Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

I learned that I’d never be free from pain but I could be free from the fear of pain, and that was enough. I finally stopped avoiding fires long enough to let myself burn, and what I learned was that I am like that burning bush: The fire of pain won’t consume me. I can burn and burn and live. I can live on fire. I am fireproof.

First the pain, then the waiting, then the rising. All of our suffering comes when we try to get to our resurrection without allowing ourselves to be crucified first. There is no glory except straight through your story.

Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming. That is what I can and must avoid: missing my own evolution because I am too afraid to surrender to the process. Having such little faith in myself that I numb or hide or consume my way out of my fiery feelings again and again. So my goal is to stop abandoning myself—and stay. To trust that I’m strong enough to handle the pain that is necessary to the process of becoming. Because what scares me a hell of a lot more than pain is living my entire life and missing my becoming. What scares me more than feeling it all is missing it all.

I burned the memo presenting responsible motherhood as martyrdom. I decided that the call of motherhood is to become a model, not a martyr. I unbecame a mother slowly dying in her children’s name and became a responsible mother: one who shows her children how to be fully alive.

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.

Because our culture was built upon and benefits from the control of women. The way power justifies controlling a group is by conditioning the masses to believe that the group cannot be trusted. So the campaign to convince us to mistrust women begins early and comes from everywhere.

Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely.

The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me.

I trust myself to have my own back, so my allegiance is to the voice within. I’ll abandon everyone else’s expectations of me before I’ll abandon myself.

Good mothers don’t break their children’s hearts in order to follow their own.

Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist. What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear—to know that if they choose to become mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live. If we keep passing down the legacy of martyrdom to our daughters, with whom does it end? Which woman ever gets to live? And when does the death sentence begin? At the wedding altar? In the delivery room? Whose delivery room—our children’s or our own? When we call martyrdom love we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. This is why Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.

Our terrible memo is also why we stay busy with the trivial while the world our children will inherit crumbles. We obsess over our children’s snacks while they rehearse their own deaths in active-shooter drills at school. We agonize over their college prep while the earth melts around them. I cannot imagine that there has ever been a more overparented and underprotected generation. New memo: Here is your baby. Love her at home, at the polls, in the streets. Let everything happen to her. Be near.

a screen. I think I’d probably be happier

Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be.

I want my son to keep his humanity. I want him to stay whole. I do not want him to become sick; I want him to be shrewd. I do not want him to surrender to cages he must slowly die inside or kill his way out of. I do not want him to become another unconscious brick that power uses to build fortresses around itself. I want him to know the true story, which is that he is free to be fully human, forever.

What did preparation for this day look like for this baby’s mother? In addition to getting ready to go back to work, this mama spent the previous night thinking through every minute of her husband’s next day.

Our boys are born with great potential for nurturing, caring, loving, and serving. Let’s stop training it out of them.

I remember looking at Craig and thinking: I wouldn’t trade places with him for all the money in the world. I would not have made it through early parenting without honest friends to talk through how hard it all was. It must be so lonely to be a man. It must be so difficult to carry by yourself all the things we were meant to help each other carry.

Our boys are just as human as our girls are. They need permission, opportunities, and safe places to share their humanity. Let’s encourage real, vulnerable conversations among our sons and their friends. Let’s

ask about their feelings, relationships, hopes, and dreams so they don’t become middle-aged men who feel permitted to discuss only sports, sex, news, and the weather. Let’s help our boys become adults who don’t have to carry life alone.

Perhaps part of a woman’s freeing herself is freeing her partner, her father, her brother, and her son. When our men and boys cry, let’s not say to them with our words or energy, “Don’t cry, honey.” Let’s get comfortable allowing our men to gently and consistently express the pain of being human, so that violent release isn’t their go-to option.

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.

“Do not leave that sweet boy alone in the woods because you are too afraid to go get him.” We don’t have to have answers for our children; we just have to be brave enough to trek into the woods and ask tough questions with them. We can do hard things.

Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those starving outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.

We hung up, and I thought: My mother loves me. And she disagrees with me about what is best for me. I am going to have to decide who I trust more: my mother or myself. For the first time in my life, I decided to trust myself—even though that meant moving in direct opposition to my parents. I decided to please myself instead of my parents. I decided to become responsible for my own life, my own joy, my own family. And I decided to do it with love. That is when I became an adult.

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. Tonight, sit down with your cobuilder and decide with honor and intention what you will have on your island and what you will not.

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. There is another kind of pain that comes not from losing beautiful things but from never even trying for them.

I’m a grown-ass woman now and I do what the fuck I want. I mean this with deep respect and love—and with the desire that you, too, will do what the fuck you want with your own singular precious life.

You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you. And if they are not and you dare to admit they are not, you must decide if you have the guts, the right—perhaps even the duty—to burn to the ground that which is not true and beautiful enough and get started building what is.

I suggested that we all take a deep breath. It felt so good to laugh and then breathe together. Everything doesn’t have to be terrifying, after all. This is just life, and we are just people trying to figure each other out. Trying to figure ourselves out.

We all believe our religious beliefs were written on our hearts and in the stars. We never stop to consider that most of the memos we live by were actually written by highly motivated men.

But I find myself unable to let go fully, because to wash my hands of the Jesus story is to abandon something beautiful to money-hungry hijackers. It would be like surrendering the concept of beauty to the fashion industry or the magic of sexuality to internet porn dealers. I want beauty, I want sex, I want faith. I just don’t want the hijackers’ commodified, poisonous versions. Nor do I want to identify myself with hijackers. So I will say this: I remain compelled by the Jesus story. Not as history meant to reveal what happened long ago, but as poetry meant to illuminate a revolutionary idea powerful enough to heal and free humanity now. There was a time on Earth—like every other time on Earth—when humanity had turned against itself.

The point is that if 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.

We know that Love has no buts. If you want to change me, you do not love me.

This is what people are like. We are all so fucked up and so magical. Life is so brutal and beautiful. Life is brutiful. For all of us. I remember now. If you want to get jaded and numb, watch the news. If you want to stay human, read letters. When trying to understand humanity, seek out firsthand accounts.

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 When I started looking upstream, I learned that where there is great suffering, there is often great profit.

Be careful with the stories you tell about yourself.”

I can’t imagine a greater tragedy than remaining forever unknown to myself. That would be the ultimate self-abandonment.

This pattern was exhausting and depressing for both of us, but I didn’t know what to do other than wait for forgiveness to eventually be bestowed upon me by the heavens as a reward for my steadfast suffering. I assumed that forgiveness was a matter of time.

All the fire was in me. None in him. I thought: How can this anger be about him? He can’t even feel it. Suddenly I felt possessive and protective of my own anger. I thought: This is happening inside my body. If this anger is in me, I am going to assume it is for me. I decided to stop being ashamed and afraid of my anger, to stop being ashamed and afraid of myself.

I knew this. My body knew this. And I had been ignoring what I knew. That is why I was so angry: I was angry at myself. Craig was the one who had strayed, yes, but I was the one who decided, day after day, to stay married, vulnerable, and angry. I was ignoring what I knew, and I was punishing him for forcing me to know it. There was nothing he could do to change what I knew. Maybe the question was no longer “How could he have done this to me?” but “How can I keep doing this to myself?” Maybe instead of forever repeating, “How could he have abandoned me?” I needed to ask, “Why do I keep abandoning myself?”

What comes after betrayal cannot be striving, contorting, or suffering to honor an arbitrary idea of right or wrong. What comes next must be an honoring of self. We must disregard the should out there and face what is real in here. If constant anger is what is real in here, we must address it—both for ourselves and for the other. Because it is not kind to keep those we

If we cannot forgive and move on, perhaps we need to move on first, and forgiveness will follow. Forgiveness does not mean access. We can give the other person the gift of forgiveness and ourselves the gift of safety and freedom at the very same time. When both people become unafraid and unpunished, that is a good good-bye. Relief from anger is not something that is bestowed upon us; it often must be forged by us.

Anger delivers important information about where one of our boundaries has been crossed. When we answer the door and accept that delivery, we begin to know ourselves better. When we restore the boundary that was violated, we honor ourselves. When we know ourselves and honor ourselves, we live with integrity, peace, and power—understanding that we are the kind of woman who will be wise and brave enough to care for herself. Good stuff.

Because when I looked at Abby relaxing, my anger was almost a bitter yearning. Must be nice. Must be nice to rest in the middle of the damn day. Must be nice to feel worthy of the space you take up on the earth without hustling to earn it every minute.

I want to be able to rest and still feel worthy, too. I didn’t want to change Abby. I wanted to change my belief about worthiness.

Hard work is important. So are play and nonproductivity. My worth is tied not to my productivity but to my existence. I am worthy of rest. Changing my root belief about worthiness has changed my life.

It’s like we really believe that our hearts were meant to be kept hidden away, bubble-wrapped, and under lockdown. As though the point of life is to not be moved. That’s not the point. When we let ourselves be moved, we discover what moves us. Heartbreak is not something to be avoided; it’s something to pursue. Heartbreak is one of the greatest clues of our lives.

Sometimes to live again, we have to let ourselves die completely. We have to let ourselves become completely, utterly, new. When grief rings: Surrender.

I do not believe that when we die, one of us will be presented with the She Who Suffered Most trophy. If this trophy does exist, I don’t want it. If there are people in your life—parents, siblings, friends, writers, spiritual “gurus”—who judge you for taking prescribed medicine, please ask to see their medical license.