PERSONAL GROWTH & LIFE TRANSITIONS
Untamed
Glennon Doyle
If you have followed Glennon Doyle's work over the years, you have been witness to her moving back and forth in the way she views the world, herself, and her truth. In "Untamed" she gives recognition and validation to the process of making, taking apart, and remaking the way we move in the world. Doyle explores topics including religion, friendship, sobriety, parenting, blended families, body image, racism, sisterhood, and identity. Her exploration continually comes back to the theme of learning to listen to your inner voice/your gut. The book is broken down into short vignettes making it a nice fit for reading and reflecting.
MEMORABLE QUOTES:
"Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you're doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes. . . . I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring."
"Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain — that the reason we're sad and angry is not that being human hurts; it's because we don't have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans. This is a clever way to run an economy, but it is no way to run a life. Consuming keeps us distracted, busy, and numb. Numbness keeps us from becoming. This is why every great spiritual teacher tells us the same story about humanity and pain: Don't avoid it. You need it to evolve, to become. And you are here to become."
"When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself."
"If there is, in fact, an objective right or wrong way to handle this, why do all of these people have such different ideas about what a person should do? I had an epiphany: It must be that should and shouldn't, right and wrong, good and bad — they're not wild. They're not real. They're just culturally constructed, artificial, ever-changing cages created to maintain institutions."
"The memos I've written for myself are neither right nor wrong; they are just mine. They're written in sand so that I can revise them whenever I feel, know, imagine a truer, more beautiful idea for myself. I'll be revising them until I take my last breath. I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming."
"We can do hard things, like be alive and love deep and lose it all, because we do these hard things alongside everyone who has ever walked the Earth with her eyes, arms, and heart wide open."
"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."
"In other words: If my daughter told me she was gay, I would not love her in spite of it, I would love her because of it. . . . It's not: I love you no matter which of my expectations you meet or don't meet. It's: My only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me."