded value beyond actual worth, value that is ultimately stolen from God.”

Have you ever seen the way a vine grasps, unfurling to latch onto and wrap itself around whatever it can? The strength of its clutch, even in something as small and tender as a zucchini vine, is astonishing.

I grasp at achievement, recognition and success, particularly achievement, recognition and success as a published author. And that is something I need to reckon with. Benning defines calling as “a way of being that is both best for us and best for the world.” The question I’m asking myself these days is whether my vocation as an author is really best for me.

I’m not making any radical decisions just yet. Right now it seems I am in a season of discernment. And the truth is, writing True You was the genesis of this journey toward uncovering my true self, a journey that in some ways has only unearthed more questions than answers. This question, in particular, begs to be asked: would I even be asking these questions about vocation and identity had I not written this book?

On the other hand, every time I walk by that pine tree in my neighborhood, the one wound round and round with the ever-expanding vine, I can’t help but notice something that seems important, which is this: while the vine is clearly flourishing, spreading its tendrils, reaching higher and higher, clutching and grasping, the tree beneath it is slowly dying, being overcome by the invasive vine a little more each day.

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If this post resonated with you, you might be interested in my forthcoming book, True You: Letting Go of Your False Self to Uncover the Person God Created, releasing January 1. In it, I dig more deeply into the themes of vocation and identity.

If you pre-order before January 1, I also have some lovely free gifts that nicely complement the book:

– a companion journal

– a guided audio meditation

– and a series of beautifully designed Scripture cards.

You can find out about where to pre-order True You and how to receive the free gifts over HERE. 

Photo by David Guenther on Unsplash