We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life's 20 Questions

by Glennon Doyle

I have often felt that grief is less like something that comes and haunts me like a visitor and more like I’m the visitor and the sadness is a room inside of me. It’s like my body is a house and there is one big room inside of me where the knowing lives; the sad, wild remembering of how beautiful and terrible and temporary and fleeting everything is. I spent decades of my life keeping that room locked: Do not enter. Caution tape. My job was just to walk by it lightly on tiptoes. Then I started letting myself visit the room. I was like: Oh, maybe this is a good place to visit. Maybe it is in my house for a reason. I would go there—only when I made art—and then leave quickly. After I was done writing, I’d tidy up and leave, because I’d have to go back to the regular world where people don’t want to talk about this shit all the time. But now it feels like I have emptied this room and put stuff from it into every room in my inner home. I have decorated every room with the wild ruinous knowing, and I live among the knowing every day, and it’s beautiful and difficult, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Amanda: So you’re no longer compartmentalizing the sadness and the knowing. The deepest existential woe is now in the joy room and also in the peace-and-comfort room. It’s everywhere. Abby: Open floor plan.