Marissa Renee Lee has been through it. Harvard. Wall Street. The White House. And also: her mother's MS diagnosis at 13, stage four breast cancer, a pregnancy loss, and now two years of long COVID. What she's learned isn't that grief has a silver lining. It's that grief has a through line, and if you're honest enough to follow it, it leads somewhere real.
In this episode, Kelley sits down with Marissa, bestselling author of Grief Is Love and her newest book Waiting for Dawn, for a conversation that gets honest about what it actually costs to be the strong one. They talk about what happens to your identity when the thing you've always counted on, your strength, your body, your plan, disappears without asking permission. And what you reach for when it does.
What you'll hear:
- Why grief isn't a detour from your life story, it is your life story, and what high-achieving Black women lose when they don't name it
- The "Flake Permission Structure" — and why saying "I want to but I can't commit" is one of the most honest and loving things you can do
- What Marissa calls "good love" and why saying no to someone you love is sometimes the most caring thing you can offer
- The two tools she swears by when the uncertainty isn't going anywhere: radical honesty about where you are, and practical hope for where you're going
Episode Highlights & Timestamps
00:04:22 — Achievement as armor: Marissa traces how her drive for success started as a survival strategy at 13, when her mom got sick and she decided the only thing she could control was how hard she worked
00:22:11 — "Not everything can be fixed. Some things must be endured." Kelley and Marissa get honest about what it means to hold yourself together when the world isn't cooperating, and why shrinking your to-do list down to just two things is actually enough
00:28:09 — The Flake Permission Structure: why saying "I want to but I can't commit" upfront is kinder, more honest, and way less anxiety-inducing than the last-minute text we've all sent
00:34:00 — Good love and the hardest no: Marissa reframes saying no to someone you love not as a failure of care but as the fullest expression of it, and why learning to feed yourself first is how you actually show up for others
Gentle Invitation
Somewhere in your life right now, there's something you can't fix. You can only endure it.
What would it look like to be honest about that, not performatively, just to yourself? And what's the smallest, most stubborn piece of hope you can hold alongside it?
Start there. Build from there.
Connect with Marissa
Grab a copy of Waiting for Dawn wherever you buy your books — Marissa especially recommends your local indie bookstore.
Find her on Substack at Holding Both and everywhere else on the internet as @MarissaRenee.
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