Taking Heart

A guest post from Stephanie Duncan Smith, author of "Even After Everything"

Happy Friday, all. Today, we have a special guest post from Stephanie Duncan Smith. Stephanie is a senior editor at HarperOne, the creator of the Substack newsletter Slant Letter for writers, and the author of Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway, which was published this week. Her beautiful insight on courage and hope is close to my heart these days. I hope you enjoy it.

---

You might say dashing people’s hopes is part of my day job, as an editor in publishing, reviewing thousands of book proposals each year and acquiring only a select few. I try to craft my declines with care and respect because I know what goes into each proposal, especially as an author myself who has been on the receiving end of such rejections. 

As every writer knows intimately: risk is inherent to creativity. Publishing will break your heart if you stick around long enough, and it’s a curious phenomenon that many do—writing onward, risking again, because creative expression has its own curious magnetic pull.

Putting yourself into anything—a manuscript, a relationship, a local community, a job or a cause you believe in—is always high stakes. We understand we can control our input, but never the outcome, and this makes for dangerous territory. There is no denying the psychologically rattling vulnerability that comes with taking risks in life, love, and creativity. Yet playing it safe is the surest way to live a small life. 

In between the realities of risk and a life of brave connection is what I’ve come to call the spiritual practice of taking heart. Taking heart might be best understood as the open admission that we don’t know how this story will end, but we’re going to give it a go. It’s the conscious choice to stay open to the world’s goodness, pulling for hope and love, even as you acknowledge the risks. It’s taking care not to learn the wrong lesson: that it’s better not to try to begin with. 

Such a choice is spiritual, because it requires the whole person, perhaps even divine help. And this choice is a practice, because it is a learned skill through repetition. The good news is the more we take heart, the more we grow our capacity for courage. The heart, after all, is a muscle. I take this to mean we were made for courage.

As someone who has experienced recurrent pregnancy loss, I’ve had to contend with this bracing and believing the best in my own life. 

I found it a wonder to move through the first trimester of my first pregnancy in concert with Advent. But then, the week before Christmas, I experienced a miscarriage. It was Advent’s week of joy. It was also the winter solstice, and the longest night felt truer, more honest, to me then. My next pregnancy grew in unsettling parallel to the global pandemic, and I gave birth to my daughter nearly one year to the day after our first loss. Later I became pregnant again, only to lose this pregnancy on what should have been the due date of our first—a ghost birthday, a final heartbeat, all blurred together. It all felt like tricks. 

The heart has its reasons for bracing, and it must be said that such reasons are valid. As a means of psychological survival, I found I had to claim agency wherever I could find it. I found some here: in the determination that I was not a fool for wanting something beautiful, for hoping and trying for life. It was a fight to believe this, but I knew I needed to honor myself for the courage it takes to try, to risk, and to brave any outcome in the name of love. Ultimately, I found I could bear no regret for such a choice, no matter what happened next.

The choice to try again that ultimately brought us my son was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But I will never forget that first ultrasound of his—I saw the image on the screen and I did not yet know if this was a viable pregnancy or not. But I knew I was filled with love, and I would not take it back. 

In the writer’s community, we say there is no wasted page. Even if it gets scrapped later, every sentence is worthy practice, and practice makes better writers of us.  In the same way, I believe there is no wasted hope. Hope makes better humans of us. 

The suggestion that any output can be wasted stems from a scarcity mindset—a belief that our creative energy, hope, or love is a non-renewable resource that must be spent only in the “right” places. But the wise mind knows love is never wasted. The wise mind knows taking heart does not go in vain, yet makes of us the kind of people we all aspire to be: the gutsy kind who stay with their courage, and stay with their humanity. 

I wrote through those four pregnancies as a way of processing, as my own spiritual practice of taking heart, and ultimately they became a book. In Even After Everything, I write,

“This kind of hope is not wispy, wishful thinking; it is a deadlift from one’s core. It takes a certain strength to keep your hopes up, to engage the muscles of your core, and lift, lift, lift—against the entropy of everything, against the gravity of death itself. To keep such a hope up is to set the total weight of your being against ‘the full catastrophe of living,’[1] and in doing so, grit your teeth, fire every muscle you have, and feel the burn of the sweat-beaded push.”

In the end, courage is the only pathway to the connection we crave most. Risk is the essential throughway. It’s no wonder we tremble on such a threshold. Of course we do. The proposal might get rejected. The pregnancy might not keep. The relationship might end in flames. Yet in a world where we control so very little, I say let’s make our choices where we can. It’s true: we cannot control the happening. But the becoming—that’s all yours. Even now, a new story longs to begin. I say let’s take heart, take our chances, and let it.

See you next week. xo

Laura

You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. Laura is the founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and the bestselling author of two books, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off from Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else).

You can give a gift subscription here.

---

[1] 9 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), 6.