This is another book that when I finished, I instantly wanted to re-read. My husband noticed it the other day, and after an off the cuff remark about knowing Kylie Jennar was reading it (????...????) he asked what it was about. I mumbled something along the lines of helping women to be strong and mothers raise their children, but even that sounds more eloquent than whatever I actually articulated to him.
Thankfully, this is why I make note of my soul inspiring excerpts. I hope that I re-read these often so that I am constantly encouraged to step into my power and honour my children for simply being who they are (I may have control issues and a giant tendency to change them while still keeping their Spirit intact somehow... am I alone??)
Love and trust. I let go of control. Only love in. And with that, the notes:
On Self
Page 116-117
I had been deceived. He only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me. I quit spending my life trying to control myself and began to trust myself. We only control what we don’t trust. We can either control our selves or love our selves, but we can’t do both. Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.
I love myself now. Self-love means that I have a relationship with myself built on trust and loyalty. I trust myself to have my own back, so my allegiance is to the voice within. I’ll abandon everyone else’s expectations of me before I’ll abandon myself. I’ll disappoint everyone else before I’ll disappoint myself. I’ll forsake all others before I’ll forsake myself. Me and myself: We are till death do us part.
What the world needs is more women who have quit fearing themselves and start trusting themselves.
What the world needs is masses of women who are entirely out of control.
Page 145
Now when I feel lost, I remember that I am not the woods. I am my own [touch] tree. So I return to myself and re-inhabit myself. As I do, I feel my chin rise and my body straighten.
I reach deeply into the rich soil beneath me, made up of every girl and woman I’ve ever been, every conversations I’ve had, every book I’ve read and song I’ve sung, everything, everything, crumbling and mixing and decomposing underneath. Nothing waster. My entire past there, holding me up and feeding me now. All of this too low for anyone else to see, just there for me to draw from. Then up and up all the way to my branches, my imagination, too high for anyone else to see – reaching beyond, growing toward the light and warmth. Then the middle, the trunk, the only part of me entirely visible to the world. Pulpy and soft inside, just tough enough on the outside to protect and hold me. Exposed and safe.
I am as ancient as the earth I’m planted in and as new as my tiniest bloom. I am my own Touch Tree: strong, singular, alive. Still growing.
I have everything I need, beneath me, above me, inside me. I am never gonna lose me.
Page 158
When we are bored, we ask ourselves: What do I want to do with myself? We are guided toward certain things: a pend and paper, a guitar, the forest in the backyard, a soccer ball, a spatula. The moment after we don’t know what to do with ourselves is the moment we find ourselves. Right after itchy boredom is self-discovery. But we have to hang in there long enough without bailing.
Page 191
It’s not the cruel criticism from folks who hate us that scares us away from our knowing; it’s the quiet concern of those who love us. My mom’s fear started to pull me away from my Knowing. I lost my peace. I became defensive and angry. I spent weeks on the phone with her, explaining myself, trying to convince her that I knew what I was doing and that it would all be okay.
“Glennon, why are you so defensive? Defensiveness is for people who are afraid that what they have can be taken from them. You are a grown-ass woman. You can have what you want. No one can take this from you. Not even Mom…”
My mother loves me. And she disagrees with me about what is best for me. I am going to have to decide who I trust more: my mother or myself. For the first time in my life, I decided to trust myself – even though that meant moving in direct opposition to my parents. I decided to please myself instead of my parents. I’d decided to become responsible for my own life my own joy, my own family. And I decided to do it with love.
That is when I became an adult.
Page 201
The trust is that it matters not at all what you think of my life – but it matters supremely what you think of your own. Judgement 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 gusts, 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.
Page 202
“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.
Page 211
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.
Page 218
REVELATION MUST COME BEFORE REVOLUTION.
Page 245
This one is made of our same flesh, blood, and spirit.
When we hurt her, we hurt our own kin.
This one is One of us.
This on is Us.
So let us protect her. Let us bring her gifts and kneel in front of her. Let us fight for her and her family to have every good thing we want for ourselves and our families. Let us love this one as we love ourselves.
The point of this story was never that This One is more God than the rest. The point is that if we can find good in those we’ve been trained to see as bad, if we can find worth in those we’ve been conditioned to see as worthless, if we can find ourselves in those we’ve been indoctrinated to see as other, then we become unable to hurt them. When we stop hurting them, we stop hurting ourselves. When we stop hurting ourselves, we being to heal.
The Jesus idea is that justice casts the widest net possible so that every last one of us is inside. Then there are no others – there is only Us. Inside one net we are free from our cages of fear and hate and, instead, bound to one another. The revolutionary idea that every last one of us is both held and free: That is out salvation.
Page 260
When I got sober, I learned that hard feelings are doorbells that interrupt me, send me into a panic, and then leave me with an exciting package. Sobriety is a decision to stop numbing and blaming away hard feelings and to start answering the door. So when I quit drinking, I began allowing my feelings to disturb me. This was scary, because I had always assumed that my feelings were so big and powerful that they would stay forever and eventually kill me. But my hard feelings did not stay forever, and they did not kill me. Instead, they came and went, and afterward I was left with something I didn’t have before. That something was self-knowledge.
Hard feelings rang my bell and then left me with a package filled with brand-spanking-new information about myself. This new information was always exactly what I needed to know about myself to take the next step in my life with confidence and creativity. It turned out that what I needed most was inside the one place I’d been running from my entire life: pain. Everything I needed to know next was inside the discomfort of now.
As I practiced allowing my hard feelings to come and stay as long as they needed to, I got to know myself. The reward for enduring hard feelings was finding my potential, my purpose, and my people. I am so grateful. I can’t imagine a greater tragedy than remaining forever unknown to myself. That would be the ultimate self-abandonment. So I have become unafraid of my own feelings. Now when hard feelings ring the bell, I put on my big-girl pants and answer the door.
Page 263
I felt real forgiveness. That was because for the first time in years, I felt safe. I’d restored my own boundaries. I’d begun to trust myself, because I’d become a woman who refuses to abandon herself to keep false peace.
Page 271
It’s like that small, dark room was a cocoon. All that time she was in there undergoing a complete metamorphosis.
Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new.
Page 273
I learned that overeating, drinking, and drugging were actually not my problems; they were my ineffective solutions. My actual problems are clinical depression and anxiety. 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 not feelings. Feelings return me to myself. Depression and anxiety are body snatchers that suck me out of myself so that I appear to be there but I’m really gone. Other people can still see me, but no one can feel me anymore – including me. For me, the tragedy fo mental illness is not that I’m sad but that I’m not anything. Mental illness makes me miss my own life.
Page 275
Five pro tips for those who live too high and too low
1 Take your damn meds
2. Keep taking your damn meds
Going off meds because you feel better is like standing in a torrential rainstorm holding a trusty umbrella that is keeping you toasty and dry and thinking: Wow. I’m so dry. It’s probably time to get rid of this silly umbrella. Stay dry and alive.
3. Take Notes [write notes to your Down self and Up self so you don’t forget]
4. Know your buttons [Easy buttons, bad, and list Reset Buttons, helpful]
5. Remember that we are the best people.
I have come to believe that we “crazies” are the best people.
This is why so many of us are resistant to taking our medication. Because deep underneath, we believe that we are actually the sane ones. We mentally ill are the only “sick” people who believe our magic is inside our disease.
Sometimes I desperately wanted that [to live normally], because living my way was so hard. Sometimes I could make myself accept that my inability to live lightly and pleasantly in the world I’d been born into was chemical and that I need help integrating like everybody else does. I needed to say “uncle” and admit: It’s not you, world – it’s me. I’ll get help. I need to get better. I need your science.
Maybe it’s exactly right to be a little crazy. Maybe the trust is: World, you need my poetry.
I’ve got these conditions – anxiety, depression, addiction – and they almost killed me. But they are also my superpowers. The sensitivity that led me to addiction is the same sensitivity that makes me a really good artist. The anxiety that makes it difficult to exist in my own skin also makes it difficult to exist in a world where so many people are in so much pain – and that makes me a relentless activist. The fire that burned me up for the first half of my life is the exact same fire I’m using now to light up the world.
Don’t forget: We need their science because they need our poetry. We don’t need to be more pleasant, normal, or convenient, we just need to be ourselves. We need to save ourselves because we need to save the world.
Page 285
I sat with my feelings and I realized: The knee-jerk reaction I’m having to this girl is a direct result of my training. I have been conditioned to mistrust and dislike strong, confident, happy girls and women. We all have. Studies prove that the more powerful, successful, and happy a man becomes, the more people trust and like him. But the more powerful and happy a woman becomes, the less people like and trust her. So we proclaim: Women are entitles to take their rightful place! Then, when a woman does take her rightful place, our first reaction is: She’s so…. Entitled. We become people who say of confident women, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it – it’s just something about her. I just don’t like her. I can’t put my finger on why.”
We want to be liked. We want to be trusted. So we downplay our strengths to avoid threatening anyone and invoking disdain. We do not mention our accomplishments. We do not accept compliments. We temper, qualify, and discount our opinions. We walk without swagger, and we yield incessantly. We step out of the way. We say, “I feel like” instead of “I know.” We ask if our ideas make sense instead of assuming they do. We apologize for…. Everything. Conversations among brilliant women often devolve into competitions for who wins the trophy for hottest mess. We want to be respected, but we want to be loved and accepted even more.
Page 286
I think of what she [Oprah] said to me every day. She was saying: Playing dumb, weak, and silly is a disservice to yourself and to me and to the world. Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully. Don’t mistake modesty for humility. Modesty is a giggle lie. An act. A mask. A fake game. We have no time for it.
The word humility derives from the Latin word humilitas, which means “of the earth.” To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become – to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It is not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to either.
When I see a joyful, confident woman moving through the world with swagger, I’m going to forgive myself for my first reaction because it’s not my fault, it’s just conditioning.
First reaction: Who the hell does she think she is?
Second reaction: She knows she’s a goddamn cheetah. Halle-fucking-lujah.
Page 300
Glennon, you are always so desperate to find yourself and ready to abandon yourself. You so badly want to be seen and to disappear. You have forever been desperate to yell “HERE I AM” and to fade away at the very same time.
Page 303
To live a life of her own, each woman must also answer: What do I love? What makes me come alive? What is beauty to me, and when do I take the time to fill up with it? Who is the soul beneath all of these roles? Each woman must answer these questions now, before the tide comes. Sandcastles are beautiful, but we cannot live inside them. Because the tide rises. That’s what the tide does. We must remember: I am the builder, not the castle. I am separate and whole, over here, eyes on the horizon, sun on my shoulders, welcoming the tide. Building, rebuilding. Playfully. Lightly. Never changing. Always changing.
Page 316
I am beginning to unlearn what I used to believe about control and love. Now I think that maybe control is not love. I think that control might actually be the opposite of love, because control leaves no room for trust – and maybe love without trust is not love at all. I am beginning to play with the idea that love is trusting that other people Feel, Know, and Imagine, too. Maybe love is respecting what your people feel, trusting that they know, and believing that they have their own unseen order for their lives pressing through their own skin.
Maybe my role with the people I love is not imagining the trust, most beautiful life for them and then pushing them toward it. Maybe I’m just supposed to ask what they feel and know and imagine. And then, no matter how different their unseen order is from mine, ask what I can do to support their vision.
Trust people is terrifying. Maybe if love is not a little scary and out of our control, then it is not love at all.
It is wild to let other be wild.
On Motherhood & Parenting
Page 128
What a terrible burden for children to bear – to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear – to know that if they choose to come mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live.
This is why Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.
What if love is not the process of disappearing for the beloved but of emerging for the beloved? What if a mother’s responsibility is teaching her children that love does not lock the lover away but frees her? What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies? What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?
My children do not need me to save them.
My children need to watch me save myself.
I’d quick using my children as an excuse to not be brave and start seeing them as my reason to be brave.
Page 151
Parenthood is thinking: This is too much. I cannot lead them. But I will do the thing I cannot do.
So we sit down next to our babies. We turn their faces toward ours until they are looking away from the chaos and directly into our eyes. We take their hands in ours. We say to them, “Look at me. It’s you and me. I am here. This is more real than anything out there. You and me. We will hold hands and breate and love each other. Ever if we are falling from the sky.”
Family is: Whether we’re falling or flying, we’re going to take care of each other through the whole damn ride.
[Not from Untamed, but my beautiful friend Shannon, we can ask “How can I love on you today?”]
Page 158
But I find myself worrying most that when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. As a result, we are raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against a wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt’s guitar and start strumming.
Page 172
It wasn’t enough for women to have equality with men; they needed equality with each other.
Page 173
I cannot rid my children’s air of all the lies they’ll be told about what it means to become a real woman or man. But I can teach them how to be critics of the culture instead of blind consumers of it. I can train my children to detect those lies and get angry instead of swallowing them and getting sick.
…
Me: Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it take to avoid disappointing yourself.
Tish: Even you?
Me: Especially me.
Page 194
A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created. When she begins to build her island not to their specifications but to hers. When she finally understands that it is not her duty to convince everyone on her island to accept and respect her and her children. It is her duty to allow onto her island only those who already do and who will walk across the drawbridges as the beloved, respectful guests they are.
Tonight, sit down with your cobuilder and decide with honour and intention what you will have on your island and what you will not. Not who your non-negotiables are but what they are. Do not lower the drawbridge for anything other than what you have decided is permitted on your island, no matter who is carrying it.
Right now, you are being required to choose between remaining and obedient daughter and becoming a responsible mother.
Choose mother. Every damn time from here on out, choose mother.
Your parents had their turn to build their island.
Your turn.
Page 232
If my daughter told me that she’d robbed a bank, I’d hold her hand and tell her that I love her no matter what. The “no matter what” would imply that even though my child had done something that fell short of my expectations, my love is still strong enough to hold her.
When it comes to who my children are, I don’t want to be an Expectations Parent. I don’t want my kids striving to meet an arbitrary list of preconceived goals I have created for them. I want to be a Treasure Hunt Parent. I want to encourage my children to spend their lives digging, uncovering more and more about who they already are, and then sharing what they discover with those lucky enough to be trusted by them. When my child uncovers a gem inside and pulls it out for me to see, I want to widen my eyes and gasp and applaud. In other words: If my daughter told me she was gay, I would not love her in spite of it, I would lover her because of it.
What if parenting became less about telling our children who they should be and more about asking them again and again forever who they already are? Then, when they tell us, we would celebrate instead of concede.
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.
If someone tells you who they are, consider how lucky you are to be graced with that gift.
Don’t respond with an eviction notice, a permission slip, or a concession speech.
Un-God yourself.
Gasp in awe and applaud with gusto.
Page 316
I am beginning to unlearn what I used to believe about control and love. Now I think that maybe control is not love. I think that control might actually be the opposite of love, because control leaves no room for trust – and maybe love without trust is not love at all. I am beginning to play with the idea that love is trusting that other people Feel, Know, and Imagine, too. Maybe love is respecting what your people feel, trusting that they know, and believing that they have their own unseen order for their lives pressing through their own skin.
Maybe my role with the people I love is not imagining the trust, most beautiful life for them and then pushing them toward it. Maybe I’m just supposed to ask what they feel and know and imagine. And then, no matter how different their unseen order is from mine, ask what I can do to support their vision.
Trust people is terrifying. Maybe if love is not a little scary and out of our control, then it is not love at all.
It is wild to let other be wild.
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You can find out more about Glennon here, I can't recommend her book highly enough.
K x
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