Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

PREFACE

Today is the last school day of this year—of this decade, actually. It’s the Friday before Christmas, bitterly cold, but the sky over Manhattan is clear blue. You can feel the swirl of the holidays all around. This morning, I went to our younger son’s elementary school for a family breakfast. Together the parents and kids made a paper chain, one link each for something we’re thankful for. Someone brought bagels and cream cheese, and someone else brought blueberries and bananas, and we brought juice, and everyone was extra grateful for whoever made a beautiful crumb cake—more crumb than cake, very much a hit with both parents and kids.

The kids were bouncing off the walls—from both the cake and the fact that it’s the last day till winter break. The parents looked harried and tired. I felt harried and tired. But we made our paper chains, crouching down to be level with their tables, wielding glue sticks and markers.

What I’m thankful for today: For that third-grader and his brother, a seventh-grader. For their dad, my husband, Aaron. For a faith whose central stories are not of pomp and circumstance but a teenage couple, a baby, a star. Christmas is rapidly approaching, and with each passing year, I have less capacity for the sparkle and more affection for the simpler sounds and sights: a hymn, the bread my Aunt Mary makes every year, the Advent book we read every night before bed.

I wrote Bittersweet ten years ago—can that be? And when I reread it, I see a young woman who is longing for a sibling for her young son, and also longing for a sense of stability and safety in the world. She feels upended by everything she can’t control, and through the writing of the book, she pushes more and more deeply into her faith, almost daring it to fail her, daring it to prove unable to hold the weight of her grief and fear. But it does hold. And more than that, it reshapes her heart page by page, and she becomes a little more faithful and a little less fearful along the way.

Ten years later, it all still rings true: a woman who wants more guarantees than life offers, who has learned the hard way that safety and stability are temporary states, and that change and discomfort are unavoidable parts of life as a grown-up. I don’t think of myself as a change-averse person—until I have to do it, and then I’m forced to face the truth about myself, which is that I like change just fine, as long as it’s completely on my terms and timelines. And maybe I’m not the only one.

What they say is true: The second book (or album or show or whatever) is always harder than the first, for at least two reasons. First, you’ve written all your best stories. The first book gets all the best material that you’ve been living and working out for your whole life, and then the second book gets, like, the next eighteen months of life and material. Inherently, this is not going to go well. You’ve left it all on the field, and now all of a sudden, there’s supposed to be more to say about . . . anything?

The second reason it’s harder is because now that you’ve written one book, you’ve been exposed to the truth of publishing, namely, that most of us are not, in fact, instant bestselling authors, and also that there are actual human people who hate our books and tell us all about it on the internet. Before the first book comes out, you can harbor this sweet, secret belief that you might be a genius and everyone’s about to find out and also you might actually be the first and only person in history to write a book that is universally loved. This is impossible, but you don’t have to face that fact till the first book is published.

Cold Tangerines, my first book, was a book about celebration—I can do that. I love that. That’s my jam. And even though in the course of writing it I had to live through and then write through getting fired from a job I loved, and all the attending wounds and broken relationships surrounding it, I still knew where true north was: happiness, goodness, hope, celebration.

This book, though, felt like falling down a mineshaft. Who wants to read this mess? I wondered, over and over. As I neared the deadline, I kept hoping for hope, for good news, for if not a happy ending then at least one that wasn’t quite so dire. But there was no happy ending. I wrote the epilogue through tears, almost apologetically—I’m sorry, dear reader, that I can’t give you what I wanted to give you.

I wanted the ending to be beautiful, an unmistakable sign of hope. But I couldn’t find one, and I couldn’t pretend. The book did not end with hope, but it did end with comfort. I didn’t have much hope, but I did have a sense of the comfort of Christ. I remember so clearly driving home at dusk one night just after that second miscarriage and almost whispering the phrase Christ my comforter, Christ my comforter. I whispered it under my breath over and over. Sometimes it helped.

I never wanted to be known for writing about miscarriage—that wasn’t what I was intending to do in this book. But to this day, I get messages from all over the world that this book kept someone company while she was grieving, or this book was left on a front porch with a note attached, or this book stayed on a nightstand through the howling storms of miscarriage and infertility. I can’t tell you what that means to me. If someone had asked me to write about getting through either of those things, I would have said, Of course not—I’m not an expert. All I have is my own experience. Sometimes, though, that’s enough to bridge the gap that needs to be bridged from one lonely, terrified heart to another.

This is the deal, it seems: when you decide to write or create art in any way, you have the honor and the challenge of connecting with people in the most tender parts of their own lives, writing from the most tender parts of your own.

I’ve been writing books for almost fifteen years, and for every one of those years, I have loved my work and have been so grateful to be an artist and a storyteller. But the single thing that has tripped me up more than any other part of it has been writing about my pain, particularly while it was still fresh, while it was still unfolding, while it still felt like there was a concrete block on my chest. But maybe that’s part of the calling, even though I’ve resisted that part for so long.

Maybe this process—writing a new preface to an old book—is an invitation to accept the last piece of the puzzle, the last key to this wonderful, challenging vocation: that the most valuable part of what writers do is grapple with their own pain. As a reader, I know that’s true. When I think about the memoirs, especially, that I’ve loved, it’s the ones that have the howl, the despair, the glinting darkness.

Writing that matters, or that matters to me, is like sitting at a loom and unraveling each thread of your loss and your fear and your disillusionment and your loneliness, pulling it back and forth across the loom, over and over, each wound, each loss, until over time, those dark threads become a garment, a blanket that can be wrapped around a lonely person who desperately needs to know that they’re not the first and not the last to feel bereft or terrified. In some seasons, I’ve resisted the requirements of it—scared by the depth of my own pain, daunted by the volume of critics, exhausted by the hours and years spent absorbing other people’s opinions about my life.

But this is what I do. This is cosmic, spiritual recycling: I hold out my broken heart and God puts his hand on it, and in his grace, he allows it to be used in the repair of another heart, almost like a transplant, like a grafting, like a resurrection.

I don’t go looking for pain. Even after everything I’ve learned about how sharing our pain transforms both the writer and the reader, I’m still more comfortable in the happy, sweet spaces. Maybe I always will be. But with each passing year, I try to get more comfortable in the dark. I do my best to allow my pain to be used in the healing and restoration of anyone who needs it.

When you’re feeling joy and happiness and hope, it’s easy to feel connected to people. You feel the collective rising joy all around you—color and happiness and cute children and blue skies. But pain, in my experience, is inherently isolating. There are two problems, then: your pain, and the loneliness you feel in that place of pain. Part of a writer’s job is to offer up their own pain as a connection point for someone else. Offering up your joy is the easy part. Offering up your pain or confusion or loss—that’s the calling part.

Bittersweet is still a word that resounds with me in such deep ways. It’s a pleasing word to write and also to say out loud, and to a word person like me, that matters. It’s also a word that captures so much about life, about the reality of a beautiful and broken world, about the interplay between darkness and light, about that knife-edge where joy and pain intersect in all our hearts.

I was naive enough when I wrote this book to believe that bittersweet would be a phase for me, a season, and then the normal part of life would resume—the sweet part. I believed that bittersweet was a temporary condition, an aberration.

Since that time, I’ve been through some seasons that were almost entirely bitter, where sweetness was nowhere to be found, nights that were so dark my eyes never adjusted and so long I almost lost hope that dawn would ever come.

Now I know that bittersweet is where we spend most of our lives—if we’re lucky, that is. I was young enough and inexperienced enough with loss and heartache to believe that they were anomalies, and now I know that fear and pain are woven right into the very fabric of our world, of our lives. This is how it is. There’s goodness. And there’s wreckage. There’s joy. And there’s betrayal. There’s beauty. And there’s destruction.

This is life. This is bittersweet. This is how it is—most of the time for most of us.

And if this is true, then we might as well try to get comfortable here, here in the dark and light, the beautiful and terrible territory, here in the land of bittersweet. It’s not a neighborhood, like I thought it was, something to drive through quickly on your way to the next uncomplicated happiness. It’s a land where most of us will spend most of our lives, and so let’s learn to live well in it, to tell the truth about it, to stare it down instead of looking away. To celebrate what we can when we can, but also to get comfortable with the language of sorrow.

If you find yourself in the territory of bittersweet, please know that you’re not alone, and that even though it may not seem like it at first, it’s not so bad here. It’s not sparkly or simple. It’s not shiny or perfect. But this is a place where good things grow, fertile soil for resilience, forgiveness, peace, courage. This is where you can sit shoulder to shoulder with people who’ve struggled just as you’re struggling now. This is where God does his best work, his most tender healing, most breathtaking transformations. This is bittersweet.

Shauna Niequist

December 20, 2019

New York, New York

prologue

BITTERSWEET

The idea of bittersweet is changing the way I live, unraveling and reweaving the way I understand life. Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness.

Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands. Sweet is nice enough, but bittersweet is beautiful, nuanced, full of depth and complexity. Bittersweet is courageous, gutsy, earthy.

Nearly ten years ago, my friend Doug told me that the central image of the Christian faith is death and rebirth, that the core of it all, over and over again, is death and rebirth. I’m sure I’d heard that before, but when he told me, for whatever reason, I really thought about it for the first time. And at the time, I didn’t agree.

What I didn’t understand until recently is that he wasn’t speaking to me as a theologian or a pastor or an expert, but rather as a person whose heart had been broken and who had been brought back to life by the story God tells in all our lives. When you haven’t yet had your heart really broken, the gospel isn’t about death and rebirth. It’s about life and more life. It’s about hope and possibility and a brighter future. And it is, certainly, about those things.

But when you’ve faced some kind of death—the loss of someone you loved dearly, the failure of a dream, the fracture of a relationship—that’s when you start understanding that central metaphor. When your life is easy, a lot of the really crucial parts of Christian doctrine and life are nice theories, but you don’t really need them. When, however, death of any kind is staring you in the face, all of a sudden rebirth and new life are very, very important to you.

Now, ten years later, I know Doug was right. I’ve thought about his words a thousand times in the last few years, a season in my own life that has felt in some moments like death at every turn. I’ve begun to train my eyes for rebirth, like looking for buds on branches after an endlessly long winter. I know that death is real, and I trust that rebirth is real, too.

Christians, generally, aren’t great at lament and mourning. Jews are really better at lament, maybe because they’ve had more practice. My favorite part of a Jewish wedding is the breaking of the glass. Like most Jewish traditions, there are a whole bunch of interpretations: some say that all the shards of broken glass suggest loads of future children and future happiness. Some say that the breaking of the glass references the irreversible nature of marriage: in the same way that the glass can never be put back together after it’s been broken, two people can never be separated once they’ve been connected by marriage. But my favorite interpretation is the one where the wine in the glass is a symbol for all of life, and when the bride and groom drink it, they accept both the bitter and the sweet aspects of life. They accept that sometimes they’ll celebrate and sometimes they’ll mourn, in the same way that sometimes they’ll drink wine and sometimes glasses will shatter.