Glennon Finds Her Healing Partner
March 30, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Hi everybody. It’s me. Before you listen to this, I just want you to know that there’s lots of talk about mental health, about trauma, about eating disorders, about pain. It’s a lot. It’s good. It’s freaking good. If you can handle it, you should listen, but I love you and I always want to tell you that first, your safety. So if it’s too much for you, don’t listen. If you can listen, do, because I think it might change your life. Okay. Bye. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.
Abby Wambach:
That was so sad sounding.
Glennon Doyle:
Was it?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I’m not always that sad.
Abby Wambach:
You were like, “Okay, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, well, interesting that you mentioned that because today’s going to be the one of those days where I talk about how recovery’s going and what I’m learning that I think might help every body. Every body. First of all, just God bless every single person who decides at some point in their adult life to really freaking do therapy and dive into all of their shit because it is hard. I mean, babe, I cannot believe how hard it is.
Glennon Doyle:
I cannot believe how uncomfortable and tiring, and I didn’t sleep last night and sometimes as I’ve told you, I just feel like, why the hell am I doing this? This is ridiculous. I was fine. I was fine before and now everything feels so hard and as I said to you yesterday, it feels like everyone else is just going on with their lives and doing all of these things. And when someone asks me, “What did you do today?” I’m like, “Well, just spent all day trying to be less fucked up as usual.” It’s just-
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Well, and like I said yesterday, it feels like you were fine long ago based on the hardship that you’re going through now, but let’s not forget-
Glennon Doyle:
That I was anorexic and-
Abby Wambach:
… that you were not fine.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. That’s correct.
Amanda Doyle:
The only thing harder than doing all the things you’re doing and the only thing more exhausting than doing all the things you’re doing is doing all the things you were doing before.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
That was exhausting and consuming. You were just got really expert at it.
Abby Wambach:
It was comfortable and now you’re in the uncomfort.
Glennon Doyle:
And I do think about-
Abby Wambach:
In some ways.
Glennon Doyle:
… to anyone who’s doing this, it can feel like self-indulgent, really can. I’m so grateful that I have this to create and give because it feels so indulgent. So much time, so much hours, so much energy uncovering all of this and trying to figure it out. And as I say to Abby all the time, everyone else seems fine. Everyone else is just going about their lives being fine, but then I think, “No, they’re not.”
Abby Wambach:
No, we’re not.
Glennon Doyle:
Nobody is fine. Actually, the reason why most of us have to do this work is because however many generations before us didn’t do this work and passed on a bunch of stuff that now we either have the choice of doing this really arduous, annoying work or just passing the buck to the next generation, whether it’s through our own children in our house or just the culture that we keep passing down all this bullshit because all this body stuff and eating stuff is not just something that happens in family, it’s something that happens in the entire culture and I don’t want to propagate it in my home and I don’t want to propagate it in the world.
Abby Wambach:
It’s interesting to me that you just used the word indulgence because it seems like maybe that’s where we all want to head, because wouldn’t it be amazing if all women everywhere lived into indulgence?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting word. We talk about food, food and bodies and rest and eating and all of it. It is the opposite of self-denial.
Amanda Doyle:
Is your perspective, Gee, that the other generations of folks with whatever it is, alcoholism or eating disorders or whatever, that they passed it on because they chose not to face it or because there’s another way of looking at it, which is both these things fall through and then if you’re the one to be able to face it, maybe it’s this ecosystem of privilege and resources and safety that maybe of course didn’t exist before.
Glennon Doyle:
Of course. It’s both for sure. I mean, I think there are generations where there was no time, money or resources to even consider this shit, which is really probably why every generation is a little bit bitter at the next one to be doing all of this work because it’s like, “Well, if I hadn’t didn’t have to walk to school backwards up six miles…” There’s truth in that, but then there’s also, I think if we’re being completely fair, there’s the desire also to not hot potato our pain because I’m not just talking about eating disorders or drinking or whatever.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m talking about whatever kind of pain we experience as human beings and then in our homes we can go inward and figure it out or we can just hot potato it out to somebody else. I think it’s Richard Rohr that says pain is either transformed or transmitted. There’s only two options. I think that maybe if you look at a bunch of generations in a row, then there maybe is a generation where there is the time, the resources, the money, the awareness, the consciousness in the culture, instead of just being rageful at all the other generations for not doing it, not breaking whatever, then it’s cool to think of all of them working to prepare a space for somebody to be able to do it. And if you do have the space to do that, you should. I think that’s the idea.
Amanda Doyle:
And then you become the matriarch for the new order. It’s a cool way of thinking about it that you will be the one that it’s like, “Oh, and that changed there.”
Glennon Doyle:
Maybe.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s a beautiful way of thinking about it.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. So inside of it doesn’t feel like any of that. It feels like leaving my bed because I can’t sleep, getting in my daughter’s bed because she’s not there, having a huge thing of animal crackers and a book and reading until 5:00 AM and then realizing oh, this is what I used to do when I was little. Anyway-
Abby Wambach:
That’s interesting.
Glennon Doyle:
I know. I figured that out at 2:00 AM. I was like, “Fuck.” I’m staring at my teenage daughter’s ceiling shoving animal crackers, reading. Try not to think so I’m reading, reading, reading, reading, reading.
Amanda Doyle:
Reading Judy Bloom.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God. I was reading this book called Sam. It’s this new novel, I think it’s freaking beautiful, but it is all from the consciousness of a girl child all the way from time she’s four and now she’s 17. And by the way nothing happens in the whole book, but everything happens because it’s just her life. And I was like, “Thank you universe for letting me read this during this time.” As I’ve said before I am kind of experiencing this as Taylor Swift would call them eras as themes of each month when I look back on it.
Abby Wambach:
It’s like you’re going through different chapters-
Glennon Doyle:
It’s something that’s happening.
Abby Wambach:
… of this recovery that allows you to look back into different chapters of your life.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. When I’m in it doesn’t feel like anything. It feels like nothing’s working and nothing’s happening and I hate everything and I want to quit. Here’s what this month has been like. So if you remember the last update I did, I was in that era where I was desperate for some other set of rules to replace my anorexia rules with. I was thinking, okay, fine, if I’m going to let go of this set of ideas that kept me safe or so I thought, that kept me in control, fine, I believe you that this isn’t healthy, but what the hell am I supposed to do instead? So you lose one religion, you’re trying to replace it with another religion. So my thought was that kept coming to me was okay, you have to replace it with nothingness. You just have to replace it with nothing.
Abby Wambach:
Because you originally tried to replace it with other rules.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh yeah. I remember all of my beauty rules I replaced it with. I was going to be a beauty monk.
Abby Wambach:
And so you realized maybe that wasn’t it and you’re now moving into the place of nothingness.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I realized that after my 16-year-old daughter told me that wasn’t it, and then my doctor told me that wasn’t it. And then so yes, myself discovered that it wasn’t it. And then the idea was that people who don’t have an internal locus of self-trust create outer ideas of control because they think that will keep them safe. So my thought was I have to figure out what this inner locus is instead of replacing old ideology, old control ideas with new ones.
Amanda Doyle:
And that’s on episode 182 for folks if you want to hear back on that one.
Glennon Doyle:
So during this time I decided that I was going to really stick to my morning walks. I’ve talked about walks before. Walks are my most important, I don’t know, spiritual time with myself. So I live close to the beach. I kept waking up early in the morning and going out to the beach for my morning walk by myself. And the interesting part of this is that when you think of a beach walk that’s not what it was because it was really, really cold. Well cold for Californians. So it would be what? 40 degrees.
Abby Wambach:
40, 50 degrees in the morning, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. So 40 degrees. So I would put on a big coat and scarf and hat and there would be a lot of wind and-
Abby Wambach:
You were so cute.
Glennon Doyle:
It felt very Virginia Wolf or something. I don’t know. I had a lot of main character energy by myself just walking in the cold for a long period of time. And here’s what happened
Abby Wambach:
In a long period of time, an hour. You go on an hour long walk.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. So long. I was basically Cheryl fucking Strayed.
Abby Wambach:
I just want people to not think it was a five-hour walkabout.
Glennon Doyle:
So this is what I think started happening, since I demanded of myself to not replace my thinking structures with any other thinking structures, since I decided I don’t think I can think my way out of this, something else started happening during those walks. And what it felt like was that my mind started shutting down and other things started rising up, is the best way I can tell you. All I’m doing you all is trying to put into words things that cannot be put into words all the time. So I’m just going to do my best to explain it in my own way and then maybe-
Abby Wambach:
You’re doing great.
Glennon Doyle:
… you’ll understand.
Abby Wambach:
You’re really doing great.
Glennon Doyle:
So all of these things started rising up as I’m walking on the cold beach and what started rising up was kind of memories, just flashes, but flashes too violent. It wasn’t flashes, it was just gentle rising of ungentle memories. And so while this is happening day after day after day, because I think we’re talking about actually a couple months and it’s still happening now, the beautiful thing for me was that I was walking on the beach and feeling upset because it’s the rainy season in California. We live in a town that has bad irrigation so when it rains in the town, all of the trash, the plastic comes from the town and gets washed into the ocean.
Glennon Doyle:
And then overnight the waves in the ocean push the plastic back out onto the coast. So when you go out in the morning in the rainy times there’s just little teeny toxic plastic all over the freaking coast. So it’s upsetting. You’re walking and you’re seeing all of this little plastic. And this one day I was walking and there’s never anybody out there because it’s too early, but I walked towards this kind of young surfer guy. He was out there. And he was just standing on the beach. And so I walked towards him and we kind of made eye contact and he looked at the plastic in the ocean and he said to me, “It’s a shame.”
Glennon Doyle:
And I felt like we were kind of having a moment because that’s how I was feeling, it’s such a shame. And I said, “It really is.” And then he looked out at the ocean and he said, “Yeah, I mean I can’t even surf.” And I just felt, of course I didn’t think of anything, I mean I just kept walking, but as I was walking away, I felt so much sadder because that was not the shame. The shame was not that we couldn’t use the ocean anymore, the shame was that our carelessness and toxicity because of that the ocean had to work so hard every night to get our toxic shit out of her. That is the shame. The shame was not that we couldn’t continue to use her while she’s trying to save herself. And so-
Amanda Doyle:
Where are you going with this, Doyle?
Glennon Doyle:
Right? Y’all my healing partner right now is the ocean. I go out there every morning no matter what the weather is and together side by side, we just get the toxic shit out of ourselves that carelessness and people have put into us. Just that is what we are doing, the ocean she’s getting it out through her waves and I’m getting it out through this gentle rising of memories that I believe now we keep our brains so controlled and busy so that these things don’t rise. It’s so beautiful. I’m out there sometimes and some mornings the ocean is angry and just scary and nobody can go near her, but she’s not apologizing for any of it. This is just the way it is today.
Glennon Doyle:
And sometimes she’s just so gentle and rolling and there’s no judgment attached to any of it. It’s just the way the ocean is today. And God bless the surfers, but every once in while I’ll be watching and she’ll just spit one off her into a wave and I literally find myself winking at the ocean. A lot of these things rising up. I feel like there’s a lot in our bodies. It’s like our bodies are just one big memory which makes sense of why we would want to stay in our heads then just bless us all. It’s a self-protection mechanism.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like a sinking ship and we’re climbing to the very top of it and living there we’re like, “It’ll be the last to go down.”
Glennon Doyle:
Listen, you picture that scene in Titanic, right?
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. We’re on the tippy tip.
Glennon Doyle:
All the people dip are holding on for dear life up in the top. They know what’s beneath, right?
Abby Wambach:
I think that that’s really fascinating. I’m glad that you pointed that out because that’s what I was thinking about the fact that for the whole of your life you’ve armored yourself with rules and regulations in order not to maybe allow some of this stuff that happened in your childhood or along the way to surface.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, there’s a lot from childhood that’s come up, but it’s not all child, it’s our lives. Yeah. It’s living in a woman’s body in on this planet, living in anybody on this planet. What happens to us and what we watch happen to other people is traumatic. Period. What I want to say to people who have trauma for living in these bodies on this planet, I have felt so gas lit my entire life about how we’re all supposed to act like what happens to us down here is normal. And what I just want to say is to anyone who has struggled or continues to struggle with living in a body on this planet because, that’s what eating disorders are about.
Glennon Doyle:
They’re not about do my thighs look fat and this? That’s not what it is. It’s the terror of living in a body and feeling unsafe living in a body on this planet which is real. I just want to say you are not crazy. We never stood a fucking chance, okay? What I am reading and learning about how all of these disorders happen, there’s three factors on our planet that contribute to them, their home, media, peers. We grew up in homes where for many, many real reasons our parents were not exposed to the healing that we are exposed to now or for eating stuff we were born to the generation of Spa Lady and Dexatrim and SlimFast and they didn’t have the consciousness we have now.
Glennon Doyle:
That was poured into us, into our homes, the media from the time we were born, every single image that was shown to us was to encourage us to believe that our worthiness was based in our appearance and that our appearance was only worthy if it was small. We were exposed to constant, constant images and reality that said that living in a woman’s body is not safe, it will be assaulted, it will be raped and then once we speak up it will not be believed. We were exposed to all kinds of degrading messages and treatment in schools. When we wonder why we are like this, it’s because this was the plan for us.
Glennon Doyle:
Sometimes I think of a room full of women suffering from eating disorders just getting smaller and smaller and smaller with no voice and bodies shrinking and I think why isn’t anyone doing anything about this rampant issue? And I think because this is ideal. In a world like ours a bunch of women wasting away to nothing and becoming completely voiceless and small and irrelevant and not causing any problems was the plan. So to all of you suffering from this shit, it’s not our fault. It’s a cultural sickness that we have become sick with. And so what I would say is we didn’t do this to ourselves. I didn’t do this to myself, but I sure as hell I’m going to undo it because I only have one life, you only have one life and we are just not going to let them have it.
Abby Wambach:
I have a question. For some of the people who might not understand the macro, the plan, whose plan?
Glennon Doyle:
I guess you could look at it through any lens, a political lens of capitalism lens. I mean I’ve stopped using basically the internet because I feel like I’m working so hard in therapy and in my reading and in my all of it to stop objectifying myself, to change my thinking about what a body is for. And then if I go on the internet it’s all it is images of that. It feels like going for a long hike in the wilderness and then smoking a pack of cigarettes. If I work this hard on therapy and then I go on the internet it’s like all of these images of a certain kind of body. We don’t know what that does to us. It’s real.
Abby Wambach:
Feels like you’re a character in somebody else’s simulation.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And that’s to sell things. Women who feel like about ourselves we buy more. And when I look at the world, I have thought about this a lot lately, when I look at the world, it doesn’t look like that. When I walk around, when I go to my kid’s stuff, when I go to… Bodies look all different. It’s not the world that looks like that, that does that to us, it’s not the actual people in our community, it’s not our actual life, it’s the media which media means medium. There is a medium between us and our world that is telling us what to think and telling us what to do and that media’s main goal is to sell things. And you do not sell things by telling people that they’re all right how they are. You have to tell them that they’re not all right the way they are.
Amanda Doyle:
To go back to Abby’s point about the plan, from a historic perspective, what you’re saying Glennon about a room full of women who are sick is the ideal that was when the industrial revolution happened and we stopped having families work as a unit so that kids and partnerships were necessary to keep a family afloat, and it shifted from that where everyone’s contribution was necessary for the survival of the family to a situation in which there was one earner of the family. And when that happened in the upper white class in which there could be one earner, it became the ultimate status symbol for that earner who was a man for their wife to be. So it’s almost unbelievable, but it’s truthful for the wife to appear to be so sick that she couldn’t work.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay. That was the model because if my spouse appears to be the kind of body that is so frail that she cannot work, that reinforces my status as being able to hold down this entire family.
Abby Wambach:
Holy fucking shit.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s true, but that phenomenon was about the inverse of power. If you’re just walking around looking like you’re full-bodied, healthy, can take care of yourself that reflects negative on me because then how is everyone going to know that I am the one who’s providing for this whole family?
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. The stronger you appear, the less strong I appear and the weaker you look, the stronger I appear.
Amanda Doyle:
And that still holds true. If you extrapolate out of that I mean, women who earn more than their husbands are multiple levels more likely to be cheated on. Women who are successful the husbands report multiple levels above dissatisfaction and discomfort in the relationship. It is when you think about it, six generations later, that same how is anyone going to know my worth if you’re out there proving yours?
Glennon Doyle:
So something interesting happened a few weeks ago, sister, you were here and our dear friend Alex was here and Abby was here and I went to a therapy session on Zoom because I had it scheduled. I asked-
Abby Wambach:
Other things.
Glennon Doyle:
… all of you to do other things because I didn’t want to miss anything you were saying to each other.
Abby Wambach:
For the hour.
Glennon Doyle:
What happened during that therapy, I want to explain to the pod squad carefully is that as part of my recovery, I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a scale in my room and I weigh myself every once in a while and then the information goes to my therapist, not me, so I can’t see any numbers on it, but as a security blanket or stepping stone in the recovery, what often happens, and what happened in my case is that my therapist and I created a window of weight gain that if I were inside of that window, and it was pretty substantial for me. It was a pretty substantial window.
Glennon Doyle:
Everyone’s window is different, but it was a way of saying, you don’t need to worry about it, I’ll let you know if you’re out of this window, but people who are recovering from eating issues aren’t great at self-analysis in terms of we don’t understand, we don’t know what’s happening to our bodies so it’s a way of us doing the work without worrying that we’re off the charts of our own chart. So what happened was that this day my therapist in a beautiful, wonderful way just said, “So I have to let you know because we have this deal. You are out of your window. The amount of weight you’ve gained is out of the window that we made together.”
Amanda Doyle:
Meaning, just so everyone knows, meaning that this was the window that you decided to in order to curb your this is totally out of control and none of this will be predictable, and how do I know I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and everything’s going to just be wildly out of control? There was a certain number of pounds after which you gained more of she would agree to tell you. So the window isn’t this is your optimal health.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Amanda Doyle:
The window is just that comfort zone where it’s like, “Okay, if you gain more than X-
Glennon Doyle:
I promise I’ll tell you.
Amanda Doyle:
… I’m back in with you so you will know what’s happening.”
Glennon Doyle:
And you don’t ask me all the time and you don’t obsess about all the things. So she tells me that and I’m sitting on my bed with the computer up and she’s looking at me and it feels like the way to describe it is sometimes in a movie where the character’s sitting there and then something happens like “Whoosh.” And then the whole background is different and they’re taken to another place and it’s all different. That’s how it felt. The second she said that it felt like everything is different.
Abby Wambach:
Scene change.
Glennon Doyle:
My entire being, the best way to describe what happened in my body was I’m in trouble. I am in trouble. That feeling that maybe you haven’t had since you’re probably an adult listening to this podcast, but the feeling you had when you were a teenager or something and you got busted. The jig was up, you got busted and you were like, “Oh shit, I’m in so much trouble.” The feeling that I had from the top of my head to my bottom of my feet was I am in so much trouble.
Glennon Doyle:
So I don’t even know, I’m not trying to analyze all of this to death, I’m doing all of this in real time, but when I came upstairs to talk to all of you, I don’t even remember the rest of the therapy session. I’m sure I said some words to try to act like I was fine with this or whatever. I don’t know. The opposite of what you’re supposed to do in therapy. By the time I made it upstairs to all of you, we did sit and talk for a while. Do you all remember anything about… What do you remember, sister?
Amanda Doyle:
I remember being scared, first of all, feeling just incredible empathy and pain with you because of the just kind of felt like a oddly a verdict had been read or something and that we were dealing with it. And I remember being afraid that since this is kind of where the rubber meets the road, that it would be like, “Well, I’ve gone too far. I trusted this process. And I told you all this was gonna happen and this is happening and now I am going to pretend like I’m going to keep doing this, but I’m going to secretly have another agenda where I get this shit under control.” That was my fear.
Glennon Doyle:
Me too.
Amanda Doyle:
Is that you were going to start managing it.
Glennon Doyle:
It did feel like a verdict.
Abby Wambach:
I wasn’t scared of that. I knew that you were so open and you’ve been so outwardly communicative. The fact that you told us made me know that you weren’t going to go down that road.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s true. That’s a big step.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it was.
Amanda Doyle:
Because had you been less healthy, you would’ve just been like, “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Abby Wambach:
She wouldn’t have said anything. Yeah, she would’ve just kept it to herself. I think what I remember most was just seeing that little girl inside you scared. You were glassy-eyed, you were almost on the verge of tears and that very rarely happens, but it was kind of like almost like you had that feeling in your throat where you’re just about to cry and it stayed there for about an hour.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
It was really, I think such a beautiful moment because you sat on the couch and sister and I literally got on our knees in front of the couch and Alex sat right next to you and we were just flanking you. We were just completely surrounding you with so much love and you just were confused.
Glennon Doyle:
I was confused.
Abby Wambach:
You kept saying, “I just feel very confused.” For a lot of reasons and I thought that you were super honest and you said so many things that felt true to you and we all just listened as much as we can, and just that little girl needed to be scared and around other people who weren’t.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. That’s good. It did feel that way. Thank you. And to everyone who is wondering why this was such a big deal, it feels like when you’re doing this kind of work mostly what you’re doing is you’re letting go of or challenging some ideas you learned as a young person, some rules that your family and your culture promised you needed to follow in order to stay safe and you believed it.
Abby Wambach:
And it was kind of true in some ways.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s true. People with eating disorders it’s less about an obsession with appearance and more about obedience. The women who far complying with the rules about denying our appetites and self-denial. And it’s so interesting because it’s obedience to power, but then it creates its own kind of power. In white womanhood thinness is a signal of status. We’ve talked about this before, of control which translates to power.
Amanda Doyle:
And just privilege.
Glennon Doyle:
Privilege. Right.
Amanda Doyle:
There’s a certain amount of privilege in that. And it’s also control. It might be shitty, but you know if A then B. If I am this then I know that these things will happen to me in the world and these things will not happen to me.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
And if you decide to not be, then it’s if X then I don’t know what.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Amanda Doyle:
And eating disorders are about control and predictability and surviving as you say, in a body in this world that is completely out of control. And so if you are voluntarily acquiescing the modicum of control you have, that is a very brave thing to do.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And one of the things that I kept saying to you is it feels like the roosters have come home to roost. I don’t even know what the fuck that means, but I kept saying it. And what I meant was, fine it’s all well and good that you’re going to go into therapy and challenge the rules or stop following the rules that your family and culture laid out for you. Mine would it be you must control your appetite. In order to stay safe and powerful on this earth your body needs to look a certain way and in order for your body to look that certain way you need to deny your appetite.
Abby Wambach:
I want to know if you remember what you said your biggest fear was when you came up after hearing this from your therapist.
Glennon Doyle:
No, what did I say?
Amanda Doyle:
You said, “I’m the chubby little girl that I was.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I said I’m the chubby little girl. I did. That’s what I felt. I felt like I am in this moment roomed into I am that chubby little girl again and I’m in trouble.
Abby Wambach:
And I feel like one of the things that was important to hear from the three of us talking to you, because a lot of this has to do with trust, trusting yourself and that your body will be what it is and that the fear of that little girl doesn’t have to subsist now in your adult life.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Well the little girl was right to believe that this is what would keep her safe. That is what she was taught. And so she was correct. That it’s just that now that little girl doesn’t live in that particular world, she lives in this world where we’re doing something different except that that little girl also lives in this world where it’s also still true. It’s complicated for anybody who is doing this very difficult work, who is challenging an old idea that was taught to them, a rule that was taught to them by their families and their culture and has stopped working for them and wants freedom. So they are starting to try to disregard that rule and live a different way.
Glennon Doyle:
So for me it was a very, I don’t know that this self-denial staying small rule is helping me anymore. So what if I try something different? What if I just actually eat what I want to eat? And what if every time I want to restrict, I don’t allow myself to restrict? What if I indulge my appetite? That’s great. Except for then there’s this moment where the roosters come home to roost, where the consequence of the breaking of the rule happens so if your rule is, we talked about this, you can rest when you’re dead. If your parents taught you that hustle, hustle, hustle, you rest when you’re dead, you decide to try something different, you indulge rest, you indulge self-care, you indulge all of these things. And then somebody comes to you and says, “That’s great, but you didn’t get the promotion.”
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. Exactly. It’s like people are like, “You’re so stressed, you work too hard, you shouldn’t stay up all night.” And you’re like, “You’re right. My rest and my mental health is worth it.” And then you try something different. You trust them and you don’t study like you did before and you get a B minus.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
And you’re like, “So wait, now are you wrong that I should’ve?”
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
Were you wrong about what you said and what I believed because now I need to go back and study the way I used to?
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
Or is it that it is true that you deserve to rest and you shouldn’t sacrifice your mental health? And what that world looks like is you get B minus.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Because what our parents taught us, what culture taught us is culture. They weren’t lying. What they taught us was if you as a white woman want to have any safety and power, fake safety, fake power in this, this is what you have to be. They were right. Okay? If they taught you do not rest in order to get ahead in this culture, you have to grind. They were right. It’s just that culture is shit. We have to decide which prize we want more. So in that moment I realized, oh, changing the rules there is a consequence. There is a prize that we give up. Am I willing to give up the price?
Glennon Doyle:
Also, I have to give up the rules and I have to give up the price. And so for me, that moment was my therapist saying, “You’re the boss. I’m not the boss. If we want to rethink things because you truly feel that this is out of control, we can work with this. We can change things, we can slow it down, we can whatever.” And it was me saying, no, no, I am not going back. I cannot unknow what I know now. I will not deny myself anymore. So this is the person who says, “No, I will rest.” And then gets passed up for the promotion and then doubles down and says, “That’s fine. I will give up the culture’s prize because I don’t believe in it anymore.”
Abby Wambach:
And start valuing the prize that you’re creating.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. The prize of being fully human and living by my own values instead of the culture’s values because I am finally giving them up. So that’s it. I mean, I think that might be enough for one episode.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s it then?
Glennon Doyle:
That’s all. That’s what’s been happening over here.
Amanda Doyle:
How long did it take you to decide that you were like, “Okay, no, the prize that I am experiencing internally is worth foregoing the prize of staying in that window.” Was that an immediate knowing or did it take you a while to get there?
Glennon Doyle:
It was an immediate knowing. There was no seconds in me that thought, “Oh well now I’m going to just go back.”
Abby Wambach:
No, but you were grieving.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Abby Wambach:
There was a grieving.
Glennon Doyle:
I was grieving. I was a grieving the release of the prize of being this.
Abby Wambach:
Culture’s prize.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
And does the grief process for that is that, are you grieving an identity? Are you grieving the privileges? Are you grieving the lack of control and not knowing what’s coming?
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know.
Amanda Doyle:
What is it?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I don’t know the answer. All I know is I was grieving feeling like what I said to you guys, the chubby little girl who’s in trouble. Maybe in my next era next month I will figure out exactly what. But also so much of this is, it probably sounds funny after hearing all this, but I really am trying to just allow myself to feel it and not try to intellectualize everything because I know how to intellectualize this shit.
Amanda Doyle:
If intellectualizing was going to work for you it would already have worked for you.
Glennon Doyle:
I would’ve done it. So I’m just trying to feel all of it this time because I’m trying to do it differently this time and this is what’s happening and this is what I’m sharing, and I hope that it made sense to anyone.
Amanda Doyle:
Do you think that’s because the feeling is the source of the bigger prize for you? You can’t point to what the prize is that outweighed the privilege prize, but it has something to do with the feeling of it. It’s just inside of you as a feeling. So it would make sense that you’d have to return to the feeling again and again because that’s where the prize is.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I think the prize is living authentically in any way. Actually, living in response to what I feel and want and know and hunger for and yearn for. And the entire prize is not replacing this with another control mechanism. The entire prize is figuring out how to live from the inside out as opposed to the outside in because there’s no prize on the outside that is big enough to sacrifice my one wild and precious life for.
Abby Wambach:
I’ve had a front row seat to a lot of this and one thing that I think is miraculous having lived with you for a long while now, seven years, is that I’m seeing this birth happen and some days it comes in blips. In a moment I can see this embodiment happening that you are becoming completely integrated and then it goes away or you get in your head or whatever it is, but there has been such a settling of your spirit of the energy of you that I don’t know, every once in a while when I look at you, it’s like you’re finally taking a breath.
Abby Wambach:
And maybe you only get one in a day, or maybe you’re getting 10. I don’t know. It’s just I see you doing this hard work and I see some of the fear come up and it’s this little child in you is screaming, “Thank you.” And I see that. And I just want you to know, and all those listening who might be dealing with something similar or something adjacent, those moments in the day are the purpose, are the worth it.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, when you say it that way it makes me think of, oh, I’m that chubby little girl again. That is what I am again. That’s what I’m walking on the exile, I call it the exile walks, the things, the parts of myself have exiled, that is who I am on those walks. I am allowing her to speak, to remember, to tell us what she needed. And the reason that I can do that now is because there is a responsible adult in the room and it is me.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Heyyo.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s me. I’ve got us. Go ahead. Come up. Say the things. Remember the things. I have got us here. We’re going to be okay.
Abby Wambach:
Gives me the chills.
Glennon Doyle:
So when I say I’m afraid I’m that chubby girl again, I’m in trouble. That is correct. I think I might actually be trying to get back to that. Yeah. All right. I love you. We’re going now. I’m done. I’m fucking done.
Amanda Doyle:
Thank you, G.
Glennon Doyle:
Bye. We can do hard things.
Abby Wambach:
See you next time.
Amanda Doyle:
Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us If you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do each or all of these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right hand corner or click on follow.
Glennon Doyle:
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