Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

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?

Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now.

Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain—that the reason we’re sad and angry is not that being human hurts; it’s because we don’t have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans.

There is no glory except straight through your story.

Ten minutes a day is not too long to spend finding yourself, Glennon. For God’s sake, you spend eighty minutes a day finding your keys.

Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.

The women asking these questions remind me of Tabitha. They are stalking the periphery of their lives, feeling discontent. To me, this is exciting, because discontent is the nagging of the imagination. Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: “Not this.”

If you are uncomfortable—in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused—you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.

Brave means living from the inside out. Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud.

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

It’s nearly impossible to blaze one’s own path while following in someone else’s footsteps.

There are three kinds of people: those poisoned by racism and actively choosing to spread it; those poisoned by racism and actively trying to detox; and those poisoned by racism who deny its very existence inside them.

The fact that the programmed poison of racism was pumped into us may not be our fault, but getting it out is sure as hell our responsibility.

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

and nothing unearths what we really believe faster than examining what pisses us off.

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.

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

I think we are only bitter about other people’s joy in direct proportion to our commitment to keep joy from ourselves.