Sister Act: Who is Amanda—and seriously, how does she know all the things?

August 19, 2021

Glennon Doyle:

Welcome back, everybody. Every once in a while, someone comes up to me and says, “I love your saying, “I can do hard things,” That helps me so much.” I always say, “Oh my gosh, that’s not what I said.” I never said, “I can do hard things.” I do not believe I can do hard things.

The important part of that is the we, the we can do hard things. That there’s this idea that all of us together make life somehow easier. That life is this extremely lonely thing that happens to us that we go through all alone. Remember, Tish came to me one night in my room, in the middle of the night and she said, “Mommy, I’m all alone in here.” I said, “No, honey. I’m right here. We’re right here. We’re right here.” She said, “No. I mean, inside my skin. I’m alone in here.” I know, which is the human condition. We’re also alone in here.

The we in we can do hard things reminds me that we’re alone together, that we’re doing these hard things next to and alongside, and at the same time as all these other people who are having this human experience. Actually, none of us are alone and sister and I have been talking about that concept so much in regard to this podcast because the most exciting part of this podcast, besides the fact that I get to talk to my sister every day about things that I don’t know, we maybe haven’t talked about in a decade or ever is the community that’s building around this podcast. The comments you are writing, the voicemails you are leaving, the posts you are making. The questions you are asking.

We just spend our entire afternoons reading what you have to say. This pod squad, I know, I love the word, the term pod squad. Sister thinks it’s the cheesiest thing in the world, whatever. We have been so excited about you that, well, as you know, we decided to do another episode every week just to celebrate this community. Just to talk about the things that you’re saying and asking. Here we are the pod squad episode. And sister?

Amanda Doyle:

Yes?

GD:

What I want to talk about first is this phenomenon that has been happening inside the We Can Do Hard Things pod squad community, and that is what I can only describe as an uprising, a bit of a rebellion. I’m so proud. It’s against me. It’s an uprising that is against me, but I’m so proud of it because it feels so cheetah-ish. That is that much of the pod squad is concerned. Some are furious about the fact that we on this pod, I refer to as sister. Everyone else refers to you as Sister.

Here’s one comment of 7 million from a pod squatter. “I think sisters should be called by her name. She is of course valuable as your sister, but she is valuable in her own identity as a human being with a name. Just my thoughts.”

AD:

It’s been amazing how many people have said that they feel like I am diminished by that. My favorite ones are the ones saying, “Don’t worry. I think they just say sister to protect her anonymity.” As if I am Angelina Jolie. Just walking around, I’m going to be bombarded. It has been interesting. People are upset by that.

GD:

I know. Listen, I have been thinking about it a lot because at first I thought, “Oh my gosh, what? They don’t understand.” I’ve been calling you sister since you were born.

AD:

Also, I call you sister as well. We tried to not do it for a minute. Then, we had to go back and edit every episode 100 times and try to eliminate half of the sisters, because it was so upsetting for people.

GD:

Which we still do.

AD:

Yes. It’s still a process.

GD:

It is interesting, I hear you is what I’m saying to the people. I hear you and your valiant attempt to free sister, I mean, Amanda. What I thought we could do today is let’s talk about you, Amanda Doyle. Human who was born Amanda Flaherty Doyle. Named after our fierce grandmother, Alice Flaherty.

Born Amanda, often in the beginning you were called Mandy. You hate that. My children still call you aunt Mandy, mom and dad call you Mandy. Some people call you Panders. Alison calls you Panders, Amanda Panda. I named my daughter after you, Amanda. Then tried to think of a nickname for her and changed her name so often that when she was five, she was coloring and she looked up at me and she said, “Mom, what my name again?”

AD:

It was while you’re checking into a camp, she was trying to decide her name and he looked up at you. “What my name again?”

GD:

What my name again? We decided on Amma then. Sister, first of all, what should we call you? What should the pod squad call you? What should I call you? Also, who the hell are you? Would you please talk to the people and introduce yourself?

AD:

Yes, I will. I am good just so everyone knows. I am great with sister. I am great with Amanda. That is where I stand on that. Who am I? Do you want me to talk about what you want me to talk about?

GD:

Well, one thing I want to talk to you about is that a lot of the pod squatters are writing in saying, “How the hell does she know all of these things?” Where are all of these facts? People who aren’t listened to me are not used to facts. They’re used to my general feelings and hunches about things.

We have always had this dynamic where I come to you and say, here’s what I’m noticing in the world. As if I am an alien who has just landed on earth and is observing. You say, “Yes, Glennon, that phenomenon you’re observing has been proven and here’s the support for that.” That’s how we live.

I am the, “I think in colors, you think in spreadsheets.” Why don’t you start and tell them about what you studied in college, all the things. How do you know all of these things?

AD:

Okay. So, the reason I get so many invitations that I am so fun at parties is because I have always been innately obsessed with how personal experiences are inextricably linked to our location within systems of power. I don’t know some people like to ice skate, I love power dynamics. I specifically interpersonal violence against women and girls. In college, I double majored in studies of women and gender and political and social thought. I got to do all of that, that I was obsessed with. It came out in a lot of ways. A lot of the things we talk about I think are fascinating because it’s all how this very personal experience that people are having are located within these dynamics.

GD:

Tell them about what you did on the weekends in college, which is so similar to how I spent my weekends in college.

AD:

During my last year of college, first of all, I was writing my thesis on the defense of the Violence Against Women Act. I graduated 2001. It had been in 2000, struck down by the Supreme Court the ability for women who were survivors of interpersonal violence to take their claims to federal court had been struck down. I was writing my thesis in defense of that, which is…

GD:

And for people who are listening, those fancy words are what we hear commonly called domestic violence.

AD:

Right. However, I hate that term. The way that violence against women and girls is perpetuated and validated by power structures in the judicial and legislative systems, is that we assign that violence to the domestic sphere. Therefore, that’s a way to validate it as personal instead of the very, very political issue it is.

That is the reason that Supreme Court struck it down because they said that it couldn’t be enforced under the commerce clause because that was about economics. You have this is true for all of women you’ve always had the domestic sphere. Then, the economic market sphere, men belong in the latter and women belong in the former.

It would be as if Congress doesn’t have the power to make any laws about COVID because that is a personal thing that happens inside of your body. But, no, of course that’s ridiculous. They’ve passed all of these laws because it is an economic and health phenomenon that is happening across our country.

The same is true. The economic consequences for our nation is of violence against women in their interpersonal relationships is tremendous, but because we’ve assigned it to the domestic sphere, that is the lens through which the world sees it. They say, “That’s a personal problem.”

GD:

Like it’s not real violence. It’s not real violence because it’s happening inside your home. If men usually are assaulted at bars or out in the world, that’s real violence. Since women are usually assaulted inside their homes, that’s just like pink cursive violence and think of it different.

AD:

It’s a personal problem and it affects how women see it themselves, that I have a personal relationship dynamic problem. Therefore, it is not worthy of being defended by the systems that are supposed to protect me.

GD:

Okay, so what did you do on the weekends?

AD:

On my weekends I went to Virginia’s only maximum-security prison for women. I was interviewing as part of the federal Women Coping In Prison study. The women who had killed their abusers, they tried to get help in for the violence against them in the court systems, and that was unavailing, and they had eventually killed their abusers. I was interviewing them about their histories. Amazingly, what I found is that there is no innate kind of male-female violence pattern that happens. Often, these women were coming into the prison. They were there for life, most of them. They were repeating these interpersonal violence patterns with their new relationships in the prison. It is just all about these learned patterns of behavior that we perpetuate over and over. And it was fascinating.

GD:

Are you saying that we make up the idea that those behaviors are gendered in any way? Is that what you’re saying? They’re not really about male-female, they’re just about repeating human patterns?

AD:

Well, I think that it is fair to say that they are gendered in practice in our world. I think that it was fascinating to see that even in a world devoid of men in the all-women’s prison that we were in, the fact that learning that a relationship is about power and control, and violence enforcing that power and control is something that translated even to an environment without men.

So, I think that it may be as simple as understanding that violence and coercion, and control are learned behaviors as integral to relationship. That we then assign where there is male-female power imbalance. We assign the man that role to enforce it because he’s allowed to. In an environment without men where you haven’t learned new behaviors and paradigms of relationship that perpetuates, at least in the case of what I saw.

GD:

We’ll have to keep that in mind as I continue to design my male-free female utopia. It’s not as easy as I thought.

AD:

It’s not as easy. You can’t just get rid of them.

GD:

Well, that’s fascinating. This is also why our parents joke that both of their daughters spent their college weekends in jail, just in different capacities.

AD:

That’s why I went to law school, that’s why I went to law school because I was trying to figure out how these dynamics, how all of the systems that are used to perpetuate these imbalances of power could be used to enforce appropriate bounds.

GD:

In the law school, is there a major in law school? What were you in law school for? Is everyone just in law school for a law degree?

AD:

This is a great question. What were any of us in law school for? That’s a great question. I was in for surviving, man, whew. No, you don’t. You can get a master’s in things in law. I do not have one of those, but that’s another degree after. No, you just go to law school.

GD:

You went to law school and then you went to a job that was like a jobby job. It was just like you dressed up in a suit and went to do corporate law. Then, what happened?

AD:

Yes, I went to a law firm. I did litigation there. I took a leave of absence from my firm and went to Rwanda where I worked for a year in assisting the Rwandese prosecutorial units to better understand sexual violence against girls and children, and how to prosecute those crimes more effectively. Then, I came back then, I started working for you.

GD:

Same. I also did that Rwanda thing you talked about earlier. People, do you see what I’m saying about this woman? You were correct. She does deserve a name. When people who are listening might find it interesting that when Amanda left for Rwanda, that was a time where she had just gone through a divorce or was going through a divorce, and things were very hard. We were both really trying to figure out what was next for us. This is when she came to me and brought me my first laptop computer and said to me, “I am going to go to Rwanda. This is something that I have to do.” You are going to stay here and you are going to write every morning because this is what you have to do. This is what you were made to do. That’s how I survived her being gone for that year and a half is that I wrote every morning and that’s how the blog Momastery started.

Then, can you just briefly tell the story of how did we start? You were in Rwanda and then you came home. You went back to that corporate job for a little bit. Then, how did we end up working together?

AD:

You were writing a ton and we would on the weekends, just use our little printer and print out all your pages and put them together, and make piles of chapters on the floor. We are finger Googling like, “How to publish a book?” Trying to figure out if we could print some copies.

GD:

We kept getting rejected. We would send them to the agents and they would say, “You suck.” In sweeter language.

AD:

Well, to be fair that was once. I do keep that email because I think to myself, “Very, very helpful to reflect back on that.” Things started going crazy and I was trying to help you on the nights and the weekends. It was clear that we should try this and it was supposed to be a one-year experiment. That was nine years ago, 10 years ago?

GD:

I just hope that you can, while you’re listening, you understand that everything that Momastery, that

Together Rising, that Untamed, that Love Warrior, all of those themes that we are always talking about

here, in terms of power structures, in terms of women. All of that has always been informed by sister

and her knowledge and her passion, and our conversations. I don’t know how to say this. I’ll try to say it

for the first time. I have personally through my experiences with food and body and relationships, and

alcohol, and all of it have felt like I was personally, in some ways, even with all of my privilege,

experiencing what you’re talking about in some ways, the way that power structures control and hurt

women. You have always been a lens through which I can say, “Oh, that thing out there, it’s not all me.

I’m not crazy. I’m just a goddamn cheetah, who the world is trying to cage. There might not be anything

wrong with me. There just might be something wrong out there.”  Because the world is constantly trying

to make women feel like we are just these little balls of neuroses and that we have to save ourselves

and we have to fix ourselves when actually, we were born whole and powerful, and perfect. What we

have to fix is out there.

AD:

I think that’s so important because there’s a reason why we’re not taught this. It’s the same reason why the whole country is clamoring to not teach about the civil rights history of our nation and the oppression of black people systematically throughout our history. It’s the same, not knowing the frameworks and the history and the intention behind the systems that we live inside of is vital to making us all feel like we have personal problems. I just feel so excited about this podcast, because I feel like the way that even just naming it. You know, Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, that blew up the whole world in a wonderful way, that her whole premise was that women had a problem with no name.

GD:

Yes.

AD:

Just that brought women the second wave feminist movement together because so many women could relate to this problem with no name. I feel like what you’re doing, Glennon, is naming all of these problems that have no name that we all feel. Even if we don’t fix it, because honestly we’re going to have to take the ball down the field. Even in our generation, we may not fix all of this just knowing we are all have this problem makes it not our problem.

GD:

That’s right. We, that’s the we that we come back to. God, that’s awesome. It’s just that thing that we figured out a while back that you are not fucked up. You are just a deeply feeling, paying attention, awake, alive person in a deeply fucked up world. So, thank you. I love you, Amanda Flaherty Doyle.

Our idea for this was that we were going to answer a bunch of questions from pod squaders, but once again, we had to respond to the pod squatters who wanted to free you. Let’s do one question and then we’ll wrap up. We have a question from Sasha. Can we hear Sasha’s question?

Sasha:

Hello. I have two beautiful, sweet little girls that I’m raising. My question is to ask you from a parenting perspective, what does this mean to raise wild cheetahs? All the sense of the word from being untamed. Also, raise human beings who can operate within this society and the systems that exist in the society, and know what that’s like to adapt and follow the rules. What does that balance actually look like? Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the podcast. I love it.

GD:

Sasha, thank you for loving the podcast. That makes me so excited and happy because I love doing this podcast. Please, keep loving it. I think that sometimes the word untamed or the word wild is misunderstood. It’s understood to be something different than what I meant it in Untamed. What I mean when I talk about that, what I mean by wild is not this idea of ferocity and loudness, and boldness. What I mean by wild is each person returning to their truest essence, their truest self. To the person they were born to be before that world conditioned them to be something else. What I mean by that is sometimes I feel like what people think I mean, when I say, “Get untamed, be a goddamn cheetah.” Is like if you’re a girl or a woman, you have to be loud and ferocious and break all the rules, and all of those things. That’s not what I mean at all.

I have two girls. One of them, her natural state is observer, quiet. She does the other thing too, but when she is in her truest self, she’s more of a listener and an observer. Then I have another one who when she’s in her natural essence, her truest, most herself, she’s loud.

The untamed version of the first one would be the quiet observer. The untamed version of the second one I was referring to would be the loud fierce, go-getter. I don’t mean that since the world tells women to be small and quiet, that we should all walk around rebelling against that and being loud and fierce that would be another taming. That would be another acting for many of us. I am not that way in real life. If somebody is unkind to somebody else or to me, or to where my cheetah comes out in real life. Generally, in a room I’m not a loud one, I’m a quiet one. That’s where I’m most comfortable. That’s where I’m most untamed. What I want is for everybody to not live in, for kiddos, because she’s talking about kids, Sasha, you’re a little one. I want your little one to not feel like she has to follow the rules of being a girl. I don’t want her to have to feel like she has to rebel against the rules of being a girl.

Obedience is a cage. Rebellion is a cage. We are looking to live creatively and freely from the inside out, not in response to who and what the world tells us to be. So, I dream of a time when we’re not raising little girls to be fierce, and we’re not raising little boys to be sensitive and quiet. I understand we have to do some over-correcting now. Okay, I get that. What I dream of is that we get these little beings and we admit that there are no characteristics that are gendered.

There are only human characteristics that we have permission. Permission to express certain characteristics is gendered. My dream is that we get these little humans and we just think, “What is the full spectrum of the human experience and how do we get these little beings to be permitted to have the whole experience.” Okay. Alright, thank you, Sasha.

We are going to move on to this closing section, which we’re gonna call Easy Things. What’s making life easier because we can do hard things, but we can also do easy things. In this segment, we’re just going to each bring you something, or maybe only one of us will, if the other one is unprepared. We look out for each other. Something that we are reading or watching, or experiencing or listening to that we’re loving and it’s just being human a little bit easier.

I would like to talk about a book during this section, if it’s okay, sister. You’re going to roll your eyes because I’ve been talking about this book for so long. It’s all I talk about is this book. What I’m doing right now is I’m rereading for, I think, it might be the third time. This book that changes my life over and over again, each time I read it, because it’s so dense that there’s so much more I get from it. It’s called How to Do Nothing. It’s by Jenny Odell.

This book, I think it’s what everybody needs. It’s about resisting the attention economy, which basically means that we are all living these less-than-human lives, because we are constantly giving all we have to really give to life in this one wild and precious life we have is our attention. What we’re paying attention to. The world has tricked us into paying attention to these little screens and these hot takes on everything and this angst, and terror and fear and division through these little screens. Really, it’s not benefiting us in any way. It’s only benefiting like a very few social media companies.

Basically, we’ve all been bamboozled and because we are choosing and have become addicted to paying attention to this other thing, we are missing real life, which is so beautiful and much less horrific, and scary in many ways. To be connected to the moment and to the human beings, and to the place that we’re in.

It’s just…it’s not about disconnecting and running away. It’s about staying present, actually, and living in our communities and how to make an actual difference instead of making a fake difference online. It’s so good, y’all. It’s so good.

AD:

That reminds me that when we did the self-care episode, and we were talking about the revenge bedtime procrastination scrolling at night, there were so many folks who commented on that I had posited that it was this idea that we don’t get enough any alone downtime, but a lot of really smart pod squatters were saying, “Actually it is a response to modern life that just frenetic pace of modern life. It’s almost like a trauma response to that where you just disassociate for those hours, because we’re so strung out from modern life. It was really interesting. A lot of folks made that comment, which I thought was quite smart. We don’t know how to do nothing. When we have this moment, we just are plugged in because the absence of anything is too unsettling.

GD:

Well, it’s the being still, right? If we’re still, then all of our shit’s going to come up and that’s terrifying. But what I would say is in this book, she does such a good job of explaining how everything is inside of nothing. How life begins inside of nothing. The nothing she’s talking about is not nothing, is all I can tell you. It’s life. It’s like, “How do we don’t want to get to the end of our lives and realize we never lived.” I didn’t make that up. It’s like Thoreau or something. Okay, we are going to stop there. By the way, probably a lot of my things that are making life easier are going to be books because actually feel like when we talk about a problem with no name that is not gendered, it is this anxiety, this frenetic anxiety that we are feeling because of our cultures, addiction to screens. It just makes us all feel shaky. There’s something that I feel when I put that away and pick up a book. I can just feel my whole self, just that. I’m obsessed with getting back to books. I know sister has small children, so she’s probably going to be really annoyed with me for even suggesting that right now.

AD:

I’ve been putting them on audio while I do things. I like that option because it allows me to, well, it’s probably not how to do nothing because it allows me to do two things at once, but I do appreciate that.

GD:

The fun and function.

AD:

Look at me, I’m sweeping. Well, no, I’m never sweeping. My one easy thing is something that you suggested in the anxiety episode, it’s a thing I can repeat over and over. You said to get us out of the terror of what if, just keep coming back to what is. I’ve just been doing that 20 times a day if I need to when I start getting super panicky and anxious about a thousand things, what is, not what if, not what if. It’s been helping me to see that these moments, actually right in this moment it’s okay, and I don’t know if it’s not going to get okay. If I just keep staying in this moment, it will be okay. Thank you for that. That was super helpful.

GD:

I’m so excited about that because I always think all of my things are going to be way too woo-woo for you, but that’s just actually logical, right?

AD:

It is. I can get behind that. It’s data-driven. It actually is okay right now.

GD:

Projecting towards the future or going backwards is actually not logical. I love you, Amanda Flaherty Doyle.

AD:

Glennon Kishman Doyle, likewise.

GD:

I love you, pod squad. Don’t forget. We can do hard things, but we can also take it easy.

AD:

We can. We’ll try.

GD:

Love ya.