Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

Ten is when we learn how to be good girls and real boys. Ten is when children begin to hide who they are in order to become what the world expects them to be. Right around ten is when we begin to internalize our formal taming. Ten is when the world sat me down, told me to be quiet, and pointed toward my cages: These are the feelings you are allowed to express. This is how a woman should act. This is the body you must strive for. These are the things you will believe. These are the people you can love. Those are the people you should fear. This is the kind of life you are supposed to want. Make yourself fit. You’ll be uncomfortable at first, but don’t worry—eventually you’ll forget you’re caged. Soon this will just feel like: life.

Good girls aren’t hungry, furious, or wild. All of the things that make a woman human are a good girl’s dirty secret.

Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?

The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It’s not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that’s no badge of honor.

But our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power, and efficiency at all costs that the folks like Tish—like me—are inconvenient. We slow the world down. We’re on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, “Iceberg! Iceberg!” while everyone else is below deck, yelling back, “We just want to keep dancing!” It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.

Golden is decided early, and it sticks, somehow, even when we are grown and know so much better, so much more. Once Golden, always Golden.

The boys looked inside themselves. The girls looked outside themselves. We forgot how to know when we learned how to please. This is why we live hungry.

There was only one of her, so she disappointed herself instead.

When I was a child, I felt what I needed to feel and I followed my gut and I planned only from my imagination. I was wild until I was tamed by shame. Until I started hiding and numbing my feelings for fear of being too much. Until I started deferring to others’ advice instead of trusting my own intuition. Until I became convinced that my imagination was ridiculous and my desires were selfish. Until I surrendered myself to the cages of others’ expectations, cultural mandates, and institutional allegiances. Until I buried who I was in order to become what I should be. I lost myself when I learned how to please.

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

Second: I can use pain to become. I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. 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.

What scares me more than feeling it all is missing it all.

When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.

The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be.

No. That is not the understanding of brave I want my children to have. I do not want my children to become people who abandon themselves to please the crowd. Brave does not mean feeling afraid and doing it anyway. 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.

We don’t control the turbulence or tragedy that happens to our families. The plot of our lives is largely out of our control. We decide only the response of the main character. We decide whether we will be the one who jumps ship or the one who stays and leads. Parenthood is serving the peanuts amid turbulence. Then when real trouble hits—when life brings our family death, divorce, bankruptcy, illness—parenthood is looking at little faces and knowing that we are as afraid as they are. Parenthood is thinking: This is too much. I cannot lead them. But I will do the thing I cannot do. So we sit down next to our babies. We turn their faces toward ours until they are looking away from the chaos and directly into our eyes. We take their hands in ours. We say to them, “Look at me. It’s you and me. I am here. This is more real than anything out there. You and me. We will hold hands and breathe and love each other. Even if we are falling from the sky.” Family is: Whether we’re falling or flying, we’re going to take care of each other through the whole damn ride.

when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. As a result, we are raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against a wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt’s guitar and start strumming.

Our judgment is self-protection; it’s a cage we put around ourselves. We hope it will keep danger out, but it only keeps tenderness and empathy from coming in.

They are imagining themselves into the other human being’s shoes, and that is making them tender because they can somehow—through the magical leap of imagination—see and feel what the other might see and feel. That’s when I realized that imagination is not just the catalyst of art, it’s also the catalyst of compassion. Imagination is the shortest distance between two people, two cultures, two ideologies, two experiences.

A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created. When she begins to build her island not to their specifications but to hers. When she finally understands that it is not her duty to convince everyone on her island to accept and respect her and her children. It is her duty to allow onto her island only those who already do and who will walk across the drawbridge as the beloved, respectful guests they are.

The miracle of grace is that you can give what you have never gotten.

When hate or division is being spread in our religious institutions, we have three choices: Remain quiet, which means we agree. Loudly challenge power, and work like hell to make change. Take our families and leave. But there is no more silently disagreeing while poison is being pumped from pulpits and seeping beneath our children’s skin.

we can find good in those we’ve been trained to see as bad, if we can find worth in those we’ve been conditioned to see as worthless, if we can find ourselves in those we’ve been indoctrinated to see as other, then we become unable to hurt them. When we stop hurting them, we stop hurting ourselves. When we stop hurting ourselves, we begin to heal.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in. —Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Be careful with the stories you tell about yourself.”

want to find inspiration in the joy and success of other women. Because that makes me happier, and because if we keep disliking and tearing down strong women instead of loving them, supporting them, and voting for them, we won’t have any strong women left.

right is not real, and should is a cage.