REGRET: What if we’d done things differently?
March 15, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Well, hello. How are my favorite people?
Abby Wambach:
Hi.
Glennon Doyle:
Hi sis.
Amanda Doyle:
Hi.
Glennon Doyle:
How are you doing today? We are so coffeed up and wired, because we’ve been up since early, 5:40 or something. It’s Tish’s birthday today, when we’re recording this, so we do breakfast in bed for whoever kid’s birthday it is, we all just walk in with a plate, “Happy birthday to you,” and they were at Craig’s this morning, so we went over there. Tish is 16.
Amanda Doyle:
Sweet 16.
Glennon Doyle:
Isn’t that wild?
Amanda Doyle:
That’s a big deal. How does that feel for you?
Glennon Doyle:
It feels weird, since she was born like two weeks ago. I am that mom now who’s like, “What happened? It went to fast,” because it’s true. There’s this weird thing that two things are two at once, the first decade with children is so freaking slow that when anyone who has a 16-year-old says, “Oh, it goes by so fast,” you want to stab them in the eyeballs, because you think, “This is the longest day of my life,” every day. Right? But there’s this thing, it’s the roller coaster. It’s like the first 10 years are… up the hill and then you hit this part and when they’re 11 or so and then it’s whoosh, just down the hill and you have to hold on. I don’t know. It’s awesome.
Glennon Doyle:
She’s so cool. I have this theory that there’s one zone that you feel awesome about when you’re a parent and you just only get one, some people love pregnancy and then after their kid’s born, it’s all over for them. Some people are awesome baby parents. I’m really liking this teenage part. I am. I feel like, I don’t know, when they go do their things, I constantly feel like that scene from Pinocchio where Geppetto makes Pinocchio and then just watches him come to life and dance about and just says, “Oh my god,” that thing that we raised is animated and moving with it’s own energy. I like it. I like the teen years, so far.
Abby Wambach:
Would you say that you have any regrets?
Glennon Doyle:
And, with that incredible segue-
Amanda Doyle:
Master of segue-
Glennon Doyle:
… my wife is telling me that I’m-
Amanda Doyle:
… master of segue, Abby Wambach.
Glennon Doyle:
… talking too much about the topic that is not our topic for the day.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
And the topic-
Abby Wambach:
Just trying to stay on task here babe.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
I love you and that story was beautiful, but we’re here to talk about something else today.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Amanda Doyle:
Beautiful, but irrelevant. Both things can true.
Glennon Doyle:
All right. I’m sorry. I regret that I took up so much of your time with that sidebar about parenting and our daughter. But today we are here to talk about regret. Regret and it’s really got us thinking and talking to each other. When I think of a memory, my regrets come back to me in flashes of memory, first of all, because I have suppressed much of my life, but also because I was drinking for so long that I actually did live a lot of my life in sort of this eternal blackout, so I have flashes that attack me. A memory will flash into my mind of something that I did and I will actually shake my head to get it out. Do you know what I mean?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, yeah. Like shake it off. Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
You’ve done lots of research for us to see about what regret is and isn’t. What is it? Regret is something we say all the time, so what are we talking about today? What is regret and what is regret not?
Amanda Doyle:
Regret is the emotion that you experience when you think your present situation would be better or happier if you had done something different in the past. That’s a very specific thing. We use regret in a lot of contexts. We’ll say things like, “Sending you deepest regrets at the passing of your grandfather.” But, presumably, you didn’t have any role in your neighbor’s grandfather passing.
Glennon Doyle:
So if I killed your grandfather-
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
… I wouldn’t necessarily regret that, that would be remorse. I’d be apologizing, right? If I killed your grandfather, purposely. That would be remorse.
Amanda Doyle:
Well, presumably it would be both, because you life would, presumably, be happier were you not incarcerated for killing someone’s grandfather. So you would have both remorse and regret, in that context, and you also would likely feel the pangs of feeling like maybe that was not your best self who did that. So I think that one kind of covers the field, as it were.
Glennon Doyle:
But the reason it doesn’t make sense to say, “I regret your grandfather’s passing,” is because your grandfather’s passing had nothing to do with me. It had nothing to do with an action that I took or didn’t take.
Amanda Doyle:
Exactly. So the regret we’re talking about right now has to do with our decisions. And then, there’s “I regret treating that person like shit,” which is your life wouldn’t necessarily be different now had you not treated that person poorly, but you do feel this pang of remorse, which is a little bit different. I think that’s how we kind of commonly think of regret. “I regret having done that bad thing.” But that has more to do with remorse and confusion about ourselves than it has to do with how our present situation would be different.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so remorse is, “I’ve wronged someone else, and I think their life would be better if I’d chosen differently.” And regret is, “I feel like I’ve wronged myself and I feel like my life would be better if I’d chosen differently.”
Abby Wambach:
Interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes, but I also think there’s this crossover between remorse and regret, they’ve done research on this where there’s kind of two types of regret, exactly like you’ve just said and one is that idea of wronging yourself. You made a decision or you failed to make a decision that you believe, had you made the other choice, your life would be better now. And those emotions are trickier, because they describe them as kind of cold. It’s this kind of-
Glennon Doyle:
Ah, so-
Amanda Doyle:
… achy, hollow-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Empty.
Amanda Doyle:
… wondering
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Longing.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
So there’s the regret that’s like, ouch, hot, searing. And I think that I live with all those kinds of regrets. Most of my regrets are white hot, searing, I just touched a hot stove, because I remember this thing that I did. Some way I treated someone, way I acted that is so discordant with who I believe I am now. And the other one is, “What if I would have?” And of course that’s empty, because you don’t have any evidence for it, it’s just a what if.
Abby Wambach:
Like the road not taken or something.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, exactly.
Abby Wambach:
Oh.
Glennon Doyle:
The road not taken.
Abby Wambach:
Okay, okay.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Okay.
Amanda Doyle:
And I think that hot, searing thing you talked about, the way that overlaps with regret is it’s so painful it kind of knocks the wind out of us to remember the people that we were who did those terrible things. There’s a lot of remorse, because a lot of people were in pain because of the way we acted. But there’s a lot of regret because that person who did that thing does not match who we believe we are now. It’s the pain of that.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s kind of having to come to peace with the fact that you were different than-
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, but isn’t that-
Amanda Doyle:
… you believe you are now.
Glennon Doyle:
In some way, I feel like, I want to get to what our regrets are in a minute, but it feels like regret in one way is tied to triumph. In one way, it’s tied to progress, it’s tied to a human who is better today than she was then. We’re all doing the best we can, basically, right? So if I am feeling searing regret from something that I did before, that’s because now I can see, now I’m the type of person who would never do that, which is proof of growth. If I were the same person back then, I wouldn’t have that searing regret, because I’d have the same consciousness that I had back then. So in that way, isn’t even having that bucket of regret proof-
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
… of growth.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, and-
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Yep. I love that.
Amanda Doyle:
Ocean Vuong talks about that. And I think that, in fact, the only way to not have regret is either to never examine your life, to never look back and see is any of that out of alignment with who I am or to never realign your life, to never be changing, because then the person you were then is still the person that you are.
Glennon Doyle:
So the whole cultural idea of, “I don’t live with regret,” or “No regrets,” is basically like, “Well, great. You’re a sociopath.”
Amanda Doyle:
It is one of the diagnostic indicators of a sociopath, is the inability to experience regret. The other people who don’t experience regret are the people who have had prefrontal cortex brain damage.
Abby Wambach:
Interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s actually an indicator of a mind and a life that is working well, is to have regret.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s proof of two things, one, that you’ve grown, because of the searing thing. And two, that you made some freaking decisions. You made some decisions in your life.
Abby Wambach:
That’s what I’m going to say. How many freaking decisions is a human being making in the course of a day. And we are not 100% all the time, ever. Every day we’re making decisions that are wrong. Now, they might not be earth shattering or life altering, but they do change the course of your life. But I want to learn about what you specific regrets are.
Amanda Doyle:
I have never felt less prepared for a podcast, because I was thinking a lot about what I would say and I realized that none of what I was preparing to say was actually as real as what a tiny a little bit ago I decided-
Glennon Doyle:
Whoa.
Abby Wambach:
Whoa.
Amanda Doyle:
… I was going to say. Regret is something you can talk about at a pretty surface level or you can kind of make it tidy. Or it’s something that, in some ways, is the most painful thing to talk about and I was imagining a listener listening to some of the things that I was going to say and feeling shitty, because feeling like, “Oh my regret is worse than that regret.” So I just decided to talk about one of the things that will wake me up in the middle of the night and still makes me feel pretty ashamed. When I was in middle school and high school I had a pretty dysfunctional long-term relationship, and it wasn’t social isolation abuse, but it was on that spectrum sort of, where he didn’t like my friends, wasn’t consistently kind to me, was kind of withholding. We didn’t have shared friends. And I’m not trying to excuse my behavior, but I’m setting the context up. For some reason, I believed that I had to have fidelity to him over the other things in my life.
Amanda Doyle:
And I remember I had been best friends with my best friend, all through elementary school, all through seventh and eighth grade and she was just the best. I mean, she was fiercely loyal, she was better to me than she should have been, she was just radically wonderful, and I loved her very much. And I started to treat her badly and I remember it all came to a head when I was in ninth or 10th grade at this point and I was in a friend’s basement and my best friend was in the bathroom with me, trying to talk to me about why I was treating her like shit. And she was just trying to get me to, basically, give any indication that I valued our friendship and I just remember her, she was bawling, and she was so sad and she loved me so much, she was talking to me and being so vulnerable and honest and I, for some reason in my head, believed that I had to declare my undivided loyalty to my boyfriend and it was almost like it was a grand inquisition and he was my god.
Glennon Doyle:
You were denouncing everything but him?
Amanda Doyle:
I was denouncing everything but him. And I remember, over and over, saying, almost with the pride of a zealot, saying, “I will always choose him over you. I will choose him over you.” Literally saying those words as she wept with nothing but the last years of treating me 100 times better than ever treated me. And I remember walking out of that room feeling like I had fought the good fought, like I had done what I was supposed to do. And I can see her face perfectly and when I think about what she deserved, just as a human, but what she had earned from me, for everything she did for me and the way she loved me, it was cruel. I was cruel. I just can’t even identify with the kind of person that would be so cruel and so confused about what to value in life and so misguided. And there was another friend outside the door who heard the whole thing and, obviously, my mistreatment of my best friend changed us and it changed my relationship with all of my friends.
Amanda Doyle:
And I eventually went off to college and there I got unconfused about things. My entire world became centered around my friends and none of my identity had anything to do with boys or men at all and some part of me kind of always thought I’d have time to make who I was now redeem who I was then. And then, the year after I graduated from college, you arrived at my doorstep from three hours away and you had driven there to tell me that she had died. We were 21 years old, she had been struck by a drunk driver and she died. And that was 20 years ago last month that you came to tell me that, Glennon. And I think about that a lot, because one of the best people to love me the best in my life was one of the people that I treated the worst in my life and she died without me never having acknowledged that or made amends for that. And I always thought I’d have time to do that and I didn’t and there’s nothing that I can do about it.
Glennon Doyle:
Death makes is so clear. Regret is when it feels like there’s no more redemption possible. There’s no way to redeem it. Is that how it feels? And is there anything about that regret… how does it feel like your life would’ve been different and better had you not done that? You’d still have those friends maybe, that whole thing wouldn’t be a…
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, regret, I guess, sometimes it has that remorse about the way your cruelty impacted others, but it always has a sense of loss for yourself and I think that I didn’t know, then, in that room that day that the best thing I’d even have was the love and loyalty and devotion of my friends. And so, I was staring at that and telling her no and that I didn’t want that and that I declared this other thing more valuable and, as a result, I lost that gift from her and that gift of friendship. I mean, that whole group of friends is still very, very close and they have a beautiful relationship that I will never have with them, because I chose not to.
Amanda Doyle:
And they rightfully chose not to do it with me, because I was incapable of it. And so, I’m very thankful that those are the kinds of relationships I have with my friends from college, but it is a loss. I don’t get to go back and recast that history and I think we just think there’s an abundance of time to make things make sense, and that is a thing that will never make sense. The only good part about it is the regret we feel most when we are just baffled at thinking about something we did, is the fact that we’re baffled about thinking about it.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
The person that we were then, who could do such a thing, is not the person we are now, who couldn’t.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it’s so interesting and weird and I don’t know why this is and I don’t have any reasons for it, but when I think of my most searing regrets, they’re flashes and one of them is a time when you told me something in high school. You came home from a thing and you were sitting on mom’s bed and you told me something and you were really, really hurt and hurting and it was a time where you sit down and you stay for hours and you talk it through and whatever and I was like, “Okay, great. I’m sorry. I’m going to pick up my boyfriend at the airport and I’m going to get wasted,” and just left you to deal with it on your own. And then, another one I was thinking was one time when you visited me in college and I was wasted and I just left you with this dude who was totally unsafe and I knew it. And a third, that I woke up last night thinking about, was in a fraternity basement where this freaking jackass said something horrific to one of my dearest friends about the way that she looked and I looked at her and looked at him and just said nothing. I was clearly aligned with this dude.
Glennon Doyle:
And I just think it’s interesting have to do with abandoning the love our sister or women and aligning with men who didn’t deserve it and abandoning the women who did. When you talk to me about her looking at you, it’s like you were in a cult. It makes me think of all of the poor parents who look at their kids or all their whatever and are like, “Where are you?,” and you’re gone, allegiance is over here and any connection with you, by the way, sister, that’s classic abuse behavior. People who are abused do think that they’re loyalty to the abuser is everything and that any connection outside of that is disloyalty. But I just think it’s strange that both of us were so willing to abandon love for the kind of protection. I don’t know. It’s interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. It is interesting.
Abby Wambach:
One of the regrets that I have is I kicked my very best friend out of the house that he was living in back when I was living in Los Angeles and this is when I was still using and he was the most important person in my life. And I was screaming and I was yelling and I was throwing things, and I was doing it in this dehumanizing way and it was about power and it was about my inability to properly communicate. And so, I didn’t say any of the things that bothered me for the year or whatever, leading up to this moment. I didn’t do any personal work, and so it just came to a head and I just blew up. And he literally had to get into a car that day, pack his shit up, and drive to Florida from California, because he had nowhere else to go.
Glennon Doyle:
Have you guys ever talked about that?
Abby Wambach:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
Is there anything-
Abby Wambach:
No.
Glennon Doyle:
… that you feel like… I just wonder, is there anything you haven’t done, because I’ve never talked to you about those things that I just brought up. I have these regrets that I truly am just hoping that no one remembers. That is my, maybe people don’t remember that thing and maybe… but is there anything in your mind that you feel like might relieve some of the regret from that situation with your best friend, because it’s interesting that you’ve never talked about, that I’ve never talked about it, that you’ve never… I just wonder, is there something, like this idea that these feelings that we have inside of us are so scary when we keep them in, but then when we let them out in the light, do they loosen? Is there anything that you think you can do that you haven’t done that would be a release valve for the pressure of that regret?
Amanda Doyle:
Well, I think part of it is right now. I mean, the fact that she has passed is kind of like that temptation to hide from it and to not take account is even more possible to try to recast that whole situation, rather than what it was. And so, I think part of it is saying it out loud. I have thought about the friend who was sitting outside the door who heard everything. I have thought about reaching out to her to just acknowledge what she heard and say, “I know how awful it was.” And I think that we say, had we not gone through that how good we would have been.
Amanda Doyle:
I think about that with her, too. She was so deeply good and had such a short, tremendous life, and I think what if I had been good to her? What if I had been the friend that she deserved to have in her short life? How would her life have been different? Because no doubt, she made beautiful friendships and beautiful love and impact in her short life, but I wasn’t part of that. Part of me thinks in the redemption of it, it’s acknowledging the fact that, hopefully, in the best case, we are evolving folks whose ability to be in alignment with ourselves is increasing-
Glennon Doyle:
Increasing.
Amanda Doyle:
… and changing over time.
Glennon Doyle:
Is increasing. Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
And-
Glennon Doyle:
That’s all we can hope for.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
And also acknowledging that if that is the case, then the integration that we have now is not the integration we will have in five years, in 10 years, in 15 years. What is what I’m doing right now, in my life right now, something that in 10 years, in five years, in 15 years, I will say, “I don’t even recognize myself in that”? And how do I expedite that change now, because if there’s anything that that story tells me, it’s that we can’t count on the five and the 10 and the 15.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
… to have enough time to-
Glennon Doyle:
That’s-
Amanda Doyle:
… change.
Glennon Doyle:
… an amazing way to use regret as a guiding principle for now. Because there’s this one way of dealing with regret where it’s just directionally unhelpful. It’s like this playing of an old song over and over again, like a security blanket that keeps you from engaging in the now, that keeps you from singing a new song that is too safe, that is too comfortable, it’s too easy. Or it’s the wrong kind of hard. Regret from the past keeps you from even this moment and then this moment will become the past and then you will regret this moment and then you’re entire life you’re living not now. But there’s a way to use it that’s like, I do wonder, it is curious, sister, that I think if people would list three things about you fiercely, almost insanely loyal, is probably one of the things to the women in your life and it’s just interesting that maybe that searing pain has-
Abby Wambach:
Informed her.
Glennon Doyle:
… informed you.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
What a beautiful way to look at life, in terms of evolution. And to prepare ourselves for a future of regret, because we have chosen to truly evolve to become more integrated with ourselves year over year over year, because who we are today is hopefully different than who we are in a year, five, 10 years. And so, I guess it is the hope for me that I’m going to regret a whole bunch of shit in 10 years that I’m doing right now, because I am not the evolved person that I dream of becoming in those 10 years.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, absolutely. And keeping in mind the finality and the brevity of life, it’s actually an ancient spiritual tradition. Many cultures keep skulls everywhere, keep a skull on their desk, keep a skull. It’s seeded in this idea of regret. Keep in mind that this will all end.
Abby Wambach:
The future.
Glennon Doyle:
And so-
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
… don’t wait, because right now… And I think about this idea of regret as being kind of perverted by capitalistic ideas, too. It’s like we think of regret as, “I have to do the big thing.”
Abby Wambach:
Right now.
Glennon Doyle:
“I have to do the big thing.” Like, “Am I successful enough? Am I whatever enough?” And I was thinking this morning about this poem that so many people over and over again reference because it’s the seed of regret and it’s the Mary Oliver, I won’t read the whole thing, but she’s looking at a grasshopper in the grass and she says, “Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is, I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon. Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Glennon Doyle:
And over and over again this poem is used to make people feel like they should’ve gone to college or they should’ve gone to this one thing or they missed their opportunity to be a famous singer or whatever. And Mary Oliver… it’s like our friend Jessica Faith Kantrowitz talks about so beautifully. This poem is used to shame people into doing more what Mary Oliver is saying is that you’re life is too important and wild and singular not to do less.
Amanda Doyle:
Her answer to what to do with your one wild and precious life is to walk around a field and stare at grasshoppers.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. It’s like-
Amanda Doyle:
That’s what Jessica was saying.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. It’s to be idle and blessed. Did I notice how beautiful everything is right now? At the death bed there’s these studies about what people most regret on their death bed and it’s never I didn’t have enough money or I didn’t do the big career. It’s, “I wish I had let myself be happy.” I wish-
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. Bronnie-
Glennon Doyle:
… I had been more myself. What are they? Do you have them?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, Bronnie Ware, she’s an Australian palliative care nurse and she walked a lot of people to their deaths and she wrote Five Regrets of the Dying and those five regrets were: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one others expected of me; I wish I hadn’t worked so hard; I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings; I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends; and I wish that I’d let myself be happier.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
I mean that’s a gut punch.
Glennon Doyle:
All we can do is try that today. That’s all we can do. The only way to avoid death bed regret is just try to avoid bedtime regret. Let’s go to a question.
Amy:
My name is Amy. I love this podcast. I recently got divorced from my husband of almost 10 years and we share two small kids. I immediately started dating a woman for the first time and fell for her really hard. This was a long-distance relationship, but somehow we were able to make it work for at least a few months. I was reading Untamed at the time and felt really connected to your story. I just keep coming back to the same thing, I kept missing my husband, our family, our life together. The woman and I broke up. It was clear I wasn’t ready, but my friends remind me over and over again the reasons I left my marriage. I’m just really in my feelings right now, if you can’t tell, I’m feeling compelled to run back to my old life, as if that’s even possible. I guess my hard question is, when you leave something that didn’t feel right, where’s the line between missing something and regretting something? This feels too hard to be right and it feels like regret, but I know we can do hard things. I would love your thoughts.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, Amy. I love this question so much from Amy. I hate this for Amy, because you can just feel the pain. You can just feel-
Abby Wambach:
Doubt.
Amanda Doyle:
Doubt, pain, the road not taken. There’s two roads and you take this one and then you spend so much time imagining what life would look like had you taken the other one and replaying it and replaying it. And Karen Schulzas a TedTalk called Don’t Regret Regret and she talks about how just even the concept of regret requires two things. It requires agency, right? So you go back, there’s that fork in the road and you have chosen one. You have made that choice, that’s your agency. And then, it requires imagination, because in order to regret, you have to go back into the fork in the road, imagine having taken the other road and then fully play that out. And so, you are necessarily comparing your reality and the pain that you’re in right now with the imagined reality of where you would have been in the other road.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Imagined reality.
Amanda Doyle:
And I think that we have to really think carefully about misconstruing our pain and our loss and even our remorse for the pain we caused other people and just generally how conflicted and shitty reality is with the idea that if we were on the other path, we wouldn’t have any of those things.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Because we have to be humble enough to admit that the imagined reality is not actually reliable and we, likely, would have a lot of the same pain and confusion and hurt were we on the other path.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Yes. And I’m imagining myself as Amy, so I’m trying to think of this would be like if I divorced Craig, fell in love with Abby, and then Abby and I broke up, right?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
Uh, I hate this story.
Glennon Doyle:
I know. But I’m trying to put myself where Amy is.
Abby Wambach:
I know, but I hate it. I’m just saying. This is a terrible alternate reality.
Glennon Doyle:
And in this terrible alternate reality, I could imagine looking at Craig and the kids and being like, “What did I do?” There’s this picture that somebody sent me, my friend Sarah sent me, actually, and it’s this woman and she’s just jumped off a cliff, okay? And there’s this big hand and it’s like the universe and the universe is the one that pushes her off the cliff and then there’s this big hand underneath her that she hasn’t hit yet and that is also the universe. So the universe is going to push her off the cliff and the universe is going to catch her at the bottom of the cliff, but the fall is so effing scary and you don’t know that the universe is going to catch you, so when you’re in the free fall the temptation is to turn around and climb… claw your way back up-
Abby Wambach:
Cling.
Glennon Doyle:
… to the cliff that you just got pushed off of. And right now Amy is in the free fall. She jumped for a reason. She left that cliff for a reason, that’s what her friends are trying to tell her. Like, “Remember, remember, remember.” But it’s just she hasn’t been caught yet. But I think that what I would say to Amy with humility and fear and what the eff do I know, is what I really want to say to her is just keep trusting the fall.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, and trust that the universe is going to catch you, not that it’s somebody else.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Abby Wambach:
It sounds like she’s anticipating a person, whether it be her husband or ex-husband or the girlfriend or somebody else or some other thing in the future to catch her, it’s herself-
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the becoming.
Abby Wambach:
… and the universe-
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the becoming.
Abby Wambach:
… that she is going to be able to stand on her own two feet. One of the things you said is people always asked, early on, well if this doesn’t work out, would you consider going back to Craig? And you always said, “I can’t unknow what I know now.”
Glennon Doyle:
The climbing back to the cliff is trying to unknow. The moving backwards is trying to unknow what became clear to you at once. But the knowing has led you to do something so scary and hard that you really do believe that it would be easier and better not to know, but the thing is, I did that, you go back and you still effing know. So then it’s the wrong kind of hard.
Amanda Doyle:
And I think people think if they have pangs of the regret, that’s an indication that they made the wrong choice and I think that that is not… I think that’s unhelpful to us. It’s unnecessarily confusing, because if we view regret as an inevitable consequence of making a tough decision, then we won’t confuse regret with the fact that we made the wrong decision. There’s this reality that say you miss your flight. If you miss your flight by three minutes, you will regret your decisions that morning leading to the missed flight more than if you miss that flight by 45 minutes. And the reason is you were so close.
Abby Wambach:
Right.
Amanda Doyle:
So you miss the flight either way. It’s irrelevant, it doesn’t matter, you’re not getting there. But you have so many more emotions around the three minute miss than the 45. And that, to me, is evidence that, for Amy, that’s just all of your big pangs of fear and discomfort and anxiety are proving that that was a hard decision that you made.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
All of these things that point to, but this was a good guy, but this was whatever it was, oh but this didn’t work out over here ultimately, so that indicates I made the wrong choice. No, what you’re looking at is the three minutes.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
The plane was leaving anyway.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
You were flying off that cliff, that was your decision.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
The pain that you’re feeling is the fact that it was a three minute miss-
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
… instead of a 45. And that doesn’t make that decision any less correct, it just means it’s harder emotionally.
Abby Wambach:
Yep.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. And I want to just emphasize that there’s a difference, I think, one I’m figuring out right now, that there’s a difference between pain and regret. All pain is not regret. When I see my kids struggle because they’re going between two houses-
Abby Wambach:
I was literally just going to say this.
Glennon Doyle:
… when I watched them get packed up and I’m like, “It sucks. It’s sad.” You think, and this could be my conditioning, but you think, “This is not the way kids are supposed to live. They’re not supposed to be trekking back and forth and all their stuff and their…” I feel pain.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, same.
Glennon Doyle:
I have had to learn that it’s not regret that I’m feeling. It’s not, “Oh, I wish I would have done it differently.” It’s just the acknowledgment that things can be hard and painful and still be right. We are in a culture where if we feel like if we have made the right decisions, everything will be easy and pain-free, because we’re imagining the other path as pain-free, but that idea that, Amy, it can hurt and that hurt can still not be regret.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, both things can be true at the same time here.
Amanda Doyle:
The only things that are pain-free are the imagined things.
Abby Wambach:
Oh.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, right? That’s so good.
Abby Wambach:
Which ones are you going to trust? That’s good. I love that.
Glennon Doyle:
Your real experience or your pretend, imaginary experience? Let’s hear from Beth.
Beth:
Hi. My name is Beth and I had a question for Glennon. I was bulimic for about four years, from freshman year in high school until freshman year in college. And then, after that I had probably a little bit of anorexia and then a lot of healing and recovery. And during that time I just, probably, made not the greatest decisions or followed my heart or, probably, wasn’t great at relationships. So it was a 10 year period where I felt like I just missed out on life and all the things that people go through during those years about learning about themselves. So I just have a lot of guilt and remorse for those years and I struggle with letting that go and I also feel like I want to explain to people, from my past, what I was going through. But I think that’s more just validating that I made mistakes. So I’m just wondering what you did to let go of that time where you were bulimic and just to forgive yourself and move on and let that go. I love your podcast and I love listening and thank you for doing this and it makes a light in my day.
Amanda Doyle:
#same, Beth. #same.
Glennon Doyle:
#same. Yeah, I mean, I relate to everything that Beth said except for the last sentence, which is what Beth is trying to get to because someone has told her the words, “let go and move on.” Those are two things that somebody told us we have to get to. I don’t know how to let go, I don’t know how to move one. I’m just trudging along with my whole entire self all the time every day. What I do know is that… and I don’t know how relatable this is going to be for people who weren’t lost to addiction for so long, but I became bulimic when I was 10 and then I didn’t get sober until I was 25. And so, most of my formative years I was just lost to addiction. My whole life was this little world that I created, which I could control, which was addiction. And so, I was basically dropped out of life. And so, what I have figured out in this second part of my life is that I’ve missed a lot. Okay? To the point where I feel embarrassed a lot of the time. I don’t know a lot of things that other people know, and I mean that in terms of facts-
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, I get that.
Glennon Doyle:
Facts, right? I don’t know a lot about freaking geography and science and history and all that stuff that people were learning during that time. I also don’t know a lot about friendship, a lot of things that how many times a day am I to you, in a joking way, but I’m like, “When did people learn this? When did everyone learn this?” And it’s funny on a daily basis, but on a spiritual basis, it’s a little bit terrifying, because I’m like, “No, seriously. When did everybody learn this?” Now, what I want to say about that is that I have come to value, to find, the value in that for myself. And that is… what I believe to be true is that there is something about that negative thing that people sense and feel in my writing and in my soul and in the way I experience life, which is this childlike, not childish, childlike awe and beginner’s mind, like I’m seeing the world for the first time. So all I’m saying to Beth is, I don’t know how we move on or-
Abby Wambach:
Or if we even do. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
But I do know that there can be something beautiful and special that comes from that being gone, and that is being fresh.
Abby Wambach:
It rings really true, the embarrassing bit. When I was training for the marathon and running with some of my former teammates and we would run together and then the actual marathon they would tell stories and I would just kind of like, “Yeah,” I didn’t remember many of the things that they talked about, which was really embarrassing. And I didn’t say it in the moment, but here I am saying it. And then, it just makes me think of my time on the national team. It makes me wonder what my life would have been-
Glennon Doyle:
Had you been sober?
Abby Wambach:
… had I been sober during my career. And yeah, I mean, it’s a regret, it’s a complete knowing that I would’ve been a better soccer player. I would’ve had better relationships, I would’ve been a better leader. I bet our national team would’ve won more games. Being sober makes me understand that I put up with less bullshit. And I do not accept certain ways of being interacted with like I know that I did back then. I know, deep down, that I could’ve done more and I feel terrible about that. And this is not a perfectionism thing. I just know it.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s real for you. Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
In some ways, I think that I probably was drinking, because I didn’t know how to handle all of it. I didn’t know how to handle men talking to me in misogynistic ways, because they thought I was one of them, I was one of the boys. I couldn’t handle conversations with leaders, with presidents of organizations, CEOs or organizations, talking to me about pay and equal pay and equitable pay and me just taking the very least. It feels like that’s what I did. Trying to get a deal done, trying to get a collective bargaining agreement done. I didn’t fight as hard as I should have and it’s because I wasn’t the kind of person that I am now. I wasn’t sober and I know that and I do have a lot of regret about that. And I’m just so glad that’s there’s probably some women that are fighting that battle now.
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s go to our pod squadder of the week. For me, it’s you. I love you.
Sarah:
Hi Glennon, Abby and sister, this is Sarah-
Kate:
… and this is Kate.
Sarah:
We are dear friends and we are both mental health therapists. And we’re sitting on the couch right now together feeling like a mess and holding hands. And we work with clients who are dealing with all sorts of things and, I mean, I’m personally just having a hard time holding all of it and we were talking and wanted to call you to say hello, because we love you. Thank you so much for sharing your story. It means the world to me.
Abby Wambach:
Just sitting on the couch holding hands?
Glennon Doyle:
I mean-
Abby Wambach:
That’s what we’re doing. I love that.
Glennon Doyle:
Sarah and Kate, first of all, god, goddess, whatever, bless the people who are the mental health therapist. I mean, you saved my life. You saved my life Sarah and Kate. And for the people who hold everyone else’s stuff and then have to find a way to hold their own stuff. I don’t know, I don’t have anything to say other than thank you, Sarah and Kate. And to everyone else who is listening, life is really, really hard. Find somebody’s hand to hold this week, even if it’s your own.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
We can do hard things. We love you.