How Glennon Transforms Sadness into Power

February 22, 2024

Glennon Doyle:

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Abby is already mocking me. Did you want to say something, or are you just going to sit there and pretend like you’re me and make faces?

Abby:

I love you so much.

Glennon Doyle:

Are you feeling a little spicy today?

Abby:

I think a little bit, yeah.

Glennon Doyle:

Okay. A little chippy today?

Abby:

Yeah, I’m feeling a little chippy.

Glennon Doyle:

Oh God, help me.

Abby:

I love it.

Glennon Doyle:

See, you guys only get this for an hour, but I have it for the rest of the day.

Abby:

You love it.

Glennon Doyle:

All right, here’s what we’re doing. This is going to be interesting. You know what? Let’s just kick it off. Let’s hear from Allison.

Allison:

Hi Glennon, sister, and Abby. My name is Allison and here is my hard thing. The thing that I want us to discuss as a community, something that I feel is missing in the mental health sphere, is how do you love the darkest, saddest version of yourself? The stage that I’m currently in is there’s a lot of really wonderful moments, but they’re broken up by the lowest feelings I think I’ve ever had. For the very first time, I’m struggling to love myself. I just don’t see any part of myself when I’m that low or that sad. I just don’t know what to do. So if we could touch on that, and if there’s anything you guys can facilitate in that conversation, that would be very helpful, I think for me, and hopefully many others. Thank you for all you do. Love your podcast. Never miss it.

Glennon Doyle:

Okay, so first of all, I will start by saying that this question from Allison, we were going to answer in a previous episode, and then we didn’t get to it. The reason I’m saying that is because I have made a rule for myself that I’m going to come to these Q&As fresh without reading them ahead of time, and the reason is because if I know them ahead of time, I obsess. I worry about the person who’s asking the question. I decide that it’s the most important thing in the entire world, and I can think of nothing else. So, we have stopped doing that, except that I read this question several days ago. So, I have not stopped thinking about Allison.

Abby:

So you failed.

Glennon Doyle:

Right. So, we are gathered here today for Allison and for all of the people who have the sadness. First of all, we know, because of lo so many years of talking about depression/sadness/lowness, that there is the science of it. Right? There’s the science, the serotonin, the dopamine, the missing parts of our brain, whatever. There’s the pills, the medicine, the science.

Amanda Doyle:

Let me guess, are we talking about something else today-

Glennon Doyle:

We’re talking-

Amanda Doyle:

… that is not that?

Glennon Doyle:

We’re not talking about the science of it.

Amanda Doyle:

Okay, great.

Glennon Doyle:

I feel like there is not enough talk about the poetry of it, the spirituality of it, the gifts of it, the thing that this is. So that’s what we’re going to do today. I feel like I can tell from Allison’s question that she has the sadness. That is not the correct word. We’re going to talk about the language around it.

It feels to me that Allison has the kind of sadness that is not always directly related to something that’s situational. If someone says to me, “What are you sad about?” That is the most annoying question I can possibly imagine. What do you mean? What am I human about? It’s too much to answer. So, I’m going to talk about sadness in a few different ways. Some might resonate, some might not. I have never been able to land on a description of this condition that stays the same, or is the true for everyone, or is even true for me the following year, so I’m just going to talk about it in a few different ways.

When I’ve been thinking about Allison and this question for the last few days, I have been thinking the sadness, the sadness, is it sadness? Is that the right word for this? So, what I’ve been calling it to myself the last few days is a godness. Okay? It’s a godness. It’s an awareness. It’s a deep paying attention that many of us are born with.

I actually really like the word “paying” here, because there’s a cost to it. Right? There’s a beauty of it, a way of being that is imperative to cultures. People are born this way into cultures, and they are people who feel what other people won’t feel or don’t feel, and they are a little weird, and in most cultures they have a name. They’re called clergy, shaman. In our culture, we tend to put them away sometimes. But it is true that these people tend to notice things that help the culture. They point out, “There are canaries in the coal mine.” Okay?

Abby:

Mm-hmm.

Glennon Doyle:

Now, lots of times people describe this sadness as something from the outside that comes in, so it’s like a visitor. Always people describing it as a visitor. So you’re walking around having your human experience, and the sadness just descends, or, actually, I think of this as, do you remember the movie Ghost where poor Whoopi Goldberg would just be minding her own business, and then Sam would possess her from the outside in, and she would suddenly become Sam. It was like the ghost had come inside her, and that was it, and she was gone, and that is what sadness can feel like. It’s completely and totally a possession. You’re kind of minding your own business and suddenly you go through, you know the car washes?

Abby:

Mm-hmm.

Amanda Doyle:

I do know what the car wash is.

Glennon Doyle:

You’re just driving, and then they yell at you to come, and then you just have to stop driving. Just hands off the wheel. It takes over. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. This is the sadness. You are not in control anymore.

Abby:

Yes.

Glennon Doyle:

There is also, I have felt very often it’s less of something that comes and haunts me like a visitor and more like I’m the visitor, and the sadness is a room inside of me. Like your body is a house and there is one room inside of me that is a big room, and that is where the knowing lives. The knowing of how beautiful and terrible and temporary and fleeting everything is, and it lives there. The remembering. Lots of decades of my life, I have spent just keeping it locked. Just like my job is to know that that wild ruin is there.

Abby:

Do not enter.

Glennon Doyle:

Do not enter. Caution tape, all the things, your job is to just walk by it lightly on tiptoes. Then I started letting myself visit the room. So, this is art. This is like, “Oh, maybe this is a good place to visit. Maybe it is there in my house for a reason.” So, I would go there and then leave quickly. Because that was only for the art, and now we have to go back to the regular world where people don’t want to talk about this shit all the time, so we’re going to tidy it up and leave. Right?

But now it feels like it is a room that I have emptied and I have put stuff from that room in every single room of my inner home. I have arranged the knowing in every single room, and I live among the knowing, and it’s beautiful and difficult, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I just live among the knowing all the time, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

Amanda Doyle:

So you’re not compartmentalizing the sadness and the knowing, and the deepest existential woe is now in the joy room also and the peace and comfort room. There’s stuff from that place in every room. It’s everywhere.

Abby:

Open floor plan.

Glennon Doyle:

It’s an open floor plan. Because, we like to entertain. I think everybody on HGTV likes to entertain. Liars.

So, Allison, I do not believe that you can feel anything without a deep knowing of its opposite. For example, if somebody is born in a place where the sun shines every single day of their life, and they have seen nothing, they have experienced nothing but sunshine, and someone says to them, “Aren’t you grateful that it’s sunny today?” They are not going to have any idea what you mean. Why would you be grateful for the presence of the sun if that’s the water you’re swimming in, if you don’t even know what a cloudy day is? So a feeling depends on the knowledge of its opposite for its existence.

Abby:

That’s really fascinating.

Glennon Doyle:

Here is what I think about the sadness, the godness, the awareness, that thing that some of us live with. I believe that that godness, that sadness, exists in those of us who were born with an inner vision, who have a feeling, a knowing, a certainty of the way things could be, of the true and the beautiful. Okay?

The sadness is the distance between the vision inside of us and what is visible to us on the outside, in our families, in our communities, in our world, in our lives. If we did not have a beautiful knowing, we would not feel so sad that that thing is not yet manifest. It’s a tension between what we feel like could be, should be, was supposed to be, and what is.

Because of this, the people that have the sadness can become warriors for truth and beauty and peace and love. This sort of sadness, this knowing, this looking at the world and saying, “Ah, I have such an ache that that’s the way it is. It’s intolerable to me, because I have this vision for the way it could be.”

So, Together Rising, we’ve been involved in Palestine, in Gaza, for years, way before this last tragedy.

Amanda Doyle:

Since 2021.

Glennon Doyle:

Right. We recently did another fundraiser for Gaza, for Rafah, because of the thousands and thousands of babies and kiddos and human beings who are starving and being bombed there, and people have never been more furious. There is fury surrounding the commitment to service there. People keep saying many versions of, “You don’t get it. It’s complicated. It’s too complicated for you. You are oversimplifying this, and it’s too complicated.”

I think that I understand that, but I also think that when we overcomplicate things, we miss the simple part of it. I think when they say to me, “You are being too simple, this is complicated,” I want to say to them, “Yes, but you are being too complicated, and this is simple,” because I see babies and children and human beings starving and being bombed. The sadness, the godness, the knowing inside of me will not look at that and say, “Oh, that’s complicated.” Because there are some things that are not complicated, and that is that starving babies should be fed.

This is all connected, and what I want to say is, “Do what you must do. Say what you must say so that you can sleep at night.” I will do the same, but as for me and my house, we will keep feeding starving babies. Period. Moving on.

We do not have enough words for the sadness. I used to teach third grade, and I had this little girl whose mother died, and we watched her go through the whole thing. It was just a year of sadness with this little one. I remember sitting and talking about her feelings in class and having this conversation with her that went something like this.

We were talking about sadness as blue, and so we were using paint, which is now a top of mind, of course. We would put blue on the paper, and it was like, “That’s not it.” It is that. Sadness is blue. But it’s not all blue. That’s too simple. I can’t stand the simplicity of the words we have for emotions. Sadness is blue, but also layered, right? So this little girl, her mom died, but it was a hellacious year. It was so hard for her to deal with the death, so there was some relief in the death. So, yes, blue, but blue with yellow, because sad, but hope, right? Yes, blue, but blue with red, because she was so angry. “Look at all of these kids in my class, and why do they get to keep their fucking moms?” Anger. Blue, but red, too. Blue, yes, sadness, but with orange, too, because, “I’m so scared. Who’s going to take care of me now?” This sadness is layered.

Some of us are blue with sadness, but it’s got gold leaf inside of it. Because we’re sad because we lost something that we love so much, which means that we had the existence of that kind of gold love. The sadness only exists because of this beauty that we had, and we are shimmering now because of it. Would we let go of that? Is it sadness? Is that the word for it? Or this blue sadness, but with white woven into it, because it’s this feeling of temporariness, knowing it’s all going to end, so paying very close attention to it. Is that sadness? I don’t know. I wouldn’t know how to live without this thing that comes and washes me out sometimes. I feel whatever this is all the time, every minute, from the minute I wake up, to the minute that I go to bed.

Abby:

Do you feel it or do you know the presence is there?

Glennon Doyle:

I know it. I just know it all the time.

Abby:

Yeah. Because I do think that there’s something to be said about living amongst it and experiencing that as reality, so you’re like, “Oh yeah, there’s where it is.” Whereas when you were first probably encountered with a sadness, it overcomes you, and it becomes what you think, a part of you that you can never get rid of it. But, really, it’s like when you get used to it and you sit with it long enough, or you allow it in, or you place it on the couch or on a coffee table, you can look at it with some reverence in a way. But when I look at you, I don’t see you experiencing the feeling of sadness all the time. I see you witnessing it and sometimes experiencing it, but not a hundred percent of the time.

Glennon Doyle:

But that’s what I mean by this thing is not just something that we oversimplify it to mean. It’s not that I’m sitting here and going, “Boo hoo, I feel so …” That’s not it. It’s a reverence, and it’s something that you can tap into the second you see somebody else who’s in it. It’s a connection. In Untamed, I write about it as The Ache. It’s just this thing that is a meeting place. It’s the truest meeting place for human beings to meet each other. It’s not just sadness, because that’s where joy is, too. Right? It’s the crying, yes, but you know this, I cry way more often at beauty, because that’s what it is. It’s this transcendent gorgeousness of everything that makes us human.

Abby:

Don’t you think that the way that we interpret even the word sadness, it feels to me like we have put sadness in this bad box.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah, that’s what it is. Even the word is like, [inaudible 00:18:15].

Amanda Doyle:

But it shouldn’t be in this bad box, because even joy is not always good. Everything is everything, and I think that the way that we even classify it in our minds, we have to actually go deeper. Why are we classifying this as bad? So much of my upbringing was based on good and bad with religion, and so it is hard for me to especially … I mean, I’m doing a ton of shadow side work now, and I’m realizing, “Oh, there isn’t good and bad. That’s just a construct that I’ve made in my own mind, in my own psyche, on how to interpret these feelings.” We’ve put these feelings, like you said, in these little boxes, and we’re like, “Oh, I can’t go down that hallway, because there’s that scary door,” or whatever. But I think that this idea of living amongst all of your feelings is really interesting.

Glennon Doyle:

I have an idea about why we do that. I haven’t worked it out, but I think the more I allow myself to live in that place, the kinder I am, the more gentle I am, the more activisty I am, the braver I am, the more things are clear about what matters and what doesn’t, and I become dangerous. Seriously. Because, if we just bottle up this knowing of connection to each other, which is really, it is love. We would take care of each other, and that is not the way that the world works. That is not the way status quo keeps us productive, keeps us hustling, and keeps us paying attention to things that don’t matter. The more we lived in this place, it would stop the factory from running, because we would stop and take care of each other and ask questions.

Abby:

That’s right.

Glennon Doyle:

And we would stop saying it’s so complicated.

Amanda Doyle:

Well, I think it’s also because you have a real sense of efficacy, and that’s not by chance. You have developed that. You have created that. You created the nonprofit because of that. I mean, it is a privilege, but you also created it.

I think for a lot of people, it’s the same reason why we see horrible things on the news and social media, and we just as fast as humanly possible turn it off or swipe it out of the way, is because it is like you are teetering so close to a cliff, and if you put one foot over the edge, you will never come back from that.

I think a lot of that has to do with efficacy, which is your ability to see how you can have any impact. When you can’t connect your sadness, or your heartbreak, or your knowing that this is not how it’s supposed to be, to a way to make this more like it should be, that is not only deeply painful, it is a desperately inhumane place to be. It feels like love without a beloved. Right? It feels like the worst feeling. Because, if you don’t think there’s a way to plug in and make things better and you feel like the world is just one big dumpster fire and there’s nothing you can do to extinguish any of it, better to avoid looking at the fire, because what is just staring at the fire going to do?

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah, I don’t know how people just stare at the fire. I can’t do that. I can’t watch.

Amanda Doyle:

Well, they don’t stare at the fire. They run away from the fire and go back to their lives, because I think if people understood and knew and connected themselves with the ability to put even a little bit of that fire out, I believe in humans to do it, but we have intentionally structured our society in a way to say, “That fire is too complicated. You have no business approaching a fire. Let the people in charge of firefighting deal with that.”

Glennon Doyle:

Who are also the arsonists, but go ahead.

Amanda Doyle:

That you don’t understand, it’s too dangerous for you, and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it anyway. I think that has created that abyss where we have to just not look at it, because if we looked at it, it would break our souls.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah, I think that there is also a way of doing it that is not about action. Clearly, that helps us. But I do feel that there is a way of just allowing yourself to … Okay, here’s why I love painting. Because I am just feeling everything. These kindergarten paintings I’m making are really not helping anyone. Nobody is being fed by the thing.

Amanda Doyle:

Except maybe your art supply owner.

Glennon Doyle:

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. It’s just a place to stay human. All of these things, all of life, it does deserve to be felt. By the way, it’s not upsetting. I’m not feeling upset. I’m just, I don’t know, it feels like the spiritual processing of all of it. It feels like what I’m doing there is staying human. I’m not turning it off. I’m not continuing to whatever. I’m just-

Abby:

You’re deepening your relationship with all the parts of yourself while you paint. And that’s what I would say to Allison is when sadness shows up, because I relate to this, especially right now in my life, going through a bunch of grief, I have learned over the many weeks that I have never really had a relationship with the sadness part of me. And talking about IFS language, this part of me that I’ve exiled, that I’ve just kept locked away in that room, and what I’ve learned is sadness is kind of a cool bitch. This bitch has showed up, and she’s relentless right now. I’m like, “Wow, you’re pretty strong.” This is the first time I’ve really ever gone through sadness sober. And so what else is coming up are all of these unresolved sadnesses.

Glennon Doyle:

She’s like, “And another thing-“

Abby:

Yeah, exactly.

Glennon Doyle:

“And another thing we never talked about, and another thing we never talked about.”

Abby:

But what I’m learning is, oh, now that I can in my mind and in my body find a relationship and try to extend an olive branch, like, “Okay, what will you have me know today, sadness?” And the more I go deep into it, it’s just love.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah, that’s right.

Abby:

It really just is. It’s just information. I’m getting to a point, a little bit like you, I mean, I think you definitely have a longer-standing relationship with sadness than I do. I’m like, “Okay, I’m just going to see how you feel if I put you on this mantle so that I can look at you every day.” Not that I have control over whether I’m feeling sadness or not, but I’m looking at her and I’m like, “Okay, you exist.”

I think part of what my issue was all of these years is that I just pretended that my sadness didn’t exist, and I refused the relationship. But now that I’m experiencing this relationship, I think it’s funny that you’re talking about colors around this, because we do then attribute this coloredness, this shadow, this darkness with sadness.

That’s just actually not true for me. Because there is always the opposite, sadness is right there, and the joy is also right there. I know that this sounds fucking crazy and probably makes no sense. It’s just like the colors then can intermix to create prisms and rainbows, and that’s something that I’ve just been kind of baffled by. I know that it’s hard, but it’s possible to have a relationship with these harder parts to ourselves.

Glennon Doyle:

And if it’s blue, it’s blue like the ocean, it’s blue like the sky, it’s vastness, it’s everything. Allison said, “How do I love myself during those times?” I don’t know. I feel like maybe I just want to say, “Experiment with loving yourself the most at those times.” Those aren’t taking you away from life. Those are life. Don’t buy all of the words that people have attached to that part of you. Make your own words, make your own colors, make your own relationship with that.

Because there’s also this idea that I want to get to, which is that something is happening in you that is preparing you for the next thing. That sounds too simple, but that is how I have experienced these times. It’s a changing, whether it’s a ghost, whether it’s like a Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze situation, whether it’s a room that you have to visit, whether it’s colors, it’s something that is happening that is a bit of a training that you can’t know anything about, but suddenly something happens where you’re like, “Oh, I was becoming that for this.”

What I would say to everyone who is working on their relationship with this and who has an innate sense of sadness, godness, whatever it is, there’s a book you must get, and it’s called Letters to a Young Poet. It’s by Rilke, and it is a guidebook for those of us that are negotiating living with being the sadness in the godness. It’s a collection of letters from this poet named Rilke who was writing back and forth to a young student who went to the same college that Rilke had graduated from. This kid, this student, had heard of him in his classes, because he was the famous one who graduated that all the teachers talked about. He was a poet, and poets live in the sadness, and in the godness, and wrestle with the big questions of life there.

And so the poet started writing to him saying, basically, “Can you just talk to me about being human.” Not about how to adult, because everyone’s talking about that, but how to human. There’s a series of letters, and one is about the sadness. Okay, so I’m going to read to you, Allison. This is for you. Okay?

The kid’s name is Mr. Kappus. Side note, Rilke wanted to send his books of poetry to this poet, but he couldn’t, because he couldn’t afford his own books. He could not afford his own books of poetry, so he had to tell the kid that the kid could go buy them, but he couldn’t send them, because he didn’t own any of his own books.

Okay, this is the eighth letter. “I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus. Please ask yourself whether somewhere, some place deep inside your being,” Allison, “you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown. Everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

That is why the sadness passes the new presence inside us. The presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber, and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream, and we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us long before it happens.

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us. And the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate, and later on when it, quote ‘happens’, that is when it steps forth out of us to other people, we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being and that is necessary.”

Allison, in other words, what the sadness is making you, inside, soon will step out of you and meet your outer circumstances, and if you have been paying attention to what that sadness has done inside of you, when that future self steps out and does something brave and amazing, you will be able to look at her and say, “There she is. I knew her. She was inside of me before she was outside of me.” You must be frightened, Allison, if a sadness rises in front of you larger than any you have ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and over everything you do, oh, you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since, after all, you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside of you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.

If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien, so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness, and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you, so much is happening now, Allison. You must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering, for perhaps you are both. More, you are also the doctor who has to watch over herself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait, and that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must do now more than anything else.

Abby:

Wow.

Glennon Doyle:

You know>.

Amanda Doyle:

Yeah, I get it. I get it.

Glennon Doyle:

By the way, this is why I was thinking of all these things and I was like, “Oh, this is why I write, because these things sound so weird to say out loud.” If I had written all of that down, you would have read it and been like, “This is so normal.” But saying it in words out loud makes it sound so weird.

Abby:

Yeah. All I would say to Allison is just because sadness has shown up doesn’t mean that you don’t necessarily love yourself. Because the love is there. I’m now convinced that the love is in me. Accessing it is a different question. And so this just might be a pause for you to become something different, to show up for yourself. So, fear not, I don’t believe that the love that you have for yourself is gone forever. It’s still there now.

Glennon Doyle:

Maybe the part you’re not loving is the part that the world has told you you should be. Maybe when you are in the sadness you are not productive, you are not shiny, you are not any of what the world tells you is a lovable self. But maybe you don’t want to always be productive and shiny. Maybe you don’t think that is what it is to be human. Think about everything you are when you are sad, and maybe decide that that is what it is to be human and that that is worthy of love.

Abby:

Yeah.

Amanda Doyle:

To me, what you’re talking about brings together the inner work and the outer work, because if you have the sadness, you have it, and so your choices are either to go to it and be with it, or to really work hard to bypass it, squelch it, and pretend it doesn’t exist. Those are your only two choices. And so if you’re going to it, you are becoming more you.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes.

Amanda Doyle:

You are becoming more human.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes.

Amanda Doyle:

If you bypass it, it might be more convenient, it might be easier on you, your whole family, your work, and your whatever, but you are becoming less you and becoming less human when you’re bypassing it. It reminds me of A.J. Muste, the person who was protesting outside of the White House all during Vietnam. The people came to him and said, “Do you really think you’re going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?” which he did night after night after night, and he said, “Oh, I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”

Glennon Doyle:

Amen.

Amanda Doyle:

And that can be true if you’re staring at the fire of the world, and you’re just looking at it and letting your heart break, or you are standing out with a candle about it, or doing something that doesn’t actually quote/unquote “change the situation,” but you are becoming more human in yourself. You are honoring your own human dignity, even if you don’t understand how to help uplift the dignity of other humans who are suffering. In honoring your own humanity in that way, I think it helps, or you’re just slowly trying to smother that piece of you and allowing yourself to be changed in a way that makes you less you.

Glennon Doyle:

That’s how, when you’re privately letting the sadness in, this is what Rilke was talking about, I believe, maybe you’re not outside at the White House with a candle, maybe you’re sitting inside your house and you’re painting a picture, or you’re just sitting on your couch and you’re reading a book about Palestine and Israel. I don’t know. You’re just immersing and not looking away. You’re becoming something that when the outside world invites you to then take action, you will be ready. Every cell in your body will have changed enough to know exactly what is right in that moment, and you will step out, and you will do the thing, and you will go, “Wow. How did I know that so clearly?” Because the sadness was inside of you, and you were changing inside your house enough to know when the moment came, the new you that the sadness had its way with steps out of you, and you’re like, “Holy shit. There she is.”

Amanda Doyle:

Yeah, and that’s what the sickness is, right, that Rilke was talking about. When something is foreign in your body that doesn’t belong, you get sick, because your little warrior cells are out there getting rid of it. When something happens in the world or just the world on a good day, and it’s not what it should be, and we absorb that, because we do, and it makes us sick. That is correct.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes. Yes.

Amanda Doyle:

That is not the way it’s supposed to be. And so you’re really bent out of shape about that. Your body is tumultuous because of that, because you’re like, “Incorrect. This is not right. This is not the way it was supposed to be, and I know intuitively that it was supposed to be better than this.” That is right. You’re supposed to be sick by those things, and let it play through.

Glennon Doyle:

Sadness is purification. It’s purification. It’s alchemy. It’s a burning up of all of the poison that told you that this is okay, what’s happening in the world. Also, I think people get afraid of entertaining it, because they think it’s going to make them a drag, or it’s going to make them feel … That is not what happens. It feels much more powerful after it works its way through. Much more powerful, much more clear, much more joyful than it was before. Allison’s going to be like, “Well, for fuck’s sake, I’m not writing to them again.”

Amanda Doyle:

“Could you just do the science and the pills next time?”

Abby:

That would be helpful.

Glennon Doyle:

That too, Allison. Okay, well, it’s not called We Can Do Easy Things. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

Abby:

Bye.

Glennon Doyle:

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We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios.