Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 429 K.J. Ramsey - Finding Joy in the Place Between Our Pains
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What does joy look like in the midst of pain and grief? K.J. Ramsey's memoir, The Place Between Our Pains, was written while she was fighting for her life - and in this conversation, she talks about what that actually means. We get into how dependence on others opens us to love in ways independence never could, why grief is a gate into aliveness rather than a place to get stuck, and what it looked like to launch a book about joy while facing a tumor diagnosis and an IV drip on launch day. This is a conversation about the kind of joy that doesn't require a tidy resolution and why that might be the kind we're searching for.
K.J. Ramsey is an increasingly feral mystic who is utterly devoted to the joy of being alive. She is a body-centered licensed professional counselor specialized in trauma recovery and an acclaimed author of prose and poetry, including The Book of Common Courage, The Lord Is My Courage, and This Too Shall Last, as well as the bestselling essay Substack Embodied. KJ advocates for fellow autoimmune patients and lives in Colorado with her husband Ryan, a hospice chaplain, and their two velcro dogs.
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Grief that is shared becomes joy that is multiplied, and I am seeing that right now in a way that is honestly astounding. And this has been the most joy-filled season of my life, even while my literal face is being destroyed. What a wild thing. If that's possible for me, not that special. I think it's possible for anybody.
Joshua Johnson:Hello, and welcome to the Shifting Culture podcast, in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make, we long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson. What does it look like to find joy when your body is falling apart, not the tidy resolution at the end of the chapter kind, but the real thing, the kind that shows up in the middle of a tumor diagnosis, an IV drip on book launch day, grief you have to physically rip out of yourself and put on a collage in the forest just to survive it. KJ Ramsey is a writer, a trauma counselor, and chronic illness advocate. Her memoir, The Place Between Our Pains, traces what she's learned through years of navigating a healthcare system that dismissed her, a body that has forced her to relearn how to walk more than once, and a life that has refused to let her pretend she doesn't need other people. Her conviction coming out of all of it, joy is sturdier than we think. Grief is a gate, not a dead end, and the limits we spend most of our lives trying to escape might actually be the very place where love gets in. So, join us. This is a beautiful conversation you are in for a treat. Here is my conversation with KJ Ramsey. KJ, welcome to Shifting Culture. Excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me.
Unknown:Thank you for having me.
Joshua Johnson:We're going to talk about your book, The Place Between Our Pains, which is a beautiful, painful, hilarious, lovely, profound memoir. It's fantastic.
Unknown:Thank you.
Joshua Johnson:And I know that this wasn't the book that you were going to write. You were going to write a book on joy that wasn't going to be a memoir, and so I think we start out in a place where you're discovering some, some joy in national parks, going back into how do we wrestle with some, some trauma. What were you thinking about when you first started on this journey of the book.
Unknown:Yeah, well, I was compelled to write the book that this was supposed to be by interacting with my readers and realizing that the vast majority of my readers felt like joy was something they could not trust, that joy was for other people, but not for them, that like too many bad things had happened to them for them to trust that it could really come, and that if joy comes, it's just going to get snatched away from you the next second anyway. So I had been coming, I was coming out of what was then my hardest health season, which now looks like almost laughable compared to what happened, but which is silly, but I was coming out of that very difficult health season, realizing that joy was sturdier than I suspected, and I was very sad that people, that other people, would feel like joy was only for those privileged enough to not live with daily pain. So I really wanted to set out to be like, why is joy so sturdy, and how do we trust that it is? And so I went back. I was revisiting the places where I first encountered joy and first learned how to even cultivate awareness of it with wonder and beauty in natural landscapes.
Joshua Johnson:We'll get into some of the difficult parts of your health journey that's coming up, but as you were walking through wonder, beauty, you're seeing things that you saw as a child that you were able to run around, you were feeling healthier at that time, you were feeling your body was was doing better. What was it like to then feel joy?
Unknown:Things were, you know, still like an ongoing treatment that was difficult, but it was the best that I had felt as an adult, and the whole year prior to that I had had to rebuild my ability to like go out on a trail, and since then I've had to learn how to walk again like. Out three times, literally, but at that point I had, like, very recently had been through cardiac rehab because of POTS that was induced by COVID, and so joy felt like realizing there's more goodness for me than I can see when I'm in the dark, but more goodness is coming, and I was getting to see the fruition of that, that was part of it, and getting to share the beautiful spaces with a friend too was another experience of how joy really emerges is when, when beauty is shared, when love is shared, when hope is shared, joy arises. There's a collective nature, a collaborative nature to joy, and so it's beginning to encounter that before the bad things happened,
Joshua Johnson:and then you got to experience the actual interdependence, the collaboration of joy, not just in people, as people are walking through some of this with you, but also in actual experiences in your body that there is stronger parts helping weaker parts, you're seeing this in the national parks, if you're looking at the forest floor, or you're looking at the canopy of the redwoods, where there is space for light. How did you start to really like sink into what interdependence does for us, and how we are all interdependent and not just independent creatures.
Unknown:I think my whole adult life has been a continuous catapult into that reality, because my body has never allowed me to, or any sustained length of time, pretend that I'm independent. I have always had such high health needs that I've had to leave, I've had to learn to accept that I need others to get by in my daily life, it took me years to accept that I'm disabled. I think we are all made to be interdependent, but some of us are thrust into that reality a little bit more extremely, in a way that we can't avoid. Those of us who are chronically ill, many of us who are disabled people with mental illnesses, and it's a reality for every human, but for those of us who have high health needs, or whose despair becomes so heavy because of our circumstances and the world around us as well, we come to this place over and over again, not just once, of seeing that we can't do the business of being human by ourselves, and we can't do the business of hoping by ourselves either, and my body just has this really fierce and persistent way of making me face that
Joshua Johnson:recently I interviewed Richard Beck, and he talked about new research that's coming out, which they're calling the prosperity paradox, and how places with the highest GDP have the the highest rate of of mental health issues in the world, and the ones with with lower GDP have have better mental health, and he was talking about self dependence. People have a higher degree of mental health issues, and I wonder what the for you the designation to figure out, like how does dependence cultivate joy? Limits cultivate joy in us, in you, in ways where maybe some people who aren't thinking about being dependent can't see.
Unknown:Yeah, that was a great, great question. So, I think you know, I think of this part in the place between our pains, where I had just had my first very excruciating bilateral knee surgery, where they drill poles into my dead bones to try to help them come back to life, put stem cells into there, and I couldn't walk for each time I did this surgery, six weeks, and I had to relearn how to walk again. And during that period, the first time I had to stay at my parents' home in Montana, so far away from where I live in Colorado, and I couldn't even get myself to the bathroom. The room by myself because of where you know the layout of the house and the fact that I couldn't use my feet or legs in any way and my dad made me a lift so that when I was cleared by my surgeon to get back into water I could enter his hot tub, and the whole time that I was recovering, he was creating this lift system in on his back deck, so that I could get in the water and just feel a tiny bit of relief, and my dad has never been somebody who can articulate very much how he loves me, or why he loves me or that he loves me, and I know he does, but when he strapped me into that lift from my wheelchair, and I sank into that water, I knew my limits let me see my dad's love for me in a way that I had never really been able to receive or soak up like the limits were the context for love to be shown and to be received, so think that we are put into a position when we have to face our limits and we have to accept them and we cannot overcome them when there's things like you literally can no longer use your legs, or you like various points in this, in this story, I was too sick and too on too much steroids to be able to think clearly enough to make my own medical calls. They were too much for me. My husband and loved ones had to do a lot for me like that. When you put into those positions, it is, it's, it's humbling as hell, and it is where the heart can be opened to being held by others, and that being held, being loved as you are in a state that is not your preferred state of being, that is actually a joyful experience. We have to, it's, it's, it's a strange thing, because it's like I talk about over and over in here, the context for the joy is through the grief of the limit,
Joshua Johnson:and there's also places where you're so dependent in a medical system and a healthcare system that sometimes doesn't advocate for for your health and your growth, and you've had to be your own advocate in the middle of something where you are dependent on others, and they're sometimes gaslighting you in things like, hey, you're not actually feeling this, this isn't you, you need to to get a psych consult or something to figure out what's going on inside your head. How do you both hold the actual joy and love of people that are walking with you that love you and care for you, and then walking through a system that is really hard to navigate and sometimes just refuses to help?
Unknown:Yes, yeah, you're pointing out something extremely important, which is that our dependency does put us in a position to be damaged. I have damage that will never be reversed in my body because of how I was harmed in the medical system in the story that is in this book, and that is a reality that is shared by millions of people, and it is not okay, and our dependence puts us in this position where we have to accept reality that it all, all is coming at us, grief is coming, and this is coming, joy is coming, despair is coming, hope is coming. I have come to believe that the only place where joy can live is in the present and in reality, and reality includes the really destructive and damaged systems that we are embedded in, and that does not mean that I accept the system as it is, that I accept the status quo. It means that I part of the system, and I must navigate the system while I vacate for the system to change for my good, but especially for the good of other people, and so I think, for me, you know, I actually wrote into, I'm going to read this tiny bit in my acknowledgements, I said. I decided to thank the doctors who have dismissed me, like you mentioned, the ones who were like, well, we'll give you a site consult, and then I come back to the ER the next day in anaphylactic shock again. So I wrote this to all the doctors who ever dismissed me and my symptoms. Thank you for giving me the gift of rage to believe my body more than your prejudice, and to devote my gifts to the dignity of patients in pain. I read that because I think that that is the invitation when we are being dismissed and gaslit in the healthcare system, or in other systems, the church, etc. We can take that dismissal and allow the energy of rage to fuel us to make change and to tell the truth about the brokenness of these systems, and so I'm getting to be part of, in my own small way, changing things, and also showing other patients that they do not have to put up with this, that they can, they can be honest about their story too, they can push back when they have medications prior authorizations denied, they, we do not have to be doormats just because doctors have more power than we do, collectively we probably have more power than they do. If we were to band together and to honor each other's stories and say keep going, so rage, rage, and joy, rage actually can then like feel the joy, but you have to. We have to be willing to grieve. It's all about grief. It's like you have, I had to grieve being treated that horribly, and the grief then compelled me into action of what am I going to do about this for myself and what am I going to do about this for other patients.
Joshua Johnson:You've walked through that grief, and you're now advocating for other patients, and to somebody who's been a trauma counselor, How does grief help us move towards that, that action that we need, and what happens if we skip grieving?
Unknown:Fantastic question, so important. Okay, so I think most of us are afraid that if we really let ourselves feel as sad as we are about what has happened to us or is happening to us, we will become utterly stuck, and the reality is actually the opposite. Our sorrow, our sadness, our grief, they are invitations into the compassion that will compel us into the love. love and feelings that we actually want to most feel, I think of grief as a gate. Grief is a gate into aliveness, and if you don't go through the gate, you are going to feel partially alive, honestly, right now. So, my, my book, as the time of recording this, came out this week, and in two weeks I will have a very destructive, very, very aggressive face tumor removed that's actively right now, like, I can feel it every moment, growing, destroying my face. I mean, I have my face reconstructed. This all found out about it literally one month before my book came out. I've already had one surgery, I'm about to have another. That's a very major surgery at Mayo Clinic, and I last week leading up to my book launch was so sad, just like when people do read The Place Between Our Pains, they will know why. It's like I spent - I've spent three years in medical hell and fought like hell to be alive, and fought like hell to finish this book, and to live to see the day that it was published, even now. I don't get the moment of just pure joy. I don't get that, and so I last week, in addition to the tumor, is just like exhausting and taking so much time to coordinate all my medical care. So I'm, don't feel great. It turns out it takes a lot of energy in your body to like both grow and fight a tumor, so I last week, and to swallow my own medicine, and I went on strike from my work of promoting my book. I said I'm going on strike until conditions improve, zero condition. Things improved in my body, but conditions improved in my soul, in that I let myself feel very sad, and I spent time honoring what this doesn't get to be. This season doesn't get to be how I wanted it to be, and I had to, I had to sit there and trust that the work of holding my sadness would not keep me stuck, but that it would be almost the on-ramp into something even greater, and it was an active process, too, you know, I spent time laying in bed resting, but I also spent time doing what I talked about in the book, that partnering with my pain is a creative force, and so I took my book, I took a copy of my book, and I took a garbage bag full of some of my discarded medical things, of from my last IV, IV, IV, IG treatment took like the tubing and catheters and some of my steroid shots, and I went to the forest, and I ripped my book to shreds, and literally it felt so good, it was so cathartic, as any sane person would do, right? Just go rip up your brand new book. I took my book, I ripped it up, and I needed to give my grief somewhere to live outside of my body, and so I, I let it be expressed, and I took all of those pieces, including I grabbed some like new growth from the forest floor, I took some pine cones, some of the very first wild flowers of spring, and I put them all onto a collage, and the process of taking the time to let my grief be externalized for it to be witnessed and held literally in my hands, and then put together with the parts of life that I like, which is the forest and beauty. It shifted things inside me, and now I am in my book launch week, and even I am surprised at how much joy I am experiencing, and I think part of that was because I welcomed the grief, the grief, and now you know it's not let the grief run away, the tumor is still here. I spent my launch day hooked up to an IV, I've got bruises all over my arm, literally spent my lunch day with my nurse, but I also spent it with author friends, and I invited my friends to share in the joy of this with me, because the fact is, joy is heavy, and we have to hold it together. We don't have to hold it alone. The weight of joy is heavy, the weight of grief is too, but when we hold it together, it's in the holding that joy actually multiplies, grief that is shared becomes joy that is multiplied, and I am seeing that right now in a way that is honestly astounding, and this has been the most joy-filled season of my life, even while my literal face is being destroyed. What a wild thing. If that's possible for me, not that special. I think it's possible for anybody.
Joshua Johnson:Wow, that's so beautiful. Let's see what that grief shared, and that actually grief outside your body, that you get to actually hold it, that the creative process of grief that moves us into into joy. It's a gate that was absolutely beautiful. One of the things that walking through and reading your book, a lot of people in the church, and a lot of people on the the wellness industrial complex love nice tidy resolution, and that nice tidy resolution is where joy is found for a lot of people, and the deep joy and gratitude that you have right now is not because of a tidy resolution, it's the opposite of it. What do you say to cheap resolution? How do we know that that's kind of like a false thing for
Unknown:us? Yes, what I say to it is it's just simply not sturdy enough for what life actually holds, it isn't. I was actually, I was messaging with a reader last night on Instagram, reader slash like acquaintance friend Christina Hart, and we were, we were laughing. She had shared my book, and I don't know, sometimes I get a little playful as you. Could you know from the book, but I was like, man, you said something like, we just.. it's so good that you're giving people more than just the hope of some heaven, and I was like, yes, like, I don't think people realize that we in the church have trained whole generations to only hope for the afterlife. It's almost like we're training whole generations of people who go through hard things to be kind of suicidal, to just a death wish of like, okay, I guess when my life is over, I'll have joy, or like Jesus, come back now, but like, sorry, I don't know when he's coming back, but I have a life to live right here and now, and I need joy that isn't just about wishing away my circumstances or hoping that there's going to be resolution one day when my body is made new. There is actually goodness in life here, and the best part about it, it's the worst news and the best news all at once, is that reality is where God lives, is where joy lives, it's where love lives. It's hard news and bad news, because it means you have to accept that pain is part of being human and uncertainty is part of being human too, and so the things that we most want to avoid or annihilate are actually the things that are most charged with energy to fill us and fuel us with joy. What I'm talking about is a complete paradox, and it is truly sustaining me in my life that continues to be pretty damn brutal.
Joshua Johnson:People that have been in your situations, and you know, people that have gone through limits, medical pain, and really, this, this difficult, brutal, brutal thing within your body. I've found that they're either the most joyful people I've met or they're the most bitter people I've met.
Unknown:Yes, that's
Joshua Johnson:where, like, it is so, like, what's the difference? How do we find the difference between that bitterness and the joy?
Unknown:Oof, you are asking such good questions. That is such an important question. That is it. Oh my goodness. Okay, there's an element of choice. I think it's actually a little bit hilarious that I used to be a hardcore reformed theologian nerd, because now in my at this point in my adult life as a 37 year old, the thing that has saved my life and continues to save my spirituality is choice, it's not that the element of anything being predetermined, it's that we actually each have been given this beautiful capacity to choose what we do with our days, moment by moment, we do not get to choose a lot of what happens to us, but we do get to choose what we do with it, and where we direct our attention, and the fact of the matter is choosing to just be angry about how my life has turned out, or at all of the people who have harmed me, and all of the systems that continue to oppress me doesn't work out well for me. Staying bitter leads me to despair, and I have despaired of life itself too many times and too darkly to choose to stay there. I would no longer be alive. I would have already taken my life. I say that soberly. If I had continued to stay angry and bitter about what I've been given, what's my lot? What's the hand of cards I've been played, I've been dealt, so it's a.. this is a very hard.. it's a hard.. I say this with so much compassion for anybody who's listening in terrible circumstances. I'm not saying this lightly.. I'm not.. this is said with utmost compassion and respect for how hard it is to choose, but choosing to look for what is good, choosing to look for love, even in the smallest of moments, like when you go to a terrible surgeon's appointment, and you're like, I don't want to be here. Her, I wish that I didn't have this tumor. I don't know how I'm going to pay for my life, or I'm ever going to be able to get back on my feet financially, because, oh my gosh, another medical crisis just happened to me. Okay, what do you do? You can, you can sit there and be angry, or maybe look and see, like, who in the waiting room is smiling, it was the receptionist kind to you. Can you be kind back? These micro moments of kindness, which you know the therapist Deb Dana describes neurobiologically as glimmers. These moments of attentional awareness of goodness of micro joys create massive shifts in how we experience our sorrows, and it's so much better than the alternative, and this can be chosen at any point. I mean, any day, it's not too late, you're not too bitter already to make this shift. It's one small choice at a time, and that choice does not cancel out your grief or push it to the side. It actually welcomes it. You can still be angry as hell, and if you can express your rage, and you can look for what's good all at once. That's the thing. It all belongs. This is being human. It all belongs,
Joshua Johnson:all of it. The other day, my wife was texting a bunch of people who work around the world, and she's like, "Hey, we're.. we want to see your micro joys. And so people were taking pictures of their, their micro joys and sending them to my wife, and she just was flooded with photos, and it.. she was like, "Look at this. It was the most beautiful thing, like these small moments of joy around the world that are happening. It was like it filled me with, like, the world is so beautiful, even in the midst of all of the, the disappointment and the dehumanization that's happening
Unknown:around the world that we're seeing right now, the brutality of the world, we see these little micro joys, and it was just so beautiful to be always there. We just don't always pay attention to them, and that's the thing, like we each have more capacity within our little bodies and our little souls to hold the grief of the world and the rage of the world with the joy that is here, like we actually have more room inside these hearts to hold things than we think we do. We think that there's not more room for goodness because there's this giant grief of the basically fall of democracy, and all of the terribleness happening in the world, and, and we're, we are terrified. Oh my goodness, there is room, and there's actually love, and there really are people out there living with kindness. There, there are a lot who aren't too, but there are a lot who are. There is so much more goodness than we and Fathom.
Joshua Johnson:So, you were able to, like, pay attention, like when you're really looking, when you were looking for it, so the first part of your book, when you're going to national parks, you were looking really like intentionally for these small little things, so you're able to see starfish and banana slugs, and you're able to see, you know, all these different things, right? When the pain and the brutality comes, what was the difference in the intentionality for you? How did you figure out how to pay attention in the midst of pain and struggle?
Unknown:Yeah, so when I went from my adventures in the national parks to two weeks later almost dying, and then continuing to almost die for a little bit there, too long, because I had already started writing this book. I, for some reason, my soul just like this stents that I needed to write this book by hand, so I had started writing it in journals of a huge stack of them that created the core of what this book became, and when I was in the hospital, I decided to just keep writing and keep jotting down, but part of what I was doing in those journals, and I've done for years, I've. I've been a journaler since I was a like 13 year old. The old ones are very full of like self-righteous spiritual piety. Now my journals are full of sensory details of the world. I am a poet, and I just, I like to jot down things I'm seeing, like down to like this person was wearing clear-rimmed glasses, like the details of a human being or of a scene are actually where the aliveness lives, and so I am so glad that I had the sense to write things by hand, because when it came, when my body started to crumble rapidly, and I was too sick to hold myself up in bed, I kept moving my pen across the page, and because I had already been in such a habitual state of paying attention to the world around me that remained even when I was far too drugged on high dose steroids to reasonably be able to form recollections later, so I look back and I'm like, I don't think I would have remembered a lot of what happened to me during this season, because it was that dramatic, had I not written it all down, and I'm so glad I wrote it all down, but the act of writing it down gave me a channel to pay attention for what was good, so when I set out on the beginning of writing this book on those road trips, I dared myself to go forage for what was good in my family's history and in my faith history, because I was too, I had become too jaded. There was a, there's a lot of trauma in my childhood, but also a lot of trauma for me spiritually as a former pastor's wife. My husband's now hospice chaplain. We've been through a lot of spiritual abuse, and I needed to.. I was.. I dared myself to try to go look for what was good, and so I just decided to keep the dare going. I didn't think I was going to have to look in such a bleak landscape. I really wanted to look at Lake Glacier National Park at Lake McDonald, but instead the universe gave me the halls of the hospital and brain scans and dead knees, and it turns out there was still love there. There's still love there, so I think you don't have to be an author to pay attention to your life like this. I think it very much helped that I already had a book contract, and I knew eventually I was gonna either have to give them the money back or give them a book, but let's be honest, but I'm so glad that I chose to just keep paying attention and to write it down, and that is something that any human being has the power to do. You might not like journaling, it might not be the thing for you, but we each can engage in habits of heart that allow us to like shift our attention to either to even just to shift our attention from being dissociated through our days to being awake to what's here, even when what's here is brutal, because being awake is actually what allows us to be alive.
Joshua Johnson:It's one of the things that you talk about, is that the, you know, we all know the body keeps the score, but you also say the body also carries the story, the story of where you've been, who you are, where you're going, I think. When we actually see story in the places that we inhabit, and one we're inhabiting this body of ours, you're inhabiting your body, and if we see it as story, I think it helps us to move forward in a way, that there is a place where I actually know how to be an embodied person in the world, that I could live something. How does story help when it comes to the wisdom of your body, knowing your body, where you're headed, how you're living? How is the body a story?
Unknown:So I think immediately of the part in the book where there's a little bit of a like parallelism in the beginning. A part of this story, I talk, I quote this Apache elder named Dudley, who says, "Wisdom sits in places, you must know those places. You must hear those places' stories, you must remember them. Then you will be wise. Then you will be like, move forward without falling into danger. And later in the book, when I'm dealing with the wild and terrible story that my body has been in. I realize the body is also a place where wisdom sits, and wisdom sits in places, and the body is also a place where wisdom sits, and so just like that Apache Elder said, of those places, wisdom sits in places, and you must know those places. Stories, you must know your body's story. And so I find that seeing my body as a living story allows me to cultivate compassion for what I have endured and for what I continue to endure, I think of, you know, a lot of times I get asked, like, how does somebody who, if your body is not a safe place to be in, if you feel like your body has betrayed you, which people could very easily say that mine has. Let's be honest, it's almost killed me several times. Like, what do you do? How do you, how do you like cultivate any sort of good relationship with your body when your body doesn't feel like a safe place to exist, or your body, for you know, I'm a trauma therapist, since for so many of us, the body is the site of our worst traumas, our abuses, our assaults, all of these things that happen to us, and I think when we look at ourselves as storied creatures who have endured so much, you can see your body even as this character in a story who is trying so hard to keep you alive and so hard to keep you going and begin to think of your body as this person and this place worth inhabiting, a person worth loving and a place worth inhabiting, like, oh, will I talk to myself? Do I want to be mean to my body, or like maybe I could talk to my body like I would talk to my best friend, and do I want to escape my body. Yeah, sometimes I really do want to escape my body, but also, like, if the body is the place, my body is my home. Like, how can I treat this place so that I want to live in it? And so, story in place, I think, give us space to imagine a better way forward in bodies that hurt.
Joshua Johnson:There's a segment of the Christian population in the United States where they're, they're placeless, they're yearning, they're like what we were saying, like, hey, heaven is after death, we're yearning for death, this place doesn't matter as much, but if we could actually move into place and story, and that we can actually inhabit where we're at, and that's going to actually help bring about the joy and the gratitude and the love that we have, and we got to figure out that this is a story that we're living, and we need to actually live this story. So, for people who pick up your story, the place between our pains, what hope do you have for your readers, the people that read this book?
Unknown:So many hopes, but my biggest hope, honestly, it is from the words that most haunt me in the book, my own words are sinking, haunting me all the time. It's like, damn it, why'd you write this in the words that have haunted me the most in my hardest moments that continue a story continued, you know, after the last page of this book, things are still hard, and they keep pummeling me. The line that haunts me the most is, "Don't give up on your life, and I feel like I don't care how many copies my book sells, I want, I know in my soul that there are going to be some people who read my book, who are struggling to say yes to their life, who like are craving the relief of death, because it life has become so painful that they're not sure they can keep living it, because I know what that feels like, and I felt it through the pages of this book, I, and I, I say. That there, I want to be able to tell people, hey, don't give up on your life. Your life is still worth living. You are still loved. Your life is still precious, and this is not all there is. Even if the hard things keep coming, there's not only hard, there's also beauty coming, but please, like, don't give up on your life, that's my biggest hope.
Joshua Johnson:So, good, a couple quick questions I really like to ask at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Unknown:Oh my goodness, I would tell her. Oh man, well, I'm, I've been trying not to cuss, so I would say, "Chill the out, chill the woman. I was just so.. I was so intense. I'm God made me intense, but I, I wanted to be so good, and I was pretty rigid. Turns out I'm autistic and have ADHD, so like the rigidity was baked in from the beginning, but I wish I could go back and just be like, "Woman, hey, like shake her shoulders and like you don't have to take everything so seriously. I wish that I would have found. I wish I would have embraced my silliness even earlier, and like let that be a safe haven for me, and so I wish I could go back and just tell her, chill, it's okay, it's okay, girl, like you could chill,
Joshua Johnson:yes, embrace the silliness, we all need that, we need play silliness, we need that to embrace that, and we all need to chill. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend?
Unknown:Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, speaking of my autism, my current hyper fixation is Project Hail Mary, and I don't know if you've seen the film yet or read the book, but
Joshua Johnson:of course it's amazing,
Unknown:it's just
Joshua Johnson:read the book, yeah,
Unknown:there's both just so beautiful, it is beyond beautiful, and the story is I feel like like a little friend to the kind of story that I told in my book, but just this, like coming together of of people to for the good of all, and that like there is more than looks than seems possible, and like being brave for one another, all of this, I just find it the the film, especially I mean, the book, too, but I have, like, fixated on the movie itself. It's such a life-affirming film in this moment when we need to be reminded that life is worth living and worth protecting and fighting for. So, yeah, I've watched it, I don't know how many times the day that it came out on streaming, I bought it so that I can watch it whenever I want, because it's not my comfort thing, it's my comfort work of art in this season of my life, and highly recommend for anybody who is as nerdy as me, which it seems that you might be, to watch the film while listening to the director's cut on the app theater ears like to hear them describing all of the minutia of how they made this like the level of detail in that art I think just as a fellow artist who wrote like I wrote my book by hand, there was no AI involved at all, like I just.. there's something so gorgeous about works of art that are made with precision to detail and that level of love for the story, and it is just utterly compelling to me as an artist, so that
Joshua Johnson:I may go
Unknown:on forever.
Joshua Johnson:I'm sorry. No, I love it. I love it, and I love the way that they built it, and how actually practical everything was. How Rocky wasn't the CGI character, but actually, actually lived physical object, yeah, all of it, like the
Unknown:it's wild,
Joshua Johnson:so good, so good. Yes, the place between our pains is out now, anywhere books are sold, so people could go and read this incredible book. It is so, so good, and it's phenomenal, and so, and so I'm glad that you could find some joy in the midst of all the brutal, the brutalness of your life at the moment that there is joy in this release and this book, and they could birth this into this world, because it is a gift not only to you but as a gift to us and to your readers and to. World that, because of this, I think we could actually find some joy in the midst of the brutality of life, and so, thank you. It's, it's fantastic. Thank
Unknown:you so much.
Joshua Johnson:How can people go and maybe connect with you in what you're doing? Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to,
Unknown:yeah, you can find my book and lots of info about it and about me at AJ ramsey.com And then I am across social media, but especially on Substack and Instagram at AJ Ramsey writes, as in writing down a AJ Ramsey writes, I'm saying hello,
Joshua Johnson:perfect. Yes, well, KJ, thank you for this conversation. What a beautiful, beautiful conversation. And so I'm so thankful for this. Thank you. It was fantastic.
Unknown:This was a joy.
