Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

I became animalistic during my daily binges. Then I’d drape myself over the toilet and purge because a good girl must stay very small to fit inside her cages. She must leave no outward evidence of her hunger. Good girls aren’t hungry, furious, or wild. All of the things that make a woman human are a good girl’s dirty secret.

Tish is sensitive, and that is her superpower. 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.

They are considered eccentric but critical to the survival of the group because they are able to hear things others don’t hear and see things others don’t see and feel things others don’t feel. The culture depends on the sensitivity of a few, because nothing can be healed if it’s not sensed first.

I rigged an election trying to be Golden. I spent sixteen years with my head in a toilet trying to be light. I drank myself numb for a decade, trying to be pleasant. I’ve giggled at and slept with assholes, trying to be touchable. I’ve held my tongue so hard I tasted blood, trying to be gentle. I’ve spent thousands on potions and poisons, trying to be youthful. I have denied myself for decades, trying to be pure.

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.

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.

The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”

I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and that pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was weakness and that I was supposed to suck it up. But the thing was that the more I sucked it up, the more food and booze I had to suck down.

First: I can feel everything and survive.

The fire of pain won’t consume me. I can burn and burn and live. I can live on fire. I am fireproof.

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.

Feel It All.

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

This is the most revolutionary thing a woman can do: the next precise thing, one thing at a time, without asking permission or offering explanation. This way of life is thrilling.

Because no one has ever lived or will ever live this life I am attempting to live, with my gifts and challenges and past and people.

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.

I know exactly what she’s talking about. She’s talking about the Ache.

WE CAN DO HARD THINGS.

“We can do hard things” becomes my hourly life mantra. It is my affirmation that living life on life’s own absurd terms is hard. It isn’t hard because I’m weak or flawed or because I made a wrong turn somewhere, it is hard because life is just hard for humans and I am a human who is finally doing life right. “We can do hard things” insists that I can, and should, stay in the hard because there is some kind of reward for staying.

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 was born a little broken, with an extra dose of sensitivity. —SOME HORSESHIT I WROTE ABOUT MYSELF IN MY FIRST MEMOIR

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.

‘And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.’

Brave means living from the inside out. Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud.

Selah

“I see your fear, and it’s big. I also see your courage, and it’s bigger. We can do hard things, baby. We are fireproof.”

Maybe courage is not just refusing to be afraid of ourselves but refusing to be afraid of others, too. Maybe we can stop trying to find common ground and let everybody be the sea. They already are, anyway. Let it be.