“In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.”
~ Fred Rogers

Since our little ones all live far away, we are what I call “come and go” grandparents. Our four grandchildren under the age of six are changing so much that we want to see them as often as we can. We stay a week or more when we visit, fully immersing ourselves in their lives.

When we get home, I’m often at loose ends for a few days. Too much to do, too little motivation to do it. Tired from the trip and out of my routine. The other evening I was in this “in between” space, feeling more unsettled than usual. Hoping to distract myself, I turned to a book I’d gotten for Christmas: Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I was curious about it, wondering why it was described as “raw” by more than one reviewer. It was highly recommended by Elizabeth Gilbert, whose writing I have loved.

I learned from the book jacket that Glennon is a writer, speaker, and activist who uses her energy and her platform for the greater good. Her nonprofit organization Together Rising has raised over $25 million for women, families, and children in crisis. She calls it a “bridge” organization. Rather than try to take on humanitarian issues herself, she connects with the people on the ground who are already doing the best work to solve a particular problem. She offers them funds, along with appreciation and support.

I read the first few pages and was astonished at Glennon’s story, which is constructed from individual essays. I’ve rarely come across anything so honest and vulnerable, and yet relatable.

(I’m a bit envious of her writing, too, but I’ve learned that each of our styles is unique because our stories are unique. As writers, we can only sound like us.)

But man! She cracked me open emotionally. We’ve all had those experiences when you read a book or see a movie and you know that, even if you didn’t expect to, you’ve been changed by it. This was one of those times.

Inspired by the Mr. Rogers quote above, I had planned to write this week’s post about listening to others. But after reading Glennon’s book, I realized it was fated, instead, to be about the importance of listening to ourselves, the central theme of Untamed.

I’m always amazed when people who’ve suffered trauma go on to do amazing things. Glennon has had a rough journey. She became bulimic when she was 10 years old, and numbed herself with drugs and alcohol for years until she had an unplanned pregnancy at 26. Stunned, but somehow hopeful about having a child, she pulled herself together and became a model wife and mother.

For years she was “good and dutiful,” until she found out that her husband had been serially unfaithful. At first she fought to save her marriage, trying hard to forgive. She wrote about that journey in her earlier books. But finally she realized that although she looked like she had it altogether on the outside, she had really become just an empty shell. She was doing and saying all the right things, but had lost her way.

Glennon maintains that women are trained to be so dutiful in part because it works well for the family and society. Generation after generation of women are taught to be like their mothers: self-sacrificing. It seems so admirable, but the cycle of trying and often feeling like we’re failing wears us out, leaving us feeling less than alive. And less than ourselves. Because we are other-focused too many of our waking hours, we don’t spent enough time getting to know our true selves. Much of the book focuses on her own reckoning with these issues, and what she learned about breaking free of the expectations of others. The transformation she describes is intense, and compelling.

She explains about learning to “go under” to listen to yourself, saying, “Whenever I get lost, what I do is get quiet and get still and return to myself. There is always some kind of Knowing that rises up. It’s not words…it’s more like a nudge, that will always point me to the next right thing.”

She writes that as you begin to do this regularly, you will feel rumblings and have dreams and imaginings that will give you hints about next steps. And then you have to be brave enough to follow them. Over time, she rediscovered a fire inside her that she’d lost when she was 10. And decided that sometimes you have to deconstruct your life in order to reconstruct it.

I won’t give away any more, except to say that I understand now why Untamed has been on the bestseller list for so long. Her message is liberating, and inspiring. Who doesn’t want to discover and respond to the fire within? Not that we all have to become activists, but whatever we’re nudged to do, we want to do it because we’re passionate about it, and because it’s right for us, no matter what others may think.

Glennon believes that when it comes to making difficult choices, “To thine own self be true” is the best path. A lifelong believer, she feels strongly that the most salient relationship we can have with God is the direct one, which is accessed by turning inward. To be sure, not everyone will agree with her views, her choices, or her beliefs. What I admire about her is she is not afraid to ask the hard questions. She has freed herself and now encourages others to look at longstanding conventions and evaluate how they came about and who they are serving.

As an author, she has that rare ability to get to the heart of things. She says much of what we’re all feeling, or have felt, but are afraid to voice. She encourages us to stand up, break out, and embrace what she calls “our one wild and precious life.”

Amen to that!

Affectionately,

Elaine

p.s. Glennon’s “one wild and precious life” reference is from the poem “The Summer Day” by American poet Mary Oliver.