Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

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.

We forgot how to know when we learned how to please. This is why we live hungry.

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 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.

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.

Why do women find it honorable to dismiss ourselves? Why do we decide that denying our longing is the responsible thing to do? Why do we believe that what will thrill and fulfill us will hurt our people? Why do we mistrust ourselves so completely?

our culture was built upon and benefits from the control of women.

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.

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

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.

Do not lower the drawbridge for anything other than what you have decided is permitted on your island, no matter who is carrying

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.”

Close to 90 percent of white Americans approve of Dr. King today. Yet while he was alive and demanding change, only about 30 percent approved of him—the same rate of white Americans who approve of Colin Kaepernick

If someone tells you who they are, consider how lucky you are to be graced with that gift.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in. —Archbishop Desmond

It’s just that living with anxiety—living alarmed—makes it impossible to enter the moment, to land inside my body and be there. I cannot be in the moment because I am too afraid of what the next moment will bring. I have to be ready.

I don’t have to be good, I can just let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.