Glennon Doyle is an activist and thought leader, and founder of Together Rising. She joins Sophia on "Work In Progress" to share her story, discuss why we need to change the expectations we put on girls and how we raise them, and talk about her latest book, "Untamed."
Executive Producers: Sophia Bush & Sim Sarna
Supervising Producer: Allison Bresnick
Associate Producer: Caitlin Lee
Editors: Josh Windisch and Matt Sasaki
Music written by Jack Garratt and produced by Mark Foster
Artwork by Kimi Selfridge.
This show is brought to you by Brilliant Anatomy.
Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to work in Progress, where I talk to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going. Today's guest is a very dear friend of mine. In fact, she is a sister friend. And what I mean by that is she's the kind of soul friend who feels like my family. And she happens to be the one and only Glenn and Doyle. I met glennon years ago, and I'm telling you, guys, we instantly hit it off. Her honesty and the way she shares about her life and welcomes everyone into her circle. Her horseshoe, in fact, is so inspiring to me. Today we're going to talk about how we met. We're going to go through her story. We're gonna dig into why we need to change the expectations we put on girls and how we raise um, and of course we're going to talk all about her latest book, Untamed, which you absolutely have to read. We started chatting right away about being morning people and how she takes advantage of the early hours of the day. So if you're catching this first thing in the morning, you're welcome. And if you're catching it later, You're still going to be inspired. I promise she's that good. Enjoy Are you a morning person? I am only a morning person, And I actually think that's why I get I'm done by five, because I'm usually up three hours earlier than two, three hours earlier than everyone in the house, So I'm usually five. I figured out a long time ago, especially with little ones when they were when my kids were little, but that was the only time I was myself m there was and also most creative in the morning. That's the only time I can really write creative LEAs first thing in the morning. But there's something about like being a woman that the minute the world wakes up, you just get thrown into a million different roles and service and showing up and all the things. And so I figured out that there's a couple of magical hours in the morning where I was like nobody's mom, nobody's life, nobody's loss, nobody, Like it's completely outside of roles, and it really feels like soul time to me. And I feel like I'm like pulling one over on the world because like I've already been up for hours before everybody else gets started, So like like like if I do nothing else the rest of the day, I've already done my things. I've usually done creative by the time the sun comes up. But yeah, that's my magic time. I like magic time. Yeah, it's if I don't have it for a while, I feel myself start to get itchy. You know, I always ask women because I just it's like that time, you know, untamed where one of the themes is like when I saw Abby evenn I thought, there she is about me, about yourself, and I I think we're all in this moment of reckoning or awakening where we realize we have to feel that way about ourselves. We've been cultured for so long to think that what we need is outside of ourselves. It's in our person, it's in our partner, it's in the Disney prints, it's in the body we want to have, or or the house we want to move into, or the Pinterest board that will eventually become our life if we try hard enough. And we spend all this time folding ourselves into these weird little pretzels, and then we wonder why our bones hurt m because nobody ever talked to us about the reality that it has to be in us. It has to be of us. The thing we're looking for is us. That's why I love your book so much. Well, it's just hustle, clock, sure, man, hustle, It's just I can't, I can't. It feels like That's why I put the story in the beginning of Untamed, about the chasing, the chasing of the dirt. Right, yes, you know, really and truly it's simple. At the end of the day, it's that we are born and then as women and men have their own ridiculous ideals and expectations, but ours are clear, and we get these ideals put in front of us, and these like things that they tell us will make us happy and will make us feel like we belong and we'll make us feel successful, and we'll make up. And then we just spend our whole lives hustling to to achieve those things. And and they're all the things you just said. I mean, you know, their beauty standards, their career standards, their personality standards. And then the crazy thing is is that sometimes we get lucky and to get those things, and then we realized that we're still ourselves and that right, which is tragic at first, And then awesome, because at some point you realize, oh, it's not that I'm not enough yet, it's the hustle. The hustle culture is the problem. Yeah. And and to your point, there are there are universal truths to this. I I have a friend named Lewis who, much like Abby, did a lot of sport. He was he became he's a sport person. He became an All American athlete, which was the thing he'd always wanted. And he said, the euphoria lasted for about eight minutes, and then he went right back to being angry. And and his his male version of this stuff was all of the sort of shaming and enraged culture and all the stuff that destroys boys, and and he got the joy for eight minutes and then he was right back to being a great and what like that's the ultimate for the boy, like in our only only gave your worthiness for boys by you know, of course all the emotion suppression and only they're only allowed to be angry. We're not allowed to be angry. They're only allowed to be angry. Um right, But professional sports, I mean that's like she right, that would like the epitome of a woman, you know, becoming a supermodel while making the perfect home, while having three point five children, while having the loving there. It's like the epitome of male success. So how tear to even reach the epitome and realize that's there there? There's no there there. Ah. We well, we've just jumped right into this, which doesn't surprise me because I've never not jumped right into things with you. When we met, this was years ago. You were you were doing this incredible speaking tour. Um I figure I should give the audience a little backstory on how we're able to do this together. And I was so excited. I was working in Chicago at the time, and you guys were doing a Chicago stop and you had asked if I would come and to this conversation with you, and you know, it's at this enormous theater auditorium. I mean, what do you even call that arena? I don't know, a sport place in Chicago. And we met in the back before we went on stage, and we were just we were barefoot on the couch together in thirty two seconds, holding onto each other's bodies, just like, Oh, thank god you're here. And I thought, oh, this is one of my people. How cool. I know when I meet my people, and and yeah, we've we've been friends ever since. We've done a lot of speaking together ever since. And there we had a fun we had a fun, little secret exchange which we'll we'll get into later that happened on that first night. But I just remember thinking, here's a person who says out loud a lot of things that I think on the inside that I haven't always been sure I'm allowed to say out loud. But when I do, I always feel better. And I know that that is a way that so many people feel about you, and about your work, and about the way that you're willing to share yourself, not just for yourself, but but in a way because when you stand steady in front of the fire, you show everyone else it's possible to you. You welcome everybody else to the bonfire with you. I'm very honored to know you. You do the exact same thing. So that's how we knew we were people. We were each other's people. Isn't that weird? When I think about that, that is so weird because I feel like you are a cozy person. Okay, I'm not that cozy of a person. Abby has always said and she said this one time and hurt my feelings so much until we got to the bottom of it. She said, you know, you are a lot of things, but nice is not on them. You're not nice. And I was like the kids were. It was in front of the kids, and I was like so devastated. But the point being that it is very unusual. I am an raging introvert and I'm super sensitive and so I am and boundaries are like my myre The loves of my life are abby, my children, coffee boundaries, okay. Um. So the fact that I walked into a room and you and I were were in um barefoot, and I remember I didn't want to go back to the stage. I remember just thinking can we just stay here on the couch forever? Like can we not go to this where all the thousands of people out there and we had to go by. But I think it's so cool when you were saying that that sometimes that happens and you just know the energy is there and you know this is going to be a person, and we celebrate that right when that happens, And it just makes me think we should also honor it when the opposite happens. MM hmm, you know what I mean. Like, we don't feel need to explain why that happened with us or why the energy was just perfect. We don't say, oh, well are you're You're such a good person and I'm such a good person, and so that's why this happened. We just honor the kids of collective energy that was matched. But like when we don't feel that energy with someone, we always feel like we have to explain in a million ways or blame a person's personality or blame it on our personality when all the people's energy just aren't right for each other. M h you know what I need? Yeah, and and that that's okay. But again, I think that speaks to us always having been told we have to be nice, we have to be welcoming, we have to smile. Think about when you watch somebody tell their their three year old child that they have to hug a relative who's unfamiliar to that child, and then that little baby learns that they're feeling of I don't want to in their body, doesn't matter because you're gonna hug this person because it's nice. We're taught from such an early age to go against our own instincts, and then especially heaven forbid, as women, if we don't like something or we just don't feel free or complete around someone, well then we must be she's a bit if she thinks that, you know. And the the extra heavy messages, I mean, the studies about like even even awake parents, okay, even parents, that we are doing it equally when when they're studied. The number of social cues that parents give to little girls versus little boys about being nice, a tilling about being likable, like those that we have about and it's not because we're bad people as parents. It's because we were raised in a culture that taught us a million different ways that little girls will only be loved and accepted if they are accommodating and sweet, and and they abandoned themselves in order to not rock the boat, and they they cause it, allow themselves to have constant inner conflict, so outer conflict. M So that's what we do. We want our kids to be accepted, So we subconsciously passed these expectations onto our little girls. And then this is what I find fascinating said it, and I can't wait to get your take on it. The amount of people who say to me, okay, And they say this with all good intention. I want to support women. I want to support women like you do. I want to love women, GiB, I want to whatever. But the women are always the ones stabbing in the back. The women are always the ones talking behind my back. The women are always And I think it's so interesting because I actually know what they're saying, like I understand, like it's not We can't be just like pretend that that's never true as feminists, like we can't be like, oh they don't, that's never happened to me because of courts. And that's okay, right, we all know that that has happened us. But I wonder if if women would stab each other in the back less, if as little girls we were allowed to stab each other in the face more, right, It's like directness and transparency and just saying how you feel much more allowed in little boys, and it r is in little girls. Right. We are trained constantly to swallow it and smile, swallow it and smile, be pleasant and be pleasant. But we're just as human, right, So what happens when a little when a person is swallowing it and smiling all the time, is it always comes outside wace right. Well, the way I think about it, the image that comes to mind for me, and I don't know why because I don't scuba dive, so literally, I don't know why this happened. But you know, like scuba divers wear those oxygen tanks on their backs, and those tanks are pressurized, and if you put too much oxygen in a tank, it will explode. And and so when anything is overly pressurized, it blows a gasket, it blows a leak, like pipes in a house will burst, and then the basement floods because there's too much volume for the amount of space. And I think that's what happens to girls, and that's what happens to women. We've been forced to do exactly what you said, Swallow it, Swallow it's swallow it, swallow it, and we get so overfilled that then these things. It's like when the daggers shoot out of the woman's eyes at someone, that's not even about the person she's looking at. When when you express anger or frustration about something or you think someone is annoying, it might not even be about them. It's about the fact that you've not been able to talk about how someone hurt you years ago for so long that now you think everyone is kind of a dick head who hurts you. You know, little little boys just like punch each other on the playground and then they're over it. They're allowed to do more of that. M So, so what why are women more direct because they're trained not to be direct? Well, and this is exactly where and this was supposed to be my first question, but ha ha, I love that. I thought i'd have a plan. This is where I want to go back and ask you to tell me the story of the Cheetah and the Pink Bunny, because you referenced it earlier and I think it's such a soul shaking ah ha moment, providing way to start a book. And you open untamed with this story. And then it made sense to me because when you sent me your book, you sent me this beautiful note and you said to me, sister, you are a goddamn cheetah, and it made me cry. And I didn't even know the story yet, but I like, I choked up when I looked at the note. So something in me knew exactly what you meant, because I think it's something that's in all of us, So will you tell the people at home about cheetahs. I was looking for a metaphor, okay, because I had just gone through this experience which I wrote about and Untamed, which is that I was in a broken marriage with a good man. Okay, that is a very tricky place for a woman to be because we're supposed to just be grateful for good enough, right. I just kept trying to make it good enough. I just kept trying to do all the right things I was supposed to do to have forgiveness just like fall to me, you know, falling my head from the sky and feel better. But I was angry all the time. It's angry all the time, and I and I just felt this like longing, this nagging inside of me that just was this constant question like wasn't it supposed to be more beautiful than this? Wasn't it supposed to be more beautiful than this? You know? And then I met Abby and um and that story is in and Untamed. But after we've been together for a little while, I so we took our daughters to the Safari park and we went to this thing called the Cheetah Run. Okay, And so we're on the side of this like race track kind of thing, and we're waiting for this Cheetah run to start. The kids are so excited. There's all these families out and this zookeeper comes out and she's holding the leash of a labrador. Okay, so I'm right away like, um, okay, I'm not a scientist. But if she tells my kids that this labrador is a cheetah, I'm getting a refund, right, I'm getting my OA. So she says, okay, kids, do you think that this um this is Tabitha the cheetah And the kids are like no, and she says, you're right. This is Mini. Tabitha, the Cheetah's best friend. Tabitha was born into captivity, was born into the zoo, so we raised Tabitha alongside Mini so that Nni could team Tabitha. And now Tabitha wants to do everything that Mini does. So first Mini is gonna run the Cheetah run while Tabitha watches, and then Tabitha will run it. Okay, So this lab lines up on the starting line. This little weird jeep thing has a pink stuffed bunny tied to it. The jeep takes off Mini the lab cheese. Is this dirty pink bunny across the finish line? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay. Then they pulled Tabitha. Okay, Tabitha. The cheetah is the most gorgeous, huge, terrifying, majestic creature. She's like stalking her way to the starting line. Her muscles are rippling beneath her. For the crowds like all quiet, and the zookeeper says, go, and this gorgeous, majestic wild animal chases this dirty stuffed pink bunny down this well worn narrow path that she's been doing every hour, every day since she was born. And the crowd is clapping, yeah, yayayay, and while the clouds crowd is clapping. So I just I just got, oh my god, this is it. This is what I have been doing. If it is possible for a wild animal like a cheetah to be tamed into forgetting who she is m hm, to be tamed into spending her entire one, wild and precious life chasing somebody else's dirty pink funnies, then that can happen to a woman too, right. That's when I figured out, Oh, all of these things. Be a good girl, be a good mom, be pretty, be accommodating, be perfect, be um, don't be ambitious, don't be All of these ideals and should and shouldn't, I mean, all of the ones that had to do with religion and faith for me, and they have just gender and have just sexuality. All of these cages I have been in, I just I just started to see them as Oh, these are the dirty pink funnies that somebody else planted for me a long time ago. And the reason why I am exhausted, and the reason why I'm overwhelmed and underwhelmed and I don't feel like I am living my true purpose is because I'm chasing somebody else's dirty pink funnence m m. And then so okay. So the zookeeper puts Tabitha away in like this big field, and she comes back and she says, are there any questions? And this little girl raises her hand and she says, is Tabitha sad? Doesn't Tabatha missed wild? And the zookeeper says, oh no, honey, she was born here. This is a good, safe life for Tabitha. She doesn't even know any better. And my daughter is heading next to me, and she nudges me, right, and she points at Tabitha and in this bigger field, So Tabitha is like a different creature. Okay, she's she's just she her. She's like sit standing up like her her neck just has grown six inches, and she's stalking the periphery of the field, just like looking out beyond the field at some place we can't see. It's like she looks completely majestic now, like in a little scary and tishe goes money. She turned wild again. God, I have a child, And I just looked at her and thought, Okay, I don't believe you, zookeeper. I don't believe that she doesn't know better, Like this might be all she's ever seen, but she knows somewhere. Like if we could talk to that Sheeta, she would say, I don't know what's wrong with me. I know that all there is is cages and dirty pink funnies and labs. But inside me, I feel like I was meant to sleep under starless skies. I feel like I was meant to hunt and kill. I just feel like it was all supposed to be more beautiful than this. M Right, there's something by that animal that knows better this is the voice of longing, right, this is the voice that we all have that looks at our lives and our relationships and our communities and our nation and our world and says, I know this is all I've ever seen, but I just have a hunch it's supposed to be more beautiful than this. Then comes the universal gas lighting of women right then, and we say, no, I just don't think this is right. I don't feel I feel like this isn't right. Then the whole world goes, oh, just be grateful, Just be grateful. You're crazy, that's crazy, that's crazy. She's crazy, right. That's why the last line of that was you're not crazy, You're a goddamn cheetah hm. Because because had Tabitha been able to say, I have these hunches, I have these this vision that it's supposed to be more beautiful than this. Actually remembering her her destiny that was that was the wilderness, the rest of the world would have said to her, don't be crazy. This is what your life is, your lab, your lab. We trained you to be a lab. Right. And that's what happened to me, man, I mean, that's what happens to all of us. We are born wild individual selves, and then because of the way civilization is set up, we begin to be assimilated into zeus. Right. We have to be assimilated into families, into social groups, into religions, into genders, into sexualities, into nations, right, and the cost we have set up systems where the cost of belonging is your individuality. If you're a girl, this is how you act, and if you don't act this way, you will be tribal shamed. You are a Christian, and this is what you will believe, and this is what you will say. And here are the people you will hate. And if you don't, and you dare to admit that you don't, you will be tribal shamed. Here's what a boy does if you step out of line, right, Here's what a straight person does. Here's what an American does. God help us follow like the patriotism line. Right. So what I am obsessed with right now is and by the way, like bless our hurts, we know the way that we have survived is to give up some of our individuality for the protection of the herd right that is evolutionary in us that we need in order to survive. We need the protection of the hurt. But now, Sophia, I feel like we are actually at this point that is a changing time in the history of the world. And what I mean by that is, I think now our survival as a species is going to be resisting that urge to give our individual voices or belonging. Yes, And I think part of it is because not to get to you know, conspiracy theory on it, but there are big forces in the world that have made a lot of money and clutched a lot of power by taking advantage of the human instinct to protect the herd. And now it's not so much about protecting each other so we survive. It's about hoarding and calling that protection. If we were really prioritizing our human herd, we would have universal health care, We would have the best education system in the world. Our kids wouldn't be going to school and schools that are jokes, our teachers wouldn't be paid the least. We would be doing everything differently if we really were saying, hey, this is about our survival, but we we market survival of us. We we we sort of like put that on like a sweater over a skeleton. That is, it's me against you, and I think women are leading the reckoning of Oh. No, I can't. I can't claim to love my children and not say something about other people's children being in cages. I can't say that I support women but sit silently when I hear women talking poorly about another woman. I can't. We we have to align our identity and our values. And I think that those things, to your point, come from the knowing. We're dropping below the culturing and we're dropping into the knowing, and we know there's something out in that field, like Tabitha did. Yeah, because and that's and and that we call that that all different things, right, I mean, I call my knowing that thing inside me that always guides me towards the next right thing, right knowing. Like when I figured out that none of the answers were outside of me, and nobody else freaking knew what the hell I was supposed to do, right, so I kind of stopped doing what I was trained to do as a girl, which is, in every moment uncertainty, look outside of myself instead of inside of myself. Right, Because boys are trained to look inside themselves for wisdom, and little girls are trained to look outside of themselves for consensus and permission and approval. Right. We learned that right around ten years old, and then we became forty four year old women who, in my case are up at three a m. Googling what should I do? My husband is cheater, but a really good depth. So during that time in my life is when I realized, okay, uh, nobody else knows what I should do, because nobody else has lived this life that I'm living, with my pain and my talent and my potential and my purpose and my people. Asking other people what they should do, it's just what I should do. It's like asking people for directions to places they've never been, right, because everyone lives is a complete, singular, unrepeatable, unprecedented experiment, right, And there's no map. All of our problems come from trying to find a map, and there's no map. We're all just frequent clueless pioneers. Right. So I figured out if I, if I looked inward, if I really got still enough, that there was kind of this strange nudge that I don't know how to describe because it's beyond language, but I describe it and untamed as like this kind of liquid gold that if I just like turn inward, or long enough, there will be this filling or the nudge that will point me towards the next right thing, one thing at a time. Right. But I don't think of it of Tabitha's turning inward as that. I feel like Tabitha's turning inward that place that she that we all find inside of ourselves that says it's supposed to be more beautiful than this. I think of that as imagination might I think imagination is faith to me, And I'll try to describe that. Faith to me has absolutely nothing to do with religion. It has nothing to do with like following a set of rules that were set by a bunch of old white men eons ago to control the world. Like, that's not what I mean. What I'm my favorite definition of faith is the unseen order of things. Okay, it's a belief in the unseen order of things. It's like there's two orders of things. There's the visible order, which is reality, what we would know as the material world, like what we see when we turn on the news, what's happening out there. And then there's an unseen order, and that's inside of us, and that's the part of us that when we look at that scene, order, even though it's the only thing we've ever known, rejects it. It's like, that's not right. The world is not supposed to be like that. They're supposed to be less being, They're supposed to be more equality. Children are supposed to be fed, women are supposed to be like that's because we have this unseen order pressing inside of us, inside of ours and saying, oh no, it's supposed to be more beautiful than this, and we don't trust that, right because we look outside inside of ourselves that we think that's as good as it's ever going to get. And I really believe that imagination or that place we go to to look for the unseen order, it's not imagination isn't where we go to escape reality. It's where we go to discover the truest reality that we were meant to bring forth into the world, right, because that's hot, that's why we're born. We're all born to bring something new to the world that the world has never seen before, whether it's an idea or a poem, or a garden or a business or a family or whatever it is. So what I've started to realize, like whenever people talk to me about why they can't do the thing they were they know to do, you know, because we all have that discontent or we have that longing inside of us. So people will say to me, you know, I want to quit drinking, but I can't. I want to go back to nursing school, but you know, a good mom is supposed to stay home with her kids. I want to leave my emotionally abusive husband, but I made my bed and so I have to lie in it. Or whenever they talk to me in the language of should and shouldn't bad or supposed to or right and wrong, what's the right thing to do? All that language is in doctor nation. There's no good in bad. That's there's no should and shouldn't, there is no right and wrong. Those are all culturally concerned right because like example, so when when I found out about the infidelity craigs infidelity, I lived in this I still do kind of live in this wild and diagram where I'm like half feminist, half Christian wacko place to be right. And one thing that was so fantastic for me is when I started looking into what I should do in the in the wake of infidelity, Omanists said the right thing to do is one thing. Christians said the right thing to do was the opposite thing. What I realized is right and wrong. They're not pure, they're completely culturally constructed, man made concepts. Right keep dogs that keep the masses in the heart. That's it. So if you want to know what was meant for your one wild impressions like you can't use language like that, right and wrong, good and bad, none of that matters. So what I started to do is when women tell me I can't do this or I should or shouldn't'd say, okay, stop. Tell me. What is the truest most beautiful story about a marriage you can imagine? Tell me I want to I want to go back to rchi of people, but I can't because you know a good mother. Blah blaa. Okay, what is the truest most beautiful story you could tell me about a career? Right? What is the truest most beautiful story you can tell me about your community? What is the truest most beautiful story you can tell me about a friendship? And this crazy thing happens, which is that when you it's like we speak two different languages. We speak the language of our indoctrination, with all the cans and cants and shims and shouldn'ts. But when you speak to somebody in the language of imagination, by saying the words true and beautiful in story, continuation shuts down and imagination ignites, because imagination is a storyteller, right And everybody the minute you say tell me the truest, most beautiful blah blah blah, their eyes laid up and they have ideas and they're I'll and and it feels like those ideas come from to your earlier point, the place where we know what's possible, where we know what's good for us. We do so much talking about the present and about the journey and about the things we've been through in our adult lives and how they led us to this place. But as you mentioned earlier, talking about the ways that you learned so early, I I want to jump back, and it's usually again where I start with people. But the forward motion here has been perfect and delicious. And I wonder if you draw the parallel not between Glennon today and Glennon who was googling what do I do if my husband has been cheating on me for a decade? But is also a really good dad. Not not even that Glennon of a couple of years ago, but Glennon as a little girl. You know, you grew up in Virginia. I wonder now when you think about who that little girl role was, who was learning all those messages? What? What are some of your early memories? What what's the beginning for you? Were you always inquisitive and curious and good with words? You know? Who who was Glenned at eight or ten? Well, it's so sad for me to think about this because, um, I don't remember, because I became really really suppressed. So I became seriously blieming at ten years old and just never got a hold on it at all, and so it just got worse and worse. And so the next my really all of my growing up years, you know, ten until I was twenty five, just became a series of diagnoses and therapists, rooms and medications, and I was hospitalized my senior year. Uh they my parents did. We didn't have the right insurance for an eating disorder clinic. So I was actually put in a mental institution, like a mental hospital, which by the way, I loved. So whenever people feel sorry, for me about that, I'm like, no, no, no, was way less crazy than high school. Okay, I was glad to be there, um for real, I was. It was a special place for many reasons. But um, I because of that life that I had for so long, Sophia, I just I realized, not until a few years ago, that my belief about myself, my deepest belief, like beneath all the like I'm a feminist, is I'm crazy? Like I just think that we kind of all have like this root shame belief that happens to us when we're little because of some lie we're told. And you know, like Abby's Abbey grew up a gay kid in the Catholic Church, so we are still like yanking at that route belief that she's not loved by the divine right that but mine was really I am crazy, and I think that I had a lot of evidence to support that. Right. Because of that, I stopped trusting myself, because because how can a crazy person be trusted not to sabotage her life in the lives of her family, right, But then I started raising this child, you know all about Tish, and she, Sophia is she is just a super super sensitive kid. And um and I watched her. She cares the most amount about everything about our family, about herself, about the world, about her friends, about kids who are not she's her heartbreaks very easily, and she she lives inside out like she's inside up right. It's transparent, Mason Jark Okay, And and what I mean, Sophia, I would never in a million years look at that child and say, oh, she's crazy, she's broken. I think so. I think she's like a prophet, you know. And I think in most cultures, for as long as time has happened, folks who are super sensitive spokes like you, folks like Tish, looks like me, and most cultures, we are identified early, right, we are noted to be a little bit eccentric, a little bit different, but crucial to the tribe survival because we are the canaries in the coal mine. Right. We are people who can see things that other people can't see and who are willing to feel things that other people can't feel. So we become in most cultures, you know, the shaman or the medicine men and women, or the poets or clergy or the you know, the people who are standing on the about the Titanic going Iceberg, Iceberg. Our culture will we're so held bent on power and efficiency and speed at all class that everyone else is just like we just want to keep dancing right. So it's easier just to dismiss us and call us rather than understanding that we are responding appropriately to a broken system and that a wise culture would pay close attention to the right. So it's revolved all of my ideas about myself as a child, which just I am answering your question, which is that I parenting tishe has has helped me free myself because I realize now that I'm not crazy and was never crazy. Well, and that's what strikes me when I hear you talk about But the revelation really that your daughter is to you is that parenting her in a way allows you to reparent yourself, you know, you you get to really create a healing in reverse. And when I think about the way that you love her and the way that you mother her, and the Abbey mothers her, and that and that Craig shows up for her as her dad, it's such an amazing thing to see a kid be so supported. And I think it's a about you as a parent and B I think we're so lucky to be living in this time where we are in this awakening and where we do have this this kind of newer access. You know, my mom and I were talking about this a little bit, and she said, you know, who you're going to get to be as a mom is different than who I had the opportunity to be as a mom. She was like, I didn't have all this research. We weren't talking about trauma, we weren't doing any of that. We were all kind of doing the best we could. And I think about the shift in this generation and how big it is when when you think about what your resources were were you Were you finding solace in books? Were you journaling? What were your outlets for all these big feelings that you felt when you were titius age that obviously we're coming out sideways in this eating disorder. Where where did you have an outlet in a good way? Yeah? Well, my only I believe that, my only real good outlook. I have always instilled you. I was always the kid who just was in the corner reading the same over and over and over again. Right, That's always who I have been, And I just I find it sometimes tricky you. You wear your outside on the your inside on the outside, which is probably why I felt comfortable right away with you in that room. But I usually don't feel that way. I usually feel anxious in social situations because I feel like, even if it's not to me, it always feels like we're acting like I don't understand it. It's like, like I seriously can't understand it. I mean, I talked about this ad nausea and she's like, what do you mean you don't understand? I'm like, I don't like when you walk into a room and you're like, hey, how are you hy, and then you talk about things like like like things that you don't really care about, right, like I don't know, I can't. I wish that I could do it better. But in books it's never like that, right It's like people are talking about their deepest, truest realist things. So it's kind of like a way to get to the insides of people without having to deal with the outsides of people. Book. Um, But but I think that was a healthy outlet. I don't remember writing writing a lot when I was really little. I think that for me what my coping mess mechanism was was food. I think that learned early on that I was supposed to be happy. That's how we teach people and everything they're gonna feel anger and sadness and jealousy and fear, and that all of those things are completely normal, right, and that none of those things are bad. Actually, they're all just the whole human experience. I didn't know that is that part of why? Because you know, you've talked publicly about some of this sort of guilt or shame that you associated with how you were feeling, because you said my childhood was pretty magical, Like why did I feel so screwed up? Why did I feel so upset? M almost like you didn't feel like you had a right to feel your feelings. Yes, And by the way, how often do you hear that I did? I have a PO box that is just smashed with letters from women like every week, and I would say that, and I don't think it's exaggerating of Each of these letters starts with I know I should I know other people have it worse than me, and I know I shouldn't feel this way, But I'm just gonna tell you, like, we just don't feel like we have the right too full human experience if we haven't, if we're not in the middle of what we deem like capital t trauma at the moment, right, Like we think that we cannot be sad because someone else somewhere is sadder, which is exactly the same as thing, I can't be happy because somewhere else, someone else might be happier somewhere. Like, That's just not how any of this works, right, It's not like suffering Olympics like we actually are all, no matter what circumstances were in are gonna experience the whole human drama. Right, So what does happen? I mean, I imagine your parents. We're afraid, like you said, they didn't know what to do with you. Where do you put this kid with all these big feelings, this this behavior snowballs, you know, through high school into your twenties and then tish then everything changes. So what how do we how do we get from teenager at the mental hospital to young mom trying to figure out what the hell she's gonna do? Yeah, oh my god, Well, I um, I found out that I was pregnant on Mother's Day when I was twenty five, and I was, um so freaking sick. I can't imagine that I wasn't close to death. I mean I was had. I was drinking myself to blackout every single night for years before that, and I had burnt every single bridge in my life, all my relationships, all of it. And I found myself on about from floor holding a positive pregnancy test, and it was one of those moments. It was it was one of those imagination moments. It was a tabitha moment. It was like, Okay, I see all evidence on the outside of me, right, I see what I see, what a ship show I have created. I see that there is clearly no worse candidate for motherhood on the planet Earth. And still like there's something inside of me that is saying yes, Like regardless of all of the evidence on the outside of me that is saying no, I feel this. It was like how I felt. The two strongest moments I felt this are when I found out a pregnant Chase and when I'm when I saw Abby and so I decided to get sober that day that I found out that I was pregnant. M So I called my sister from the bathroom floor. She literally came to my house and picked me up off the bathroom floor and too, you know, my first recovery meeting. And then that's what began the beautiful, terrible process of early recovery, which is a freaking nightmare and is an and is the best thing on earth and everything that I know I learned in those few first years, right, and what happened. The way that I got from that kid who didn't know how to use for big feelings and sensitivity to the person I am now is art. Art is the art and activism. So I learned in those recovery meetings that there is this way to heal which has to do with honesty and truth and sharing. And then um, I learned that this this sentivity that I had as a child that led me into numbing and alcoholism, I could also use the exact same sensitivity to be a really good artist. The beginning part, the thing that you touch on in recovery that to me feels like such an important seed. And I just I feel like there's people who are listening to us have this conversation going, But what what does that mean? The thing that you learn to turn into your art? What's the seed in recovery? What's the beginning? What's the thing you have to say in that room that starts your new life. I don't know if there's anything that you have to say in that new room that starts your new life. I think it's something that you have to say to yourself. I don't believe in having long discussions with people about whether or not they should get sober. I really don't, because I think it's all horseship, because I know that everyone knows. I know that like all of those conversations, a circular conversations about do I have a problem? Do I have a problem, Like people who don't have a dreaming don't spend all day wondering if they have a drinking problem. Okay, okay. If you are a person who spends all day wondering if maybe you have a drinking problem, probably okay. And all I care about is that there is I don't care if people drink or not. For God's sake. What I do think is tragic is when people have something in their life, whether boozed or certain relationship or whatever it is, that is keeping them from freedom, that is keeping them living as fully and beautifully and with as much joy and freedom as we were all designed to write. When people have a in their life that they know in their gut is in the way of them and the life they were supposed to be living. That's the moment that matters, right, that's the moment. And we don't do the thing. We don't get rid of the thing because we're scared, because it's usually something that keeps us from facing the truth. And I remember being at that, I wrote and untamed. I was at my fifth recovery meeting and I finally and I said, it was the first time I spoke at a recovery meeting. And what they don't tell you about sobriety. Okay, I see what happens is when you're really bad at it, everyone in your life wants you to get sober, desperately, okay, because you're ruining everyone's life, right, Okay, we ruined everyone's lives. Okay, So everyone wants us to get sober so bad, and so by the time we finally say okay, i'll try, we think it's going to be some promised land of joy because everyone has asked us for so long to get there. But it's terrible, it's awful and horrible and sucks. Okay, early sobriety hurts so bad. It's like you've been purposefully frozen forever and now you're slowly defrosting, and everything everything hurts, okay, And then you just all day you just think, oh, this is why I started drinking in the first place. That all right, I didn't work, but I see why I did that. And so I just was so freaking miserable the first week. And on the sixth day, I went to my fifth meeting and I finally stood up and I said, I am Glennan, and I have been sober for six days, and I feel awful, and I am afraid that what is wrong with me wasn't the booze, that what is wrong with me was beneath the booze, that what is wrong with me is actually me. Praid that that that everyone else has some kind of secret of life that I don't have, because it feels like life is so much harder for me than everyone else. And that's all thank you. And this woman came up after after and she said, Okay, honey, I just want to tell you something that someone else told me in early sobriety, and that is that if there's any secret to life, the secret is that life is just really hard, not because you're doing it wrong, but because you're finally doing it right. What you're doing now is your experience being, you're experiencing being fully human. That what you're doing is you're feeling all your feelings. And the thing is that all feelings are for feeling, all of them, even the hard ones. It's just that they hurt, and that's why so few people do it. And what I had learned and after that meeting, I thought, Okay, fine, I'm gonna try. I'm just gonna try to show up for all of it. I'm gonna try to feel all of my feelings and see what happens. And what I know. What I learned is that I thought that feeling my hard feelings to kill me, which is why I avoided it for so long. And this magical thing happens when you just stopped numbing, which is that you realize that none of your hard feelings kill you ever. Actually you know all of it. And what's struck me in my own parallel realizations about this in different forms. You know, I didn't I didn't have a problem with eating or with booze. I had a problem with trying to save people, and being in relationships with men who were very bad for me. And what I realized about the painful feelings, the things I didn't think I had a right to feel because my life was so much better than so many other people. It's not perfect, But who am I when there is this suffering in the world? You Know? What I've realized is that every time I refused to feel a bad feeling or a negative feeling or pain, or to say I think there's something better for me than this, I was turning my back on myself. And I would never turn my back on you in a hard moment. I would never turn my back on a child in a hard moment. Why was I turning my back on myself? And then when I think about the oxygen tank idea, I realized I was shoving every single available molecule of feeling into only the happy feelings, only the good feelings. And then my good feelings felt like they were going to explode and maybe kill everyone. And and there was this whole tank for sadness that was empty, but it wasn't actually empty. The tank was still sitting there. I was just ignoring it. And and something really magical and Yes, painful and awful happens when you finally acknowledge all the feelings. When when your body is full of pins and needles because you're defrosting, is that you're like, oh, look how much bigger my body is. Look how much more space I have for all my molecules. Because I'm not just trying to be on the happy side. It's like, it's like when you get to spread out, and you know how rare this is because you have a gigantic family, when you get to be in your bed alone and you can put like a hand and a foot in every corner and spread out, like that's what coming home to all our feelings feels like. To me, you're like a little lonely in the bed, but you can also spread out in it, in your own skin and see what's in there. Well, that's so good. And you also, I think like what we're both what we both figured out is that number one, we don't have anything figured out, but which is wonderful. Like, I don't trust anybody who thinks they haven't figured out. If you're not even wise enough to know you don't new ship, then I can't mess with you. I'm like, no, I know things that are true for us, like about what we deserve, and I know what the knowing means, and you gave me the words for that, but I don't know anything else, like about anything. But here's what I love in a woman. Okay. What you just said is what we figure out is that all of these things we use to numb ourselves from pain to jump out of pain. Okay, So for me, food, booze, drugs for you, codependent relationships for for other people. There's a million ones that are just more socially acceptible, okay, like perfect them or snark or um rage or or um scroll scroll scroll scroll, like all of these things we use, I don't develop a relationship with myself. And then we wonder, well, that is what we do? Know that we are women who have stopped abandoning ourselves so trust ourselves. And so much of that has to do with just sitting through the pain and not running away, just staying with yourself. Mm hmm, right, and what else? We spend the first half of our lives being convinced by everyone on earth that we can't trust ourselves, and then we spend a while figuring out that we can, and then we get to live. So if getting sober for you was the beginning of coming back to life, was beginning to put yourself out in the world, was that the next piece? Was that the next reclamation because momastery change so much for so many people. But that came because of a Facebook post. Yeah, well it came up. The Facebook was stories ridiculous. I mean, I just couldn't get to meetings because I was just dripping with children. And I noticed these people were doing this thing on Facebook called the twenty Things. Do you remember that. I was like lists themselves, and so I was like, oh cool, I could do that. I could write about myself for twenty list. I could do that. But I didn't freaking read anybody else's list first, So I just wrote mine the way I talk, Okay, So like, so I wrote it out and I left and I came back to my computer an hour later, and they were like, my list had been shared all of these gazillions of times from my private page, and I had like sixteen new emails in my email box, and I had a bunch of calls in a row from my sister, which is always a sign that I've done something that is inappropriate. And I required a lot of clean up on her part. So so my number six was I'm a recovering food and alcohol addict, but I still find myself missing Booze in the same twisted way we can miss people who repeatedly beat us and le us for dead. It's true to me. But my friend Lisa's number six was my favorite snacker is humis okay? So that we weren't doing this, But can I tell you that this is why, this is why I always knew you were my person, because I don't know how to do the Hummus number six. I only know how to do the Glennon number six. And I made a joke recently which was my first like aha thing. I was with some friends at one in in one of the environments where I feel the most insane, which is like events in my industry. I don't know how to socialize and do the small talk. So I ran into a friend who was really going through something. He was not I'm not my story to tell anyway, he was really going through a thing and there was a little group of us talking and he was like, yeah, you know, with all this ship going on in my life, I just don't know how to talk to anybody here, and I said, well, my uh tendency is to want to ask a question that is so probably inappropriate at the Golden globes that then I have to swallow my own tongue to keep myself from doing it. But when people say what's up with you? I want to be like, you know, same old, same old. How are you are you processing your childhood trauma? How are things going? Like that's what I want to talk about. I don't know how to do what what did you get at the order of table? I don't get it? So thank you for a very honest number six. You know. So I had that feeling of wanting to swell right like that golden I was in my kids playroom, like I just was like, oh my god, what did I do? Um? And I just remember feeling like, oh my god, how do I take it back? I called my sister. She's like, you can't take it back. It's the interwet up, like, you can't take it back. So I was just embarrassed and felt overly vulnerable. But then I started opening these emails, Sophia, No, you know, I'm telling you what they were. They were from people who I had known my entire life, but who I had freaking known because we were so busy talking about the goddamn hummus and how perfect everything was and how shiny and wonderful we were, that we had never brought to each other the heavy stuff that we are actually meant to help each other carry, right, And what I learned in those emails they just said you know me too, me too a million different ways like me too. And so I think how you get from that to the writing is like there's just these moments in your life where you figure out, oh, this is something I could do, Like I'm just this little person, this one person, but this thing I just did seems to like have helped people. Like first all helped me because I like this, like I can see myself, I can feel myself, I feel healthy when I'm doing this, I feel strong, I feel visible, I feel and also it seems to be doing something for other people. So that's like then diagram was like a treasure map. It was just like oh, like you know, like the little tinklies went off inside me. I was like, this is this could be my thing and what a weird thing. Like, So so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna say a bunch of crazy ship on the interwew that no, Like, I knew there was an art to it, and I knew that like truth telling could be this incredible key that could unlock people. Not only did it help was it a service to people, but it helped me feel more human and it helped me find my people, right because I could be at sixty four thousand cocktail parties and I will never know who my people are because we're not talking about anything that helps you find your people, but like one honest essay and your people show up. Mm hmm. So that's how I got to the writing thing was just like and then so after that Facebook thing I started, I promised myself I was going to write every single morning, because you know the mornings are and so I started sending a group of friends an email every morning that was just my thoughts about the world. Okay, So these poor people like I would send pagelong emails each morning, and then if they didn't write back to me, I would ping that throughout the day and just be like, Hi, just wondering if you had any thoughts about my thoughts. Okay. Finally, my friend Joanna sent me an email with a link to how to start a blog, and she was like, gee, this is what people do have as many thoughts and feelings as you do. Bless Joanna. Yeah, so it's a family joke. My writing career started because my friends did not want to read my ship anymore. Like that is. And then my sister, who you know, is my life, she decided after a really hard divorce right about that time, that she was gonna quit her corporate job, moved to Rwanda and spend her life prosecuting uh people who have committed sex crimes against children. Okay, that's what she was gonna do. And she right before she left, she brought me a new laptop because my laptop was like total crap and it would turn off every twenty five minutes so I couldn't write. So she brought me a new laptop and this letter that said, I'm going to go do this thing that I have to do, and you're gonna stay here and you're gonna do this thing that you have to do, which is you, which is that you were made to write, And you're gonna sit down every morning you to open this computer and you're going to write with the voice of the person who wrote that Facebook list, and I'm telling you do for the next year, and so I do what my sister tells me to do. So that's how I started writing monstery mm hmm. And then what's the experience, what's the experience of building out that community, of realizing that you had created a homing beacon for so many people. It was beautiful, it was wonderful. It just I sat down every morning and I wrote, and I promised myself. My rule for myself was that I would post publish every single day after an hour and a half, no matter what. And I think that that saved me from perfectionism, which is what keeps most people from putting their art out in the world. Right. I think had I not had that role for myself, I would have decided every day that it wasn't good enough, and then I'll just fix the next day, and then I'll fix it the next day. But I saved myself from that with that rule. People started coming in, you know, and so I never I still to this day, would never know. I never promoted my blog anywhere. I never had an ad on my blog. I never did any any of the things that you're supposed to do, and it just kept growing and growing, and then it turned into Together Rising, of course, which is really what I think. Every word that I write or speak is really about Together Rising, which is our nonprofit that is run by all women and is just become the leading American organization for reunifying families at the border. For um DO, it's still still um serving and dealing with the refugee crisis and more importantly to us just as just first responders just every day just meeting the needs of women and children and we're in crisis. And you know, I think so that what I've seen and when I believe is that life gives you these little quirks, talents, whatever they are, and then and then you start showing up for your talent or your art. But really it's just all to get to the big game of service, right. It's like it's like the art is just like the stream that gets you to the big river. Like anybody who I know and love and respect in the world is somebody who has thought that they were really like, oh, I'm good at this thing, and this is what I'm gonna do, But that's not the thing, Like that's the thing that gets you to the thing, right, Yeah, it's like that. I don't know how to describe it. It's like the art is just the hook. It's just the hook. And then you end up at the big game, which is service and activism and and usually first it's philanthropy, right, So you just start thinking, Oh, I'm just supposed to like save people, supposed to help people. That's what I'm supposed to do, right, So that's what happened. We just started reading so many stories and people were suffering and I couldn't put food on the table, couldn't buy diapers, couldn't do this and that. So we started matching up people, you know, raising money for hurting people. And then over a long period of time, we just started asking ourselves harder questions like why are these people suffering so much? Like why are these people who are working so hard having so much trouble making ends meet? Right? Like? What is want? And so that? And right around that time, I read this quote that said you can only pull people out of the river for so long until you have to look up river and figure out who's pushing them in h So that's when I started to look deeper and ask the right questions and realize that wherever there's great suffering, there is always great profit. Yes, right, so yes there are. We're we are at the other rising like hand over fists, trying to help people who have been traumatized by um school shootings or by the unbelievably harmful and traumatic drills that they're now doing with all kids, all these people suffering. Why, Okay, let's look up river and look at the n r A, and let's look at the politicians who are paid off by the n r A, because that profit is going for this suffering. Okay, we can continue to build l G B t Q centers all over the country for kids who have been kicked out of their house. We can do mentorship, we can do. But what what we also have to do is look up river at the religious institutions who are poisoning people from creating the shame that is then causing these families to kick the kids out. Right, we can we can just over and over again, every problem we have, we can look up river and realize. So so it's like art led me to philanthropy, and then philanthropy led me to activism, because anybody is a philanthropist for long figures out that you can't. You can't stay justin philanthropy because with power, like oh, the people up river can keep throwing them in and profiting because they've got these other people just pulling them out all the time their partner. You become their partner if you aren't. Also, it's like it has to be end both. You have to be pulling people out of the river and you have to be constantly looking up river and giving living hell to the people who are pushing them. Yes, yes, And I think that's why when people ask why women like us are so political, that's always the question, right, And I like to put it in quotes, and then I realized people listening at home can't see me doing that. I'm literally air quoting. And I'm like when people say, like, well, what do you think gives you the right to be political? Because everything is politics. We're alive, we're breathing. If if we're not active politically for each other, if we're not talking about reforming these broken systems, if we're not talking about making sure we're electing people who are going to keep the air clean so that kids don't die of asthma, there's there could be nothing more important to me. And and I think you know, in in the in our different ways, we took very much the same path. Philanthropy is always the window in And if you really care about the philanthropic cause that gets you up in the morning, you absolutely continue sinking and getting deeper. And then you see the systems at play that make this problem exists in the first place. It it feels like a in a way, like a mirroring of the thing you were discussing earlier, that shift from the external to the internal, because really, in in the personal, the external to the internal is a deepening of your knowledge of yourself. And and then when I think about it in the macro, the external, the stuff we get distracted by out here, the shiny surface, we can shift to the internal, which is really in the macro, I think about the internal being the roots. Like if we dig down and we look at the roots, it changes everything. And and one of the things I love so much is that you've talked about how the that shift takes you from this idea of faith to a true knowing. Everybody has faith. Everybody has faith, that's it's just what you have faith. Then I mean I have stopped having faith that anyone else knows what I should do. I stopped having faith that I have stopped believing that I can outsource my faith to a bunch of what they went to school for a few years about God. Like the fact that you can get a really you can get a degree in God. It's still baffling to me. I don't even get me started. But but that's a scary um thing to think about. Because we are human beings. Human beings love, We want to be independent, and then we don't. We fiercely want to be independent, and then we fiercely want someone to tell us what to do. Right, I get completely. And so because of that, it is simpler in some ways to outsource our faith to ministers. It is simpler in some ways to outsource our political lives, which just means our lives politicians, it is. It is simpler to outsource our life decisions to therapists. Right, all of these things that we do to put faith in things in forces outside of ourselves instead of to put I no longer believe that there is like I was absolutely believe that that the God we speak of, that the higher power that we speak of, is inside of ourselves. Right, I do not think it's simihere out there, you know, standing away from us, judging us from the outside, organizing us into groups. Thank you. The deepest, truest parts of ourselves are the divine right. And that is why religion, to me, in some of the ways that it's set up, is the hardest place to find God. Okay. I think that fundamentalist religions are the single hardest place to find God. Insomuch as what we find about fundamentalist religions is that the first thing that fundamentalist religions have to do is separate you from yourself, teach you that you cannot trust yourself, okay. And Christian culture, the way that this is done is the pull scripture. I was told from from very young. Your heart is wicked. Your heart is wicked. You cannot trust yourself, you cannot lean on your own understanding everything was. You cannot trust yourself. Okay. So the reason why we train people not to trust themselves is so we will trust them instead. And the scary part of religion is that they say to you, trust God, don't trust yourself, trust God. But what they're really saying is don't trust yourself, trust us, Trust our system exactly nothing to do with God, nothing, nothing. The difference between religion and God is just night and day. So so what I would say is I am forever suspicious and wary of any institution or group of people or person who tries to separate me from myself. I will never abandoned myself again. Right. I will abandon every institute, I will abandon every relationship. I will abandon every expectation that required, but that require to me to abandon myself. M hmm. So and I and I find that so amazing. Like so I think, like, talk to my kids about this recently. How strange is it that the first right of passage we have for human beings is to give themselves away to other people, Like I vow that I will never abandon you to another human being, Like I feel like you want to create some kind of writer passage for my sixteen year olds that is just like no, no, no, First, you will never abandon yourself, right, and you will never choose anything else that requires you to abandon yourself, because that will be proof in itself that that's a bad decision. Mm hmm. But it's like we have to have before we say I love you before I say I give myself to you, don't We have to know who the eye is. Mm hmm. The coolest wedding I've ever been to two of my dearest girlfriends, my girlfriend Emily and her wife Michelle. When they got married, they designed their ceremony to talk about each of them as individuals and then their relationship as a unit, and they delivered wedding vows to the eye, the U, and the we, so good, so good because they wanted to commit. Michelle wanted to commit to Emily as she is. Emily wanted to commit to Michelle as she is. Emily committed to Emily, Michelle committed to Michelle, and then they committed to the unit, to the third thing that is them together, the third thing. It's a it's a third thing. And then the wild thing is is that you can't even commit to that third thing. So because you have to commit to everything, that third thing will become be the same, it will always be the it will always change. Like Abbie says to me all the time, which I think is the most beautiful thing. I love you and I already love every woman you will become because it's like what we fall in love with these ideas of people. But people nature are supposed to evolve and change over and over again. Have these relationships where people are holding each other back because they want the person to be the same right, So we have to It's like when we fall in love with other people. We can't even fall in love with other people. We have to fall in love with that person's process, and we have to commit to upholding their process rather than to your point clean to who they are today or who they were yesterday. It's not hard for people to see the journey from Momastery to your first book and to your second book, and and and to learn about what your journey was with Craig. And I'm I'm so amazed by the way the two of you loved each other, oh most more in the taking a part of your marriage than you've even loved each other in it, so that you could build a better family, because the family is the point. But I I want to talk about Abby. I want to talk about you meeting Abby. I want to talk about how you couldn't have written Untamed without Abby and what Abby helped you unlocking yourself because it's you with Abby, and now I feel like I can tell the people of the secret. So the night we met and we were pretzeld on the couch barefoot together. I had been speaking to Abby because she and I had met a few months before. Again as as to you know people out there on the on the activism front, and I am an unabashed as much as I don't understand a lot of sports, I am a mental soccer fan. Like I I become I become one of those people, like when you do the videos in your house during the tournaments and everyone is screaming. I become that person. It's like I it's like I become the Hulk, or like when a great white shark when it's little eyes get covered right before it attacks something. I some other part of me comes out and I turned into a crazy person. It's just women's soccer or is it men's soccer? No? Like I I well, no, I'm a crazy person for women's soccer. I really like men's soccer. Like I've I've traveled to see men's soccer games in places. Yeah, I'm like, I'm really I'm a fan. I'm a soccer person. I played a y s O soccer when I was a little Um. I'll send you a photo of me and my little uniform, but I I just love it. And and Abby had just led the women's national team to win the World Cup and and was doing so as such a heart forward activist while leading a team and proving, as women often do, that they can literally do seventeen things and spin a plate on their head at once and look elegant doing it. And and so we all we all got to meet at this event, and I was like, there's the team. What am I going to say? Oh my god? And then before I know it, Abby's walking up to me, and I'm like, there, who is what is she doing? What's who is she coming me? She's coming, She's coming to me. And she walks up and goes, all these girls over here are too scared to talk to you. They're all huge One Tree Hill fans. We think you're a badass, and also we know you're a soccer fan. Come over here and have a drink with us. And I was like, okay, Abby, And that's how Abby and I became friends. And so we had stayed in touch for a while and talked about the deep things and and she was going through all these amazing transitions again, heart forward and then she calls me and says, hey, you're going to do this together to her with my girl Glennon, and I was like, oh god, Abby, I just love her. I think she's so cool. We're going to be in conversation tonight. It's like a fireside and I can't wait. I just like, I feel like she's my people. And she goes, yeah, no she is, I mean, and and you know she's my girl, and I was like, no, I know. I've been like she's gonna also she's gonna be my girl too, Like I just know right like she's our people. And Abby goes no, no, no, no, you're missing it. So if she's my girl, and I went what And I was like, oh my god, who knows? And she was like nobody knows. And I was like, oh my god. So when we were in the little in the backstage area that night, I even waited until the people who were around us were out of your shot, and I was like, Glennen, I know that Abby loves you. And then you love Abby and I'm so happy and you were like, oh my god, I'm so happy that I can talk about this with someone now, Like the magic of of knowing that you both had been like just hit by the lightning bowl of this love that you still that still maintains this electricity between you two, tell us everything about it, because you had a big you had a lot of stuff that you had to kind of cast aside to live your biggest truest life and your and your biggest truest love. So what what do you do? I mean, I almost didn't do it. I almost just I had finally, So so we met at a at the first event for Love Warrior, which was problematic. So, yes, I was watching Love Warrior, which was being touted all over the place. It was an open book Club pick. It was supposed to be like the biggest book of the year, and it was The tagline was and the epic marriage redemption story. Okaysic, this is literally the book about how Craig and I saved our marriage. And then I go to the first event and me, Abby, can I ask you something though? Did that feel fair that people were calling it that? Because, yes, your book was a redemption story about two people choosing to love each other. But I never read it as a story of you choosing to stay. I I read it as a story of you choosing to do the work to find out why it broke in the first place. And thank god we didn't do the work, because you know, I thought we were doing all of that work to have our happily ever after, But we were doing all of that work so that we could leave our marriage with respect and trust for each other and spend the rest of our lives co parenting. So I yes, fell madly in love with Abby in immediately, like upon first sight, which I can't even say still without gagging because he's so upset that for the rest of my life I have to tell that truth because it sounds so cheesy. And I just I am never a person who believed in any kind of romantic love in my life, like I used to say, so, I'm just it was my family's like thing. I'm just I'm more like, you know, some people are like lasers and they love one person with their love, but I more like a floodlight, Like I just love like I didn't ever have that look before, never, which now I kind of have some more clues as to why. But I but I madly in love with her immediately, and we were in the same room for a couple of hours with a bunch of other writers at this big librarians can mention where we were speaking to a thousand librarians on this day as together. We both had this like ridiculously magical moment and then we both lost our minds. So like she stood up to speak do her part, and she talked for like three minutes since sat down, I forgot her whole speech. Then I stood up to speak, and then I didn't. I completely disregarded my speech and just said a bunch of things that I thought would make her think I was cool, Like let was in front of a thousand in libraries. That's what I did, Okay. So so then we went our separate ways, and as you know, she went back to Portland, I went back to Florida. We started writing each other letters. We fell deeply and deeply in love through letters to each other. She actually gave them to me like all bound up. Later it was like a stack like this, But we never saw each other again. I dismantled my entire life and she dismantled her entire life. Before we had ever been alone in the room together or ever touched each other um And I think that's because it was an insanely romantic, magical thing. But I think it's also because I understood very clearly that I was at a huge turning point in my life, that this wasn't really about will I stay with Craig or go with Abby. It wasn't that it was like, will I abandoned myself again? Like I have myself rise up? Like I have I felt my true self, like the girl I was before the world told me who to be. I have felt her just like rise up inside me and rattle the bars of my cage. And will I allow myself to be free? M hm? Will I do? And And so it felt very much like a life or death situation, and I think it was and a spirit you know, a soul life or death situation. And and you know that, you know, I almost didn't do it, so because I had so many tamed ideas about motherhood, you know, as you know, imagine being me and looking at Tish and thinking, oh God, like this child cries for eight hours if I can't tie her shoes fast enough, like so I'm going to break up the family like christ And I just had this, you know, I just thought a good mom doesn't hurt her children a good mom doesn't hurt her children. And then one day I was bringing Tish's hair and I looked at her and I thought, Okay, I am staying in this marriage for her, But what I want this marriage for her? And if I wouldn't want this marriage for her, then why am I modeling bad love and calling that good mother m? And the answer is simple, It's because somewhere along the line, I swallowed the idea that a good mother is some arter m. And a mother earns her mothering nous proves her love by burying herself, by burying her needs, her ambition, her dream fire, in honor of her children, by being oh so selfless for the others, as if our needs are mutually exclusive. See that posen route. That that is a poison pill that culture gives women. They can go for what is good for you, because what is good for you will necessarily be bad for your children and your people, which is that's horseship, Like what is good for you will always inevitably be what is good and true for your people. Because there's no such thing as one way liberation. Right generate ourselves when we live true to ourselves, that automatically grants permission to everyone in our circles to live true to themselves. So that is really I mean, that was one of the clearest moments I had of my really how tamed I was, because I am a woman who is smarter than that. Like I know that love is not about slowly dying, right, I know of is not about disappearing, but about emerging. I know that I would never want my daughter to slowly die inside of the marriage, and yet I was doing it in honor of my daughter, which means that I had been brainwashed. It is very clear that a good mother is not a martyr. Right. That is a terrible burden and a terrible legacy to leave for your children. Right. That is, a children of martyr mothers grow up thinking that they have to be martyrs also, And they also grew up knowing that they were the reason their mom stopped living. They also knowing that they never knew their mother because buried beneath all of those expectations and shids and shuns. Right. That is why Carl Young said that the greatest burden of child can bear is the unlived life of a parent. Right. So that's just one version of these roots, these beliefs we have to rip out from under us. Like. A good mother is not a martyr, right. A good mother is a model. Right. A good mother mother who knows that her children will only allow themselves to live as fully as she allows herself to live. So she must not settle for any relationship or life, or community or nation that is less beautiful than the one you want for her child. So when you know it's amazing you did this in spite of your children, fuck that. No, I did this because of my children, But you did it because of them, because you were willing to look deeper than what we're trained to do. Because to your point, women, we as women see our mothers be martyrs. And then we have this unconscious or subconscious understanding that we are slowly marching towards the death of self because once we have a kid, we're going to have to do it too. And and we don't even know that that's what it is, because everyone gives us the fairy tale, which says, once you have your partner and your baby, you're just going to feel whole and happy every single second of every single day. So we're told to opposing things and we don't know what's true, So we kind of nor it and we blindly stumble towards the future, which is either scary or perfect, but both feel wrong. And then it perpetuates, and you said, stop, look underneath, go to the route. Oh, I'm afraid to cause pain that might feel in the in the present, in the moment, catastrophic to my child. So I'm sentencing her to a lifetime of pain that exists on a scale from potentially dull and consistent to catastrophic every single day. Well, that certainly doesn't make sense. Let's do the momentary so we can change the future. That's it. But it's that it's that pause, right, It's that sailah. It's that like it's a difference between living an unexamined or examined life. Right, we choose to live unexamined lives. We will chase dirty paint funnies for the rest of our lives and wonder why we feel like we're slowly dying, and we will take train our children to do the same thing. I think it comes down to that thing I love that Witman said, which is just like our our duty is to re examine every single thing we've been taught in school, in a church, in a book, and dismiss whatever insults our souls. Right, it insults my soul. The idea that love, that a woman's form of love is to disappear in any way, right, insults myself and so and so. Yeah, I just decided that the way that I can mother my children well is to live the truest, freest, most beautiful, most whole life that I can possibly imagine, and just fully expect them to do the same. And that's getting untamed. Thanks, So yeah, because I do. When we pass down these ideas of martyrdoms, we're just taming our girls. I don't retaining them, you know, That's what I was doing. Our kids know, like they know when we're in loving relationships or not. And so when we when we make when we stay in a relationship that is not healthy and that it's broken, we are teaching our children what love is. Right. So you talk in the book about how so many of us have been so controlled for so long, and that what the world really needs is more and more women who are completely out of control. And I think about this time that we find ourselves in the world is out of control. And we're also so many of us stuck at home with ourselves. This could be an opportunity for that Sailah that you reference that pause to let it sink and settle. Can you explain what you mean by out of control women? And and can you, maybe as an expert at this offer to listeners a couple of nudges towards how to get reflective with self control. I think most of my pain in my life has been trying to control things. Like I realized this when I fell in love with Abby. And I didn't realize that I was such a controlling person before I knew Abby, because I just I always knew that I was like the leader ding ding ding ding ding how everything always But I just thought that I had really good ideas, you know, and that I cared about my people so much, and so I thought that my duty was to lead and guide them right, and that just always seemed to kind of work for me. Um while, I mean, I got divorced, so clearly what wasn't working. But but then when I'm married Abbie, it so Abby is really good at communicating things to me very clearly and kindly. And one day I was doing the thing that I do where I was like manipulating the situation behind the scenes, that I think people don't know what I'm doing when I'm controlling them, you know. And she stopped me and she said, Honey, I need you to know that I see what you're doing. I see that you're trying to control me. And what I need you to know is that that hurts my feelings so much because it makes me feel like you don't trust me, and I trust you so much. I trust you so much, and I just want you to trust me um and believe in me. And that's when I realized, oh, okay, so I have been trying to love people by controlling them, when in fact love is the opposite of control, Like you control people or we can love people, but we can't do book because love requires trust, right, and we only control things that we don't trust. So what we're getting at to the with that is it took me to see love and control as opposites in my relationships for me to be able to see love and control as opposites for myself. Okay, the amount of things that women try to control about ourselves. Right, we can't let our hair go, right, we can't let our hair and be what it is, we have to fix it. We can't let our skin be what it is. We have to fix it. We can't let our bodies be what they are. We have to control them. We can't let our emotions be what they are. We have to control them. We can't let our ambition be what it is. We have to control it. We can't let our dreams be as big as they are. We have to control them. Like we can't let our body like. We do not love ourselves. Okay, whatever freaking commercials soap commercials tell you about what is self love is not what self love is. What self love is is when you can leave yourself the funk alone because rust yourself. I do not love my body, and I know that, and it has nothing to do with the shape of my body. Okay, I don't give a shit about that. The reason I know I don't love my body is because I'm still constantly trying to control it. Right, because so much of my day, because of the stuff that was ingrained in my bones when I was little, about how a woman earns her worthiness by staying small, I spent so much of my time and energy thinking about food and thinking about exercise because I'm trying to control my body to keep it small, okay, instead of just letting it be whatever it will be. Mm hmm. So what I mean by I mean I stopped dyeing my hair, right, I mean I still throw bleach it it sometimes I think it's kind of fun, but like the gray is okay. I stopped botox in my face and just let it be what it is. I stopped control like I have stopped, And what I figured out is, oh, my hair is awesome, Oh my awesome. I've stopped trying to control my anger. I'm not trying to manage my anger anywhere. I'm harnessing my anger into change is good and smart and wise. Yes, because you're angry about the brokenness that you see when I try to think that every time we feel angry, there's something wrong with us, when actually you know, it just means there's something wrong. And every marginalized group will always be trained to be ashamed of their anger. And the reason why it's because angry people tend to demand change, simple, simple, simple, right. So that's what I mean by out of control is that I don't it means when I think she's out of control. What I mean is what I think is Oh, she's out of their control, out of of harmful religions control, she's out of the beauty industries control, she's out of imbalance and and just political control. She That's why me like women who are out of control of outside power and have returned to themselves and trust their inner power. And when you're out of their control, you can be in love with yourself, with your knowing, with your people. You stop gas when you finally see all the gas lighting for what it is. You mean, no, no, no, no, Like all my feelings are okay. 's okay, my skins okay, my hair is okay, my pain is okay, my ambition is okay, my desires are okay. Like things are good. Everything that we are trying to unlearn comes from the basic thing that women are taught in a patriarch agriculture, which is that you are that you are bad and you cannot trust yourself, and so we have to reject that on every level and return to we are good and we can trust ourselves. Mm hm. One of my favorite things I've read that outside about your book, because obviously you know I love you and I'm also your biggest fan in parade magazine. I read all the reviews, obviously, um, they said something that I loved so much. They talked about your first two books, and they said, if carry On Warrior and Love Warrior were about the battles over self, compassion, and un numbing from life's pain, Untamed gives readers the blueprint for finally maybe having a chance at peace. And what you're saying to me about getting out of their control and back into self, which really taps us back into each other in a real way, in an authentic way, that that makes my heart feel at peace. And so I'm I'm excited for everyone to have been able during this conversation to bask in your words and your wisdom, but also to have the book. It's not lost on me, by the way that under its perfect glittery cover, with all of the colors and all of the passion that does we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. The book looks like an X ray of your insides, but under the cover the book is blue, like it's a blueprint. Oh. I love it so much. I want to ask you a hundred more questions, but I'm not going to because you have a life and children, to go and you know, attend to or just yourself and tiktoks. This is what my children do, you know what in a time of Corona. I think it's all fair and good. You know what they're doing, Glenn and there in film school, that's what TikTok is. They're learning to tell stories and edit sounds. Yeah, no, I think that's completely fair. But I do have one. I have one last question for you, and I'm so excited to ask you. We're talking king about being a work in progress. That's that's the whole theme of the show. And I I wonder when you hear the phrase, whether it's something that's personal or professional or in any other circle that goes in that ven diagram, what feels like a work in progress in your life? Right now? Okay, I'll tell you the real one, because I did have as your half it ones. I think it's the body Ship, and I'm so I'm so annoyed about it, Sophia. I just I'm like, I'm forty four years old. I think google that yesterday in an interview of some reason. How old are yours? I think it's Yeah. I have times in my life where I get the you know, I became believing when I was ten, and ever since then, I've struggled with body and I don't it's more like it's like compulsive thoughts about it. It's like it's kind of like being harassed by somebody really mean, but like the caller is from inside the house, and and it's so embarrassing for me because I feel like I'm supposed to be this, this leader for women and like this feminist person, and so I feel like, for God's sakes, I should at least have this body thing figured out, and I should not care and I should be freer about it. Um. But the truth is I told Avery recently that I bet, like I bet, it gets worse and better at different times, and things are all usually gets worse, but I bet fifty of all of my thoughts are about food. And and that makes me so furious because of the opportunity cost. Right, because I'm such a smart and powerful woman, And when I think about the art or the activism that could have happened if I had that back, that's the cost, right, That's the cost the freaking messages. So anyway, I had gotten to the point where life and this it's just I'm just gonna live this. It's fine, but I feel like maybe not, maybe I should. I could not should, maybe I could do the work. I'm just tired of all the work. You know, it's hard to be progress forever. It's so hard to be human. But I think because everyone lies and tells us one day we're going to wake up and feel great, and then eventually you realize, no, I'm not. And then you think I should do the work, and then you do the work and you get to the end of let's call it a worksheet for lack of a better term, and then there's a new worksheet and you're like, I'm sorry, what I have to this is cyclical. This goes on forever. If I want to be a conscious person, I have to do this forever, oh so much. And then I said that, really, it's like we all just have the same freaking theory worksheets our whole entire dim life. Like all of my issues are really just like three things, and they just keep coming back over and over again iterations every decade of my life. You know, it would be cool if by the time I was fifty, I was a little bit freer in the body food progress. It's where I will. That's my work in progress. I love that. And you know, maybe you've done so much work on so many systems that affect us out there that now that inner part of you is saying, yeah, you've got to look at the one that affects us in here too. Love me the way you love the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you so much for fear. I'm sure next Tuesday I'll have it all figured out. Next Tuesday, I'm just going to get a photo of a worksheet and you'll be like, I did it well, my sister. I love you. I'm I'm so grateful for your book. I'm so freaking proud of you, which probably feels weird, but i am. I'm just like God, I'm proud of her. Thank you. I'm proud to know. I'm so grateful to be your fund and sister. Thank you for sharing all of this with with all of us. Thanks for trusting me with this beautiful community you've made here. They're so cool. They really are so cool. This show is executive produced by Me, Sophia Bush, and sim Sarna. Our supervising producer is Alison Bresnick. Our associate producer is Kate Linley. This episode was edited by Matt Sasaki, and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. The show is brought to you by then Brilliant Anatomy