When Everything Happened

Losing the “Dream Life,” Finding Something Truer

Oh hello lovely person, 

If you’re reading this, then I’m guessing that, like me, you are someone who suspects that the good life is often nothing like what we were promised (cue 90s timeshare pitch). I’d like to tell you a story of how this all began. 

Everything Happens was born not in a season of clarity or certainty or strategic planning. Nope. It was a crucible. 

It was the year of our Lord 2015, which feels like a lifetime ago. Maybe because it was. I was thirty-five, had gotten my dream job as a professor at Duke University, and finally had the baby I wanted after years of infertility. And on one very average Tuesday, I was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. No warning. No family history. Just an immediate fissure that broke my life into a before and an after. I was plunged into a world of needles and new belly buttons and scans. But also into a world that wanted to convince me that everything happens for a reason.

Ironically, I had just published a book called Blessed that laid out the first history of the rise of the idea that the right kind of faith will bring you health, wealth, and happiness. I had been a researcher and an expert and a pretty-great question asker with a sensible clipboard. Now I was walking around feeling like my life was now evidence of something else. A failure, maybe. 

There was no room for someone like me in a world obsessed with "your best life now," with hyper-individualism, certainty and success, and manifesting a future without fragility.

I started writing, frankly, because I was profoundly lonely. I wanted to name the truth. To laugh. To bless. To curse. To say aloud what so many of us know in our bones: that life is harder and more beautiful than we expected. 

But I didn’t really think anyone would read it, which sounds silly now because Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) became a clarion call. And a TED Talk. And a viral New York Times essay. And a podcast. And this gorgeous community.

(But truthfully my plan was to print it out on the Divinity school computers and pass it around to friends.)

People started to come closer. Not just the people facing awful diagnoses (hi! I know you are here too), but caregivers, parents, pastors, doctors, teachers, doubters. People in grief, in recovery, in transition. People trying to love well and live gently in a world that didn’t prepare them for their own limits.

And that is how Everything Happens was born. 

This feels about right…

It feels like the most ridiculous grace to that for the past decade (!!) I’ve invited millions of readers and listeners into a gentler, more honest conversation about what it means to live in a world where shiny lives and perfect answers so often fail us. Good medicine and prayer and (if I’m honest) my medical stubbornness (thank you Dr. Google!) have kept me living. I am cancer-free. 

But we (*gestures wildly*) are people who have been cracked open by love and grief and the sheer weight of our efforts. Instead of pretending everything is fine, we’re learning to tell the truth. We are becoming. Because when you’ve been through hell, as Rabbi Steve Leder says, we don’t want to come out empty-handed. We want to learn to live in reality with more honesty and courage and hope and joy than culture allows. 

So here on this Substack, I will sometimes write blessings for impossible days. Or essays that take apart cultural myths. But all of this is a story about lives that don’t fit the mold…and the truth that we don’t have to be shiny to belong. 

This isn’t self-help. This isn’t performance. This is the honest-to-God story of what it means to be human in the world right now. 

So whether you’re holding it together with duct tape and grace, or feeling like you’re ready to reimagine what a meaningful life could look like…welcome. We have snacks. 

Come for the hard-won wisdom. Stay for the gallows humor. 

With all my love,
Kate