How To Live with Uncertainty and Find Hope in the Midst of Chronic Illness with Marisa Renee Lee

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Episode Transcript:

Marisa 00:00:00  I don’t know that we ever reach a point in life where it’s like, okay, I’m healed. Period. All good. See you guys later. I think it’s more like the guy or girl who played sports in high school and, you know, got the bad knee injury. And when it rains, even though they’re 50, like, the knee still feels a little funny. Like, I think that’s what it is with the emotional stuff. And so if you can think about it like that, it makes it a little bit easier to see it coming because it’s coming.

Chris Forbes 00:00:37  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

Chris Forbes 00:01:04  But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:21  Most of us can tolerate a lot if we believe it’s going to end soon, but some of the hardest seasons in life are the ones that don’t come with a clear diagnosis, a clean timeline, or any real sense of when things might get better. In this conversation, Marisa, Renee, Lee and I talk about what it means to live inside uncertainty without letting it swallow you. We talk about illness, grief, pain, and the emotional toll of not knowing what comes next. But we also talk about hope not as blind optimism, but as a practice as something you choose and build, even when life is not giving you much to work with. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. I’m Marisa. Welcome to the show.

Marisa 00:02:11  Hi, Eric. Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:13  I’m really happy to have you on to discuss your book called waiting for Dawn living with uncertainty. And I think uncertainty is a hot topic right now. There is a lot of it out there. So I think this is going to be a really beneficial episode. But before we get to that, we’ll start the way we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life, and in the work that you do.

Marisa 00:03:07  Oh, I love that. When you started, I was like, what? Where is this parable going? And before you even got through it, the word that popped into my mind was love, my son. He’s four and a half. He has this habit of asking about your favorite things. You know, what’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite place to go? What’s your favorite food? And lately he started asking like, what are some of your favorite words? Very, very specific question. And I’ve told him, you know, my favorite word is love. Because if we can, you know, stay focused on love, you know, loving ourselves, loving each other, loving strangers out in the world. It just makes it a lot easier to make decisions, which is a long answer for a four and a half year old. But that is that is the truth. So when I think about what I feed, it is all rooted in love. Like across my family, my friends, community, career that is my central core value and the wolf that I always want to win.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:05  That’s a beautiful answer. And what a great thing to have somebody asking you about your favorite things all the time. Like, we should do more of that. Like maybe you and I should just do favorites back and forth for the rest of this episode. There’s a poem out there I think it’s by Rosemarie Hautala. Trauma. I don’t know if you know her, but you would love her poetry. It’s something like, is this the path of love? And it’s a great poem about, like, every day. How do we, you know, am I on the path of love? You know, it’s very good.

Marisa 00:04:33  So I’ll have to check that out. Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:35  She’s a great poet. She’s been a guest a couple of times. And I think you would really like her work. Based on what I know of you, what you do, like. And your book, which let’s jump into. So your book is, as I said, waiting for dawn, living with uncertainty. And in it you walk through a season in your life where a lot changes.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:55  Tell me about it.

Marisa 00:04:56  Yeah. And I, I should share that I’m technically still in this season a little bit. I had a book come out in 2022 called Grief is Love. And immediately after Grief is Love came out. You know, I sort of thought I was gonna ride off into the sunset with our newly adopted baby and, you know, successful best selling book and all would be well. And instead, my mother in law, who we have a complicated relationship with, was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. And we found ourselves, you know, navigating caretaking from a distance. And it was also just traumatizing for me because it was the same thing that I lost my mom to as my mother in law was dying. One of my cousins went missing and was later found murdered by her husband. And a couple of months after that, I got Covid for the first time and I should share, you know, I was I was out in the world. I had done book tours, I traveled, I went to the Beyonce concert.

Marisa 00:05:59  My kid was in school, you know, I wasn’t, of course, like I didn’t want to get Covid, but I wasn’t like trying to avoid it in any significant sort of way and managed to not get it until 2024. And it never left. I got sick and actually got sicker over the course of the following six months. You know, asthma for the first time in my life at 41. At one point, my larynx was over 70% blocked. And so like, air just was not circulating properly in my body at all. I had to, like, very carefully calculate the amount of steps that I would take around my house, you know, upstairs and downstairs. It was it was too much for me to just walk comfortably through my own home. Some days all I would do was get my son ready for school, get him to school, come home, spend hours in bed before I could even think about taking a shower. That’s how limited my energy was. Super low blood pressure and just all sorts of pain and dysfunction throughout my body as a result of that virus.

Marisa 00:07:08  And a couple months in, I decided I was going to write about it and share what it’s like going from and I might even say overly able person to someone who is dealing with a disability and a lot of uncertainty. And through that process, waiting for Dawn was born. I would say it’s it’s not a book about long Covid. It’s really a book about, you know, how you can live well in the midst of uncertainty of any kind. And so the biggest theme in it is actually hope.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:43  Yeah, I think uncertainty is a really important topic and I found a lot in it valuable. I was hired to work with a group of people who have something called SIDs. It is a nerve condition where the myelin sheathing on your nerves basically erodes. Oh, but there are people that are facing similar to what you did, just a sudden amount of uncertainty. They don’t know day to day what their symptoms are going to be like. They don’t know what the progression is going to be. They live in uncertainty all of the time.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:12  And so reading your book definitely also has helped me with the way I want to work with those people as well.

Marisa 00:08:19  So glad.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:20  Yeah. Talk about the uncertainty element of it in particular. Like so we know it it sucks level, right? Yeah. There’s all the physical discomfort and all that. But talk about the toll that the uncertainty of it takes and what that feels like.

Marisa 00:08:35  Yeah. So I mean, I’ll be honest, for the first few months I was I was so deep in the land of denial, Erik, because the last thing that I wanted wasn’t to have something wrong with my body. You know, I knew there was something wrong with my body. I wasn’t completely delusional, but the last thing that I wanted was to have something wrong with my body, that there was no clear sort of treatment plan around, no, like specific guidelines or timelines or next steps or anything, you know, to have this thing that is wrong, that, you know, even now, a few years later, a lot of doctors still don’t know what to do with patients when they show up with all of these symptoms that fall into the category of long Covid.

Marisa 00:09:17  And so I tried to act like I didn’t have long Covid, you know, like, oh, it’s just a bad headache. Or, you know, it’s just this it’s just that until I got so sick and, you know, was overseas teaching, writing retreat in Greece and I couldn’t breathe. And, you know, being on the other side of the world, away from my family and incredibly sick and unable to take care of myself like that was the wake up call. And I realized when I came home that like, yes, what I was dealing with was riddled with uncertainty, which in the book I define uncertainty as a period of stress and or overwhelm related to the unknown. But the only way that we make our way through uncertainty is by being honest about what it is. And it was super stressful to have to say, you know, I don’t know what medications I need. I don’t even know what treatments are available out there, if any exist. You know, I don’t know how long I’m going to be in pain.

Marisa 00:10:17  I don’t know how long my mind is going to continue to function in this way, and that the mental and the cognitive pieces of it were probably some of the hardest for me. Like, I am someone who my entire life I took for granted my ability to be a fast processor, to be able to synthesize and, you know, regurgitate information and make decisions quickly and speak in front of people and, you know, just do all of these things that, thankfully, had always come naturally to me. And suddenly they were gone, you know, like, I would leave my car door open overnight, I’d be in a presentation with a client and say, you know, I want to talk to you about three things. And in the middle of things, one thing, two would just disappear. I would look for random like kitchen items in just the wrong places, like sugar and the refrigerator. Like, who keeps sugar in the refrigerator? That’s actually not a thing. and so it takes a toll.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:13  I seem to keep lots of things in the freezer that don’t belong there. I’m like.

Marisa 00:11:17  Like what? Now I want to know.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:18  The biggest one is like, this cup. I have this cup. And I love to put iced tea in it. And you’d think I would catch on after about the first time, but I’ll be like, where is the lid? I’ll go wandering around the house looking for the lid. Well, the lid is in the freezer because I took it off to to put it in.

Marisa 00:11:32  There, putting ice in there or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:34  Yeah, but to be honest, there are there are other things that end up in the freezer. It’s one of my now I’m like, if I can’t find something, it’s like, check this thing. Yeah, check the freezer. So talk to me now about where you are with long Covid. You and I have. We had a little conversation ahead of time. You’re in a slightly different place, but what I’d love to know is have you described that but also describe the uncertainty aspect of it and how that feels today? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:02  Given where you are.

Marisa 00:12:03  So the uncertainty aspect of it, I’ll say, feels a lot less overwhelming. when I came back from Greece in the fall of 2024, the only thing that I had was a commitment to myself that I would not be this sick and in this much pain forever. But I had no I had no plan. I had no strategy beyond, you know, you need to put your client strategist hat on and, like, figure this out and leverage every available resource at your disposal. But I didn’t really have a plan because like most people, I didn’t know anything about long Covid. Whereas today, you know, two years later, I have been the entire time working with this Amazing specialist out of Mount Sinai who is a virus specialist. Like that is like what she does. And she learned a lot about long Covid from her work with HIV and Aids, actually. And so she has been a phenomenal partner. And because of her and all of the things that she has had me do, you know, I’m still taking handfuls of pills twice a day.

Marisa 00:13:13  I still have to get a lot of rest. I have not been able to exercise properly in two years, but I’m like starting to do a little bit of strengthening and walking more, which is great breathwork every single day, which cured the asthma, thankfully. And the biggest thing that has changed just in the last 4 to 6 weeks, she has been following the research around GLP one and long Covid and she put me on just like a very, very low dose. You know, you can barely see the medicine in the syringe of compound and within 48 hours, I noticed a difference. Like, my brain was more clear. I felt like, you know, my sharpness had returned. I had more energy. I was sleeping better. Like, everything improved that quickly. And that has been, like, such a good reminder that if you just if you commit to believing that things will get better, and then you take steps to get there, like it will come together. And that’s one of the big messages that I want people to take away from this book.

Marisa 00:14:19  Like when you don’t know what’s next. You just have to be committed to figuring it out and doing whatever you have to do to get to where you’re trying to go.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:48  Did you feel that way before you started seeing significant improvement?

Marisa 00:14:53  No. You know what I was doing before I started seeing significant improvement? I was doing a thing that in my grief work, I would always tell people not to do, but I hadn’t related it to this period of uncertainty. And that’s, you know, after somebody loses someone they love, they often talk about like, I just want to get myself back. You know, like, I just want to feel like Marisa again. I just want to feel like Eric again, you know, before this defining loss. Right? And you’re not going back. Marisa is different. Like the day that my mom died. February 28th, 2008. 5:37 p.m.. Like, I became a different person, like it or not. And I kept actively comparing my long Covid sickest.

Marisa 00:15:36  Can barely walk around my house self to old Marisa, who you know, could run around the house with like a two year old attached to her limbs on a work call, making dinner all at the same time. You know, like. And it’s like. No. Like you’re a different person. And there are a lot of differences and changes that I’m super grateful for that I can see now. You know, I am more patient. I am more self compassionate. I am more hopeful and even more joyful in a lot of ways. But I only am able to see those things because I know that I shouldn’t be comparing myself to, you know, healthy. Marisa, I should be saying, what can I do this month that I couldn’t do a month ago? And looking at progress that way, and once I made that switch, and that switch was thanks to a woman who I became friends with, she was following me on Instagram because she had long Covid and my grief work had been helping her.

Marisa 00:16:33  And so when I shared that, you know, I was diagnosed with long Covid, she reached out. She was the person who connected me to my doctor, and she’s been like my long Covid Sherpa mentor type person. And she was like, you need to stop. And I was like, oh, right, I know better. Why am I doing this?

Eric Zimmer 00:16:50  And how when you’re in the midst of an uncertainty like that, do you stop from telling yourself the worst case stories? Because that tends to be what we do, right? If you add uncertainty with physically feeling bad, like that is a concoction that it will stir up the worst case scenario. So how did you work with that?

Marisa 00:17:12  Well, first of all, it took me a while. And I will add, in retrospect, I should have probably been on some low dose antidepressant. You know, that period from like August of 2024 until January, February of 2025 was just I mean, it was just awful. Like I was so sick.

Marisa 00:17:34  You know, I live in the Hudson Valley. It was dark and winter and cold, and I just I felt like I had nothing, you know, like no life. And it was so miserable. And I was in pain. And in my case, in addition to, like recognizing that there are people who have long Covid in an even more debilitating way than how I was feeling, I also had this story in the back of my mind from my own childhood. When I was 13, my mom got sick. She was 37. She never got better. She just progressively got worse. Three and a half years later, we learned she had multiple sclerosis, at which point the disease had already done damage to her brain. And then, you know, it was probably like 7 or 8 years after that, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she was dead at 49. And so, you know, like when that’s your childhood story, you can’t help but feel like, oh, well, maybe that’s where this is all headed.

Marisa 00:18:30  And I just had to be really disciplined and say, like, you’re not going to plant those seeds. You have to believe that, yes, your story and her story are intricately connected, of course, but your story is not her story like you have to commit to writing whatever your story is meant to be, and then getting whatever help you need to make it happen. It’s not easy.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:54  And in the case of your mom, write with a condition that looks progressive in a certain direction. Did you see your mom do anything, or did you observe anything that helps in that case, because you’re describing hope as like things are going to get better, but there’s a lot of things in life that don’t get better. They get worse, you know? Yeah. And so within that context, how would you think about that? Like you had the ability, like you kept hoping that it would you would find a way. And I think hope is powerful. But for example, we spent six years with my wife’s mother who had dementia and there was no yeah, there was no like, well, we believe it’s going to get better.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:35  We had hope in certain things, but it wasn’t that.

Marisa 00:19:38  Yeah, yeah. No, that’s a really great, great question. with my mom. The thing that she always held on to was finding a way to live as well as possible. No matter what the circumstances were. And so she and I’m very grateful for this. She was never like, you know, praying for a miracle. I come from a very religious family, but like she was, she was going to keep it real, at least with me. And that was my way of coping as well. And so, you know, we could have really hard, honest conversations. And the way that hope manifested for her was more in terms of like, you know, I want to make sure that I die at home. Like, I don’t want to die in a hospital, hooked up to a bunch of machines. I don’t want you guys to have to make those types of decisions around my end of life. And like, my hope is that when the time comes and like, I can’t speak for myself, that like you will speak for me and like I was able to do that for her on the day that she died in my childhood home that my dad still lives in.

Marisa 00:20:40  And it was around things like we’re going to have as much fun as possible for however much time is left. So the year that she died, I turned 25 and my dad turned 50, and our birthdays are a couple of days apart. And so she had been planning like a joint surprise birthday party for us. It didn’t end up happening because she was septic and in the hospital like.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:03  Come on, mom, pull it together. I mean, she.

Speaker 4 00:21:06  Just like she was so determined.

Marisa 00:21:08  I have to.

Speaker 4 00:21:09  Tell you, I still.

Marisa 00:21:10  Have somewhere in this house today. She had these, like, custom candy bars made, with like, little snippets of information about me and my dad on them because she was like, oh, yeah, we’re definitely having this party. And I finally had to be like, mom. Like, look, look around. Like, we’re in the ICU. We’re not having this party.

Speaker 4 00:21:28  Like. But a couple.

Marisa 00:21:30  Weeks later, we did have a party for her 49th birthday.

Marisa 00:21:33  And let me tell you, all those church ladies that said they didn’t drink, they did drink, they did drink. They drank a lot. It was a brunch too, and I ran out of booze. I’ve never run out of booze at a party before, but when church ladies lie like it just it is what it is.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:47  Well, that’s very good to know. You know, something that makes me think along those lines is it’s something you talk about very early in the book. You talk about two layers of self, right? Identity and essence. And it sounds to me like maybe your mother found the way to to hold on to her essence. Say more about that. Yeah.

Marisa 00:22:07  So I really struggled with long Covid in regard to the loss of my like, intelligence and quick thinking. You know, like I said, it was something that I’ve taken for granted and I didn’t realize I took it for granted until it just disappeared one day. And, you know, it’s also what I’ve built my career around.

Marisa 00:22:30  And so I had a really hard time when suddenly my brain just didn’t work the way I was used to working for my entire life. And I. struggled with the idea that like, oh, I’m like, not super smart right now. And that feels uncomfortable to me because I’ve never had that happen before. I didn’t like that. I was so attached to intelligence and like, you know, it also took the loss of it to realize the attachment. And so I started thinking about, you know, what? What really is identity like? What is it all about? And so, yes, it is how we see ourselves in a bit of a more superficial sense, like smart, thin, pretty, whatever. But what really matters to me, and I know part of why this matters to me is because I saw, you know, my mom at her end of life. And like, what was really important. I care about what people are going to say at my funeral. Like, like the words that people use to describe you in your eulogy like that is your essence.

Marisa 00:23:36  Like they are the things about you that will not change. Like my mom was a joyful person. The day that we ended up having her funeral, it was supposed to be just like a random ice cream party at our house because she loves ice cream. And so, you know, some of these other ladies were like, oh, you know, your birthday was two weeks ago, but we’re gonna throw you this ice cream party just for fun. Because, like, that’s just that’s who she was. She was incredibly, incredibly generous. She would give and do anything for anyone all the time. You know, again, the birthday party that she thought she was going to throw and she was like, literally on her deathbed. and I want people to think more about essence and, like, character over these kind of more external markers of identity, because when life just completely falls apart, it is those like those deeper things that are going to get you through.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:31  It’s interesting you bring up the funeral piece in my book.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:35  I have a whole section on like working with values, and that’s one great way of figuring those out, is to imagine people at your funeral. What would you want them to be saying about you as a as a way of orienting towards what’s most important?

Marisa 00:24:49  Yeah, for me, like that is how you get at what really matters. I think it makes it easier to make decisions in day to day life, but it especially makes it easier to make decisions and figure out like how to move forward when life is really hard.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:26  Let’s talk about pain. You’ve got a chapter in the book on pain. Share whatever you would like about that section. You talk about suffering versus pain. You bring up a few different things.

Marisa 00:25:38  So I had a mom who was sick from the time I was 13, and I felt like that meant I had an understanding for, you know, what it must be like to live in pain, to live with a disability, all of these different things. And I was wrong.

Marisa 00:25:53  And I didn’t realize I was wrong until I found myself in this place where I was in horrible pain every single day. Like I, I have yet to experience a day in the last two years where I haven’t woken up in pain at some level, sometimes excruciating, sometimes more moderate. Which is the case right now, thankfully. And it changes. You like having to figure out how to function and be in the world. And, you know, ideally I also care about like being a good, useful person in the world and being a good mom. And, you know, being a mostly patient spouse, you know, all the things. but it’s really hard because it changes you like it changes your personality. It changes your capacity for patience, your capacity for thinking like for empathy sometimes, like it’s it’s a really hard way to live. And what I realized and I, I had reflected on this parable previously, it’s the Buddhist parable of like suffering as like the two arrows, you know, the first arrow that hits like that, that’s pain, you know? And we’re all going to encounter pain in this life, that just statement of fact.

Marisa 00:27:10  Unfortunately, the second arrow is you deciding you’re not going to do anything about that first arrow. You’re just going to keep walking around with an arrow in your chest that is suffering. And I knew that I had to find as many avenues as possible to pain management in order to live as well as possible. With long Covid like, I had to get creative. I had to get strategic patient, you know, more open to trying different types of things because I didn’t want to choose suffering. Like I knew I wasn’t going to just completely erase the pain overnight. And I still haven’t completely erase the pain, but by, you know, being open to all the different things that could help me. And I’m talking everything from there is a drug called low dose naltrexone that’s like technically a super, super, super low dose form of Narcan, which sounded scary. And I was like, I don’t know if I want to take that, but I don’t want to be in pain unnecessarily. So you know what? You take it.

Marisa 00:28:09  I don’t like needles. My husband gives me a shot once a week now and I just whatever like it helps. And so I do it eMDR therapy because I had and I still have some probably concerns just the right word that just decades of dealing with traumatic life events and that stress on the body. I think that probably contributed to me getting long Covid. And so, you know, I want to make sure that I deal with those things as well. And once I was strong enough to do therapy, I started doing that. I think people, when they are in pain, you know, if you’re in pain and you’re listening to this, I want to encourage you to be patient with yourself and to also be just so incredibly compassionate with yourself, because if you are able to access that compassion, it will allow you to consider things that previously would have been like, oh yeah, no, I don’t want to take that. I don’t want to do that or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:06  With the pain. There were things that you did that helped modulate the pain down, but as you said, you still have some amount of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:14  You just mentioned being compassionate to yourself. What other things did you find you could say to yourself that made it? I’m not going to say better, because that’s not the right word. That made it more manageable.

Marisa 00:29:27  So one of the biggest things for me, and this sort of connects to the, you know, constant comparisons to prior. Marisa while I was sick with long Covid. You know, I’m on deadline for a book. I am also a primary breadwinner in our house. Like there’s a mortgage that needs to be paid and school fees and all the things. And I felt a lot of pressure around productivity and really like the absence of productivity, especially on days when like the pain was really bad, you know, like there were days when I just could not even open up my computer because looking at the screen hurt my eyes too much. And that would create an even worse headache than whatever I was dealing with. And so one of the things that was helpful for me, I have a friend who I forget the technical term for the diagnosis, but she also uses little person and she is a disability justice advocate.

Marisa 00:30:23  And when she learned about my long Covid, she called and she basically lectured me for an hour and was like, these are the things that you need to do. And one of the things that she said was, you have to just let a bad day be a bad day, and you have to figure out what is going to go into your like, bad day toolkit so that when the bad days come, like you are prepared, you do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself, and you let go of all the expectations. And once she said that, I was like, okay. And I think part of why I was willing to listen to her versus someone else was because, you know, she’s lived in pain for most of her life. Both of her parents had disabilities as well. And yet she is one of the most accomplished people I know. And so it was one of those things where I was like, oh, okay. Like, if you’re saying this, you know, my former white House colleague who’s this, like, famous woman in the disability justice space, like, I should listen to you because clearly you’ve figured some stuff out here.

Marisa 00:31:24  Yeah. And so that’s what I did. I just said, you just have to let a bad day be a bad day and not fight it.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:28  It’s very wise. I want to go to a chapter called marathon where you say navigating uncertainty is not a sprint, but a marathon and endurance. Emotional endurance is not a quality you either have or don’t have. So what are ways of developing this emotional endurance?

Marisa 00:31:47  That’s a good question. I think one of the most important aspects of cultivating emotional endurance is being honest about whatever it is you’re facing and or dealing with, you know, whether it is a personal, physical or mental health challenge or a challenge in the context of a relationship or even, you know, frankly, right now, just feeling a lot of stress and grief and overwhelmed by the state of the world. Because what I learned by initially ignoring the fact that I had long Covid and hanging out in the space of denial, is that that only makes things worse. And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about recently, that also is a reminder for me that ignoring as opposed to acknowledging, will make things worse and make it harder for you to cultivate that kind of endurance.

Marisa 00:32:48  Is racism. I think one of the big challenges in our country as it pertains to racism, racial equity, etc. we have never really fully acknowledged the stain of racism and systemic racism, in particular in America. And without that full acknowledgement, you miss out on the space for healing and with emotional endurance. It’s like as we go through life, obviously, you know this. I know you’ve experienced this. Like there’s always going to be something else. Unfortunately, it’s not like, oh, Marisa lost her mom when she was young, and now she’s good and there will be no more hard things. Like. That’s just. That’s just not how it works. And so figuring out what you need to acknowledge in order to heal throughout the different things that come up, is part of what allows you to continue to cultivate and build that muscle. I know as hard as it has been, this experience forced me to increase my own emotional endurance by forcing me to deal with some of the stuff that I was still carrying around related to my mom and my childhood, and the impact that it had on my early life.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:03  Yeah, you have a whole chapter on that basic idea, that prolonged uncertainty or even we could say pain. New pain doesn’t just create new pain. It surfaces all this old pain. Yeah, yeah. And so when we are under stress, when we are not feeling good, when we are in pain, when we are in periods of great doubt, it tends to be that all of our old demons. Yeah, come right up to the surface, which, as you’ve said, is an opportunity to work on healing them, but also kind of inconvenient.

Marisa 00:34:39  Oh, it’s super inconvenient. I was oh, my goodness, I was so mad. And I want people to know, like it is okay to be mad. I am a big supporter of rage. Like, I just, I’m all about, like, be mad and get it out. Like, you are absolutely entitled to that because, you know, like, I’m super sick. I had to leave this amazing professional experience early because I couldn’t fucking breathe.

Marisa 00:35:04  And now I’m realizing I have all of this, like, icky stuff that I have to deal with from almost 30 years ago. I was like, is this a joke? Like, I’ve already written an entire book about my mom. Like, how are we still here? but there we were. So, Yeah, I had to. I had to deal with it. I think it’s something that I’ll like continue to deal with in different ways for the rest of my life, but I have less fear around it. I think that and that’s what I think you ultimately want to get to. I don’t know that we ever reach a point in life where it’s like, okay, I’m healed, period. All good. Like, see you guys later. I think it’s more like the guy who or girl who played sports in high school and, you know, got the bad knee injury. And when it rains, even though they’re 50, like, the knee still feels a little funny. Like I think that’s what it is with the emotional stuff.

Marisa 00:35:58  And so if you can think about it like that, it makes it a little bit easier to see it coming because it’s coming.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:04  I agree, I had a few years ago, I had something happen in my life that was extraordinarily unexpected and extremely emotionally painful, and it threw me for a loop how much I was struggling. And I had this moment where I was like, the last 25 years I’ve been on this journey of healing. Like, what? Has nothing done any good.

Marisa 00:36:28  Am I good? Like what’s good?

Eric Zimmer 00:36:30  Like what? What happened? And I came out of that with a couple of things. One was a therapist said something to me. I thought it was really good. He’s like, look, you have gone from that stuff bothering you 95% of the time to like that stuff bothering you in like the 1% of your worst moments. And that was really helpful. I was like, okay, you know, look, this used to run my life. Yeah, now I’m healed enough.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:57  But he said, look, everybody will have a point at which the stress or whatever becomes too much. You’ll be outside your window of what you can handle and you’re going to feel that way again. And then the other analogy that I found really helpful with that is to think of also like a spiral staircase that has like pictures on the wall and like as you go around, like you see the it’s like there’s that picture again. And then you come back around and you’re like, there’s that picture again, but ideally you’re a little bit higher up. Yeah. Than the last time right? Yes. You can see something in the picture. The light’s a little bit different, and I think that’s kind of the way it is to I think some of these things that are deeply embedded in us are going to be scenery at parts of our lives. Yes, yes. But ideally each time I see them I’m a little bit different. And that’s true. I was definitely different dealing with that stuff this time than I was maybe, say, the time before.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:53  It’s still it didn’t make it not hurt like hell. I mean, you know.

Marisa 00:37:57  It is still brutal.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:00  Still it is still definitely, definitely brutal. I want to talk about help. You talk about asking for help, and you talk about how for some people, it’s very, very hard to ask for help. So I’d like to have you talk about that. But you also go into how to ask for help. And I think that’s really practical and useful. So talk about the first part.

Marisa 00:38:22  Yeah. So in terms of it being hard to ask for help, I think for some people and this has happened to some people who I know and love. You know, they grew up in environments where they didn’t have people they could rely on. You know, even people that they absolutely should have been able to rely on, like parents and, you know, aunts and uncles, things of that nature. They couldn’t actually rely on those people. When that is your environment as a child, why would you think that people want to help you? Which is I mean, it’s devastating, but truly, like, why would you think that you should be entitled, asking for help, that you should feel comfortable asking for help and that people want to show up for you? Like, you just you don’t.

Marisa 00:39:05  That’s one piece of it. I think another piece of it is our culture is so committed to individualism and, you know, pull yourself up from your bootstraps. And I did it so you can do it, too. And just this idea, this myth, actually, of people being self-made and doing all of these things on their own. And I think that I know that there are a number of people who feel some degree of shame around asking for help. And so I think it’s important to remember a few things. Like one, human beings evolved in community for a reason. If we hadn’t, we would have just we would never would have evolved. We would have just gone extinct like a long, long time ago. and so we are meant to be together like we are meant to show up for and support one another. And this isn’t even just in, you know, these, like, really big, challenging moments that we go through, even in day to day life. Like I think about when community feels good and, you know, you’re taking turns with another mom doing pick ups and drop offs or, you know, collaborating with friends on Friendsgiving and, you know, like doing those kinds of things, like, it feels good to give and it feels good to receive when we let ourselves do that.

Marisa 00:40:21  And when it comes to asking for the help, I want to encourage people to be as specific as possible while also being somewhat flexible. And I’ll just give a quick example of this. where we live. My dad lives about 20 minutes from us. My son is the only grandchild in the family. My father is obsessed with him. My son is obsessed with my dad. It’s great. Except my dad, even though he’s like 68 years old, he’s like a 17 year old boy. Like, that’s just who he is. That’s who he probably always was. But my mom kept him in check for a long time. She’s no longer with us. And so, you know, we have like, we. Yeah, we’ve got like a 17 year old boy in the family. And so my dad, my dad took my son once Saturday afternoon. And this was when I was like early stages of illness. And I am I’m sure this will come as a big surprise to you, Eric. Like I am the parent that sleep trained like right as soon as you could.

Marisa 00:41:18  Like I keep the schedule because mom needs her sleep. This predates long Covid. Like, I was just like, I cannot have one of these kids that’s up all night. Like, I’ll completely lose it. And so my dad kept him out too long. He missed his nap. You know, he delivers back, like this sort of crabby, annoying toddler. And I was just like, oh, like, are you kidding me? But I follow this thing that my therapist Emily shared that I think is common in the cognitive behavioral therapy space called the Rule of six. Like, whatever you’re upset about right now, is it going to matter in six days, six weeks or six months? A two and a half year old missing his nap? It’s not even going to matter tomorrow. Like, let’s be honest. And so I realized, like, it’s better to have had the free childcare help on a day when my head felt like it was going to explode, then to have it be like the most perfect childcare, like it was better than nothing.

Marisa 00:42:18  And so you just have to get over it. And then when when you ask someone for help and they don’t respond in the way that you want them to. I want you to take a step back and ask yourself a couple of questions, like, did you ask your friend who is notoriously flaky? Like, you love her, she loves you. But like, she’s just, you know, usually there’s kind of a flake. You probably didn’t ask the right person. In that case, could this person be going through something in their life that you don’t know about, that you know they’re just consumed by? And so should you consider extending them some grace and maybe asking again at a different point, because we all have so much going on that doesn’t show up necessarily on like the zoom call or social media app or whatever, but that is real and hard. And so, you know, be a little bit thoughtful and strategic about it, I would say, and don’t take anything personally outside of the fact that you are worthy of asking for and accepting help.

Marisa 00:43:15  Like, I want you to take that very personally because it’s true.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:19  It’s a different kind of asking for help. But since your book is a week out and my book is a day out as we record this, Holy mackerel! I feel like all I’ve been doing is asking for help and saying that don’t take anything personal is really important.

Marisa 00:43:36  Yeah, yeah. I’m wondering. So it’s so funny. I wrote something on, on social media the other day. You know, I was like, I want people to know you’re going to see, like, interview clips and, like, fancy events and all of these things in the next couple of weeks. Like, I need you to know that this process is also filled with rejection. Some is spoken, a lot of it is just silent, like the people who don’t respond to your emails or your texts or whatever. And like you just have to keep going.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:05  It’s so funny the way perspective plays a role, because I can get into the nose or the complete indifference being ignored, and that’s where I spend a lot of attention.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:16  And then I had a friend said to me, like, what? What? What sort of things have you got, you know, going for your book? And I listed, I was like, you are killing it. I know. And I’m like, well, okay. Which you know. it’s hard. Yeah. That is the part I’m most ready to be over. Yeah. Is this constant asking to move back into a normal, more normal balance of like, yes, I’ll ask for some things and I’ll give a bunch of things and I’ll ask for some things and. Whew.

Marisa 00:44:44  It’s relentless. It’s relentless. And the thing about books is, like what you have created, like it is something that like, came from within you. Like I view my books as like a piece of my soul. Yeah. And so when people don’t respond to that email, like, yeah, I get a little salty.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:01  Yeah. And they have this window of sort of like, you know, not that books don’t continue to sell over time, but that initial, you know, launch part is important and not even just to hit like a bestseller list, but to show retailers and show Amazon and get that symptom guide.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:18  Yeah. Yeah.

Marisa 00:45:19  It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting. It is not fun.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:23  Keep trying to focus on the fun parts and focus on the like. This is a really good problem to have. I mean, this is a really good problem to have that I’ve created a book that I feel really good about and I want people to know about and and get something from is definitely in the better quality of problems it is.

Marisa 00:45:44  But, you know, knowing that it is, it’s hard to like stay in that headspace when you’re in the constant grind. The other thing that I’m trying to do, and I haven’t fully figured this out yet, but I’ll just plant this seed in your head as well, is figure out where are the moments when I am going to press pause and just take time for like celebration and or reflection? Yeah, because, you know, even if you’re a constant writer, like you only have a book come out every three years, maybe, you know, like it’s it’s still a really big deal.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:18  it is. So this is my first.

Marisa 00:46:20  Okay. So you really have to celebrate.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:22  Like you have a dinner plan. Okay. Tomorrow night, my partners organized a little party of some of my favorite people, and we’re going to go out to dinner. And so. Yeah.

Marisa 00:46:32  Yes, I’m happy.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:33  There’s some celebration in there. Yes. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s such a pleasure to talk with you. I think the book is really, really valuable and I’ve enjoyed this conversation.

Marisa 00:46:43  Thank you. This is super fun.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:45  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:11  Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.