Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

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.

Be Still

HOW TO KNOW: Moment of uncertainty arises. Breathe, turn inward, sink. Feel around for the Knowing. Do the next thing it nudges you toward. Let it stand. (Don’t explain.) Repeat forever.

We will remain caged by this world instead of taking our rightful place as cocreators of it.

Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: “Not this.”

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.

Let’s conjure up, from the depths of our souls: The truest, most beautiful lives we can imagine. The truest, most beautiful families we can fathom. The truest, most beautiful world we can hope for. Let’s put it all on paper. Let’s look at what we’ve written and decide that these are not pipe dreams; these are our marching orders. These are the blueprints for our lives, our families, and the world. May the invisible order become visible.

Tarea

May our dreams become our plans.

They’d convinced me that the best way for a woman to love her partner, family, and community was to lose herself in service to them. In my desire to be of service, I did myself and the world a great disservice. I’ve seen what happens out in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet, and small. Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.

is one in which each member can bring her full self to the table knowing that she will always be both held and free.

a whole family

I’ll not abandon myself. Not ever again. Me and myself: We are till death do us part. We’ll forsake all others to remain whole. I unbecame a woman who believed that another would complete me when I decided that I was born complete.

The goal is to surrender, constantly, who I just was in order to become who this next moment calls me to be.

She’s talking about the Ache.

The Ache paralyzes me with You know how this ends. When she goes, you will not survive.

This ends. Don’t get too attached to anything.

The Ache keeps me fine, which is another word for half dead.

“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. I don’t know what the reward is yet, but it feels true that there would be one, and I want to find out what it is. I am especially comforted by the We part. I don’t know who the We is; I just need to believe that there is a We somewhere, either helping me through my hard things or doing their own hard things while I do mine.

I say to myself every few minutes: This is hard. We can do hard things. And then I do them.

I entered this Ache alone, but inside it I have found everyone. In surrendering to the Ache of loneliness I have discovered un-loneliness. Right here, inside the Ache, with everyone who has ever welcomed a child or held the hand of a dying grandmother or said good-bye to a great love. I am here, with all of them.

This will pass; stay close. I have been alive.

I was born a little broken, with an extra dose of sensitivity.

it. 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.

Here, there is more time to be human, maybe because there has been more time to learn how.

A woman isn’t allowed to do well unless she also does good, so I became a do-gooder for the world. I raised tens of millions of dollars for people who were hurting, and I lost a decade of sleep writing back to strangers.

“And now that we don’t have to be good, we can be free.”

She said, “I do what the fuck I want.”

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

To be brave is to forsake all others to be true to yourself.

That is the vow of a confident girl.

It is a blessing to know a free woman. Sometimes she will stop by and hold up a mirror for you. She will help you remember who you are.

I have decided, once and for all, that just because someone texts me does not obligate me to respond. If I believed differently, I’d walk around all day feeling anxious and indebted, responding instead of creating.

why: Because our culture was built upon and benefits from the control of women. The way power justifies controlling a group is by conditioning the masses to believe that the group cannot be trusted. So the campaign to convince us to mistrust women begins early and comes from everywhere.

Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely.

We can either control our selves or love our selves, but we can’t do both. Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.

What the world needs is more women who have quit fearing themselves and started trusting themselves. What the world needs is masses of women who are entirely out of control.

A surface desire is one that conflicts with our Knowing. We must ask of our surface desires: What is the desire beneath this desire? Is it rest? Is it peace?

If women trusted and claimed their desires, the world as we know it would crumble. Perhaps that is precisely what needs to happen so we can rebuild truer, more beautiful lives, relationships, families, and nations in their place. Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model. Own your wanting. Eat the apple. Let it burn.

Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of.

I trust women who trust themselves.

You need to make sure there are no lies there. You need to make sure the eyes in the mirror are the eyes of a woman you respect.

We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.

There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.

My children do not need me to save them. My children need to watch me save myself.

I knew how to be desired. I did not know desire. I knew how to be wanted.

we set our lives on fire for the chance to become the women we were born to be.

Selah

Scholars believe that when it appears in the text, it is a direction to the reader to stop reading and be still for a moment, because the previous idea is important enough to consider deeply.

Selah is the nothingness just before the big bang of a woman exploding into a new universe.

Tish is our family’s conscience and prophet. She is our selah.