Transcript of Would You Look Away? A Family’s Attempt to Escape Nazi Germany & the Cost of Being a Bystander with Ruth Stitt New

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to The Edge. Hey, hey, my friends. Welcome back to this episode of Notes from The Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. This is where we talk about the things we should be talking about, but we aren't. And my guest today is Ruth Stitt. Now Ruth has a fascinating story. It's not linear, as usual for our guests on this show. Um, she has a history of having some letters sitting somewhere. In 1938, her grandmother was living in Bridgeport, Connecticut when she received a letter from her first cousin in Berlin. He was a physician and he and his 2 sisters were searching for relatives United States who might help them escape Nazi Germany. That one letter began a 5-year correspondence containing an immigration story, a romance, desperate hope, and profound tragedy.

And these letters sat on Ruth's shelf for many years until she realized they're not just family artifacts. They carried stories that needed to be told. Just a content note, folks. This episode does include discussions of the Holocaust, persecution, forced displacement, psychological trauma, and severe loss. Please listen with care. If you need to pause and come back, please do so. And if you feel like you may be in crisis, reach out to your support structure or call 988. Let me finish Ruth's bio because it's pretty fascinating. She's an author, licensed counselor, educator, ordained minister, Bible scholar, and and professional jazz musician. For more than 30 years, she worked as a counselor and educator, helping thousands of people navigate the heavy stuff— grief, trauma, crisis, transition, relationships, and complexities of just being human. Alongside that— and we like our multi-potentialites in this space— she was performing professionally as a guitarist and a vocalist. She has also published 2 non-fiction books, One explores the continuing relevance of ancient scripture in everyday life, and the other brings together the personal and professional lessons she gathered along her career as a therapist. And in 2024, she made a significant creative pivot into historical fiction.

And that's where we're going to stop because Ruth, we're going to let you take it from there. Welcome to Notes from the Edge, my friend. How are you doing today?

Thank you so much, Lisa. I'm doing well. Thank you.

Good, good. So I'm big on pivots. I like those pivots. So I want to know what happened in 2024 after a 3-decade-long career that made you go, I have a story that needs to be told.

All right, well, some of it was sort of a very organic development of my identity as a writer. You know, I had started my theological blog in 2018, wrote hundreds of, you know, kind of scriptural application reflections, which then became my first book. Well, when you write your first book, like when you have your first child, you know, you become a mother when you have your first child, you become an author when you write your first book. So, Then I— so now I knew, I know, well, now I'm adding to my resume, my, uh, that now I'm an author. So what? So authors continue to write books, right?

I'm a writer now. Yes.

Yeah, I'm an author, not just a writer, but an author. And, uh, then I had taken some time away from my therapy practice to, to compile that first book. And I kind of enjoyed not doing the work for a little while, having a break from it. But I thought, what if I never go back? And I haven't gone back full-time. I do still do some counseling, but I thought, I have learned so many, so many interesting things from clients over the years and from supervisees and just ministers and places, the kinds of positions I've held as a, as a counselor. And I thought, you know, I, I need to write kind of like a capstone career project that captures some of the cool things that God and people have taught me over these many years. So that, that really inspired my second book, which is all about everything that goes into caring for other people, you know, listening to them. Uh, you know, it's, it's quite a, uh, it's, it's got a lot of material about depression and trauma and infertility and divorce and, um, just you name it. Um, and a lot of it is also connects to scripture because that's kind of my, that's my brand, so to speak.

I, I relate everything to something in the Bible. So I launched that book in 2024. And, you know, as you know, October 7th happened in Israel, which may have been some sort of influence in the background. But I, again, now I'm an author and what am I going to work on next? And this book of letters just I don't remember the day or exactly how it kind of coalesced, but I thought, it's time. It's time to take these— well, first of all, I took the book off of my shelf and I read it straight through again, as I had when I first received it in 1992. And it blew me away again, like it had at the beginning. The fact that it existed, the fact that, like, my grandmother— this is something, Lisa, that really occurred to me much later in the process. So they have this correspondence, my grandmother with her cousins. I have all of her letters, not just theirs. I have her letters. So it occurred to me she knew, she knew back in 1938 that she better document this. So she copied her letters as well as theirs and preserved them.

Wow.

Isn't that interesting?

It is.

So I took a trip with some writers to Oxford that year and really got some, you know, had a chance to like just marinate and tell people about it and get input. And so I made the decision that I was going to write the story so it wouldn't just be a book of letters sitting on my shelf for the rest of my life. Yeah, because the story just needed to be told, you know, it's an important story that needed to be told. So—

What I want to point out to our listeners is that it sat there since 1992. So that is such an example of timing. When the timing is right, my friends, you will always, always know. Yeah, typically when we push and we force and we rush, we're gonna run into obstacles. But when the timing is divine, it's just gonna flow. And I'm assuming it did for you when you wrote it, correct?

Well, it did, but I had to— I had a lot to learn because what my plan was just to write it as historical narrative, just write the story. But I was visiting with a friend who's also an author, and she was the one that suggested— she said, have you thought of writing it as historical fiction? Because your, your relatives that went through this, their, their lives are important, but they're not famous people. You know, you're not writing about— somebody that people will know or necessarily care about. But if you, if you do it as historical fiction, you can really write it as a story about people, and you can develop those characters so that your readers really care about them and what happens to them. So, that meant that I had to take this pivot You know, because I'd only really done nonfiction, and learn how to be— how to write historical fiction. Yeah, so, so when you ask, was it, was it, you know, the timing was right, yes, but I had, I had a bit of a hill to climb to, to learn to write it in the way that I chose to write it.

I would imagine there was a little bit more freedom And it's an easier genre to get into the world. And, but yeah, I would imagine you had a little bit more freedom once you let your imagination take over, right?

Right. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

But not, you know, I didn't get the hang of it right away because I wrote my very messy, as some would say, shitty first draft, right? Anne Lamott. And I sent it to a developmental editor, and when she sent me back 25 pages of fine print notes on the book and some, some like kind of high-level critique of just kind of my whole approach to it, and so valuable. I recommend if you're working on something that's, you know, weighty and you really want to make it right, to use that process of having an editor look at it from, you know, 30,000 feet and really be able to see where structurally it's not holding together or where these characters are— have inconsistencies or it doesn't feel authentic. So, she pointed out so many important things that really shifted my ability to tell the story. Probably the most important was, you know, when you— I had to do so much research to just begin to write scenes for these characters to inhabit. And so I'm studying all this Holocaust history and European immigration and India, because there's an India part of the story. And she showed me that I was doing a little bit too much of what they call history dumping.

You know, I was, I was doing so much exposition and explanation about the events and the places. And she kept telling me, trust your reader more and tell the story. You're— it's not a history that you're telling, it's a story. So, and then she pointed out to me, almost to an embarrassing degree for me, that like she said, you're a therapist, right?

Yeah.

She said, I don't see that. I don't see you using the knowledge that you have about psychology and about the soul and about trauma and all the people that you've talked to. And so I was thinking about it before we, before we went live, you know, as, as a therapist, my— I think my strongest, um, my, my greatest strength as a therapist is what I have come to call accurate empathy, you know, that you, you don't just you're not just able to relate and understand somebody else's experience, but you're able to accurately reflect it back to them.

Mm-hmm.

So, her critique— her name was Pippa, by the way, she's a British editor, brilliant Pippa— helped me to understand that I needed to go back to all of these scenes, and instead of talking about them, get inside the heads of these people. What did they see? What did they hear? What did they smell? What did they feel? What did they say? How did they say it? And that really transformed how I saw the whole story.

Yeah, collaboration when you are writing a book is an absolute must. Yeah, having a good editor, I mean, a whole team behind you really helps transform that shitty first draft. So it's interesting though, you were keeping yourself outside the story, your knowledge outside of it, your knowledge of psychology and how people work and operate and deal with grief and trauma and loss outside of that first draft.

Yeah, well, to some degree, yeah. And it just kind of confronted me that I was staying way too safe. I was staying outside the story instead of allowing myself to really feel it.

And readers can sense that when we're not going there. Readers know. And I got the same feedback on my memoir. We're pre-launch October, launching November 1st. But same feedback, trust the reader. They can figure it out, and, and that builds trust in you. If you trust them, they trust you back. So, um, when did these stop— when did these letters that sat on your shelf since 1992 stop feeling like family documents and start feeling like something you could no longer ignore?

Well, whatever triggered me to take it off the shelf and read it again, I immediately knew that it was time.

It was a knowing.

Yeah, I can't tell you exactly why, but I was ready for my next project, and that had to be it because I'm 65. I'm not getting any, you know, none of us know how long we have on this earth, and I'm the only writer in my family. So if somebody's gonna write it, it's gonna be me. And yeah, it's time because, you know, I could kick the bucket and it doesn't get done.

Well, it's getting done now, isn't it? It's getting done now.

Got it done.

All right, well, your relatives were not looking back at history with the knowledge we have now. They were actually living inside of it in these letters as it unfolded. What did you discover as you explored these letters about denial and hope and the gradual realization of a danger that a traditional history book can't capture?

Well, you know, since I launched the book in April, That the most— I've gotten so much feedback that has— from people who've read hundreds of Holocaust books, that what they appreciate about this one is that it does— it is— there's a sense of intimacy to it, that you're— you really are seeing the reality of it on the ground in Nazi Germany. As well as, you know, in Bridgeport, my grandmother's domestic life and her relatively, you know, quiet, safe life as she's trying to comprehend this heroic mission that's been presented to her to try and save these people. And I guess, I learned a great deal. I really could sense, especially in— so the 3 cousins were Louise, George, and Anna in the book, The Cousins in Berlin. And the 3 of them— I wrote the book with 4 different points of view, the 3 of them and my grandmother. So the book kind of shifts back and forth between these various points of view. So they're not all alike. They, they all experienced it from their own personality and background. Um, but one of the big themes is that— is denial. That, um, they just— they were assimilated, educated, um, modern Jewish Germans.

They, they were very proudly German. They were more German than they were Jewish in some ways. You know, they weren't highly religious people. Um, I— the way I wrote the story, George had served his country in World War I. They were perf— they were urban professionals, highly cultured people. As was the culture of Germany, was very, very sophisticated. You know, there's Goethe and Mozart and just amazing creativity in their whole tradition and culture. And they just could not understand that their wonderful German people could really allow this to keep happening.

Yeah.

I think day after day they probably, they and other Jews and other German, ordinary Germans who were sympathetic, had Jewish friends and were, you know, co-workers with Jews, intermarried with Jews, were saying, who somebody's got to come along that's able to get rid of this man.

Yeah.

This Hitler. Some— the military? Is it the military? Is it the Lutherans? Is it— who's going to get rid of this person who is destroying everything that we treasure about being German, um, because of his intense hatred and psychosis.

Yeah.

And so that kept, especially Louise, there's a— I think my favorite chapters in the book is a conversation that Louise has with a rabbi, a kind of a famous rabbi in Berlin, where she's— they're discussing that question, you know, it's kind of the existential questions of You know, what, what do you do when everything that you've always known has been just day after day been stolen from you? How was— how is a person to respond to that and still stay alive, you know, not just completely kill themselves or be completely overcome with despair?

That's a, that's a tough place to be completely overcome with despair. And Ruth, after working with so many people and after writing this book and after seeing the strength of your own family, what is your answer to that? How, how do we, in, in circumstances in life when external factors happen to us beyond our control, how do we keep ourselves out of that complete place of utter hopelessness and despair?

Well, I was looking to see if I could find that just brief passage, but I'll paraphrase it because that's why I really like that chapter that I wrote with that conversation, because Leo Baeck, if you're familiar with Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning. He was a concentration camp survivor, and he was an existential psychiatrist. He was a doctor who cared for patients as a psychiatrist, and a similar kind of mindset that says people and circumstances can Steal everything, everything that we own, every relationship that we value, every, every they can steal our livelihood. They can take our food away so that we don't have enough to eat and become a mation. They can do they can try to kill our body and our soul and everything that makes life worth living. But what they can't do is demand that I respond in a certain way. You know, that, that, uh, Viktor Frankl famously wrote that, you know, you can make me do a lot of things, but you can't make me hate you. You can't even make me hate you.

Mm-hmm.

I have to choose whether I'm going to hate you or not for what you're— what you've done to me. And that's just a powerful powerful message that I wanted to include in it because this rabbi's very kind and wise reply to Louise is, you know, you know, God says in our book, in our Torah, he says choose life. So even when others choose death for you, you can still choose life. When others choose hate for you, you can still choose love. So the question is, who can you love until you are ready to go? Because at that point, they didn't know, and I won't spoil it for the— for readers, but they— she still didn't know if she would survive it or not.

So choose. Choose love.

Choose love.

Because when everything is stripped away, that's the, the only thing that you get. You know, Ruth, it's interesting. I, um, I live with a congenital blood disease that keeps me in and out of the hospital, uh, with, uh, pulmonary embolisms that nearly kill me every time I'm in. And, uh, so I face my mortality in a way that I, I don't think other people have to. And I could literally drop from a heart attack, a stroke, or another PE at any point in time, even on thinners, even on the medication that's supposed to keep me alive. And my husband and I were just the other day talking about it, and he happens to have a serious fear of people in his life dying.

Mm-hmm.

He was in a lockdown rehab and had lost his grandmother during that time, and I think that feeds into some of that fear. But he married a woman who has a disease that could take me at any point in time. But he said, you know, you're— you don't seem scared of death. He said, I, I fear you dying more than you fear you dying. And at the end of the day, I've come to the conclusion that when, when it is all said and done, the only things I get to take with me are my memories. and my regrets. And I no longer want any of my regrets to be the memories that I missed out on, right? And those memories are about the people that you're in front of. And I think that's exactly what you're alluding to— choose love and choose people. You know, you can't make me hate me. You are human. I won't hate you. That is the choice, even when all other choices have been taken from you. It's beautiful. That's Beautiful. So when we reduce escape stories to the phrases like, why didn't they just leave, what in your research did you learn about the financial, legal, bureaucratic, political, and emotional barriers Jewish families faced when attempting to try to leave?

Because it's easy to say, why didn't you?

Right. Yeah, well, unfortunately, this family, the Sickles were their name, Louise and Anna and, and George Sickel, um, they did wait too long. They waited too long. Um, and again, I don't want to spoil the story, but, um, the, um, the Nazis were just comprehensive in their evil. I mean, they, they covered everything. So at first, you know, at first in, in Germany, the emphasis was on getting rid of people by having them leave, having them emigrate. So in the early years— so Hitler, Hitler became chancellor at end of January 1933, starts systematically stripping away the rights of Jews. That year, 1933, an incredible amount of, of actions, what they called actions with the K, happened just in the first year of his Reich. So that George, as a doctor, was going— he knew that he was going to lose his rights to be to serve as a doctor. Louise knew that she was a headmistress of a Jewish school. She knew the writing was on the wall and that they could just shut her down at any, any time. Yeah. So, so at first people were leaving voluntarily and they were going various places if they could find a sponsor in America.

They would come to America. Some of them went to Palestine, it was called at the time, went to whatever nation would have them and where they might be able to, you know, find work and find a— make a new start somewhere.

So it was so gradual, systemically, it just snuck up on people is what you're saying?

It snuck up on people. And then after 1938, which was when George sent his first letter to my grandmother, then it became— they weren't making it easy for, for Jews to leave because I think Hitler already had it in his brain that he'd rather kill them than let them go. He wanted to just wipe them out. So on the German side of it, the Nazi Germany side of it, they put every obstacle in place. You know, you had to get multiple copies of all these documents, and you had to get them from the police, which, you know, were, were the people that hated them. So they had to go and get letters of reference from people who hated them. Uh, just Crazy, crazy stuff. And, you know, they, they didn't have enough money to really make a proper immigration, to do it in a way that wouldn't be really, really traumatic.

And so there were so many obstacles in the way.

So many obstacles.

So easy to look from the outside and say, why didn't you? And, and that goes with so much in, in our human experience, in human life, when we're looking at others, we're other-focused, looking at others' lives, judging them. It's so easy to say the questions, why didn't you, when there are always layers to the story underneath.

And the longer it went on like that, the fewer— there were fewer and fewer places to go where they could go. The United States had very, very limited quota numbers for Jewish refugees. The Roosevelt administration was not very open to accepting many Jewish refugees. So the immigration process on the American side, there were very few countries that just opened their arms and said, yeah, you can come here. Very few. Wow.

So let's move kind of back into your career because 3 decades is a long time. Um, and you stayed for 3 decades. That's a long time to be staying. Most people don't make it that long. Um, and you have helped people with trauma and grief and crisis and transition. Um, how does your work as a therapist influence the way you now look at fear, psychological survival, contained— those things, fear and psychological survival, contained in those letters? How did that shift your perspective?

Wow, it's a really deep question. Um, okay, so there's fear. Fear is kind of a, a big I guess it's one of those umbrella categories, you know, categories. There's, you know, there's anxiety, there's, uh— I'm sorry if my dogs are coming through.

My hubby's gonna be home any minute and you're gonna hear a madhouse in here, so don't worry.

We have a workman that just arrived, so they're going crazy.

Yeah.

Um, okay, so let me, let me focus here. So fear, fear involves— I've often come to the conclusion that anybody who comes to me, whatever, however the presenting problem, however we come to define it, there's going to be some kind of fear.

Right.

Fear of loss, fear of, um, loss of control. Um, fear that— fear of rejection, fear of abandonment. And there's also an element of grief, you know, because even when somebody, uh, you mentioned transitions, is even counseling with people who just got married and they're, they're full of joy, or they just got a new job. Yet they understand that there's something that they're really grieving because they don't have the life that they had before.

I think we miss that a lot of times, giving ourselves time to grieve during times of transition— a move from one home to another, a job change. Um, you're absolutely right. My husband just took over the, the family mechanic shop, so huge transition for him. And we got a little bouncy for a minute there because, um, I don't think we give ourselves— because it's, it's new and we're moving on to it and we need to do it. But, and I love the fact that you're, you're positioning fear and grief together sometimes.

Yeah. Um, You know, you asked specifically how that kind of informs my understanding of the characters in the book as well. And Louise, she was the oldest and, you know, just a very stalwart, always wore black, and she was this very stern headmistress and took no nonsense from anybody. So she had this very strong constitution and very stoic, you know, stoic, um, stoic people just kind of put, put— and I have some of this in me, which is part of why my first draft didn't really go there, you know. It's like you just— I, I'm very reality-based. I, I have learned to accept that things are not going to be the way I want them to be. most of the time, but I can still be happy. Um, but I would not gloss over that.

That's pretty huge. Things are not going to be the way we want them to be all the time, folks. That's just right. No, that is the reality.

You know, becoming a grown-up, that's one of the key, one of the key, uh, pieces that we need to, to grasp at some point. So there's this— there's a scene or kind of a series of scenes in the book where it's 1936, so things are already very, very difficult in Berlin for Jewish people. And Louise, at breakfast with her longtime friend, says, let's have a party. And she throws a party because she realizes we've all been just like hunkered down in fear. We've had to just shut down our lives. Let's just do this massive act of rebellion and have a party, even if it gets us in trouble. Let's, let's do it. So they— all these Jewish friends come, and they're musicians, and they have a big jam session, and they eat whatever food they could find, and they drink schnapps, and they, you know, they do all the stuff that they used to do. Because they, they just It's a rebellion against fear. It's also a rebellion against that stoic, we'll just bear up against hardships. Yeah, we'll just bear up. And because when you— and this, this will preach, Lisa.

Preach.

If you deny the loss, the trauma, the fear, The sorrow, you also potentially cut off your capacity for joy and friendship and creativity. And so I wanted in this scene to kind of draw that contrast. Outside the walls, everything is still as it was yesterday, but today, for a moment, we get to experience beauty and love and friendship and camaraderie and, um, nourishment and connection. And connection.

We all need that. We really do need human connection. We are wired for it. And you brought up a word that I think is so beautiful, and that is sorrow. Not only grief, but sorrow. And Again, going back to those transition periods, because I'm in a transition too. I went into surgical menopause, and because of my blood disease, it can't be treated. So my whole body has transitioned, my whole attitude— my attitude has transitioned just a little bit. Um, and there, there was sorrow there. There was grieving that, that old self to, to lean into who who I am now, not who I'm becoming. And that question irritates me— who am I becoming? But who am I now? You know, who— what did I perform in order to survive, and who am I now? So beautiful words to ponder. And you're absolutely right, there are polarities, and we cannot— we cannot, as human beings, have one without the other.

Mm-hmm.

have the creativity without the sorrow. As a matter of fact, sometimes the sorrow is the creativity. Sometimes the sorrow spawns and is the muse of the creativity. So we have to feel it all, the whole spectrum of it. So, um, how did— in the book, how did you decide where the documented truth ended and like the historical fiction began? What was kind of your process for figuring that out?

Yeah, there were, there were some sticky moments with that because I didn't have anybody to ask really. You know, my sister, my sister is very, very well acquainted with the story. She did a major term paper in college about the letters, and so she told the story in a smaller form before I did. So, I knew some things about my grandmother that I could legitimately, you know, factually write about. I kept any names of individuals that were named in the letters or wrote letters, I kept the names the same. you know, some historical fiction writers kind of believe in to protect whatever, you know, to— so that there's no ambiguity about what's real and what's not, we'll change the names and then they can just say, this is, this is, you know, my own creation. I didn't want to do that because I wanted to, I wanted to honor the actual people that, that were part of the story. story. So where that question really came into play was in writing scenes, because writing scenes are not just about the facts of what happened. You have to let the reader see something, you know.

Experience it, right?

They're in a, you know, they're in a room and they're having breakfast. They have breakfast on one Sunday a month, and the The curtains are open and there's a beam of light that's coming through and shining off of Louise's piano, and the coffee is strong and George lights his pipe. And, you know, so did George smoke a pipe? I have no idea. I created Anna to be the more anxious, nervous, fearful member of the family. Was she that way? I have no idea. I don't— all I could know about their real personalities was what, what was revealed in the letters, and the letters really are pretty opaque emotionally. You know, they, they were these very stoic people, and they're in Nazi Germany, so they were probably afraid to reveal very much.

Ah, that's a very valid point. Right. That's a very valid point.

So, once I started to get on a roll with it, with writing scenes, it got easier. It got easier as I went because I thought, as long as I don't feel I'm portraying anybody in a way that would be— would bring shame to them if they could read it, You know?

Yeah.

But in this kind of genre, in order to kind of like cover myself, I wrote a lengthy author's note that kind of shares with the readers afterward. I put it at the end because there are some spoilers in it, but at the end I talked about how I came to make those decisions about about what, what is the factual, what are the factual pieces and what are the products of my imagination.

I love that, I love that. So you have described ambivalence and denial as important parts of history. What did writing this teach you about the danger of ordinary people witnessing dehumanization and convincing themselves it's not happening, it's not that bad, don't need to do anything? What did you come to the conclusions of about our human nature just to pretend like it ain't happening and we don't have to do anything about it?

Well, it's, it's remains a pervasive sickness, I think, in humanity. And it's, it's very much alive right now, today, as we speak.

It is.

Um, and you, you almost have to practice some denial, you know, because this— the, the scope of the problems that we have are just so enormous that if I were to sit around and try to think about how do we solve this? How do we solve immigration? You know, how do we solve antisemitism? I don't know. I don't have the answers to that. But I have a good friend now, a fairly new friend, but a good one named Rosalie, who is the founder of the Holocaust Remembrance Association in Houston. And She helped me to understand that in a contentious situation or an oppressive situation like what happened during the Holocaust and is happening in many places now, when ordinary people— so in every situation like that, you have victims, you have perpetrators, and you have bystanders. And I think what you're alluding to is like, what about the bystanders?

Yes.

What are the bystanders going to do? And in Germany, and then I'll bring it back to today, I included much, very late in the process of putting the book together, I included a conversation between George, the doctor, and his Aryan non-Jewish partner in his medical practice. And they have this very vulnerable conversation about his partner Klaus is a Lutheran, and George really wants to know what do the Lutherans think about what Hitler is doing to the Jews. And these are 2 very good friends. You know, they've been practicing together. Their different backgrounds and ethnicity has never been an issue. But now they have to talk about it. And man, it's— and Klaus, for his part, I wanted to really portray for readers that the ordinary Germans that were not Jewish but who did not hate Jews, they were almost as paralyzed as the Jews were.

Yeah.

Because they could not— if they spoke up— Klaus is an imaginary character, but I wrote him, you know, he had a wife and young children, and if the Gestapo came to drag George away, would he speak up? You know, and he confesses to George, you know, he says, I'd like to think I'm a fairly courageous person, but I don't know. I don't know what I'll do because—

We don't know, do we?

We don't know.

We don't know until we're face to face with it. We, we absolutely don't know what we're gonna do. Well, Ruth, where can people— it's all going to be listed here, guys. You don't have to write this down right now, but where can people find the book right now? It just launched. in April, so it's available now. Where can they go to find it and find you and more of your work?

I'd love to tell you that. I just need to complete this one thought, that victim, perpetrator, bystander— what Rosalie taught me is this other, this 4th category called upstander. Oh, and that's what I want to be. That's what I want my book to be. That's what I want it to represent, that when you see a situation where somebody's being bullied, harassed, persecuted, will you say something? Will you do something and not just be a bystander? Because if you, if you just become a bystander, you're really not— you're not much better than the perpetrator. You're not doing anything to prevent it.

Aren't you part of the problem then? Yeah, aren't you part of the problem?

Promoting that. I want to be an upstander. I don't know how courageous I am because you're right, we don't know until we're put in a situation. But that's my aspiration, to be an upstander and to inspire other people to, to stand up and do what's right when the time comes.

I love that. And Ruth, I had a, um, a very top-notch, top-notch coach one time tell me, Lisa, you're working too hard. It's enough just to inspire people. Yeah. So Ruth, remember that it's enough just to inspire people. You're an upstander because you're here inspiring people. Well, and it's true, being a truth teller, you know. Okay, so now where can we find the book?

So the book is on Amazon, so you can, uh, you can just type in Ruth E. Stitt, my name, and it'll bring up all 3 of my books. You know, there's a whole bio and book blurb there. You can learn all about all 3 of my books. Um, I also have a website called Scripture Comes to Life. The actual URL is scripturecomestolife.com, and there are links to everything, everything that I'm doing on my website.

And friends, we will post it all here. You don't have to write it down right now. Now, Ruth, before we let everybody go, we always ask our guests 2 questions, right? The first one is, in your own life, what do you feel like you performed in order to survive, and what did dropping that role, mask, or performance do to transform it?

Um, okay. Performance. Well, I have been a bit of an overachiever most of my life. I don't do things in a small way, and I'm not sure where that came from, but I have— I'm pretty driven to perform, and I admit it, you know. I think as a kid, you know, my family situation was pretty messy for a while, and my mom was very unhappy, and she kind of employed me as her confidante and kind of parentified me for a while. And I think that could have something to do with how I became a therapist. But I always feel, I guess, the performative aspect that I have, I've really worked on letting go, um, is that I, I don't have to figure everything out, you know. I, I don't have to always figure everything out. I, I can ask for help. I can collaborate. I can— I don't have to be the hero.

Um, you can say you don't know.

I can say I don't know.

Yeah.

And dropping some of that just extreme sense of responsibility, you know, to always appear competent. I never want anybody to see me as less than perfectly competent.

Yeah.

But then when you mush that together with being a musician, There's so many times when I'm singing a song and I completely forget the lyrics. I just have a moment. I don't— I just kind of fall apart. I don't really care. I'm doing the stuff. You know, it's Brené Brown, her book Daring Greatly. You know, it's not the one that's sitting there criticizing, it's the one that's up on the stage doing the stuff.

We're doing the stuff. We're doing the stuff. That's enough.

Yeah. So yeah, even when I mess up badly, I still am able to like myself and give myself credit because I'm— I, I dare greatly to do, to do a lot of stuff, and I do some of it pretty well.

Well, and I think you bring up a very good point. Life changes for us exponentially when we dig who we are as humans and we understand who we are as humans, how we're built and designed, and then can articulate that to the people that love, care about, and are of service to us. so that we get that reciprocal relationship. So, all right, last question. Okay. And then I'll let you go. What do you feel like we need to be having more conversations about?

Oh gosh. Um, what it really means to be— I don't know— to be an adult.

You know, God, it's just—

there's just so much.

Are any of us an adult? Seriously?

I know, but she— like, so much foolishness, just so much adolescent foolishness that's coming out of the mouths of grown, grown-up, you know, grown-ass men and women. It's like, I know, instead of telling me how all about your feelings, could you learn to like Make an argument.

Teach, teach.

I think people need to learn to formulate actual thoughts and arguments that make sense instead of just spewing their feelings all the time. And that's coming from a therapist, right?

I love that. I love that. Enough talk about our feelings, guys. Critically think for yourself, please. Critically think. There can be feelings in there too, but Use your feelings to make some common sense, but make the common sense, guys. I love it, Ruth. I love it. All right, Ruth, we're gonna close out on that. Well, guys, we're gonna have all the ways you can find Ruth and her beautiful, beautiful, beautiful creation. Um, Ruth, congratulations on finally getting it done. Um, I know what a huge accomplishment that is, and, uh, we're gonna try to promote it as much as we can. to get into the hands of as many people as we can to, uh, um, not only give people an experience but, um, let people remember that at the end of the day, what do we really have choice over? We have choice over how we're going to respond in love to the people that are around us. Because honestly, when it's all said and done, at the end of the day, that we're not going to be worried about that light bill or the fancy car or—

Mm-hmm.

What the next thing on the goal list is, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. All right, my friends, for you guys, in the meantime, you guys don't forget to ask yourself, what are you performing in order to survive? Is it still serving you? And if it isn't, what greatness can happen in your life if you drop the role, mask, or performance? All right, that's all for now. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey. Welcome to the edge.