Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living

by Glennon Doyle

I set free my beautiful, rowdy, true wild self. I was right about her power. It was too big for the life I was living, so I systematically dismantled every piece of it. Then I built a life of my own. I did it by resurrecting the very parts of myself I was trained to mistrust, hide, and abandon in order to keep others comfortable: My emotions My intuition My imagination My courage Those are the keys to freedom. Those are who we are. Will we be brave enough to unlock ourselves? Will we be brave enough to set ourselves free? Will we finally step out of our cages and say to ourselves, to our people, and to the world: Here I Am.

Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones.

being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything.

I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever.

I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.

To trust that I’m strong enough to handle the pain that is necessary to the process of becoming.

I keep a note stuck to my bathroom mirror: Feel It All.

The building of the true and beautiful means the destruction of the good enough.

If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.

When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves.

I will not hold on to a single existing idea, opinion, identity,

story, or relationship that keeps me from emerging new. I cannot hold too tightly to any riverbank. I must let go of the shore in order to travel deeper and see farther. Again and again and then again. Until the final death and rebirth. Right up until then.

Freedom is not being for or against an ideal, but creating your own existence from scratch.

To be brave is to forsake all others to be true to yourself. That is the vow of a confident girl.

Every truth is a kindness, even if it makes others uncomfortable. Every untruth is an unkindness, even if it makes others comfortable.”

It is a blessing to know a free woman. Sometimes she will stop by and hold up a mirror for you. She will help you remember who you are.

me: Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself. Tish: Even you? me: Especially me.

In my thirties, I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It’s the inevitable, excruciating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave, openhearted life—and I’ll pay it.

So I can correct that misguided first judgment, but it takes me a deliberate effort. We become the air we breathe.

Dr. Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

If someone tells you who they are, consider how lucky you are to be graced with that gift. Don’t respond with an eviction notice, a permission slip, or a concession speech.

Glennon, you refer to God as “she”—why do you believe that God’s a female?” I don’t. I think it’s ridiculous to think of God as anything that could possibly be gendered. But as long as the expression of God as female is unimaginable to many while the expression of God as male feels perfectly acceptable—and as long as women continue to be undervalued and abused and controlled here on Earth—I’ll keep using it.

Iam a sensitive, introverted woman, which means that I love humanity but actual human beings are tricky for me. I love people but not in person. For example, I would die for you but not, like … meet you for coffee. I became a writer so I could stay at home alone in my pajamas, reading and writing about the importance of human connection and community. It is an almost perfect existence.

Everything I needed to know next was inside the discomfort of now.

Living without ever finding our purpose Dying without ever finding true belonging

The two biggest fears women disclose to the author

What is it that affects you so deeply that whenever you encounter it, you feel the need to look away? Look there. Where is the pain in the world that you just cannot stand? Stand there. The thing that breaks your heart is the very thing you were born to help heal. Every world changer’s work begins with a broken heart.

Courage says, “I will not let the fact that I cannot do everything keep me from doing what I can.” We all want purpose and connection. Tell me what breaks your heart, and I’ll point you toward both.

Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new.

When grief rings: Surrender. There is nothing else to do. The delivery is utter transformation.

Depression, for me, is a forgetting, an erasing, a slow fade into nothingness. It is like I run out of Glennon, and there is nothing left but panic that I am gone forever this time. Depression takes all my vibrant colors and bashes them together until I am gray, gray, gray. Eventually I get too low to operate, but as I begin to fade, I can usually still accomplish small things: do the dishes, take the kids to school, smile when it seems called for. It’s just that it’s all forced. I am acting instead of responding, because I have forgotten the point. Perhaps this is why so many depressed people become artists, to reclaim the power of answering the question: What is the point? We are clawing at the ground with pen and paper while drowning in quicksand.

When you start sinking into the gray, get out your phone or a notebook and write a few notes from your Down Self to your Up Self. Write about how you feel right now. This does not need to be a novel, just a note. Here is one of my notes from my Down Self: It’s all gray. I can’t feel. I am all alone. No one knows me.

Fight like hell to keep yourself, and when you lose her, do whatever it takes to return to her.

It has taken me forty years to decide that when I feel bad, I want to do something that makes me feel better instead of worse. I keep a handwritten poster in my office titled “Easy Buttons and Reset Buttons.” On the left are all the things I do to abandon myself. On the right are my reset buttons, the things I can do to make staying with myself a little more possible.

When everything is terrible and I hate my life and I feel certain that I need a new career, a new religion, a new house, a new life, I look at my list and remember that what I really need is probably a glass of water.

I’m an artist and an activist, so pretty much all my friends struggle with what our culture has defined as mental illness. These people are the most alive, passionate, kind, fascinating, and intelligent humans on Earth. They live different kinds of lives than the type we’re trained to aspire to. Many of them live lives that include spending days in the dark without leaving their homes and holding on to words and policy and paint-brushes for hope and dear life. This kind of life is not easy, but it’s often deep, true, meaningful, and beautiful. I have begun to notice that I don’t even enjoy folks who aren’t at least a tad mentally ill. I don’t wish folks without a little anxiety or depression any harm, I just don’t find myself particularly curious about them. I have come to believe that we “crazies” are the best people. This is why so many of us are resistant to taking our medication. Because deep underneath, we believe that we are actually the sane ones. We mentally ill are the only “sick” people who believe our magic is inside our disease. I did. I still do. When people said “Get better,” I heard: Get the same as everyone else. I

But other times—when I turn on the news or watch closely how people treat each other—I raise my eyebrows and think: Actually, maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you, world. Maybe my inability to adapt to the world is not because I’m crazy but because I’m paying attention. Maybe it’s not insane to reject the world as it is. Maybe the real insanity is surrendering to the world as it is. Maybe pretending that things around here are just fine is no badge of honor I want to wear. Maybe it’s exactly right to be a little crazy. Maybe the truth is: World, you need my poetry.

I’ve also learned that while choosing joy makes it easier for me to love myself and my life, it seems to make it harder for the world to love me.

I have noticed that it seems easier for the world to love a suffering woman than it is for the world to love a joyful, confident woman.”

Girls and women sense this. We want to be liked. We want to be trusted. So we downplay our strengths to avoid threatening anyone and invoking disdain. We do not mention our accomplishments.

We do not accept compliments. We temper, qualify, and discount our opinions. We walk without swagger, and we yield incessantly. We step out of the way. We say, “I feel like” instead of “I know.” We ask if our ideas make sense instead of assuming they do. We apologize for … everything.

I once sat with Oprah Winfrey at her kitchen table, and she asked me what I was most proud of in my life as an activist, writer, mother. I panicked and started mumbling something like “Oh. I don’t feel proud, I feel grateful. None of it’s really me. I’m surrounded by great people. I’m just incredibly lucky and …” She put her hand on mine and said, “Don’t do that. Don’t be modest. Dr. Maya Angelou used to say, ‘Modesty is a learned affectation. You don’t want modesty, you want humility. Humility comes from inside out.’ ”

She was saying: Playing dumb, weak, and silly is a disservice to yourself and to me and to the world. Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully. Don’t mistake modesty for humility. Modesty is a giggly lie. An act. A mask. A fake game. We have no time for it.

I’ll tell you this: The braver I am, the luckier I get.”

“You’ve never fallen in love, so you’ve never been in this part before. I have. It changes. I want the change. I want the next part. I’ve never had that before. This first part isn’t the realest part. The next part, when we stop falling together and land side by side, that’s the real part. It’s coming. I want it, but I’m afraid that when it comes, when we land, you’ll be disappointed and you’ll panic.”

I have decided that I want to be in love with a person, not a feeling. I want to be found in love, not lost in it. I’d rather exist than disappear. I’m going to be midnight forever. That’s perfect.

Answering the question Who do I love? is not enough. We must live lives of our own. To live a life of her own, each woman must also answer: What do I love? What makes me come alive? What is beauty to me, and when do I take the time to fill up with it? Who is the soul beneath all of these roles? Each woman must

answer these questions now, before the tide comes. Sandcastles are beautiful, but we cannot live inside them. Because the tide rises. That’s what the tide does. We must remember: I am the builder, not the castle. I am separate and whole, over here, eyes on the horizon, sun on my shoulders, welcoming the tide. Building, rebuilding. Playfully. Lightly. Never changing. Always changing.

But right is not real, and should is a cage. What’s wild is what is.

That is what family is to me: where we are both held and free.