YOU ARE NOT A MESS. The World Is.
September 9, 2021
Glennon Doyle:
Hi, everybody. It’s Glennon. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Just want to start this episode by saying good luck to you, good luck to you. We are recording this episode two days before I drop my son off at college, so today is dooms day eve eve. And I am in the midst of just some real, deep feelings that I’m not really sure I can even isolate.
Before I knew of Chase’s existence…I got sober the day I found out that I was pregnant with Chase. It was on Mother’s Day 19 years ago. And so, before that day, I was not who I am today. I was an addict, I was a food addict and an alcohol addict. I had no sense of myself at all. I hurt people, I lied to people, I stole, I was just a really, really lost human being. I had no North star, I had no self really. The day that I found that I was pregnant with Chase, well, I guess it’s the first time I ever wanted something more than I wanted to just be numb. And so, I decided that I wanted to become a mother, which meant that I was also going to have to become a human being.
And so, the way that I became a human being is that I just constantly asked myself consciously at first and then subconsciously, “Okay. What would this kid’s mom do?” Every decision that had to be made in my work, in my life was just like okay, I would look at this little child because I think the universe just looked at me and was like, “Oh, bless her heart. We are going to have to give her the easiest child ever first because she can’t handle a normal person. She’s just learning to become a normal person. We’re going to have to give her this child that is like this little Yoda of a person.” I’m not lying, you guys. He’s just-
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, no. He’s objectively just exceptional.
Glennon Doyle:
He’s just this gentle, wise, beyond his years little human who has been so patient with me. He’s the child who … He’s very rarely pushed the boundaries of anything for me, but once he was … I told him to stay inside this little fence and he and his friend jumped the fence, and I got there and he wasn’t at this little playground and I was so scared. I found him and I brought him back to the house and I was just staring at him because he’d never done anything like this. I said, “What is happening?” He said, “Mommy, I’m going to push boundaries sometimes and you’re just going to have to give me a consequence.”
Amanda Doyle:
He was like five.
Glennon Doyle:
He was five. “You’re going to have to give me a consequence, mommy.”
Amanda Doyle:
“How the world works is I learn about boundaries through natural consequences.”
Abby Wambach:
He was parenting you.
AD:
He’s always been like that.
GD:
He’s always been parenting me, and I have become a person that I’m proud of. I have become a person who trusts herself and who other people can trust and who the world even trusts on some level. It’s because every day, every day I have looked at this kid and been like, “What would this kid’s mom do? What would the woman who was worthy of being this child’s mother say right now, do right now, decide right now, create right now?” Every day I’ve just been trying to be worthy of being Chase’s mom.
And, it hit me the other day when my friend has … This is the time when a lot of people’s kids are leaving. One of my friends’ kids is leaving and she said, “I’m just scared for him. I’m scared for him. I’m just laying in bed thinking I just hope I’ve taught him enough. I hope he’s learned enough from me to go out into this big world on his own.”
AD:
Oh, my God.
GD:
And y’all, you know what I thought? Oh, my God. That’s not what I’ve been thinking at all. I’ve been thinking, “Oh, my God. I hope he’s taught me enough. I hope that he has trained me enough so that now I can go out into this world and be good and brave and wise enough without him.” I hope that he’s done enough to send me off into this world where he’s not watching me every day. I can still be good and I can still be wise and I can still be brave and I can still be strong, but what I’m telling you is that the truth is that I have never been any of those things without him in my daily life. What I’m wondering is if maybe in some ways we’re all just trying to be as good as the person who loves us the most believes we are.
AD:
Mm. Mm-hmm.
AW:
I get that.
GD:
Maybe we are all just each day creating this character that we just hope one day we’ve practiced enough to just become reflexively.
AW:
Lives into the dream of who we wish we could be one day.
GD:
Yeah, and that’s what he’s been for me, is just he’s helped me create this self that I am just trying to be good enough for him.
AW:
That’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful, honey. If you could just only see yourself through my eyes. That’s all I’ll say. I see it every day. I see you every single day having gotten strong enough for this moment, and you are.
GD:
I love you. Well, it’s just this amazing … Through all of these times, it’s so wild. You’re looking at your kid walk away and you’re like … First off, helping him pack the other day. I’m like, “This is not parenting.” We have to help our children break our hearts. I’m helping you leave me.
AD:
Yeah.
GD:
The indignity.
AD:
Here’s what you should say to me when you break up with me.
GD:
Exactly.
AD:
It’s like that.
GD:
The unselfishness it takes. I just want to sabotage everything. What I’ll tell you is I do feel like I’m on the edge of that canyon, that dark pit of despair. Last night, Abby, you said to me … Abby’s tiptoeing around me a little bit and not even asking how are you quite often because there’s just too much to that answer, so last night when you did ask me, “How are you,” the truth was I told you that I was thinking about how we’re almost dead.
AW:
Yeah. She says to me, she says, “Well, the truth of it is I feel like this is the first step to the end.”
GD:
To death.
AW:
The next step is death. I said, “Oh, okay. We’re 45 and 41 and…”
GD:
Exactly.
AW:
“…it’s not for a long time. Hopefully, that is not coming.”
GD:
Okay, but what I’m trying to say-
AD:
It’s the Harry Met Sally “And I’m gonna to be 40!” “In eight years.” But it’s out there!”
GD:
That’s how I feel, y’all, because I know that I go too far with things, I know that reel me in or whatever, but what I am on the edge of is watching your kid separate from you, him walking away now doing life on this level without me, it just feels like dress rehearsal
AD:
Mm-hmm.
GD:
It feels like practicing for when one day we’re going to separate for real.
AD:
Yup. I get that.
GD:
It feels like that is what I’m touching, that’s the hot stove that I’m touching here with this separation. What I’ve decided is that I can’t feel these feelings. Okay? So, your leader who’s told you over and over to feel it all, I have scheduled three days where I’m going to feel my feelings. I’ve not gotten away from this family for so long. Abby’s taking me to a place for three days. Inside of those three days, I’m going to allow myself to feel the feelings.
AW:
It’s gonna to be loads of fun, folks.
GD:
Right. In structure liberates, I’m just going to jump into the pit of despair during those three feelings because when you’re a mom, you don’t even get to feel your feelings. I have to walk Amma and Tish through this experience. I have to make Chase not worry that he’s mom’s going to jump off a cliff.
So, I’m sitting in the car I think last week, actually in a parking lot. I stayed there during Amma’s practice. As an act of maternal resistance, I refuse to watch children play soccer. I mean, I watch them play. I refuse to watch children practice soccer. There’s a new thing where it’s not enough to go to the games. The parents sit and watch the children practice. That is where I draw the line. I will take her and drop her little self off, and then I go sit in the car. I’m sitting in the car thinking about Chase leaving. Thinking about it even, you guys, feels like touching a hot stove. I think about thinking about it, and then I shut down a little bit.
And so, I wrote myself a note in the car. I started having these big, big feelings. I wrote myself a little note as you know I do, sister. The note said, I wrote it on my phone, it said, “You’re actually not a mess at all. You’re just a feeling person in a messy world. You are exactly right to feel a lot right now. It does not mean you’re weak. It means you’re strong enough to be paying attention. Be gentle with you.: Listener, if you’re asking yourself right now, “Does she actually write herself notes?”, the answer is yes. Abby knows. Right, babe?
AW:
Uh-huh.
GD:
So, I wrote that note, and then I was like, “You know what? I should share this. Maybe it’ll help someone else because it actually helped me a smidge.” I shared it. I put it somewhere on Instagram or something. The responses … People are feeling a freaking lot right now. People are feeling so much. The comments that came back, the idea that actually we are not all a disaster, we are not all a mess. We just are paying attention to what is a very messy world.
AD:
Mm-hmm.
GD:
And actually, being upset by these things, having these feelings does not at all imply weakness. It implies the strength that is inherent with the decision to pay attention, right?
So, one of the comments that came back, sister, what was it? Because I think I sent it to you. It was just like the world is on freaking fire.
AD:
Yup. “The world is constantly on fire. How do we go on and keep breathing?”
GD:
Yeah. Exactly. That is the question. I think we have a voicemail, don’t we?
AD:
Yup.
Ella:
Hi, Glennon and sister. My name is Ella. I just wanted to start off by saying that I absolutely love your podcast. I also love Untamed. Funny story, I actually read the book on an airplane in one sitting, and then once I got off the airplane, a few days later I got “We Can Do Hard Things” tattooed on my arm so it’s now with me forever. That is just how much I love your book and you too.
Anyway, my hard thing, my question that I wanted to ask is that I am really, really sensitive. I’m also an environmental science major so I’m constantly burdened, just by like climate change, global warming, all kinds of really horrible, awful things, and I constantly think about that. There’s not a day in my life that doesn’t go by that I do not think about the end of the world and our future and plastic and turtles, all of those things. I just wanted to ask if you had any advice on how do I not think about these things or constantly how do I not be burdened by them. I don’t know. Have you guys had that same experience? Anyways, I love you both. I hope you have a fabulous afternoon. Bye.
GD:
Ella! Ella, thank you for being burdened by what’s happening to our planet. Ella made me think of Tish, actually. Remember, I’ve told you all this story and I put it on Untamed, and I’ll tell a brief version of it. Ella described herself as sensitive. I have a kid that is sensitive. One day, her kindergarten teacher called me and said, “Glennon, we have an issue.” I said, “Of course, we do.” She said, “So, I mentioned to the kids about climate change, and I talked to them about the polar bears losing their homes because of the melting glaciers, and the rest of the kids were sad. They felt sad, but they were able to carry on. They were able to soldier on to recess, but Tish is still sitting on the rug, circle time rug, with her little face in shock and she keeps asking me question after question. ‘What about the polar bears’ mothers? Why isn’t anyone helping the polar bears?’”
GD:
Okay. Anyone who has a sensitive kid knows what the next few weeks of my life were like. All we did was talk about freaking polar bears day in and day out. I had to sponsor some polar bears online, I had to buy polar bear posters. In one of the lower moments of my parenting life, I had my friend Liz write me a fake email about how the polar bears were now fine and we didn’t have to worry about the polar bears anymore. They were A-okay. Tish did not believe that email because she’s not an idiot. Polar bears saga continues.
One night, I’m putting Tish to bed, I’m almost to that place which is I’m outside the door and I’m almost to the couch, I’m almost to the Netflix and then I hear, “Mommy.” I say, “What’s wrong?” She says, “It’s the polar bears.” I’m like, “Oh, hell no. No.” She says, “Mommy, it’s that now it’s the polar bears, but no one cares, so next it’ll be us.” And I was like, “Oh, my God. The polar bears.” Like, “Oh, she is not crazy to be perseverating to be burdened by the polar bears. We are crazy to not be perseverating to not be burdened. What she is worrying about is the end of our planet. She is not annoying. She is a prophet. She is looking at the end of the world wondering why we are all carrying on,” which is what Ella is doing.
AW:
Yeah.
GD:
Ella lives in a world that is so batshit crazy that it’s like, “Can the Ellas just be quiet? Could they stop annoying us while we destroy our planet?” Ella, the first thing I would say to you is that you are not crazy. You are a goddamn cheetah. You are paying attention. You are one of the ones like we say, like a canary in the coal mine, you’re standing on the bow of the Titanic yelling, “Iceberg, iceberg!” and the rest of the world is like, “Can you be quiet? We just want to keep dancing.”
AW:
Also, the icebergs are melting from global warming.
GD:
Right. That’s right, that’s right. That’s full circle there, babe. Full circle.
Number one, Ella, you’re not crazy. You are correct. And, you get to have joy, too. And, we have to find a way for people like Ella who are so many people listening to this podcast. A lot of our pod squad are big care-ers. We are in a moment right now, and maybe have been for a very long time, where people are finding themselves thinking two things. Number one is I care so much that I just have to look away, and the second option is I care so much that I have to look all day. This idea. Sister, you and I talked about it. You gave it a different term. It was this all or nothing idea of paying attention to the pain of the world which was-
AD:
Right. Well, also, Ella is an environmental science major, so it’s all the more important that she not wear herself down so completely in being devastated by this that she can’t actually do the good and help forward she’s going to be able to do for environmental science. The idea was this idea of rumination or repression, that you can either just get so dwelling in the thing that you just go on loop where you can’t step out of thinking about it, but you’re actually not … That’s not doing any work in the world. It’s just immobilizing you or you can repress it completely and-
GD:
Which are both self-indulgent in the end.
AD:
They are.
GD:
Because what I think we get confused about, and I do often, is I confuse myself when I tell myself I can sit and read this shit or listen to this shit all day because that is doing something. That is responsible citizenship, but actually I’m not doing anything. Watching the news all day or listening to the news all day is actually not doing anything.
AD:
Right. Both of those things lead to poor health too for yourself, so you’re actually being self-indulgent and you’re rendering yourself unable to do anything effective for it. I think if you go there, if you make yourself feel the feelings and imagine it like in Afghanistan right now where you can digest all this information, but then you can try to get there in your head and really imagine that’s just dumb luck that I was born here and not there with my babies trying to get out of a horrible situation and having no options. You can get there on a humanity level, which also isn’t doing anything, but I think there’s this kind of recognition of mutual humanity that happens that I think it might be the kind of hard change.
Like, that woman in Afghanistan who is the other me, the other part of that coin, that’s not doing anything to help her, but I think if we could all get to that humanity place, I think it might lead to a world in which we didn’t have as much of this shit all the time.
GD:
That’s right. I do think that’s doing something. That is different to me.
AD:
When you do the recognition of your humanity connecting to their humanity, then you’re undoing what starts wars to begin with-
GD:
Yes.
AD:
…what leads people to those places because that is always based on othering. It is always having to say their humanity is different than yours. Therefore, you could tolerate this happening to them whereas you couldn’t tolerate it happening to you. I think there’s that part of it, and then I think there’s this other part that you said about we can’t let the fact that we can’t fix everything stop us from doing something that we can do, and there’s always something you can do. If you recognize your humanity and you would want someone to step up for you, then you can step up in the ways that you can. That’s how Together Rising started. It was just a response to knowing that we could do a little bit to help a little bit, and 33 million dollars later, individual donations of about $25 each, we’ve spent 10 million dollars at the border reuniting families who were separated, we just pledged and already have on the ground money in Haiti to help families there with boots on the ground Haitian partners who have been embedded forever. We just invested $250,000 in Afghan Women for Women, and they are working 24/7 to get folks out as quickly as possible and to save lives.
I think that there is this hopelessness that happens with us when we know that we alone can’t fix it and that our little bit won’t make a dent, and there’s power in knowing that many, many people for whom that’s true can get together and actually do something that does.
GD:
That’s right. And the doing something. The doing something on a personal level, that little thing is the crusher of apathy, of hopelessness.
I love the idea of doing something, deciding that you’re always going to do something. That is a huge act of resistance to hopelessness, but that you’re also going to be committed to this thing we’re talking about which is in a world that wants us to be numb, that wants us to other people, that you’re going to resist that by finding ways to find humanity in these crises, in these situations all over the world. The headlines don’t do that for me. It’s the stories, it’s the well-reported places that give you the humanity of the situation.
AW:
It just reminds me. I don’t know. You got to tell the story about the man and the candle outside the White House.
GD:
Oh, God. I love that story so much. Okay. During Vietnam, there was this man who, I can’t remember his name right now, but we’ll put it in the notes, who every single day would go to the White House and would stand outside of the White House holding a single candle day after day after day. Finally, this news reporter, people caught wind of this weird thing happening, and so this news reporter came up to him with the camera and said, “Sir, do you really think that you standing here with this single candle is going to change anything? Do you really think that you and this candle is going to change that?” He said, “Oh, I don’t come here and hold this candle to change them. I come here and hold this candle so they don’t change me.”
And I love that story so much because I think the ultimate act of resistance in a world that wants to divide us, in a world that wants to other people, in a world that seems to be getting harder and harder is to just refuse to become hard, to find all of the different ways that you are insisting on your own humanity and other people’s humanity, and to remember that the reason we all feel overwhelmed is because we actually were not designed to be exposed to be constantly deluged with this much information about so many places in the world, that we were actually wired to be able to respond to a village, a smaller world. This complete overload of information feels like overload because it is overload.
And so, what we can do after we enter into the pain of the world is to remember to act locally, to care about the worlds also that we can touch to when we worry about the world’s loneliness, to meet the loneliness in our communities, to constantly be involved with and connect into the worlds that are in our reach because what social media does and what media in general does is it makes us simultaneously feel like we have to be connected to everyone, and in reality be connected to no one because we are not even out in the worlds that we can touch.
AD:
I want to say one thing. I think that it is so true everything you’ve said, and I would just say that also a woman in Afghanistan knowing that you recognize her humanity and a woman of Afghanistan knowing that you’re reading 30 articles and that your heart is broken doesn’t help her for shit.
AW:
Yeah.
AD:
Right? If your humanity rails against something that you see, respond to that call of your humanity. Do something because we live in a world that is overconnected, overexposed. You know what that means? That means that there are places that you can find that are doing the work that your humanity demands to be done so it isn’t about you and your feelings. It’s about what your humanity requires you to be part of. So, recognize the humanity, and then do something with your hands and your wallet if you can that that woman in Afghanistan can feel.
GD:
Yeah. I remember some saying to me pity is your pain in my heart. Who the hell cares? Who the hell cares? Compassion is your pain in my heart and back out through my hands.
AW:
I just have to ask because this is … I don’t know. I’m sure a lot of people are going to have a lot of feelings about this. I am not like you in this way, Glennon. I am not an empath. I sometimes find it more difficult to get to where you are. I do all the time in my brain. I’m like, “Yes, this makes sense. This is what we’re going to do.”
GD:
You mean in terms of feelings, in terms of caring?
AW:
Yeah. Sometimes, when you sit at the foot of my bed and you have an easel and a coffee and you’re like, “Coffee revolution. We’re going to get these kids out of cages at the border,” I’m like, “Okay. I understand that it’s terrible in my brain, but I don’t experience it in my body.” I actually feel like a lot of your listeners might understand and feel this similar way that it actually feels like something’s broken in me because I see it happening so real and fervently inside of you that I’m like, “Am I an ice queen? Am I cold?” When we go to art museums, you’re walking around and you have tears in your eyes. I’m like, “I got nothing.”
AD:
Nice picture.
AW:
I’m just walking around with my hands behind my back, acting the part like, “This museum … It looks like she’s having a grand old time.” I’m excited for you. I don’t know. I just feel like there are probably some of us out there who don’t feel as deeply, who will do the right thing. I always get there in my mind. I always do and I care, I do care, but I don’t care the most amount like you care.
AD:
Yeah. You don’t care with your body.
AW:
Yeah.
AD:
You care with your head.
AW:
That’s right.
GD:
Thank God for that, my love. I want to respond to that. Because we empaths, whatever that is, we feel really precious about ourselves a lot. I do. I want to tell a quick story, babe, that I just thought of when you were talking. A couple years ago, you and I were at one of our kids’ sports events.
AD:
Oh, Lord.
GD:
During this sports event, you and I were two of the only adults there. I don’t know how this happened. There was just a ton of high schoolers and you and me, and then I had the girls with me too. It was one of Chase’s events, and then the girls were with us.
AW:
Oh. Cross country.
GD:
Right. Yes.
AW:
Yeah. Here we go.
GD:
Okay. At the end of the event, one of the children passes out and lays down on the ground. Long horrifying story short, which ends fine to all of my worriers, it ends fine. This child ends-
AD:
But he was not breathing.
AW:
Cardiac arrest is the proper term.
GD:
Yeah. I just want everybody to know that the kid’s okay because I’m actually starting to get upset too. The kid ends up fine.
AW:
He lives. Yeah.
GD:
But in this moment, the child is laying down on the ground with high schoolers all around him. He’s their friend. His heart has stopped. People are starting to circle around him. Abby runs over and starts to direct CPR. She turns towards me-
AW:
Hold on. I just want to be clear. There was a couple of parents, one who was a doctor who was on top and performing CPR. I wasn’t directing high school kids to do CPR.
GD:
No, no, no, no, no. I’m sorry. You were helping direct two other adults.
AW:
There was a doctor who was doing CPR on this child. Yeah.
GD:
Okay. All the other children are in need of guidance in this moment because there are several adults who are helping with the person who is on the ground. I am the only other adult. Abby turns towards me to direct me to go help the other children deal with their emotional moment.
AW:
I was trying to get you to take the other children away from said situation so that they weren’t-
GD:
All small children.
AW:
Yeah.
GD:
Abby turns to me, I look at her and I promptly pass the F out onto the ground like a tree has fallen over. My two children who are already in trauma because they’re watching this child, now their mother has passed out cold on the ground. Not only my two children are double traumatized, but all of the other high school children have now lost their only hope for any sort of adult supervision or guidance.
AD:
Not to mention the poor doctor who’s like, “Jesus.”
GD:
No. Now he’s got this one dropping like-
AW:
I’m coordinating the ambulance. I look over and Glennon is now on the ground, and of course what’s going on over here makes me think that’s what’s going on over there. I see Glennon go down and I think she’s … I think in cardiac arrest. That is what my children also think. I’m not a doctor.
GD:
Okay.
AW:
They’re all white, they’re about to go down. It was the stand by me moment where everybody just starts throwing up.
GD:
Exactly. That’s what I was just thinking, babe.
AD:
In other words, it’s just not super helpful.
GD:
Not super helpful. What I’m getting at here is that I’m going to tell you why I went down. I remember the moment before. I was watching a parent watch their child, the parent thinking that the child was dying.
AW:
And I was consoling the parents. I was trying to get the parents away.
GD:
This moment for a deeply feeling person, I was a circuit breaker that was just like, “Nope. Nope. Must save self.” Whatever. My body was just not having it. My point babe is empaths are good for some things. We are good for pointing out problems, we are good for sensing things in the universe that needs to be healed. We are not often the people who are going to do the healing.
AW:
Ah.
GD:
You know who you don’t want to be the empath? Your surgeon perhaps. You know who you don’t want to be an empath? Maybe a hostage negotiator. There are lots of actually deeply helping things that empaths should be nowhere near. You were much more helpful in that situation than I, our deeply feeling family empath was. I feel like we empaths need to be very careful about how precious we are about ourselves and our role in the world because we sure as hell don’t want a lot more of us running around passing out left and right.
AW:
Maybe some of Sister’s advice from the other day’s podcast would really help in that moment, that this emotion will not take control over me, that if you become the observer, maybe you would just at least stay conscious.
GD:
Maybe. Staying conscious would be the first goal. I just think babe, what I’m trying to say to you is you and your way of being are not broken. You are so deeply, deeply helpful to the world. You just do it in a different way and there’s different roles. If we were both me, we would just sit around in our weighted blankets all day and do nothing.
AW:
That’s why we’re a team.
GD:
Exactly.
AW:
A team needs certain strengths.
AD:
Evolution requires it. Yeah.
GD:
Yes. I help us feel, you help us do. You are not broken. I might be. You are seriously, seriously helpful.
AW:
You’re not broken either.
GD:
Let’s go onto the next question.
AD:
Okay, here’s a write-in. Hi, Glennon. My name is Casey. My kids are six and nine and I’m a fierce mama bear who wants to dive in and protect my children in any way and all circumstances where they can potentially be emotionally harmed. I understand on some cognitive level that that’s not my job. What am I supposed to do when I see negative situations happening at school or on the field or with their friends and all of my instincts want desperately to intervene and fix and protect? What do I do when my babies are facing pain? Casey, first pass out.
GD:
Yeah. Casey, stay conscious. First of all, stay conscious. Didn’t Casey said, “I can’t handle when my kids could possibly experience emotional pain?” That is life.
AD:
Potentially be emotionally harmed. Potentially. Maybe not.
AW:
Life might be tough on you, sister.
GD:
All of life. That’s right. Life is just one situation after another in which we will likely be potentially emotionally harmed, right?
AD:
Right.
GD:
Listen, I think that this is a major challenge for the particular parenting generation that is raising children right about now because there are parenting generations in the past who have not been so completely obsessed with the idea that our job is to protect our children from all pain. That’s actually a modern way of being that this is what’s created us as helicopter parents, lawnmower parents, this idea that it’s not our fault. We were given this idea that our job as parents is to just mow down anything in our children’s way that could make them feel sad or make them feel lonely or make them feel left out or angry or anything. That’s why we are all neurotic because we have been given an impossible job. Protect your humans from being human. Give life and protect from life.
We have been given an utterly impossible situation. I’ll never forget early on being at this convention and this sweet woman, she stood up and she raised her hand and she said, “Glennon, I’m going through a divorce and my little boy is so sad. Every day I look at him and I think, “Oh, my God. It was my one job to protect you from this sort of pain and I couldn’t do it.” Every day, I feel like such a failure. All the other people in the audience are just nodding and crying. It was just this moment where … I think coming from a sobriety background where my job as a human being was to learn, just to learn deeply that pain is okay, that pain is actually more than okay. It’s what teaches us in many ways. It’s how we become fully human that in a way pain can be trusted.
When you figure that out, then you realize that that’s also what you have to pass onto your kids. I just remember looking at her and saying, “Okay. Just give me three words that you would use to describe the kind of person you’re trying to raise.” She said something like, “I want him to be brave and I want him to be wise and I want him to be kind.” Then, the question becomes, “Okay. What is it in a life that creates wisdom and kindness and bravery?” We all know that the answer to that is struggle. It’s not never overcoming anything. It’s overcoming and overcoming and overcoming.
The irony of our parenting generation is that we are constantly trying to protect, to steal from our children the one thing that will allow them to become the adults that we dream they’ll be, which is this idea that our job is not to run in front of our children putting out every single fire over and over again, franticly putting out fires behind them and around them at soccer practice and at school and in friends groups. Our job is just to notice the fires ahead with them and to just walk them towards them over and over again and let them walk through the fire and sit in the fire because what we all know, everyone listening to this podcast knows, is that the more fires you walk through, what you learn is that you’re fireproof. You don’t have to ever avoid those fires because you will survive and survive and survive. For me, I feel like my goal is to just … I want them to be able to do that when I’m gone.
AD:
It’s easier said than done. You see your kid being left out or you see your kid being made fun of, or you see this vulnerability that your kid has out in the world and you just know the looks that everything pierces like a knife. I think it’s interesting in researching for the episode we just did on Tuesday, this idea that the people who place the highest value on happiness are less happy than those who view emotions neutrally because they’re constantly striving and wondering why they’re not happy. I’m wondering if every time our kids are anything but happy, we are in a tizzy about it and we are trying to intervene and say, “Oh, God. Did that not make you happy? Did that not make you happy?” That is teaching them that something is wrong with them if they’re not happy.
GD:
Right.
AW:
Mm-hmm.
AD:
Like something is wrong in their life if they’re not happy. We’re setting them up to live really unhappy lives by constantly queuing to them that it is bad when they’re unhappy, it is something to be fixed when they’re unhappy. You bring it to me and we’re going to make this unhappy transform into happy. I just wonder if it’s more just that neutral mindset of, “Did that happen? Wow. Yeah. That happened to me too.” Moving right along.
GD:
That’s okay. There’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to fix if you’re sad. There’s nothing to fix. Let it come. It’s visiting. It’ll go. Yeah. That’s good.
AW:
I’ll take the sports perspective because I think that a lot of parents feel this way when they put their kids in sports. Glennon, it goes back to you not wanting to watch practice. Actually, that’s a philosophy. That’s a good parenting technique in fact.
GD:
Oh, thank you.
AW:
It’s important for parents to let the kids go out and to practice without them watching so that the kid starts to learn to not look over their shoulder for their parent’s affirmation, for their parent’s attention, that they can actually start to build and develop their own self individual identity away from that parent. I think when we’re talking about sports or putting your kids in situations where other people, adults might have a little bit of power or control over how this child is getting acclimated into that life, whether it’s school or a team, I think we’ve lost trust in other adults to be able to do that for us instead of us. What I would say is to do the best research you can on the teachers that your kids are going to have or on the coaches that you’re going to put your kid in front of. Make sure that those people, and then let your kids tell you the story of their life.
AD:
All right. Let’s get to our pod squader of the week. Who is it?
AW:
I love these people. So much, I love these people.
Amy:
Hi. This is Amy. I am just calling. I’m not even all the way through today’s episode, and I just needed to communicate that Amanda “Sister” Doyle is a goddamn cheetah badass. Holy fuck. First, she said the prison part about what she did on weekends and my jaw dropped. Then, she took a leave of absence to go to Rwanda. What the actual fuck? You, I love everything about this. That’s all. Continue your good work. Bye.
AW:
I literally listened to the podcast and I was freaking out. I got home and I was like, “Glennon, I didn’t know some of this stuff about Sister. Are you kidding me? She went to where during law school on the weekends? I want to know more.”
GD:
You don’t even know about the time she went to Hawaii by herself to learn how to surf for a summer, or when she told our parents, “I want to go to Ireland, but I’m just going to go by myself and I’m just going to walk around and find places to stay and live.”
AW:
Oh, my God. This is finding out you’re best friends with somebody that you are so excited to keep learning about. What the heck?
GD:
I know. I just want to say that Amy who was that woman who called in, I don’t know why Amy made me so happy, but Amy was listening to the podcast and she stopped it to call in to say the thing. That just makes me feel so warm and cozy because that means we are having a freaking in-real-time conversation with Amy.
AW:
Yes.
GD:
She was like, “I need to tell them something real quick. Hold on.” She called us to tell us something.
AW:
I love it.
GD:
And then, basically her comment was, “Sister, what the actual fuck?” Which is what I’ve been saying my whole life.
AW:
Yeah.
GD:
Yes, Amy, to that. Amy, we love you. We love all of you. I think the takeaways from this week are go ahead and feel your feelings, let your people feel their feelings, and don’t let the fact that you can’t fix everything keep you from doing what you can do.
AD:
Amen.
GD:
We love you. We’re going to keep showing up and do what we can do forever so you can just join us and we’ll do it together because we can do hard things. We’ll see you next week. Bye.