Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

Go about your business, which is to suffer less so you can live more.

Take good care of all of your selves. Fight like hell to keep yourself, and when you lose her, do whatever it takes to return to her.

On the right are my reset buttons, the things I can do to make staying with myself a little more possible. EASY BUTTONS RESET BUTTONS Boozing Drink a glass of water. Bingeing Take a walk. Shopping Take a bath. Snarking Practice yoga. Comparing Meditate. Reading mean reviews Go to the beach and watch the waves. Inhaling loads of sugar and passing out Play with my dog. Hug my wife and kids. Hide the phone. My reset buttons are just little things. Big thinking is the kryptonite of high and low folks like me. 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.

Actually, maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you, world.

I used to stay brokenhearted like it was my job and destiny. Like pain was what I owed to the world and staying sad was how I stayed safe. Self-denial was how I earned my worthiness, my goodness, my right to exist. Suffering was my comfort zone. I decided, at forty years old, to try a new way.

I hope that my new belief that love should make you feel both held and free is a belief my children will keep.

I have been conditioned to mistrust and dislike strong, confident, happy girls and women. We all have. Studies prove that the more powerful, successful, and happy a man becomes, the more people trust and like him. But the more powerful and happy a woman becomes, the less people like and trust her. So we proclaim: Women are entitled to take their rightful place! Then, when a woman does take her rightful place, our first reaction is: She’s so…entitled.

Dr. Maya Angelou used to say, ‘Modesty is a learned affectation. You don’t want modesty, you want humility. Humility comes from inside out.’ ”

“It’s true. We are terribly lucky. It is also true that we imagined this life before it existed and then we each gave up everything for the one-in-a-million chance that we might be able to build it together. We did not fall into this world we have now, we made it. I’ll tell you this: The braver I am, the luckier I get.”

There I was, just walking down the street of my life, when I fell into a rabbit hole. This is why they call it falling in love, because there is suddenly no solid ground beneath you anymore.

But to have that fun, I had to climb down from Martyrdom Mountain. I had to allow myself one less thing to sigh about. I had to ask for help. I had to sacrifice some of my moral high ground, perhaps lose a few points in the She Who Suffers Most competition. I think we are only bitter about other people’s joy in direct proportion to our commitment to keep joy from ourselves.

I am very controlling. I want to control things. This is because I am afraid. Things feel so precarious.

I am beginning to unlearn what I used to believe about control and love. Now I think that maybe control is not love. I think that control might actually be the opposite of love, because control leaves no room for trust—and maybe love without trust is not love at all. I am beginning to play with the idea that love is trusting that other people Feel, Know, and Imagine, too. Maybe love is respecting what your people feel, trusting that they know, and believing that they have their own unseen order for their lives pressing through their own skin.

Maybe my role with the people I love is not imagining the truest, most beautiful life for them and then pushing them toward it. Maybe I’m just supposed to ask what they feel and know and imagine. And then, no matter how different their unseen order is from mine, ask what I can do to support their vision. Trusting people is terrifying. Maybe if love is not a little scary and out of our control, then it is not love at all. It is wild to let others be wild.

“We were so young and afraid back then. We hadn’t yet learned that Knowing never goes away. It just stays there inside, solid and unmoving. It just waits as long as it takes for the snow to settle.

“I hope that whatever you do next is born from you and not imposed on you. I hope the rest of your life is your idea. For what it’s worth, I hope you trust yourself. You know what you know.

The truth of my thirties was: Stay on your mat, Glennon. The staying is making you. The truth of my forties is: I’m made.

I will not stay, not ever again—in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself. When my body tells me the truth, I’ll believe it. I trust myself now, so I will no longer suffer voluntarily or silently or for long.