Love Warrior

by Glennon Doyle Melton

  As I hold her and avoid eye contact with the rest of the family, I feel nothing but failure. This is the one thing I promised myself I’d get right. I’d let them be kids by protecting their hearts from pain. I’ve failed. Their hearts are broken. I wipe Amma’s tears and see that Craig has turned toward the sink. He is pretending to wash dishes so the kids won’t see his tears. Chase pushes away his cereal and walks over to me. He wraps his arms around my shoulders. “It’s okay, Mama,” he whispers. Oh, God. He’s nine, and he feels like he needs to comfort me. By pretending. Failure. Failure, Glennon. The ache of the moment becomes too much to bear. I have to get us out of this. I shake my head back and forth, wipe my eyes, steel my heart, smile, and say, “Okay, guys. Let’s get moving. We’re fine! Go get dressed for school.”

  Everybody leaves their breakfasts and disappears into their own rooms. I watch them and think, We were there. We were inside love, being real, together—and I just pushed us all out, back into our little rooms, back into our own scared, safe, alone selves. Double failure.

  * * *

  After I drop the kids off at school, all I want to do is go back home and crawl into bed. I can’t though, because Craig is there and I don’t want to face him. So I drive to the yoga studio. I walk into the lobby and the receptionist tells me that Allison’s class is full. I want to throw myself on the floor in front of her and yell No! I need Allison! This is the last straw! But it dawns on me that throwing a fit would be a waste of time. There is no promise that straws will be distributed fairly. This is the last straw! Ha! According to whom? My mind is a toddler throwing pointless tantrums, wasting all our energy, getting us nowhere. Instead of declaring to the world that I have too many straws, I must get strong enough to carry all the straws I’ve got. So I bring my mat and all my invisible damn straws into a different yoga class and sit down.

  As I’m setting up, I note that the air-conditioning must be broken because it’s at least one hundred degrees in the room. Even so, all the other students in the class are sitting cross-legged and smiling, so I try to join them in their Zen attitudes of detachment. But the hotter it gets, the sweatier and angrier I become. I am attached to air-conditioning. Very attached. After three minutes of sweating, I decide that since I am not even a real Buddhist, it is fine to be pissed about this. So I huff and puff and start gathering my things to leave. But as soon as I stand up, our teacher walks into the room. She closes the door behind her and says, “Hello. I’m Amy. Thank you for coming to hot yoga.”

  Hot yoga? What fresh hell is this? Too embarrassed to leave, I sit back down, wipe sweat from my face, and stare at the door longingly as the room starts closing in on me. While I scramble to plot my escape, Amy says, “Let’s decide on our intentions for class.” She nods to a woman up front who smiles and says, “My intention is to embrace loving-kindness today.” The second person says, “I want to radiate sunlight to all creation.” I sit, incredulous, as the next few ask for peace, strength, and clarity. What the hell are these people talking about? What am I doing wasting my time in here when my entire life is falling apart out there? Loving-kindness? I have real problems, people! Then it’s my turn and Amy is looking right at me. When I open my mouth, this is what comes out: “My intention is just to stay on this mat and make it through whatever is about to happen without running out of here.” My voice trembles, and the room gets very quiet. Something about Amy’s eyes makes it clear to me that I’ve just said something important.

  Amy breaks the silence by replying, “Yes. You just be still on your mat. Yes.”

  She starts the class, and for ninety minutes I sit still on my mat with no escape from my self. It is torturous. All the images I’ve been trying to outrun appear in front of me. Ghosts from the past: There I am on the laundry room floor; there is my baby crying into her cereal; there is Craig taking another woman to bed; and there they are afterward, hugging, kissing, laughing. Ghosts from the future: There is Craig walking down the aisle with another woman; there is Tish as a flower girl—wait, is that bride stopping to tuck my little girl’s hair behind her ear? Is she holding my girl’s hand? No, No, NO! It’s like a sadistic game of Whac-A-Mole in which the moles are my worst fears popping up in front of me and I have no mallet. I have nothing to swat at these ghosts with, no way to distract myself from them, nowhere to run from them, nothing to do at all but be still and face them. I wipe away tears that keep forming in response to my misery and the restlessness that feels like it might actually kill me. Sitting there, unmoving, my body hurts as much as my heart does. I feel so alone with my love and pain.

  As I watch the others—people who are not just sitting, but stretching, and posing, and contorting—I consider feeling embarrassed. I try to remember that their intentions are not my intentions, their straws are not my straws, their paths are not my path. My directions were specific and personal: Be still and do not run out of here. A few times I choke back loud tears and I feel embarrassed again. All I can do is let myself feel embarrassed. Let them hear you. We are all here for different things. You are here to learn how to stay on your mat and feel the pain without running out of here. Be still. So the images keep coming and I just let my tears fall and mix into my sweat. I let it all be terrifying and horrible and unfair. I sit there and accept how unacceptable it all is. I just let it be.

  Somehow, Amy understands. She comes by my mat to check on me throughout the class, and on her face I see respect. She knows I’m learning something important. I can tell she’s already learned it. Many times, maybe. Every few minutes she looks at me and gives a little nod that means, Yes, you’re doing this right. Don’t give up. Don’t run out. And finally, after ninety minutes, we are done. Amy asks us to lie down, and I lower myself to the floor and open my eyes to the ceiling. I realize that I have allowed myself to see it all and feel it all and I have survived. All the ghosts are still there, but they’re less threatening now. They can scare me, but they cannot kill me. They tried, but I won. Everything is still a bloody mess, yet here I am. Alive. I’d been fully human for an hour and a half and it had hurt like hell. It had almost killed me, but not quite. That not quite part seems incredibly important.

  I close my eyes and when the tears flow downward toward my mat, I feel surprised that there’s any liquid left inside of me. Then I feel a hand on my arm, and along with it, an immediate twinge of shame: I am sweaty and crying and snotty and gross and someone is close to me. Up close, touching me. But I do not pull away. I do not wipe my eyes or my nose. I just let us be. I open my eyes and Amy is right there next to me and she says, “That—what you just did? That is the Journey of the Warrior. Now, don’t forget to breathe. You need to remember to breathe.” I do not understand why everyone keeps telling me to breathe. I’m alive, aren’t I? Isn’t it clear that I’m breathing? And what is the Journey of the Warrior?

  Finally Amy bows to us and tells us that the God in her honors the God in us. She opens the door and the cool air rushes in. I walk out through the lobby and into the sun and experience an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. The Journey of the Warrior. This phrase rings a bell in my soul, but why? I climb into my van, rush home, and pull Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart off my nightstand. I flip to a page I’ve dog-eared and I run my finger down the lines to a sentence I’d underlined and highlighted but hadn’t really understood until now:

  So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t sit for even one, that’s the journey of the warrior.

  I sit down on the floor and as I read that sentence over and over, I understand that my entire life has been a race from the hot loneliness. I picture ten-year-old me, feeling my anger, fear, jealousy, otherness, unbelonging for the first time and understanding these uncomfortable but normal human feelings to be wrong, shameful. I thought I needed to hide these feelings, escape them, fix them, deliver myself from them. I didn’t know that everyone feels the hot loneliness. I didn’t know that it would pass. So for
the next twenty years, every time anger or fear or loneliness started bubbling up, I reached for an easy button—a book, a binge, a beer, a body, a shopping spree, a Facebook feed—to shove it back down. I’d press that button and find myself magically transported to a pain-free place. Distracted, numbed, underwater, gone. Off my mat again and again. Running out of here.

  Oh my God—what if the transporting is keeping me from transformation? What if my anger, my fear, my loneliness were never mistakes, but invitations? What if in skipping the pain, I was missing my lessons? Instead of running away from my pain, was I supposed to run toward it? Perhaps pain was not a hot potato after all, but a traveling professor. Maybe instead of slamming the door on pain, I need to throw open the door wide and say, Come in. Sit down with me. And don’t leave until you’ve taught me what I need to know.

  I’ve never let myself trust love because I’ve never let myself trust pain. What if pain—like love—is just a place brave people visit? What if both require presence, staying on your mat, and being still? If this is true, then maybe instead of resisting the pain, I need to resist the easy buttons. Maybe my reliance on numbing is keeping me from the two things I was born for: learning and loving. I could go on hitting easy buttons until I die and feel no pain, but the cost of that decision could be that I’ll never learn, love, or be truly alive.

  I started numbing with food at age ten. Through our therapy sessions, I learned that Craig started numbing with porn when he was just a few years older. Porn was his relief, his underneath, his easy button. He told me he’d hide in his room, watching smuggled videos, first feeling relief, and then feeling ashamed—just like I felt during and after a binge. Maybe Craig was becoming aware of his hot loneliness, too, and porn was how he learned to jump off his mat. Like me, he would’ve had no way of knowing that his restlessness was just human. Just as I’d understood the rules for girls, surely he’d absorbed the world’s rules for boys—that emotions are forbidden, that to be a successful boy he needed to “buck up and be a man.” Do girls abandon our bodies because that’s where we’re shamed and boys abandon their emotions because that’s where they’re shamed? Little boys: Don’t feel. Little girls: Don’t hunger.

  I picture both of our ten-year-old selves: I am in the corner reading, while Craig is on the soccer field playing. All day, every day, he played soccer. And then, left with his feelings in the stillness, there was porn. And as he grew, there were women’s bodies. Body-to-body is how he felt known, seen, loved. And then he became a model, continuing to build his identity with his body. His whole life has been a retreat into his body. My whole life has been a retreat into my mind. Is this why it is so hard for us to love each other? Because he understands love to be the joining of two bodies, and I believe love to be the joining of two minds? Neither of us is bringing our whole self to the other. Maybe we are exiled from each other because we are each exiled from a part of ourselves.

  Most of the messages we receive every day are from people selling easy buttons. Marketers need us to believe that our pain is a mistake that can be solved with their product. And so they ask, Feel lonely? Feel sad? Life hard? Well that’s certainly not because life can be lonely and sad and hard, so everybody feels that way. No, it’s because you don’t have this toy, these jeans, this hair, these countertops, this ice cream, this booze, this woman … fix your hot loneliness with THIS. So we consume and consume but it never works, because you can never get enough of what you don’t need. The world tells us a story about our hot loneliness so that we’ll buy their easy buttons forever. We accept this story as truth because we don’t realize that their story is the poison in our air. Our pain is not the poison; the lies about the pain are.

  Craig and I have spent our lives breathing the same poisonous air. Along the way, we’ve internalized the lies: You are supposed to be happy all the time. Everybody else is! Avoid the pain! You don’t need it, it’s not meant for you. Just push this button. Finally, I was being quiet and still enough to hear the truth: You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it’s hard. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody. Don’t avoid the pain. You need it. It’s meant for you. Be still with it, let it come, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you’ll burn to get your work done on this earth.

  There on the floor, I know the truth. We either allow ourselves to feel the burn of our own pain or someone we love gets burned by it. Craig and I had spent our lives denying our pain, but that did not make it disappear. Since we refused to hold it, we passed it on to the people we loved. Since I refused to feel my pain, I passed it on to my parents and my sister. Since Craig refused to feel his, my kids and I were carrying it. But maybe Craig hadn’t meant to pass his pain on to me. Maybe he hadn’t meant to hurt me with those other women any more than I’d meant to hurt my family with booze. We were each just reaching for the easy buttons we learned to use long before we even met.

  My mind flashes to Amma’s tears at breakfast. That very morning, she was trying to feel her hot loneliness and I’d grabbed it from her. “It’s okay. We’re fine, baby. We’re fine,” I’d said. I’d pulled out the easy buttons of pretending and denial and held them out to her. I’d encouraged her to jump off her mat. I’d reacted this way because I feared that my baby’s pain was my failure. But if learning to sit with hot loneliness is my warrior journey, isn’t it hers, too? More than anything, I want Amma to grow to be a brave, kind, wise, resilient woman. So what is it in a human life that creates bravery, kindness, wisdom, and resilience? What if it’s pain? What if it’s the struggle? What if I was trying to take from Amma the one thing that would make her the woman I dreamed she’d become? The bravest people I know are those who’ve walked through the fire and come out on the other side. They are those who’ve overcome, not those who’ve had nothing to overcome. Maybe my job as Amma’s mother is not to protect her from pain, but to hold her hand and walk into it with her. Perhaps the wisdom she needs for her journey is not only inside of me: It’s also inside her struggle. If I want to invite Amma to begin the Journey of the Warrior, I need to stop distracting her from her hot loneliness. I need to look at her and say, “I see your pain. It’s real. I feel it, too. We can handle it, baby. We can do hard things. Because we are Warriors.”

  Just as these new understandings about Craig and Amma settle, my thoughts shift to my friends. I’d been so angry with them for grabbing my pain from me in the wake of the News. But maybe my friends were loving me the best way they knew how, just like I was trying to love Amma. We think our job as humans is to avoid pain, our job as parents is to protect our children from pain, and our job as friends is to fix each other’s pain. Maybe that’s why we all feel like failures so often—because we all have the wrong job description for love. What my friends didn’t know about me and I didn’t know about Amma is that people who are hurting don’t need Avoiders, Protectors, or Fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpless vigil to our pain.

  There on the floor, I promise myself that I’ll be that kind of mother, that kind of friend. I’ll show up and stand humble in the face of a loved one’s pain. I’ll admit I’m as empty-handed, dumbstruck, and out of ideas as she is. I won’t try to make sense of things or require more than she can offer. I won’t let my discomfort with her pain keep me from witnessing it for her. I’ll never try to grab or fix her pain, because I know that for as long as it takes, her pain will also be her comfort. It will be all she has left. Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I loved well. Here is my proof that I paid the price. So I’ll just show up and sit quietly and practice not being God with her. I’m so sorry, I’ll say. Thank you for trusting me enough to invite me close. I see your pain and it’s real. I’m so sorry.

  The Journey of the Warrior. This is it. The journey is learning that pain, like love, is simply
something to surrender to. It’s a holy space we can enter with people only if we promise not to tidy up. So I will sit with my pain by letting my own heart break. I will love others in pain by volunteering to let my heart break with theirs. I’ll be helpless and broken and still—surrendered to my powerlessness. Mutual surrender, maybe that’s an act of love. Surrendering to this thing that’s bigger than we are: this love, this pain. The courage to surrender comes from knowing that the love and pain will almost kill us, but not quite.

  * * *

  Holding Chödrön’s book to my heart, I lean back against my bedroom wall, exhausted. My body has done its work. My body is my teacher now, and I have learned. Pain and love are places I must be brave enough to visit. My courage will come from knowing I can handle whatever I encounter there—because I was designed by my creator to not only survive pain and love but also to become whole inside it. I was born to do this. I am a Warrior.

  Suddenly I feel deeply hungry. I don’t hear anyone in the house, so I walk woozily to the kitchen. Craig is there. He looks at me and seems surprised. I’m soaking wet and red from tears and sweat. I look at him and say, “I’m so hungry.” I sound weaker and more desperate than I’d planned.