Today we’d like to introduce you to Lindsay Smith.
Hi Lindsay, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’m not entirely sure how to tell my story because, like most people, it doesn’t feel like a straight line. I am only 37, but I have lived so many lives already.
For a long time, I was moving very fast. I worked in sales, started a nonprofit called The Merry Outlaw, and filled my days with projects, people, causes, deadlines, responsibilities. Much of it came from a sincere place. I cared deeply about the work. I cared deeply about people. But I also think I was uncomfortable with stillness. As long as I was moving, there was always another thing to do, another problem to solve, another place to be.
Then, in May of 2022, I was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Everything that had felt urgent suddenly wasn’t. My calendar, my plans, my assumptions about the future…none of them mattered in the way I thought they did. My job became getting through treatment and learning how to live in a body that felt completely foreign to me. My job became learning how to tolerate uncertainty, how to sit still, how to accept what is.
I would never choose cancer, and I don’t romanticize it. It was the hardest thing I have ever experienced. But it interrupted a life that was moving so quickly I’m not sure I was fully inside it.
The years since have been quieter in some ways and fuller in others. I’ve become more interested in listening than achieving. I choose community over productivity. I choose curiosity over certainty. I spend a lot more time paying attention now. To people, to grief (mine and the world’s), to joy, and to the thousands of ordinary moments that make up a life.
I’m still very much in the middle of my story. I don’t feel like someone who has arrived anywhere. And maybe there’s no arrival at all. Maybe we’re not here to finally figure it all out, but to keep showing up for what is here.
When I got the email about this interview, my first thought was, Wait, why me? I don’t have a particularly impressive answer to that question. My days are fairly ordinary. I am a death doula. I help with tongue cancer research. I tend the chaotic garden I planted three years ago with my mother, which somehow keeps teaching me the same lessons over and over again. I write. I take long walks. I lift weights. I sit in retreat halls and open my heart. I call my friends. I forget things. I start over.
After cancer, I became aware of how easy it is to miss your own life while you’re busy planning it and improving it. Time feels precious to me now, but also wonderfully ordinary. Most days are not dramatic. Most days are made up of watering plants, answering emails, talking with my friends, watching the light sparkle through the window. And yet, this is it. This is the life. So these days, I try to show up for it. The heartbreak and the wonder. The grief and the joy. The moments that change everything and the moments that change nothing at all. I just want to be here for all of it, as awake as I know how to be.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No. Not even close. There have been periods of my life when I’ve genuinely wondered if I was being punished for being a vicious person in a past life.
There has been trauma, loss, identity crises. More illness than seems statistically reasonable, honestly (my body collects rare diagnoses). My mental health has suffered at times, my body has certainly suffered. I’ve lived through seasons of sheer exhaustion from all of the effort required to navigate one thing after another. For a long time, these experiences felt like huge interruptions, like detours standing between me and the life I was supposed to be living. I don’t see it that way anymore.
I don’t believe suffering automatically makes people wiser or better. Pain hurts. Fear is frightening. Grief flattens you. There is nothing poetic about insomnia caused by frantically googling “DO I HAVE TONGUE CANCER” at 3am for five months until you finally get a diagnosis.
At the same time, when I look back, I can see that many of the hardest chapters of my life have also been my greatest teachers. They have humbled me and softened me. They’ve stripped away all of the crazy ideas I once had about control, certainty, what it means to live a good life. They have made me more compassionate toward other people because I know firsthand that everyone is carrying something we cannot see. My struggles have shaped me in ways comfort never could have, and for that I feel deep and unwavering gratitude.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
This question makes me a little uncomfortable, if I’m being honest. I’ve spent the last few years questioning the idea that we need to be known for something in order for our lives to matter. I used to be much more interested in achievement, recognition, and building things that looked impressive from the outside. These days, I’m much more interested in the ordinary.
That said, I do write. I publish a Substack (themerryoutlaw.substack.com if you’d like to follow!) and I hope that one day some version of that writing becomes a book. Writing has been one of the great loves of my life, though it took me a long time to understand my relationship to it.
For years, I thought the challenge was figuring out how to become a better writer. Recently, I’ve realized the challenge is actually figuring out how to live my life more presently. Then the writing takes care of itself. When I am living fully, when I am paying attention, when I am allowing myself to be moved by it all, when I am staying curious about the world…my writing is alive. The words arrive and they have something to say.
Wwhen I am rushing, numbing out, going through the motions, disconnecting from myself, the writing reflects that too. It feels flat and forced. Sometimes I get impatient. I think, Just sit down and write the book already. And maybe that’s good advice for many writers. In fact, I know all the best writers would say it. Sit your ass down and write consistently, every single day. But I have come to accept that my writing seems to grow out of my life, not the other way around.
So my focus is less on producing a book and more on creating a life that feels honest, connected, and fully inhabited. I want to keep saying yes to conversations that change me, experiences that challenge me, friendships that deepen me, and moments that remind me I am alive. I trust that if I keep doing that, the writing will continue to emerge. It always has.
As for what sets me apart, I’m not sure that’s for me to say. But I do know that I am endlessly curious about what it means to be human. I love listening to people’s stories. I love asking questions. I love sitting beside people in moments of grief, transition, joy, uncertainty. That curiosity is the thread that seems to run through everything I do.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
Finding my people. The ones who don’t ask me to be smaller, quieter, or easier to understand. Then staying close to them, loving them well, and letting them love me, too.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://themerryoutlaw.substack.com
- Instagram: @_outlaw.girl
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-smith-890a9729/
