Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

I have not seen my daughter this alive since she was ten years old. My mother watched the spark in my eyes fade during my tenth year on Earth. Now, thirty years later, she was witnessing the return of that spark. In the past few months, my entire posture had changed. I looked regal to her. And a little scary. After that day, I began to ask myself: Where did my spark go at ten? How had I lost myself?

I wasn’t crazy. I was a goddamn cheetah.

“Wait. Adam gave birth to Eve? But don’t people come from women’s bodies? Shouldn’t boys be called woman? Shouldn’t all people be called woman?”

That sin is wanting to know more than we are supposed to know, wanting more instead of being grateful for what we have, and doing what we want to do instead of what we should do.”

Religión - Herramienta de control

There I was, in the twenty-first century, when boys are still being taught that real men are big, bold, violent, invulnerable, disgusted by femininity, and responsible for conquering women and the world. When girls are still being taught that real women must be quiet, pretty, small, passive, and desirable so they’ll be worthy of being conquered. Here we all are. Our sons and daughters are still being shamed out of their full humanity before they even get dressed in the morning.

Then I looked down at my baby and thought: Ah. You are not crazy to be heartbroken over the polar bears; the rest of us are crazy not to be.

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.

It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.

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.

“It’s not hard decisions that mess up kids, it’s indecision. Your kids need to know which way this is going to go.”

That is how I found myself in bed at 3:00 A.M., shoveling Ben & Jerry’s into my mouth, typing into my Google search bar: What should I do if my husband is a cheater but also an amazing dad?

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.

While she was on her hands and knees wiping up her own puke with paper towels, she thought: What is wrong with me? Why did I stay and suffer? The door wasn’t even locked.

We spend all of our time, energy, words, and money creating a flurry, trying not to know, making sure that the snow doesn’t settle so we never have to face the fiery truth inside us—solid and unmoving.

We keep ourselves shaken up because there are dragons in our center.

As I climbed out of the tub and shook my hair dry, I told myself: Maybe in a different life. Isn’t that interesting?

As if I had more than one.

What is the point of being a writer if I have to say words about the words I’ve already written? Do painters have to draw about their paintings?

my husband’s betrayal did not leave me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart. I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot. Hell hath no fury like a memoirist whose husband just fucked up her story.

I decide that heaven is saying anything that makes this woman smile like that.

Sobriety was the field in which I began to remember my wild.

was afraid of what was inside me. It felt powerful enough to destroy every bit of the lovely life I’d built. Like how I never feel safe on a balcony because: What if I jump?

Maybe we are all fire wrapped in skin, trying to look cool.

the girl I was before the world told me who to be—and she said: Here I Am. I’m taking over now.

I did it by resurrecting the very parts of myself I was trained to mistrust, hide, and abandon in order to keep others comfortable:

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Key One: Feel It All

It doesn’t seem like being alive is as hard for other people as it is for me. It just feels like there’s some kind of secret to life I don’t know. Like I’m doing it all wrong.

Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”

I began to insist upon my right and responsibility to feel it all, even when taking the time and energy for feeling made me a little less efficient, a little less convenient, a little less pleasant.

In the past eighteen years, I have learned two things about pain. First: I can feel everything and survive.

Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life. I learned that I’d never be free from pain but I could be free from the fear of pain, and that was enough.

Second: I can use pain to become. 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.

life. Consuming keeps us distracted, busy, and numb.

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.

Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic.

That is what I can and must avoid: missing my own evolution because I am too afraid to surrender to the process.

I hope the pain will pass soon, but I’ll wait it out because I’ve tested pain enough to trust it.

I keep a note stuck to my bathroom mirror: Feel It All.

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

BE STILL AND KNOW.

Just. Stop.

StopMovingStopTalkingStopSearchingStopPanickingStopFlailing.

If you just stop doing, you’ll start knowing.

I can know things down at this level that I can’t on the chaotic surface.

If what I’ve found in the deep is just my self—if what I’ve learned is not how to commune with God but how to commune with myself—if who I have learned to trust is not God but myself—and if, for the rest of my life, no matter how lost I get, I know exactly where and how to find myself again—well, then. That is certainly enough of a miracle for me.

I have to search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval.