Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

I did not know, before that woman told me, that all feelings were for feeling. I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy.

I burned the memo that defined selflessness as the pinnacle of womanhood, but first I forgave myself for believing that lie for so long.

I burned the memo presenting responsible motherhood as martyrdom.

I let burn my cherished, comfortable idea of America as a place of liberty and justice for all. I let a truer, wider perspective be born in its place, one that included the American experience of people who don’t look like me.

Life is exactly as I remembered it: just the fucking worst.

The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love.

I have never been fine again, not for a single moment. I have been exhausted and terrified and angry. I have been overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. I have been amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. I have been reminded, constantly, by the Ache: This will pass; stay close. I have been alive.

“I’m a hot mess and proud of it! I love this crappy version of humanity that I am! I am broken and beautiful!! Eff you, Perfect Woman!” The problem was that I still believed that there was an ideal human and that I was not her.

Rebellion is as much of a cage as obedience is. They both mean living in reaction to someone else’s way instead of forging your own. Freedom is not being for or against an ideal, but creating your own existence from scratch.

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.

She is saying for us: Don’t tell me to smile. I will not be pleasant. Even trapped here, inside two dimensions, you will see the truth. You will see my life’s brutal and beautiful right here on my face.

“Oh! I thought Alicia doesn’t wear makeup.” She turned around, looked at him, lipstick in her hand. She said, “I do what the fuck I want.” That’s it.

She is twelve. Maybe eleven, actually. I have three children, and their ages change every single year. All I know is they are in the phase that comes after crawling but before college.

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.

guess women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want.”

She seemed certain, steady, free, relaxed. She was not complying and she was not rebelling. She was creating something new.

Recently, my friend Erika called my cell phone. I will never understand why people insist upon calling my cell phone. It’s such an aggressive action to take: calling someone. Each time my phone rings, I have a heart attack like my pocket’s on fire and a tiny siren is going off.

When we are little girls, our families, teachers, and peers insist that our loud voices, bold opinions, and strong feelings are “too much” and unladylike, so we learn to not trust our personalities.

Politicians insist that our judgment about our bodies and futures cannot be trusted, so our own reproductive systems must be controlled by lawmakers we don’t know in places we’ve never been.

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.

when I request an explanation for a decision someone has made, the women on my team know that I’m not looking for justifications, judgments, or opinions. I’m looking for Knowing. So the decision maker will say, “I did the research and sat with these options for a while. This option felt warm to me. The alternative felt cold.” That will be the end of the discussion.

I trust women who trust themselves.

When I realized that Tish was me, I remembered that acting happy was what had almost killed me. I quit trying to make Tish happy or pleasant and decided just to help her be Tish. Tish is fourteen now. She is still turned inside out. What she feels and thinks on the inside, the world hears and sees on the outside.

“I see that you’re upset. Are you ready for a solution yet? Or do you just need to feel this way for a while?” She usually just needs to feel this way for a while, because she is becoming.

We got a terrible memo. Our terrible memo is why we feel exhausted, neurotic, and guilty. Our terrible memo is also why our kids suck. They do, they just suck.

phones were designed to keep us addicted to exterior life and that if we never dive inward, we never become who we were meant to be.

You are a human being, and your birthright is to remain fully human. So you get to be everything: loud quiet bold smart careful impulsive creative joyful big angry curious ravenous ambitious. You are allowed to take up space on this earth with your feelings, your ideas, your body. You do not need to shrink. You do not need to hide any part of yourself, ever.

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 do not recall rocking my son to sleep with stories about tender men. I do not remember pointing to men passing by: “I bet he’s a poet, a teacher, a devoted father.” When an adult mentioned my son’s sensitivity, I don’t remember saying, “Isn’t it great? His tenderness is his strength.” When he started school, I do not recall saying, “You can be quiet, sad, merciful, small, vulnerable, loving, and kind out there in the world. You can be unsure of yourself and still be a boy.” I do not remember saying to him, “Girls are not for conquering. They do not exist to play supporting roles in the stories of men. They exist all on their own.”

Did this father just arrive on Earth? Is he new here? Why does he need minute-by-minute coaching in order to care for his baby?

this father appeared to be a grown man who loved his son. There was no earthly reason why he would not be every bit as capable of caring for his son as his wife was. They were both new parents. How had one of them become so helpless? Oh, I thought. OH.

I don’t give a rat’s ass how much respect you earn for yourself out in the world if you are not showing respect to the people inside your home. If you don’t get that right, nothing you do out there will matter much.”

when you laugh at something someone has said, it’s not about the person who spoke. It’s about you. He was brave enough to be honest; you be brave enough to handle it. Life is hard; friends need to be safe places for each other.”

I can teach them how to be critics of the culture instead of blind consumers of it. I can train my children to detect those lies and get angry instead of swallowing them and getting sick.

We have to explain that to them so they don’t learn that sex is about violence. I just think that saying anything at all—even if we say it awkward and stumbling and afraid while our kids roll their eyes—is better than saying nothing at all.

“We don’t want you to stay away from porn while you’re young because sex is bad. We want you to stay away from porn because real sex—with humanity and vulnerability and love—is indescribably good. We don’t want fake sex ruining real sex for you.

successful parenting includes working to make sure that all kids have enough, not just that the particular kids assigned to us have everything?

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.

Defensiveness is for people who are afraid that what they have can be taken from them. You are a grown-ass woman. You can have what you want. No one can take this from you.

Explaining is fear preparing its case, and we are not on trial.

No Fear In. No Fear Out. Only Love In. Only Love Out.

Your fear that the world will reject our family is causing you to create the very rejection you fear exists. Our children are not carrying the fear that you are carrying—but if you bring it here, they will help you carry it, because they trust you. I do not want that unnecessary burden to be passed to them.

we cannot be the ones to teach you that you can love and accept us.

sit down with your cobuilder and decide with honor and intention what you will have on your island and what you will not. Not who your nonnegotiables are but what they are.

Love is a river, and there are times when impediments stop the flow of love. Mental illness, addiction, shame, narcissism, fear passed down by religious and cultural institutions—these are boulders that interrupt love’s flow.

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

You are your own source. Your river is strong.

Anything or anyone I could lose by telling the truth was never mine anyway. I’m willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.

I left my husband and I am building a life with Abby because I’m a grown-ass woman now and I do what the fuck I want. I mean this with deep respect and love—and