Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

Maybe we’ll admit that liberty and justice for all has always meant liberty for white straight wealthy men. Then maybe we’ll gather the entire family at the table—the women and the gay and black and brown folks and those in power—so that we can begin the long, hard work of making amends.

If I want to know how I’d have shown up in the last civil rights era, I have to ask myself: How am I showing up today, in this civil rights era?

“At least I’m trying. No one is even grateful. All I do is get attacked.” People become upset, because saying “I am being attacked” doesn’t accurately describe what is happening. People are just telling us the truth for the first time. That truth feels like an attack because we have been protected by comfortable lies for so long.

I am a fierce, forever feminist. But I still have sexism and misogyny running through my veins. You can be one thing, and your subconscious can be another thing.

It is understood that there is a difference between a misogynist and a person affected by misogyny who is actively working to detox.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Doing our best now is an active thing, and so is knowing better.

what if I demand freedom not because I was “born this way” and “can’t help it” but because I can do whatever I choose to do with my love and my body from year to year, moment to moment—because I’m a grown woman who does not need any excuse to live however I want to live and love whomever I want to love? What if I don’t need your permission slip because I’m already free?

you did not choose yourself instead of God and church. You chose yourself and God, instead of church. When you chose yourself, you chose God. When you walked away from church, you took God with you. God is in you.

“Why—if your church is based on the Jesus who spoke incessantly about orphans and widows, demilitarization, immigrants, the sick, the outcast, and the poor—are you choosing abortion and gayness to hang your hat upon?”

In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time.

They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values,

to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan—who, as governor of California had signed into law one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country—began using the language from the new memo. Evangelicals threw their weight behind him, and voted in a bloc for the first time to elect President Reagan. The Religious Right was born. The face of the movement was the “pro-life and pro-family values” stance of millions, but the blood running through the movement’s veins was the racism and greed of a few....

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.

I think it’s ridiculous to think of God as anything that could possibly be gendered. But as long as the expression of God as female is unimaginable to many while the expression of God as male feels perfectly acceptable—and as long as women continue to be undervalued and abused and controlled here on Earth—I’ll keep using it.

Thank you for not landing on: I love you, but…We know that Love has no buts. If you want to change me, you do not love me. If you feel warm toward me but also believe I’m going to burn in hell, you do not love me. If you wish me well but vote against my family being protected by the law, you do not love me. Thank you for understanding that to love me as yourself means to want for me and for my family every good thing you want for yourself and your family. Anything less than that is less than love.

Some of the hardest and most important work of our lives is learning to separate the voices of teachers from wisdom, propaganda from truth, fear from love and in this case: the voices of God’s self-appointed representatives from the voice of God Herself.

“Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”

Good art always comes from our desperate desire to breathe, to be seen, to be loved.

Ah, yes. This is what people are like. We are all so fucked up and so magical. Life is so brutal and beautiful. Life is brutiful.

We provide shelter and mentoring for LGBTQ homeless kids. And we go upstream to renounce the religious-based bigotry, family rejection, and homophobic policies that make LGBTQ kids more than twice as likely as their straight or cisgender peers to experience homelessness.

it is not kind to keep those we can’t forgive close to us and punish them forever. If we cannot forgive and move on, perhaps we need to move on first, and forgiveness will follow.

Should never helps me because I am dealing with what is. Layering a judgment on top of a feeling doesn’t change the feeling.

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.

I’m sweating, panicking, waiting for it to hurt terribly bad. It never does, but it feels like it’s always about to.” I said, “Yes. That is how I feel all the time.”

pretty much all my friends struggle with what our culture has defined as mental illness. These people are the most alive, passionate, kind, fascinating, and intelligent humans on Earth. They live different kinds of lives than the type we’re trained to aspire to.

It’s nice to be happy. I feel lighter and clearer and stronger and more alive. I haven’t been struck down yet. One thing that has surprised me is this: The happier I become, the happier my children seem to become. I am unlearning everything I’ve been trained to believe about motherhood and martyrdom.

we downplay our strengths to avoid threatening anyone and invoking disdain. We do not mention our accomplishments. We do not accept compliments. We temper, qualify, and discount our opinions. We walk without swagger, and we yield incessantly. We step out of the way. We say, “I feel like” instead of “I know.”

I want to say, “Baby, let’s forget about all of this. Mommy’s got you. Let’s get back in that car and go get some ice cream.” Instead I say, “I believe in you, Tish. This is a hard thing to do. We can do hard things.”

The braver I am, the luckier I get.”

“You’ve never fallen in love, so you’ve never been in this part before. I have. It changes. I want the change. I want the next part. I’ve never had that before. This first part isn’t the realest part. The next part, when we stop falling together and land side by side, that’s the real part. It’s coming. I want it, but I’m afraid that when it comes, when we land, you’ll be disappointed and you’ll panic.” “I feel like you’re saying that we’re under some kind of spell and soon it will wear off and we will love each other less than this.” “What I’m saying is that soon the spell will wear off and we’re going to need to love each other more than this.”

I have decided that I want to be in love with a person, not a feeling. I want to be found in love, not lost in it.

We must remember: I am the builder, not the castle. I am separate and whole, over here, eyes on the horizon, sun on my shoulders, welcoming the tide. Building, rebuilding. Playfully. Lightly. Never changing. Always changing.

we are only bitter about other people’s joy in direct proportion to our commitment to keep joy from ourselves. The more often I do things I want to do, the less bitter I am at people for doing what they want to do.

Since I love Abby the most, it follows that I have to control her the most. I want to make all of my dreams for her come true. I just really want my best for her. To that end, I have relentless good ideas to share with her about what she should do and wear and eat and how she should work and sleep and read and listen.