Glennon Doyle’s “Untamed” asserts that we were conditioned
at a young age to be something that we are not.
She asks, “Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?” (p.
6). This “taming” begins around age ten,
when “children begin to hide who they are in order to become what the world
expects them to be… Ten is when the world sat me down, told me to be quiet, and
pointed towards my cages” (p. 4).
The more Doyle tried to tame the “wild” within her, the more
she truly lost herself. It was not until
many years later as an adult that she came to this realization-and came to
accept and Know the person she was supposed to be.
When Doyle shares learning of her husband’s infidelity,
Doyle’s reaction might appear to some as odd, but as a writer myself who can
appreciate the perfect plot mixed in with humor, (whether it was added for
comedic relief or her actual reaction at the time), I would call it freaking
fabulous. “I sat in the driver’s seat
for a while and realized that the revelation of my husband’s betrayal did not leave
me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart. I was feeling the rage of a writer with a
broken plot. Hell hath no fury like a memoirist
whose husband just f***d up her story” (p. 33).
Ironically, at the very book tour where she was promoting “Love
Warrior” about her current “love story,” was where her next love story began-
when a woman named Abby lit the room on fire.
Doyle’s love for her wife Abby is conveyed so poignantly throughout this
book, that it makes you wonder if love at first sight exists. “Fire-red and golden rolling bubbles of pain
and love and longing filled me, brought me to my feet, threw my arms open wide,
insisting: There. She. Is” (p. 46). Seeing Abby brought out her “wild.” She writes, “I wanted her, and it was the
first time I wanted something beyond what I had been trained to want” (p.
5). It was the first time Doyle gave
herself permission to love without restriction.
“After thirty years of contorting myself to fit inside someone else’s
idea of love, I finally had a love that fit—custom made for me, by me” (p. 5).
Some might call Doyle’s story or family unconventional—but
the purpose of this book is to challenge conventions. Any word that was ever created is a
perception of how groups of people came to describe something. Accepting the way things are “supposed to be”
takes away from individual lived experiences.
Doyle shares her experiences, showing how she challenges the system,
whatever that might be. A family does
not have to be nuclear. Love does not have
to be between a man and a woman. Doyle challenges
you to ask yourself what beliefs you hold that you were conditioned to believe
as truths and then flip them on their head.
Find your truth. Find your
Knowing.
The problem with conformity is of course nothing
changes. People remain comfortable,
complacent even. Every movement in
history started with someone bringing light to the uncomfortable. As Doyle writes, it was only when she stopped
pleasing others that became who she was meant to be. “I set free my beautiful, rowdy, true wild
self…I did it by resurrecting the very parts of myself I was trained to
mistrust, hide, and abandon in order to keep others comfortable..” (p. 47).
As Doyle recalls speaking with Oprah Winfrey about her first
memoir in which she wrote, “I was born a little broken,” (p. 114), Doyle now
sees the absurdity of that statement.
She writes on p. 92, “Broken means: does
not function as it was designed to function.
A broken human is one who does
not function the way humans are designed to function.”
As Doyle
speaks candidly about her battles with bulimia and alcoholism, this becomes
even clearer. Life was not
designed to be easy. It was meant to be
messy and challenging. “Being human is
not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it
right. You will never change the fact
that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever
supposed to be easy” (p. 93). Our shared
human experiences are filled with doubt, envy, longing to do better or be
better, etc. Confronting these
challenges is what makes us human. “If
this is our shared human experience, where did we get the idea that there is
some other, better, more perfect, unbroken way to be human?” (p. 93).
Everyone possesses within them a voice that guides
them. Some might call it a conscience,
others might call it God, but Doyle calls it the Knowing. “The Knowing feels like warm, liquid gold
filling my veins..” (p. 58). She first
discovered it after several sessions of climbing into her closet, closing her
eyes, and “sinking” into herself. “I
have learned that if I want to rise, I have to sink first” (p. 60). When confronted with decisions, Doyle writes,
“I just do the next thing the Knowing guides me toward, one thing at a
time. I don’t ask permission first..”
(p. 60).
If there’s anything I’ve learned from this book it is to be
brave- whatever that means to you. Embrace
your Knowing. When you find it, there is
no need to be afraid. Take chances. Defy conventions. You got this.
Today is Friday, July 24th and Taylor Swift just
released her latest album yesterday. I
have been working on this review for a few days, not quite sure how to work in
the beautiful artwork on the front cover, of which I knew I had to have because
it is glittery and colorful and speaks to me, despite the fact that you should never
judge a book by its cover. And there in
the song, “Illicit Affairs” I see it all clearly now. Abby is all over this cover. Doyle’s story began with her husband’s
illicit affairs, but her story didn’t end there. She got out of that relationship and Abby
reawakened her life to one filled with colors “you know I can't see with
anyone else.”
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