Inspirational Book Recommendation

I was listening to Brene Brown's  Unlocking Us podcast at a friend's recommendation while doing a puzzle last weekend when she teased her next episode (I'm behind of course) and said her next guest would be Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed, and wouldn't it be awesome if everyone read her book and it was like a virtual book club of sorts. 

The same friend who recommended the podcast also is reading Untamed for her book club (it's a Feminist Book Club, which I am trying to figure out how to surreptitiously invite myself to because it sounds fantastic), and so when I heard it twice I was like, "Okay, message received...I will go read this book (before I listen to that episode)." 

I knew absolutely NOTHING about Glennon Doyle before getting the book (on my Kindle, so I could get it and read it right away, and so I could save all my highlights which was good because for this book I had a zillion). I had no idea that she was made famous by her inspirational writing as a traditional Christian woman. I had no idea that she had a crisis when her marriage was strained by infidelity, but she didn't re-examine her life and what she wanted it to be until she met and fell in love with Abby Wambach. Like, the soccer phenom from my very own Rochester, NY. And so this book is NOT so much about her traditional Christian life that she had before, it is about dismantling the life she had that did not serve her, keeping the parts that made sense, and starting a new one that is true and beautiful. 

The book is gorgeous. 

She is so very good at weaving vignettes of memoir and self-improvement thoughts together without at all being preachy. Her writing is poetic. She has threads that wend their way throughout all the pieces, right to the very end. The book is brutally honest about examining your life and your priorities, listening to your Knowing, doing right by children (sound advice not just applicable to parents but anyone who loves children and has influence), dealing with grief, and managing anxiety and depression. 

I went from "Glennon who? What's a Glennon?" to "Glennon Doyle is my spirit animal." I love her, and I found so many ideas that I just want to remember and internalize. She is a window in some respects (I am not married to a woman, I am not a person of religious faith, I am not a parent) and a mirror in others (living a different life than the one imagined, finding yourself in your 40s, dealing with grief and anxiety and depression). Often I stopped and thought, "ARE YOU IN MY FREAKING HEAD, GLENNON? How do you KNOW these things?" I'm telling you, in a time when everything in the world looks so dire and terrifying, it was so soothing to read something that felt like a best friend giving you great advice peppered with swear words, and telling you about their life, warts and all. I loved it. 

Here are some of my favorite nuggets that apply to the infertility experience, particularly resolving differently than you'd hoped: 

"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."

"Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true." 

"Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new."

"If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled. You are whole again, and strong, but you are suddenly a new shape, a new size. The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain—whether it’s a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a canyon of grief lasting decades—it’s revolutionary. When that kind of transformation happens, it becomes impossible to fit into your old conversations or relationships or patterns or thoughts or life anymore. You are like a snake trying to fit back into old, dead skin or a butterfly trying to crawl back into its

cocoon. You look around and see everything freshly, with the new eyes you have earned for yourself. There is no going back."

"I will not stay, not ever again—in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself. When my body tells me the truth, I’ll believe it. I trust myself now, so I will no longer suffer voluntarily or silently or for long."

And passages about living with anxiety and depression (I actually read some of this to Bryce because I was like, "She can put this perfectly -- this is how I feel..."):

"Being both depressed and anxious is a bit like being Eeyore and Tigger at the same time. It’s like always living a little too low and a little too high. It’s always struggling to be at the level where life happens, which is here and now. ... Depression and anxiety are body snatchers that suck me out of myself so that I appear to be there but I'm really gone." 

"Depression, for me, is a forgetting, an erasing, a slow fade into nothingness. It is like I run out of Glennon, and there is nothing left but panic that I am gone forever this time. Depression takes all my vibrant colors and bashes them together until I am gray, gray, gray."

"Anxiety is feeling terrified about my lack of control over anything, and obsessing is my antidote."

"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. ...When one lives in a state of constant vigilance, if something actually goes wrong: Forget about it. Full panic." (This section was particularly true because she was like, "Abby is late, clearly she's dead. I didn't get a call from someone right when they said, they're dead. Everything goes straight to DEAD DEAD DEAD." Paraphrased, but that is EXACTLY how I operate. Bryce is late? He's clearly in his car, upside down in a ditch, squished and bloody, definitely dead or almost dead and he can't reach the cell phone to call me and tell me goodbye. Screwed up? Yes. Constant thought process? Absolutely.)

"I do not believe that when we die, one of us will be presented with the She Who Suffered Most trophy. If this trophy does exist, I don’t want it. If there are people in your life—parents, siblings, friends, writers, spiritual “gurus”—who judge you for taking prescribed medicine, please ask to see their medical license. If they can show it to you and they happen to be your doctor, consider listening. If not, tell them sweetly to fuck all the way off. They are two-legged people who are calling prosthetics a crutch. They cannot go with you into the dark. Go about your business, which is to suffer less so you can live more." 

Honestly, I could keep going, but I want you to read the book if this speaks to you. Because it was empowering, and hopeful, and honest. And because it is the story of a beautiful life, but also all the pain and grief and difficulty that had to be hurdled in order to get there, which makes that beautiful unexpected life all the more amazing and appreciated. Which is something I can wholly relate to, although our experiences were different.