Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

  The truth is that it matters not at all what you think of my life—but it matters supremely what you think of your own. Judgment is just another cage we live in so we don’t have to feel, know, and imagine. Judgment is self-abandonment. You are not here to waste your time deciding whether my life is true and beautiful enough for you. You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you. And if they are not and you dare to admit they are not, you must decide if you have the guts, the right—perhaps even the duty—to burn to the ground that which is not true and beautiful enough and get started building what is.

  That is what I want to model now, because that is what I want for all of us. I want us all to grow so comfortable in our own feelings, our own Knowing, our own imagination that we become more committed to our own joy, freedom, and integrity than we are to manipulating what others think of us. I want us to refuse to betray ourselves. Because what the world needs right now in order to evolve is to watch one woman at a time live her truest, most beautiful life without asking for permission or offering explanation.

  * * *

  So the next morning, I woke up, poured myself some coffee, opened my computer, and took a long, deep breath. Then I posted—to a million people—a picture of Abby and me snuggling on our front-porch swing, her strumming a guitar, both of us looking directly into the camera. We looked certain. Content. Settled. Relieved. I wrote that Abby and I were in love and planned to build a life together, along with the kids and their father. I didn’t write much more than that. I was careful not to apologize or explain or justify. I just let it stand. Then I walked away and reminded myself that I was responsible for telling the truth but not for anyone’s reaction to it. I’d done my part.

  My sister called me an hour later, and her voice was trembling. “Sissy,” she said. “You won’t believe what’s happening. Please sit down and read what our people are saying. What they’re doing. How this community is showing up for you and Abby.”

  I logged on and saw thousands of gorgeous, kind, gracious, intelligent, spacious, gentle, nuanced comments. They were from a community of people who understood that they did not have to understand me to love me. It was not a bloodbath. It was more of a baptism. They seemed to say, “Welcome to the world, Glennon. We’ve got you.”

  That night, a friend called and said, “Glennon, here’s what I’ve been thinking about all day: You made this community for other women. But maybe it was actually for you. All this time you’ve been creating the net that one day you’d need to fall into.”

  May we all live in communities where every person’s truest Self is both held and free.

  I was eleven years old when I started treatment for bulimia. Back then, the mental health world treated eating disorders differently than it does now. When a child got sick, it was assumed that she was broken. We didn’t yet understand that many sick children are canaries in coal mines, passively inhaling toxins in the air of their families or cultures or both. So I was separated, sent away to therapists and doctors who tried to fix me instead of trying to fix the toxins I was breathing.

  When I was in high school, a therapist finally asked my family to attend one of my sessions. After a few minutes, she turned to my dad and asked, “Can you imagine how you might be inadvertently contributing to Glennon’s illness?” My dad became very angry. He stood up and walked out of the room. I understood why. My dad’s first priority was to be a good father. He held so tightly to the identity of good father that he couldn’t dare to imagine that he might in any way have hurt his little girl. In his mind, good fathers do not contribute to family dysfunction. They do, of course, all the time, because good fathers are still human. In retrospect, I can see that our family had ideas about food, control, and bodies that would have been healthy for all of us to excavate, pull out into the light, and clear up. But my dad’s refusal to look inward meant that I was on my own for a long while. Nobody else was going to turn their insides out but me.

  * * *

  Decades after that day in the therapist’s office, Donald Trump was elected president. A friend called me and said, “This is the apocalypse. This is the end of our country as we know it.”

  I said, “I hope so. Apocalypse means uncovering. Gotta uncover before you can recover.”

  She said, “Oh, God, not more recovery talk. Not now.”

  “No, listen—this feels to me like we’ve hit rock bottom! Maybe that means we’re finally ready for the steps. Maybe we’ll admit that our country has become unmanageable. Maybe we’ll take a moral inventory and face our open family secret: that this nation—founded upon ‘liberty and justice for all’—was built while murdering, enslaving, raping, and subjugating millions. Maybe we’ll admit that liberty and justice for all has always meant liberty for white straight wealthy men. Then maybe we’ll gather the entire family at the table—the women and the gay and black and brown folks and those in power—so that we can begin the long, hard work of making amends. I’ve seen this process heal people and families. Maybe our nation can heal this way, too.”

  I was adamant and righteous. But I’d forgotten that sick systems are made up of sick people. People like me. In order to get healthy, everybody has to stay in the room and turn themselves inside out. No family recovers until each member recovers.

  * * *

  Soon after that conversation with my friend, I sat on my family room couch and patted a spot to my left and one to my right. I said to my daughters, “Come here, girls.” They sat down and looked up at me. I told them that while they were asleep, a man who was white had walked into a church and shot and killed nine people who were black.

  Then I told my daughters about a black boy their brother’s age, who was walking home and was chased down and murdered. I told them that the killer said he thought the boy had a gun, but what the boy really had was a bag of Skittles. Amma said, “Why did that man think Trayvon’s candy was a gun?” I said, “I don’t think he really did. I think he just needed an excuse to kill.”

  We sat with all of this for a while. They asked more questions. I did my best. Then I decided that we had talked about villains for long enough. We needed to talk about heroes.

  I went to my office to find a particular book. I pulled it down from the shelf, came back to the couch, and sat between them again. I opened the book, and we read about Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, and Daisy Bates. We looked at pictures of civil rights marches, and we talked about why people march. “Someone once said that marching is praying with your feet,” I told them.

  Amma pointed to a white woman holding a sign, marching in a sea of black and brown people. Her eyes popped and she said, “Mama, look! Would we have been marching with them? Like her?”

  I fixed my mouth to say, “Of course. Of course we would have, baby.”

  But before I could say it, Tish said, “No, Amma. We wouldn’t have been marching with them back then. I mean, we’re not marching now.”

  I stared at my girls as they looked up at me. I thought of my dad in that therapist’s office all those years ago. It was as if my girls had turned to me and asked, “Mama, how do you imagine we might be inadvertently contributing to our country’s sickness?”

  A week later, I was reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, famous essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and I came across this:

  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.”

  This was the first time I had encountered language that defined the kind of person I was in the world. I was a white person who imagined herself to be on the side of civil rights, because I was a good person who strongly believed in equality as the right idea. But the white woman Amma had pointed to in that photograph wasn’t staying home and believing. She was showing up. When I looked at her face, she didn’t look nice at all. She looked radical. Angry. Brave. Afraid. Tired. Passionate. Resolute. Regal. And a little bit scary.

  I imagined myself to be the kind of white person who would have stood with Dr. King because I respect him now. 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 today.

  So, if I want to know how I’d have felt about Dr. King back then, I can’t ask myself how I feel about him now; instead I have to ask myself: How do I feel about Kaepernick now? If I want to know how I’d have felt about the Freedom Riders back then, I can’t ask myself how I feel about them now; instead, I have to ask myself: How do I feel about Black Lives Matter now?

  If I want to know how I’d have shown up in the last civil rights era, I have to ask myself: How am I showing up today, in this civil rights era?

  * * *

  I decided to read every book I could get my hands on about race in America. I filled my social media feeds with writers and activists of color. It became very clear very quickly how strongly my social media feeds shaped my worldview. With a feed filled with white voices, faces that looked like my own, and articles that reflected experiences like mine, it was easy to believe that, for the most part, things were fine. Once I committed myself to beginning each day by reading the perspectives of black and brown people, I learned that everything was, and always has been, quite far from fine. I learned about rampant police brutality, the preschool-to-prison pipeline, the subhuman conditions of immigrant detainment centers, the pillaging of native lands. I began to widen. I was unlearning the whitewashed version of American history I’d been indoctrinated into believing. I was discovering that I was not who I imagined myself to be. I was learning that my country was not what I had been taught it was.

  This experience of learning and unlearning reminded me of getting sober from addiction. When I started to really listen and think more deeply about the experiences of people of color and other marginalized people in our country, I felt like I did when I first quit drinking: increasingly uncomfortable as the truth agitated my comfortable numbness. I felt ashamed as I began to learn all the ways my ignorance and silence had hurt other people. I felt exhausted because there was so much more to unlearn, so many amends to be made, and so much work to do. Just like in my early days of sobriety from booze, in my early days of waking up to white supremacy, I felt shaky, jumpy, and agitated as I slowly surrendered the privilege of not knowing. It was a painful unbecoming.

  Eventually it became time to speak up. I started sharing the voices I was reading, and speaking out against the racism of America’s past and the bigotry and strategic divisiveness of the current administration. Every time I did this, people got pissed off. I felt okay about this because I seemed to be pissing off the right people.

  Much later, I was asked to participate in an activist group led by women of color. One of the black leaders tasked another white woman and me with the job of planning an online webinar for other white women with the intention of calling them into the work of racial justice. Our mission was twofold: Begin educating other white women and solicit donations to fund bail and respite for black activists putting themselves on the line day after day.

  The other white woman and I accepted the job. On our planning calls for the webinar, we decided that she would focus on the history of complicity of white women and I would focus on my personal experience as a white woman waking up to her place inside of white supremacy. I thought that if I explained to white women that the confusion, shame, and fear they would experience in their early days of racial sobriety were predictable parts of the process of unbecoming, they would be more likely to remain in the anti-racism effort. Also, they’d be better equipped to confront their racism privately, instead of mistakenly believing that their feelings should be shared publicly. This felt important, because black leaders were telling me that the ignorance and emotionality of well-intentioned white women was a major stumbling block toward justice.

  I knew what they meant. I’d seen it happen again and again. If white women don’t learn that our experiences in early racial sobriety are predictable, we think our reactions are unique. So we enter race conversations far too early and we lead with our feelings and confusion and opinions. When we do this, we are centering ourselves, so we inevitably get put back where we belong, which is far from the center. This makes us even more agitated. We are used to people showing gratitude for our presence, so being unappreciated hurts our feelings. We double down. We say things like “At least I’m trying. No one is even grateful. All I do is get attacked.” People become upset, because saying “I am being attacked” doesn’t accurately describe what is happening. People are just telling us the truth for the first time. That truth feels like an attack because we have been protected by comfortable lies for so long.

  We are dumbfounded. We feel like we are always saying the wrong things and that people are always getting upset about that. But I do not think people become upset just because we say the wrong things. I think people are upset—and we are defensive, hurt, and frustrated—because we have fallen into the trap of believing that becoming racially sober is about saying the right thing instead of becoming the right thing; that showing up is based in performing instead of transforming. The way we show up reveals that we haven’t yet done the studying and listening required to become the right thing before trying to say the right thing.

  We are mugs filled to the brim, and we keep getting bumped. If we are filled with coffee, coffee will spill out. If we are filled with tea, tea will spill out. Getting bumped is inevitable. If we want to change what spills out of us, we have to work to change what’s inside of us.

  “How do I enter the race conversation?” is the wrong question in the early days of racial sobriety. We are not talking about a conversation to enter publicly as much as a conversion to surrender to privately. Whether we are in it to perform or to transform becomes evident by the way we take up space. When a white woman who is unbecoming does show up publicly, she does so with humble respect, which is a way of being that is quiet, steady, and yielding. Not with hand-wringing shame, because self-flagellation is just another way to demand attention. She has feelings, but she interrogates them within instead of imposing them on others, because there is a deep understanding that how she feels is irrelevant when people are dying.

  I planned to share all of this on the webinar. My hope was that it might prepare participants for the early stages of racial sobriety and that this preparation might serve the larger social justice efforts of our activist group. We sent the plans for our webinar out to the leaders of our group for feedback and approval. We made their suggested adjustments, then posted online about the seminar. Thousands registered. I went to bed.

  * * *

  The next morning, I woke up to a text from a friend that said: “G, Just checking on you. I’m watching what’s going down online. Let me know that you’re okay.”

  My heart sank as I opened up Instagram. There were hundreds—eventually thousands—of comments, many of them from people calling me a racist.

  What I didn’t know back then is that there are several valid and contradictory schools of thought about how white women should show up in the racial justice movement. One view: White women—when accountable to and led by women of color—should use our voices and platforms to call other white women into anti-racism work. Another view: White women should only use their voices to point to pe
ople of color already doing the work. Those who subscribed to the latter philosophy were furious with me about this webinar.

  Why would you try to teach instead of pointing toward women of color who are already doing this work? Why would you take up space in this movement when so many women of color have been doing this work forever? You offering a free course is taking money out of black educators’ pockets. Offering a “safe space” for white women to talk about race is wrong—white women don’t need to be safe; they need to be educated. You are canceled. You are a racist. You are a racist, Glennon. You are nothing but a racist. Everywhere, the word racist.

  I was stunned.

  I am not new to criticism. I am a woman who announced her engagement to a woman during a countrywide Christian speaking tour. I have been publicly ridiculed by and excommunicated from entire religious denominations. I’m used to the “other side” hating me; I wear that kind of backlash as a badge of honor. But friendly fire was new and excruciating. I felt idiotic and remorseful. I also felt terribly jealous of every single person who had decided to sit this one out. I thought of the quote “It is better to be quiet and thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it.” I felt defensive, hurt, frustrated, and afraid. I could not think of a single thing I was more terrified of being called than a racist. This was rock bottom.

  Luckily, I am a woman who has learned repeatedly that while rock bottom feels like the end—it’s always the beginning of something. I knew that this was the moment I’d either relapse with a couple shots of self-pity and resignation, or I’d double down on my racial sobriety and carry on. I told myself: Breathe. Don’t panic and flee. Sink. Feel it all. Be Still. Imagine. Let it burn.