I Know Nothing
For so long,
I thought knowing would save me.
If I could see far enough ahead,
read the room correctly,
anticipate what might hurt,
choose the right words,
make the wisest decision,
perhaps I could keep the people I love
and the life I love
somehow safely gathered in my hands.
So I learned to watch closely.
To listen for the change in someone's voice.
To replay the conversation on the drive home.
To notice what I might have missed,
what I should have said,
what I could still repair.
I learned to stand at the edge of tomorrow
and squint toward the horizon,
as though enough looking
might finally let me see
what was coming.
And I became very good
at holding on.
But lately,
every now and then,
something softer finds me.
A small opening
where an answer used to be required.
A quiet recognition—
I don't actually know.
I don't know what this moment means.
I don't know what another heart is truly feeling.
I don't know which road will open
or which one will disappear completely
without any warning.
I don't know why some things arrive
and others leave.
I don't know what Life is doing
beyond the small circle
my eyes can see.
I know nothing.
And strangely,
those words do not frighten me
the way I thought they would.
They feel more like setting something down.
Like unclenching a hand
I hadn't realized was clenched.
Like discovering
that uncertainty is not a hole
I am required to fill.
Maybe there are things moving
beneath the surface
that I cannot see.
What if there are currents of energy
I am not meant to understand?
Maybe I have mistaken
my ability to predict the waves
for the very ocean that keeps me afloat.
I don't need to tell myself
that everything will work out
exactly as I hope.
I don't need to understand
where the water is taking me.
Maybe, for this moment,
it is enough to notice
that I am here.
Breathing.
Held by a Life
I have never fully understood.
And somewhere inside
that vastness of not knowing,
I feel the smallest opening—
not certainty,
not an answer,
not even courage.
Just a willingness
to loosen my grip
on everything I thought
I had to know.
I don't know.
But I am open
to trusting
what I cannot see.
Back in the summer of 2017, our family decided to spend a week in a beautiful resort in Cancun, Mexico to celebrate Megan’s high school graduation. We knew even as we booked our flights that the United States had issued a strong travel warning for Mexico due to an outbreak of some kind of illness. But, we figured we’d just stay in our little resort and be just fine.
When we arrived, we reviewed the protocols with our three daughters. Don’t drink the water. Don’t eat any fresh fruit or vegetables from outside of the resort. Don't wander up to a little roadside stand and start eating things that may or may not have been washed in water your digestive system has never met before. This was not secret information. EVERYONE knew the rules.
But apparently vacation Missy was feeling adventurous. There was all this beautiful fresh fruit, and I thought, Oh, come on. I'm in Mexico. I'm going to eat the fruit. My family thought I was crazy. But, I chose to eat the fruit. And the fruit won.
Within a very short period of time, I had what people call Montezuma's Revenge. I was sicker than I had ever been in my life. And not just for a day or two. I was in what felt like a level 10 intestinal nightmare for about two solid weeks. We came home from Cancun, and I could barely eat anything. Rice and applesauce became my best friends for a while.
And then came the mission trip. I had committed months earlier to go on a weeklong mission trip with my church. People were counting on me. And my adorable little conditioned mind insisted that I must honor my commitment, regardless of the condition of my body. So there was only one logical choice: Go on the mission trip.
And this is where I want to be very careful not to tell this story through the eyes of the woman I am today. Because it would be very easy for me now to look back at that younger me and say, Missy. For the love of God. Stay home. Your body has been sick for weeks. You're barely eating. You're exhausted. Cancel the trip. REST.
But that isn't how I understood the world in 2017. And we do not get to choose how we see the world in any given moment. We see what we see…until the lens changes and we see something fresh.
I wasn't knowingly ignoring my body. I wasn't thinking, My poor body is begging me for rest and I refuse to give it to her.
I was doing what I genuinely believed was the right thing to do. I had made a commitment. And good people keep their commitments. People were counting on me. And good people don't let other people down. I had signed up to serve. And good people show up to serve.
I was tired and weak and still eating mostly rice and applesauce, but, in my little mind, that was my problem. I certainly wasn't going to make it everybody else's problem. I could do hard things. I could push through. I could rally. I could shine. Good Girls shine. So off I went on this weeklong mission trip with my little digestive system waving a white flag behind me.
Now, I don't remember every detail of that week anymore, but do remember LUNCH. Every day at the work site, lunch came out of old beat-up coolers. And inside those coolers were bologna and cheese sandwiches. It was somewhere around 95 degrees outside. I had spent the previous several weeks cautiously negotiating with rice and applesauce, and now I was being asked to navigate bologna and cheese from a cooler in 95-degree heat. Decision time again. And again, the only logical choice was to eat those sandwiches every day, in spite of my body screaming loudly.
But the story does not end there. It does not end with me coming to my senses and crawling into my cozy bed at home for a nice long recovery. Because I had another commitment waiting for me at the end of that mission trip.
Upon returning from my week with my church, I had a work trip to Nevada. I was working in education at the time, and I had been hired to teach groups of principals and teachers how to administer a new set of formative assessments. This wasn't something where I could sit quietly in the back of a room and hope nobody noticed me. I was the person at the front of the room. I was the trainer. I was the one who was supposed to know what she was doing. People had traveled there to learn from me. So, let’s check in with Choice Point number 4: stay home and rest or go on the work trip?
You already know the choice that was made. I packed my suitcase again and got on a plane to Nevada. By this point, my body was profoundly, completely depleted. Each morning in Nevada I would take this enormous breath. And I would basically ask my body for one more day. Come on. Just get me through today. Just get me through these presentations. Just let me do what I came here to do. And then I would get up. Get dressed. Put myself together. Walk into that room. Smile. And give them everything I had.
And then, on about the third day in Nevada, I noticed a couple of strange little bumps. Just a few. I didn't even know what they were. I remember asking one of my coworkers, What are these? And she looked at them and said something like, I think those are hives. Hives? I had never had hives in my life. I didn't really know anything about hives. And I wasn't particularly worried about them. They were just these strange little bumps that had appeared on my skin.
My body had apparently decided to try an entirely new method of communication. The stomach and intestinal screaming had apparently not been quite loud enough for me to hear. So, right on cue, hives showed up. Choice Point number 5: take a pause or keep going? You already know the answer. Cover those babies up with some Clinique makeup and move on. I will just shine even brighter. And I did. I finished the trip. I came home. And those few little hives did not remain a few little hives.
Eventually there were hundreds. Then, thousands. They spread across my body. I went to my doctor to try to find out what was happening. She asked me to describe my life over the previous three months.
And I told her. Cancun. The fruit. Montezuma's Revenge. Two weeks of being terribly sick. Rice and applesauce. The mission trip. The heat. Coming home. Getting right back on an airplane. Nevada. Teaching all day. Barely making it through. Pushing. Striving. Powering through.
And after hearing the whole story, my doctor explained that the Montezuma’s Revenge had set the stage for my hives but that my perfectionistic and people-pleasing tendencies had sealed the deal. Essentially, a series of very poor choices had led to this moment, covered in thousands of hives. My mind immediately interpreted her words to mean, "This is all my fault. It is of my own doing."
And if we stopped the story right there...then we can easily fall into the cultural trap that has been around for thousands of years: "I should have known better. I DID know better and simply made horrible choices. I never should have eaten that fruit from the fruit stand. I never should have powered through and pushed harder to prove how reliable I am."
But that is a trap. It is a powerful cultural narrative that is filled to the brim with illusions and misconceptions.
Thankfully, I get to tell the rest of the story here...the parts where I began to wake up from the trance of all of those compelling "should have known better" and "whould have done better" stories.
You see, those hives became a much bigger part of my life than I could possibly have imagined when I stood in that hotel room in Nevada staring at the first few little bumps on my skin. They sent me searching. They sent me questioning. They brought me face-to-face with the way I had been living my entire life. They began to expose deeply held beliefs that I hadn't even known were there before. My need to push. My need to please. My need to be okay so everyone else could be okay. My belief that my value was directly linked to my productivity, to my ability to keep a hundred balls in the air at one time. My belief that a good person keeps going no matter what. A Good Girl doesn't disappoint. A Good Girl doesn't need too much. A Good Girl shows up. A Good Girl gives 200 percent. A Good Girl shines all the time in all things.
And slowly—not in one giant revelation—those hives became part of a much bigger unraveling; an UN-LEARNING of sorts.
So many of the things I had been absolutely certain about began to look a little less certain. And some of the things I had spent my whole life trying to control began to look a little less controllable. Some of the things I had called good began to look...well, I don't know. And some of the things I had called bad began to look...I don't know. Who decides good? When does bad slip into best thing ever?
Eventually, through a road I never could have mapped from that fruit stand in Cancun, I ended up here. Sitting with all of you. Having conversations like this one. Seeing my body differently. Seeing my mind differently. Seeing LIFE differently.
So, was it GOOD to eat that piece of fruit? I don’t know. I just know that I DID eat the fruit. That was the actual REALITY before any judgement of good or bad, right or wrong, should or shouldn’t.
I ate the fruit. And then I got very sick. And from that space of being very sick, I grew and expanded in ways that I can only describe as miraculous. So, maybe instead of calling that first choice—the one to eat the fruit in Mexico—GOOD or BAD, we just say, that's what happened. Full Stop. And if it happened, maybe there is something inside of it that is incredibly trustworthy.
Imagine standing on Page 30 of a 300-page novel and calling the page awful or bad or wrong. Just because Page 30 looks scary or dark or uncomfortable. That would make no sense. You have no clue how the events of that one page are shaping the narrative that unfolds in later pages and chapters.
The version of Missy standing at the fruit stand could not see Nevada. The version of Missy in Nevada could not see the years that followed. The version of Missy covered in hives could not see the life that was unfolding so beautifully—the one that INCLUDED being really sick for a while.
And if that's true of that page...that chapter of my life, how do I actually know it isn't true of every page?
How do I know that today's disappointment isn’t absolutely perfect? How do I know that an unexpected closed door isn’t the best thing for me? How do I know what that awkward or cringey conversation meant yesterday? How do I know that the thing I worked SO freaking hard to get but didn’t get it, isn’t the most efficient thing for me to see some deeper truth of life?
How do I know that the choice I made that cost me a job or a relationship isn’t setting me up for something much richer or more meaningful on a different page, in a future chapter?
The rush to judgement begins to feel more and more suspicious, now.
My sweet mind still occasionally cries out, “You shouldn’t have done that or said that thing…”
But now, I love to ask it, “How do you know?”
And my mind usually comes back with something like, “Because it led to so much discomfort. It made me insecure. It was awkward. I lost a job because of it. I lost a friend because of it. Someone got hurt..."
But what if we really don’t know. What if we can still do all the things we typically do like apologize if we hurt someone, or change course if something didn't work, or try something different if it's clear that another path might work better? But at the same time, we STOP believing the mind's judgements of "it shouldn't have happened that way"?
Because, if it DID happen a certain way, how do we really know that Life somehow went wrong?
And that is where I am finding SO much freedom these days.
Right in the middle of I don't know.
I don’t know but I am open to trusting what I cannot see.
There is such a different feeling in my body when I say that.
When I'm trying to control, everything in me gets tight. When I find myself judging myself and others, my world feels small and fragile. I lean forward. I scan. I plan. I rehearse. I grip.
But when I let myself fall all the way into I know nothing, something opens.
I know nothing.
And maybe even...How could I know? I'm standing on one tiny page of an expansive novel.
That fruit that was the BAD DECISION in June of 2017 is now the first beautiful domino that fell in a long series of dominoes that led me to where I am now. And I am eternally GRATEFUL for that infamous decision.
There are pages ahead of me I cannot see. There are things moving beyond the reach of my understanding. But for now, this seems to be the most spacious place to land:
I don't know, but I am open to trusting what I cannot see.
And in the spirit of "I don't know, but I am open to trusting," I also see so clearly now that all of that programming—the perfectionism, the people-pleasing, the beliefs that tied my value to my performance and productivity—THOSE weren't bad or wrong either.
They were simply part of my path. They could not have been any different. I have so much gratitude for the decades I spent living inside of those conditioned programs. I love that younger version of me so much. She helped me grow into who I am today. She taught me self-compassion, kindness, and grace. She was freaking AWESOME. I LOVE that she learned how to shine so brightly, even at the expense of her body. That's precisely what paved the way to today. To this beautiful moment. How could I ever say that those decades could have been better? I can't. Thank goodness.
My mind will likely continue to sing its favorite song—“you should have known better…done better…been better…You should have made wiser choices…” but, for now, I will just smile and remind that sweet little mind, “We know nothing. Now let’s go play.”