Back during the pandemic, my neighbor and I were having our nightly glass of wine—six feet apart in the driveway, of course—when she said, “Listen to this podcast I’m sending you. You’ll love the guest. She’s so brave! Her name is Glennon Doyle and she says to trust our feelings instead of meeting others’ expectations. Matt, it was so good, I listened twice!”
The next morning, I listened and instantly LOVED her. Glennon was fierce!
She wrote a memoir, Carry On, Warrior, in 2013, that was so vulnerable and shameless that she even said, “I’m almost ashamed at how little shame I have.”
As a child, Glennon struggled with bulimia; then, young adulthood brought with it alcoholism, drug abuse, and arrests. She unexpectedly became pregnant and impressively dropped all the bad habits like, well, bad habits, got married, had two more children, found God, and became an excellent and attentive mother.
The book surprises us when she reveals her husband’s infidelity, but being the “caged” woman she was, she was deadset on repairing her marriage. Then, right before the tour for her second memoir, Love Warrior, something unexpected happened.
Glennon met someone and started considering her own needs, which she’d really never done before. She was falling in love—not only with someone else but, for the first time ever, with herself. It gets better, though—she’s falling in love with a woman—Abby Wambach, the soccer player and two-time Olympic Gold Medalist.
When I picked up Glennon’s third memoir, Untamed, I couldn’t put it down.
Untamed is about Glennon’s new life, now married to Abby, and begins with their two daughters at the zoo. Glennon uses the metaphor of a tamed cheetah, Tabitha, to frame the book’s structure as well as its lessons.
As the zookeeper explains how Tabitha has a good life at the zoo since she doesn’t know any better, having never lived in the wild, Glennon grows queasy. She feels certain if Tabitha could talk, she’d say, “Something’s off about my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this. I imagine fenceless, wide-open savannas. I want to run and hunt and kill. I want to sleep under an ink-black, silent sky filled with stars. It’s all so real I can taste it.”
In Untamed, Glennon suggests there’s life beyond our “cages,” and all we need to do is find the “keys,” which she’s identified as:
- “Feel”
- “Know”
- “Imagine”
- “Let It Burn”
The chapter that made the biggest impact on me is titled “Islands.” In it, Glennon tells her mom she’s thinking about getting bangs, and the next morning, her mom calls at 6:00 am and says, “I’ve been up all night worrying. It’s the bangs, honey. You don’t do well with bangs. You cut them and then you regret them, and it becomes a whole thing. Your life is stressful enough already. I am worried that the bangs are the wrong decision for your family, sweetheart.”
Glennon tells her readers the obvious: “If my decision to get bangs had kept my mother up all night, you can imagine her reaction to my decision to divorce my husband and marry a woman.”
Glennon had spent weeks on the phone with her mom, helping her become comfortable with Glennon’s decision to live a true life while convincing her the kids would be okay, but her mom needed more time. Glennon decided it was time to please herself instead of her parents, and she wrote, “That is when I became an adult.”
A while after this conversation, Glennon’s mom asked to visit her grandchildren. It was still evident to Glennon that her mom didn’t yet understand her new life and trust that it would all be okay. Glennon told her mom, “No. You can’t come,” and kindly explained that while she and her family were not on the easiest path, they were on the truest path. She said, “When you are ready to come to our island with nothing but wild acceptance and joy and celebration for our true, beautiful family, we’ll lower the drawbridge for you,” but “we cannot be the ones to teach you that you can love and accept us.”
At the time, I was going through a rough patch, and there was something happening inside that my life wanted me to hear. Reading Glennon, I realized it was saying, “It’s time to learn to love and accept yourself.”
While I had never experienced severe admonishment from my loved ones for being gay, I had never experienced profound acceptance for it either. Perhaps I never asked for it, or maybe it was even offered, and I rejected it, but deep down, it became clear that I didn’t think I deserved it.
I started having this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this.
I was living in a cage—I felt things, but I didn’t know what to do with my feelings, so I kept numbing myself with wine and weed because I thought I wasn’t supposed to feel the way I did. As a result, I was suffering from unmanageable anxiety and depression.
Glennon taught me not to deny my feelings, that it was okay to feel, and through feeling, I’d learn what I need—even if it meant saying no. Glennon showed me how to set boundaries with my family, prioritize myself, break free from my cage, and live my truest and most authentic life.
