Stop Trying to Be Good & Trust Your Untamed Heart w/ Glennon Doyle

In this episode of MarieTV, we do have some adult language. So if you do have little ones around, grab your headphones now.

In this episode of MarieTV we do have some adult language. So if you have little ones around grab your headphones now.

Marie Forleo: Hey, it’s Marie Forleo, and welcome to another episode of MarieTV and the Marie Forleo Podcast. So today you are in for a treat. I have one of my dearest friends, she’s a brilliant writer and she’s got a new book out that I know you are going to love. Glennon Doyle is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Love Warrior, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, as well as the New York Times bestseller, Carry On Warrior. Glennon is an activist and speaker, and she’s the founder and president of Together Rising. She lives in Florida with her wife and three children. Her latest book, Untamed, is available now. Glennon.

Glennon Doyle: Hi baby.

Marie Forleo: I know my audio guy’s like, “What the hell is she doing?” You guys, Untamed. I texted you from the plane, I was halfway through. I was bursting out of my skin because this thing is incredible. I was like, “Who is my friend? Who has my friend become? How has she become one of the most brilliant moving writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading in my life.” I have so many damn underlines in here, I’m like, “Holy cow, this interview is going to be …” I was like, asked you, texted you, “How long do you have today?” Because this conversation’s going to be big. Congratulations.

Glennon Doyle: Thank you. I can’t believe you said bursting out of your skin. That’s what I want this to do. Let’s get women to burst out of their skin.

Marie Forleo: And it will, and it will. I have a feeling it’s going to be atop anything that you can possibly imagine. So. I love the line, “When women learn how to please, we forget who we are.” For those in our audience who may not know who you are quite yet, or just may not be familiar with your story and your journey, can you share a little bit about what inspired you to write Untamed? I will share another line. I’ve been doing this a lot in this interview you guys, basically telling Glennon about her own brilliant words. “What follows is how I got caged and how I got free.”

Glennon Doyle: Yeah. Well, who I am. I’ve spent the last 10 years writing and speaking about feminism really, about women trusting themselves and believing in themselves and conspiring together and challenging institutions and ideas. Then I got all of that tested fairly recently, a few years ago. I was struggling for many reasons in my marriage. That was the last book, and I was at an event, and a woman walked in the door and I looked at her and three words swelled up in my being, and the words were, “There she is.” For a long time, I thought those words had come from on high. This was some magical Disney moment.

Glennon Doyle: It took me a while to realize that those words had actually come from within, right? That I was actually hearing from the voice of the person I was before the world told me who to be, right? Because I fell in love with her, and it was the first time I’d loved someone beyond the people who I had had been conditioned to love, right? I wanted her so much, and it was the first time I had wanted something beyond who I’d been trained to want and what I’d been trained to want. Right? What unfolded next was this question, will I trust that voice? Will I trust myself? Because what I realized is it’s one thing to be a feminist out in the world saying, “Believe women, trust in women,” and it’s quite another thing to become a woman who actually trusts herself.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Right? Because the whole rest of the world, you can imagine, the whole rest of the world was saying to me, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” about upending my life, and following my truth to love Abby. But I think that’s when you realize that you’re starting to untame when the whole rest of the world is going, “No,” and you’re going, “Yeah.”

Marie Forleo: That is the good stuff. Yes.

Glennon Doyle: You’re like, “If this makes no sense to me the world, then this must be me finally hearing from myself.”

Marie Forleo: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Again, for those who don’t know your journey specifically, all of this was going down when your last book was soaring to the top of the charts. Oprah had you on the show. We’re talking about marriage, you’re a faith-based person. There’s all of these different layers and it’s like, “Whoa!”

Glennon Doyle: And life isn’t convenient that way.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Right? You’ll get tested right at the moment… You’ll get tested. The universe will say, “That’s nice that you’re out there preaching that. Do you believe it?” Right? Because yeah, I announced my divorce I think a few weeks before my book came out that was touted as a marriage redemption, and this is life, right?

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: This is life.

Marie Forleo: Yes. Before we go any further, we have a lot of writers and aspiring writers and creators in our audience, and I want to take a little bit of a right turn for a minute into the structure of the book, because I get asked a lot of questions about, “Oh my gosh, I have this other idea for a book,” or, “I want to write my first one, how do I do it?” What I so appreciated about yours, was it’s like these little… I would call them almost like little chapterettes, toastettes, little delicious pieces of toast that I want to put tomatoes and mozzarella on, and then we go into an area that there’s Q&A, and then it’s different. It is untamed and it’s structured. So I’m curious from the craft of writing side, did you go in with that intention or did the book reveal that to you as you were writing it?

Glennon Doyle: It felt to me, writing this book ––  art, feels to me the same way that religion or sexuality, all these categories that we have, right? So I have this wild faith inside of me, right? This unique wild idea about who God is and who I am and how we co-create together, and then I get this blueprint for religion, and I’m like, “Not that. It doesn’t fit in there,” right?

Marie Forleo: Yeah.

Glennon Doyle: Or I have this a sexual identity, right? That’s weird and different, and I can’t really explain and was different last year than it is this year. Then they’re like, “Here’s the blueprints for sexuality.” I’m like, “What’s in here, the wild in here doesn’t fit inside there,” which is what a lot of people are saying now, which is why our old ideas of sexuality are crumbling, and our old ideas of religion are crumbling, right?

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Same with art. I wrote this book which is really about getting that wild inside out into the world and living with integrity, which means that our insides match our outsides, right? In a very structured way at first, it was essay after essay about what it means to be a woman in the world. And I sat down with a dear friend, and I was figuring out why isn’t this working? By the way, this is 100,000 words in. Okay?

Marie Forleo: Yeah. That’s no small amount. That…

Glennon Doyle: No, at that point you’re like, “I’ll just make this work.” Right?

Marie Forleo: Yeah.

Glennon Doyle: We figured out, “Oh, you’re writing a book about being untamed and you’re trying to put it in an old structure that’s been created by somebody else.” You’re trying to birth this thing, this idea. I mean art is just about having a vision inside of us and somehow through all this blood, sweat and tears, making it real in the world. You have this particular wild vision inside of you and you’re trying to fit it into somebody else’s structure. Burn it, throw it away, let it all burn. Start over. The opening vignette is about a cheetah. I wrote it like that cheetah. I want to run through this. I don’t want to second guess myself, I don’t want to try to fit it into anybody, I want the reader to be breathless by the end. Right? That’s how I wrote it, and I think it feels wild.

Marie Forleo: It does. It feels fantastic, and when I say it makes sense, I mean on an intuitive and soulful level, not necessarily from a logical structured place because that’s why I was like, “Yes.” I was like, “Even how this book unfolds is untamed.” I’m curious, from the publishing standpoint or editing standpoint, did you get some pushback initially or…

Glennon Doyle: Yes.

Marie Forleo: Yes, okay. Cool. Talk…

Glennon Doyle: If you don’t get to pushback initially, that means you’re not doing anything new.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Right?

Marie Forleo: Absolutely.

Glennon Doyle: It’s very interesting to be an artist because your job is to always push the envelope, to always do the next thing that no one’s ever seen before. But inherent in that is that you’re bringing that new thing to a structure that is built on, but all of these other things have worked.

Marie Forleo: Totally.

Glennon Doyle: Right? It is your job as the visionary to push back on that. It is their job by the way, to still say, “Yikes.” But that’s why it’s so important to be with a team and be with an editor, be with a publishing house that believes in your vision even when they’re afraid.

Marie Forleo: Absolutely.

Glennon Doyle: Right?

Marie Forleo: We experienced that with Everything is Figureoutable too, and I was really grateful to have people that I could have those tough conversations with and that we can go back and forth, and for me to be able to just remind them like, “Hey, here’s why you invested in me because you saw something different than I was going to do something a little different.” Yeah, I just…

Glennon Doyle: And you trust your people that they’ll get it, right?

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: It’s not just with art, it’s with your life, it’s with your relationship, it’s with the way that you speak about your faith. Like, “Oh my God, that’s scary. That doesn’t fit into the mold.” I think they’ll get it.

Marie Forleo: Yes, 100%.

Glennon Doyle: I think they’ll get it, and even if they don’t agree, they’re going to feel that… They might not say, they’re going to feel the truth and the beauty in it.

Marie Forleo: That’s right.

Glennon Doyle: Right? We’re not trying to be right, and when you’re an artist and they say, “That won’t sell,” you have to say, “Okay, all right. I’d much rather make what’s real and true and see what happens than change this thing to fit what you tell me will happen next.”

Marie Forleo: Yes, absolutely. You talked about the cheetah story, which by the way, come on.

Glennon Doyle: I love a theme.

Marie Forleo: Let’s stay on theme, baby. The story about the cheetah and the dirty pink bunny, oh my God, I was laughing but also the metaphor of that just struck me so hard. I’m wondering if you can share that story, because I think it alludes to the fact that so many of us begin to get caged at a very early age.

Glennon Doyle: Yeah. I love that day, because when you’re messing with ideas in your mind and then you see the metaphor for it in the world, there’s no more exciting moment, right?

Marie Forleo: Yeah.

Glennon Doyle: I’m at the zoo, this safari park with my daughters, and we go to this thing called the cheetah run. This is the park’s big event for the day. The zookeeper comes out, and she’s holding the leash of a lab. I’m like, “What?” She says, “Is this our cheetah?” The kids all say, “No.” She said, “You’re right. This is Minnie the lab. We raised Minnie alongside Tabitha, the cheetah, so that we could tame her. Now, Tabitha and Minnie are best friends, and Tabitha does whatever Minnie does.” Something about it, and we watched the cheetah run. Tabitha…

Glennon Doyle: Minnie went first, and they attached this pink stuff, dirty bunny to a Jeep, this little Jeep, and then the Jeep took off, and Minnie the lab chased the dirty pink bunny, right? Tabitha watches from her cage. Open the cage, Tabitha walks out, just majestic, gorgeous, muscles rippling. This gorgeous majestic creature stands at the freaking starting line and chases this dirty pink bunny. Why is this wild animal following this well worn path, settling for this applause of these spectators when she could turn to those zookeepers and tear them to shreds if she remembered her wild. Right? Why is she doing it? Because she’s been tamed, because she’s been raised to be a lab. It just struck me that, “Holy crap, if a cheetah, if a freaking cheetah can be tamed to forget her wild, certainly a woman can too. Right?

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Then I started thinking about all of the dirty pink bunnies that women are trained to…

Marie Forleo: To chase, yes.

Glennon Doyle: …chase. Right? I talked to a group of women recently, and they were , and at first they weren’t buying this cheetah thing, and I was like, “Okay, all right. I want you to start talking to me about all of the things that you were taught to believe about what makes a good girl, what makes a good wife, what makes a successful woman,” and they just started, “Oh, be quiet, be small, be pleasing, be…”

Marie Forleo: Nice.

Glennon Doyle: “…accommodating, be nice, be humble,” and then, “Oh, there’s your dirty pink bunnies.” Be perfect, be thin, be beautiful, be faultless, be… over and over and over again. Then we wonder why we are unfulfilled, why we are exhausted, why we are overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the exact same time. It’s because we were meant for wildness, but we’re chasing these dirty pink bunnies that somebody else put in our path.

Marie Forleo: Totally.

Glennon Doyle: Right?

Marie Forleo: Yes. Yeah, that’s the cheetah. I think it was so cool, because later, they led Tabitha into this field, and then the zookeeper started talking about cheetahs that were raised in captivity, right? The little girl raised her hand and said, “But does Tabitha miss the wild?” And the zookeeper said, “No, no, no, no, no. Tabitha was born here. She doesn’t know any better.” Right? Or she doesn’t know any different. Tish, my daughter, was watching Tabitha in that field and she pointed to Tabitha and she said, “Mommy, she changed.”

Marie Forleo: I look over at Tabitha and Tabitha is a different animal away from the zookeeper, away from the dirty pink bunnies. Her posture has changed, she’s looking regal, she’s looking fierce, she’s stalking the periphery of the fence, looking beyond the fence. You could just see this energy rise up into her, and Tish looks at me and she goes, “Mommy, she turned wild again.” I thought, “Oh, that’s what happens because Tabitha has never seen the wild. It’s in her.”

Glennon Doyle: Yes. Right? That’s what women are feeling. It’s this restlessness, this stalking of the periphery. This is all I’ve seen. All I’ve seen is a bunch of Minnies, right? But I know I’m meant for something different. Right? I know my faith is bigger than this religion I’ve been handed, I know my sexuality is wider than this category I’ve given, I know my potential is bigger than the opportunities that have been put in front of me, I know I’m meant to love deeper, I know I’m meant to be loved, deeper and realer and truer, and it doesn’t matter that I can’t see it because it’s in my imagination, and I really think that imagination is not where we go to just dream up something. That imagination is where our truest reality is.

Glennon Doyle: Yes. Right, so…

Marie Forleo: Right.

Glennon Doyle: If we start there and lead from the inside out instead of the outside in, that’s how we create the truest most beautiful from our wild.

Glennon Doyle: Yes. I love the line that you wrote, “Who was I before I became who the world taught me to be?” I feel like so many of our early, when we’re in our 20s and our 30s, at least my own experience, was trying to fit myself in, trying to chase those fucking dirty pink bunnies.

Marie Forleo: Oh God. I remember I was engaged at 23, thankfully my inner knowing, she is so unbelievably loud. She will make me physically sick when I am going too close to a path that is not true for me. So I’m super grateful for that. I want to shift because I think there may be a lot of people listening right now who can relate to that feeling of both being overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time, and in a form of pain. You write, “Being human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything. Pain is not tragic, it’s magic. Suffering is tragic.” You said, “If you are in deep pain or angry, yearning, and confused, you don’t have a problem, you have a life.” Let’s talk about pain, let’s talk about the story of protecting Tish from pain. I think this is a great place to go next.

Glennon Doyle: Yeah. Well, after I fell in love with Abby, I was really struggling to figure… I mean I was trained early to believe that good mothers don’t break their children’s hearts, right? In order to be true to myself, I would have had to leave my then-husband, which would have broken my children’s hearts, because he is such a good man and such a good father, and still is one of my dearest friends. I was taught that being a mother, that a good mother protects her children from pain, right?

Glennon Doyle: I’m standing in front of my daughter, Tish. She’s an extremely sensitive, fierce, wonderful soul, and she’s doing her hair and she looks back at me and she says, “Mommy, can I do my hair like yours?” Something in that moment I realized, “Oh, every time my daughter looks at me, she’s asking a question,” right? She’s looking at me and she’s asking, “Mommy, how does a woman do her hair? Mommy, how does a woman live? How does a woman love? How does a woman be loved?” Right? I realized, Oh, I am staying in this marriage for my little girl, but would I want this marriage for my little girl?” I realized that in staying in that marriage to protect her from pain, I was taming her, right?

Glennon Doyle: I was training her how to be a lab. I am a mother who… Our parenting generation, maybe every parenting generation, gets this memo that mothers should show their love by martyring themselves for their children, right? That mothers, their job is to just keep disappearing, to keep putting their needs so far below everyone else’s that they just slowly disappear, and what a burden for our children, right? To know that they are the reason that their mom stopped living. Right? And to know that if one day they become parents, that will be their fate also because they… If we teach them that martyrdom is the epitome of love, they will feel like they need to rise to that definition. Right?

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: What I realized in that moment was that this is why Carl Jung said that “the greatest burden a child can have is the unlived life of a parent,” because children will only allow themselves to live as fully as their parents lived. So the duty of a parent is to not accept any life, relationship, conversation, occupation, to accept nothing less true and beautiful than we would want for our own children, right? Because they will only allow themselves to step into lives as big as the ones that we allow ourselves to live. So that was a dirty pink bunny, that I was taught that mothers are to be martyrs, right? Oh, who could have created that one? Who could’ve created this dirty pink bunny after dirty pink bunny that insists in every arena that women get as small as possible, and slowly die? Right?

Marie Forleo: Well, we know the answer to that.

Glennon Doyle: Right. So if you go, “Oh my God, this little girl, she doesn’t need her mother to protect her. She doesn’t need me to protect, to save her. She needs to watch her mother save herself.” Right? I threw away that dirty pink bunny of mothers are martyrs and I said, “No, no, no. I’m going to create my own ideal, my own expectation, which is that mothers are models.”

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Right? I will live my life so fully that my little girl will have no other option than to live her life as fully as possible. Not to match mine, but to match herself.

Marie Forleo: Yes, and on pain too, I love that you said, “I can feel everything and survive. Everything that I thought would kill me didn’t. Every time I said to myself, ‘I can’t take this anymore,’ I was wrong, and this is what’s great. I can also use pain to become. I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. What scares me more than feeling it all, is missing it all.” I think for anyone listening to us right now who finds themself in pain, it’s such a powerful reframe.

Glennon Doyle: Well, listen, we live in a capitalist culture, and the way that people sell things to us is that they tell us through 17 million messages a day that the reason that you’re sad and depressed and angry and lonely and heartbroken is not because life is sad and depressing and heartbreaking and lonely, it’s because you just need these countertops. Right? Everyone else is happy because they have these countertops, and if you also… We’re like, “Okay, I’ll get the thing,” and then we just keep going and we keep getting the thing and we keep getting the thing and we’re still lonely because you can never get enough of what you never really needed.

Glennon Doyle: The lesson of my life is to figure out that a very early age I learned that it is too much to have big feelings. I was a little girl who was trying to fit in in every which way possible, and the world showed me a dirty pink bunny that girls are pleasing and smile and are accommodating, and I had big feelings and I had big fear and I had big rage and I had big all the big, and so I started numbing myself with bulimia. I became bulimic when I was 10, and I spent the next 25 years in a cage trying to protect myself from my muchness. Right? I was too much. Numb, numb, numb, food, booze, but all the things.

Glennon Doyle: Then I’m raising my little girl, right? Sometimes it just takes looking at the world through another person’s eyes, especially a child, to forgive yourself and figure out who you really were. She has so much. Big feelings, big all the things. This is a good example of her. When she was in kindergarten, her teacher called me and said, “Glennon, we have an issue,” and I was not shocked. She said, “I just accidentally may have mentioned to the kids about global warming and that the polar bears were losing their homes.” She said, “The rest of the kids were sad about that, but able to soldier on to recess.”

Glennon Doyle: She said, “Tish is still sitting in the middle of the carpet. She keeps asking me questions about polar bears, she keeps asking who’s going to step up for the polar bears? Where’s the polar bear’s mom? I can’t get her to go out to recess.” Marie, I’m not kidding you when I tell you that, for months, our freaking family’s life revolved around polar bears. We had polar bear posters on the wall, we adopted four freaking polar bears from Antarctica. I don’t know if there’s some website. It got so bad that at one point I asked my friend to please email me and pretend that she was the president of Antarctica, and tell me that the polar bears were now in fact fine.

Glennon Doyle: Because I just couldn’t take it anymore, this child. One night, I’m getting ready to put Tish to bed and I’m walking out the door and I hear, “Mommy,” and I’m like, “Jesus, no,” and I go back and I say, “What’s wrong?” She says, “It’s the polar bears.” I said, “Oh hell no.” Hell no. She says, “Mommy, it’s just that, it’s just that… it’s the polar bears now, but nobody cares, and so tomorrow it’ll be us.” And that little brat fell asleep, and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s the polar bears.” Holy shit. I’m looking at her, and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, she’s not crazy. She’s a prophet.” Right?

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: The sensitive freaking kids. Basically, her teacher just told her the world is ending, and then then it’s like can you just carry on? What I figured out is these sensitive souls, they’re standing on the bow of the Titanic going, “Iceberg iceberg,” and everybody is like, “We just want to keep dancing.” These sensitive souls in most cultures and throughout history have been identified as important to the culture. They’re the shaman, they’re the medicine men, they’re the poets, they’re the clergy. They’re the ones that are a little different, a little eccentric because they can see things that other people can’t see, hear things other people can’t hear, feel things that other people can’t feel, and so they are honored as weird but crucial to the culture’s survival.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: But our culture is just so hell bent on efficiency that we call those people broken, like they did with me, instead of understanding that they are responding appropriately and importantly to a broken system.

Marie Forleo: Amen.

Glennon Doyle: Right? Through raising that girl, I figured out, “Oh my God, I was never crazy. I was a goddamn cheetah.”

Marie Forleo: That’s right, girl.

Glennon Doyle: Right? Now, what I figured out is that I am still… Well, I should say I am finally the girl I was before the world told me who to be, because we know that we start to internalize our conditioning at 10 years old. 10 years old is when I became bulimic. Right? When Abby proposed to me, she went to talk to my parents first, and the first thing my mom said is she started crying, and she looked at Abby and she said, “Abby, I have not seen my daughter this alive since she was 10 years old.” Tamed at 10, untamed at 43, right? I just finally returned. Untaming is not about becoming better. There’s no self improvement in it at all. It’s just returning to who you are as always were, right? Before you started that self-improvement shit.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Just returning to who you are, it’s an unbecoming of all of the expectations and ideals and dirty pink bunnies that the world laid on you, and it’s just returning to that person you were before you were 10 years old. What I figured out is, “Oh my God, the sensitivity, the intense sensitivity that I hid from for so long is the sensitivity that makes me a really good artist, and the fire that I have, which my therapist calls anxiety, but these labels, right? I call it my fire, that makes me live a fearful life sometimes, that’s the fire that makes me a really freaking good activist.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Right? I was Tish on the floor of the school saying, “I’m not ready to go out to recess yet.” I heard what you just said and it affected me and my heart is broken, and I’m a little angry, I’m going to stay and keep asking freaking questions. That’s how Together Rising started.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: It was a group, it was of women who will no longer numb and ignore their anger and their heartbreak, but who will stay with it, who will stay on the floor of the school and say, “I am not ready to go out to recess yet.”

Marie Forleo: Let’s talk about Together Rising. We’ll bounce around. We’re going to go there later. But let’s go there now. So that anger and that heartbreak, you say, “Despair says, ‘The heartbreak is too overwhelming. I’m too sad and too small and the world is too big. I cannot do it all, so I will do nothing.’ Courage asks, ‘I will not let the fact that I cannot do everything keep me from doing what I can.'” So you introduced us to Together Rising, but again, for those people who don’t know, and I’m obviously a huge fan and huge supporter. I consider myself…

Glennon Doyle: Yes, you are.

Marie Forleo: …a champion of Together Rising.

Glennon Doyle: Yes, you are.

Marie Forleo: Tell us a little bit about the organization and some of the phenomenal numbers.

Glennon Doyle: Well, my sister and I started Together Rising. What I would say about Together Rising first is that it took me to become untamed. I think before I would’ve said I’m too sensitive to make a difference in the world, and now I would say I am so sensitive that I can make a difference in the world. Right?

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Every activist and artist I know is a little mentally different, right? As a matter of fact, the only people I really like are the people who are a little mentally different. We’re the most interesting, passionate, sensitive group. So Together Rising started when my sister and I decided to harness our anger and our heartbreak to make a difference in the world, right? I think that is a very untamed thing to do because one of the dirty pink bunnies that the world sells to women is that we are supposed to be happy and grateful, and not angry all the time. Right? So women, I’m sure they say this to you, but when raise their hand and say, “I’m struggling with anger, Glennon.”

Glennon Doyle: I say, “Why are you struggling with it? Are you struggling with joy? Just be freaking angry.” There’s only two types of women that I respect in the world right now, and those are women who are angry, are women who are in an active coma. Right? If you are in an active coma, when you wake up, I’m going to send you some links and you are not going to believe the shit that’s going on down here, right? So what I figured out is, “Oh, okay, in cultures like ours and patriarchal cultures like ours, the zookeepers will always train every marginalized group to be ashamed of their anger, and to suppress it and to stay in this cage of gratitude and happy.” Why? Because pissed off women make change.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: So if we are just constantly ashamed of our anger and trying to fix it, we won’t harness it and use it. So Together Rising is a community of fierce, heartbroken, pissed off, hugely loving, cheetah untamed women and men who have decided to harness their heartbreak together. We have raised $23 million through… The amazing thing is the average donation is $28, right? So this is a very grassroots effort. What I’m proud of is the numbers. $23 million for change is unbelievable. But what I’m more proud of is how it’s raised. Every single thing that we do at Together Rising, every effort, every cause that we give ourselves to is presented in a way that is meant to educate all of us, right?

Glennon Doyle: Secondly, I’m really proud of how we give the money, right? Because what we have figured out at Together Rising is that we are not the warriors. One of my favorite quotes is, “The most revolutionary thing you could do is introduce people to each other,” right? We have these heartbroken, angry warriors in their homes, and we have these boots on the ground warriors who are out in the world doing this incredible work and have been doing it forever, so like at the border, right?

Glennon Doyle: There are groups that have been on the ground dealing with these separated families crises for so long. Our job is to find the boots on the ground people, doing the most effective, scrappy, immediate, wise work and connect them with the warriors in their homes. Right? That’s really important because what we found over and over again as a nonprofit is that a lot of the giving goes to these big organizations that have so much red tape. They’re what people know because they have the most marketing money, right?

Marie Forleo: Yep.

Glennon Doyle: But what we found over and over again is that most of the most effective scrappy warriors on the ground, meeting the crisis that is happening all over in the world right now, are led, are smaller and you don’t know them, and they’re very often led by women and they’re most often led by women of color, and the reason why is because the women of color have been in every single justice since the beginning of time. We just got there, where the white women are like, “We’re here now.” Right?

Marie Forleo: Yeah.

Glennon Doyle: That’s one of the joys of our life, and one of the responsibilities we take so seriously is to find the people who are doing the most effective work on the ground and connect them. Warriors in the homes to warriors on the ground. Yeah, I mean we’ve become the leading organization in reunifying families on the border. You know because you were a crucial force outwardly facing, and your people should know behind the scenes, you’re one of our secret angels who give so that every penny that we get from the public can go directly to people in need.

Glennon Doyle: It’s the honor of my life. I think that every word that I write is really about Together Rising. One of the reasons why it’s so closely related to this book is that I just feel like when women become untamed in their lives, meaning when they do the thing they think they cannot do, because it’ll rock the boat. When you do that in your relationships and in your conversations and in your parenting and in your home, you start to do it out in the world too.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Right?

Marie Forleo: Big time.

Glennon Doyle: We figure out that we can do… The world will tell us, “You can’t make a difference. There’s nothing you can do.”

Marie Forleo: That’s right. I mean, some of our favorite things that we’ve done in the company because I’m finding ways to use our resources, financial, our voice, anything that we have to help, and I just remember our first love flash mob that we did together and it was just like I found myself sitting on the couch watching the nightly news, hearing some horrific thing and feeling that heartbreak in my heart and going like, “God, someone should do something.” I was like, “Wait, I’m someone.” Do you know what I mean? What do I have? I just happened to really love business and I love making money and I love connecting with people.

Marie Forleo: I’m like, “Oh, I have some assets here. How can I align them with people that are doing the right thing to make some change happen?” So for people watching right now, one of the things I loved… A gajillion things I loved about the book, is a question that… Let’s say someone watching this right now, they’re getting fired up, right? They can feel that wild coming back, and they’re not sure though perhaps how to start making that bridge from where they are right now to where some essence of them, a pre-verbal energy is imagining where they could be. So you have a question? Is it okay if I read it?

Glennon Doyle: Please.

Marie Forleo: Yes. I’d love for everyone watching, you all have to journal about this. I’m so big into writing too. It just helps us I think become clear in ways that we can accomplish just mulling around in this thing. This thing is a messy place for me. Here’s the question. What is the truest most beautiful story about your life that you can imagine? Tell me about the power of that question. Because I love when women come to you and ask, “Glennon, what the hell do I do? I’m feeling so lost.” This is often what you tell them. This is what you ask them.

Glennon Doyle: Well, I think that we tend to have this tamed language that we use, which you’ll hear women say, “What is the right thing to do? I want to be good, I want to be good mom.” If you hear right and wrong, good and bad, that’s very tamed language, right? Because there is no right and wrong, there is no good and bad except what you’ve been conditioned to. So for example, when I was deciding what to do with my marriage, the feminists would tell me this was the right thing to do. The Christians would tell me this was the right thing to do. The parenting experts would tell me this was the right thing to do, and all of those things would be different, which made me realize, “Oh, right and wrong are not up here.” Right? They’re not here. They’re culturally constructed ideas.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: Right? They’re also the cages that keep us locked up, right? They’re purposeful, because we’re always thinking should/shouldn’t, good/bad, right/wrong. To get us out of that language, that caged language, that tamed language, there’s questions we can ask ourselves, which is, “Okay, forget the right and wrong. What is true and beautiful?” Right? What happens, what I’ve realized is when I use that language with women, their mind shuts down and this other thing rises up, right? Which is imagination, which is soul, which is spirit, which is pure, which is wild, which is true to them, right?

Glennon Doyle: A woman might write to me and say, “My marriage is struggling. What’s the right thing to do?” I’ll say, “Tell me the truest, most beautiful story you can tell me about a marriage,” right? Then what happens is when you say story… Because when you start to ask people to dream up something better, they are afraid to do it because they think if they admit that they dream these things, then they will have to do it, and all women start seeing is their bars, their cages. I would do that but I can’t because. What we want to say is forget the “can’t because.” All we’re doing is dreaming, okay?

Glennon Doyle: Imagine that you never ever have to do this thing, right? It’s just between you and me. What’s the most beautiful story you can tell about parent and child? What’s the most beautiful story you can tell about a woman in her community? What’s the… Then you just see all the cants flow away. I would if I could but… and then this other thing rises up, and I think it’s super, super important to write it down.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: What you just said.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: I do not think that the truest most beautiful life goes from here to reality. I think it comes to life one dimension at a time.

Marie Forleo: Correct.

Glennon Doyle: Right? It’s in the dimension of imagination, which is not a pipe dream. What I really want to get to the wildest… What is in our imagination? It’s not Pollyanna, it’s not a pipe dream. It’s our marching orders, right? So first, forget the marching order part. It’s too scary. Write it down on a piece of paper. An architect does not dream up a building and then start building, right? The architect has a vision, and then they let it come to life on paper. Tell yourself, “You are only going to dream it up. You’re not going to do a damn thing with that dream.” Right? So you don’t scare yourself out of admitting that you can dream.

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: It’s okay, right? Then the amazing thing is you write that story and you put it away somewhere, and then you keep living your good enough life, your good enough marriage, your good enough without saying those things. I’ll give you an example of the story I was thinking of when you told this, which is about the woman who wrote to me and said her marriage… I said, “Tell me the truest, most beautiful life about marriage you can imagine.” She wrote it, she sent it to me, it was beautiful. It was just… Women are so scared of what they want, they think it’s too much.

Glennon Doyle: What women want is freaking beautiful. She wanted to be loved, she wanted to be seen, she wanted it to be valued. Everything she wanted was true and beautiful. Right? Took her a while, but she eventually put that dream on her husband’s pillow, and then he didn’t say anything for three weeks. I’m like, “She’s emailing him like shit. I don’t know.” That was the best advice I had. Right? Then later later, he puts his true and beautiful on her pillow. Right? They both… They both…  I think women are so afraid to own what they want, but there is no such thing as one way liberation.

Marie Forleo: That’s right.

Glennon Doyle: When we free our wild and ourself, that frees other people to free themselves too. Right?

Marie Forleo: 100%, including our husbands, our sons…

Glennon Doyle: Our children.

Marie Forleo: …our children, everyone.

Glennon Doyle: All of them. Everybody’s just asking, “Can I be free?”

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: If we say yes with our lives, that’s the ripple effect, right?

Marie Forleo: Yes. And talking about can I say yes, a story that had me laughing was Adam and the Keys, because I have an inside joke. We have an inside joke here at Team Forleo. So do you want to read this one?

Glennon Doyle: Sure.

Marie Forleo: It’s pretty short.

Glennon Doyle: Okay. Adam and the Keys.

Marie Forleo: You guys are going to love this.

Glennon Doyle: A few years ago, Alicia Keys announced to the world that she was done wearing makeup. She said, “I don’t want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, nothing.” That’s it, I thought. Last month, I read an interview with Adam Levine. He said that while they were filming a show together, he poked his head into Alicia Keys’s dressing room. She had her back to him, and she was leaning into the mirror putting on makeup. He smiled and said, “Oh, I thought Alicia doesn’t wear makeup.” She turned around, looked at him, lipstick in her hand, she said, “I do what the fuck I want.” That’s it.

Marie Forleo: Oh my God. Again, on the plane, the people sitting next to me, they were like, “What is going on over there?” We say that phrase in our company all the time. I often tell it to guests before they’re going to come on, and I’m like, “Hey, we can do this however you want. You know why? Because it’s my fucking show. I do what the fuck I want, because I’m a grown-ass woman.”

Glennon Doyle: Yes.

Marie Forleo: There is so much like, yeah, that’s picante Marie, spicy Marie coming out. But it’s just the truth, the truest of the truth, and it just had me howling. I want to move on to something. I get asked this question a lot, and it’s essentially, if you’re any bit of a public figure or the type of work that you want to create and share with the world requires you to share things publicly online or perhaps speak in public, folks are really afraid of criticism, afraid of the pushback that comes back.

Marie Forleo: I thought it was interesting you wrote about … that it’s easier for the world to love a suffering woman than it is to love a joyful woman, and that someone stood up at an event that you were speaking at and just said, “I used to really be able to relate to you and now I don’t really relate to you anymore.” I’ve heard versions of this, like, “I used to like you when you had the brick wall.” I’m like, “Bitch, I’m growing.” Do you know what? It’s just…

Glennon Doyle: Absolutely.

Marie Forleo: Yeah. What was your experience of that?

Glennon Doyle: Well, criticism comes in all kinds of forms to women, but I think in terms of women who are untaming, this is going to be the one that they get the most often. I was at an event recently, but it happens all the time recently, where a woman will stand up and say, “When you used to talk about suffering and pain and being miserable all the time, I related to you. But now I don’t know. Ever since you married Abby, ever since… I find it harder and harder to relate to you.” I understand that. Okay? I was at my daughter’s soccer game recently, and there was this girl on the other team.

Glennon Doyle: She was just rubbing all of us soccer moms the wrong way. I don’t know. I was looking at my friends and they’re like… I felt this on the inside too, and so I’m like… Now learning that my knee jerk reaction is my conditioning. It’s important and We can forgive ourselves for it, right? Our knee jerk reaction is our conditioning. It’s not our wild. So every time I have a bitchy response like that, I think, “Okay, what’s going on here?” So I’m watching her, she is, this girl, she’s walking around like she owns this field, right? The other annoying thing is she’s on the other team and she’s very good, right?

Glennon Doyle: She doesn’t even look like she’s trying that hard. She’s like… I’m going through this annoying thing, and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, Glennon, she’s 12. She is 12, and you don’t like her because she’s confident.” Right? What’s going on there is our conditioning, which it’s proven. We know. We know, we know study after study that the more confident, successful, joyful a woman, a man becomes, the more people like and trust him, and it’s a bell curve. The more joyful and successful and fierce and bold a woman becomes, the less we like and trust her. Right?

Glennon Doyle: It’s our taming. That’s all it is. What we say, what our conditioning, what our teaming says is we look at a bold, fierce, confident woman and we say, “I can’t put my finger on it. I just don’t like her. Right? I can’t put my finger on it. It’s freaking misogyny,” right? Because we’ve been taught… I won’t put my finger on it. Right?

Marie Forleo: Yes.

Glennon Doyle: It’s because we’ve been taught since we were children that women should stay quiet and uncertain and suffering. Suffer like it’s our job.

Marie Forleo: And modest.

Glennon Doyle: And modest and quiet and accommodating, and the second we see a woman who has stepped out of that cage, it is in us to want to put her back in it. Right? What I think is part of our untaming, and I’m working on, we all need to work on, is if we do not start, instead of dismissing and shaming and voting for bold, confident women, we just won’t have any left, right?

Marie Forleo: That’s dismal and scary.

Glennon Doyle: We got to support the hell out of… Even when our knee jerk reaction is, “Who does she think she is?” What we need to tell ourselves is she’s a goddamn cheetah.

Marie Forleo: That’s right. Please vote for the cheetahs.

Glennon Doyle: Vote for the freaking cheetahs. Please, God.

Marie Forleo: Well, I need a matching… I’m going to get MC Hammer pants and a cheetah top.

Glennon Doyle: Your version of cheetah.

Marie Forleo: I’m going to come and hang out in Florida with you. As we wrap up today, first of all is did we cover everything that we’ve wanted to cover before I have you read…

Glennon Doyle: You always cover everything, Marie.

Marie Forleo: I know. There’s…

Glennon Doyle: You’re the best at this.

Marie Forleo: A gajillion thanks more. But if you would be so kind as to read a little bit that I have flagged for you at the end, I think it will wrap us up on quite a note. Here you go, my love.

Glennon Doyle: Okay. “I will not stay, not ever again, in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself. When my body tells me the truth, I’ll believe it. I trust myself now, so I will no longer suffer voluntarily or silently or for long. I’ll look at those women to my left and right, who must stay, because it’s that time for them, because they have to know what love and God and freedom are not before they can know what love and God and freedom are, because they want to know, because they are warriors. I’ll send them every bit of my strength and solidarity to help them through this part, and then I’ll pick up my mat and slowly, deliberately, lightly walk out. Because I have just remembered that the sun is shining, the breeze is cool, and these doors? They’re not even locked.”

Marie Forleo: Yes. Congratulations, my love. This is such an incredible gift to all of us. For everyone watching, you have to get your hands on Untamed, get several copies for every woman and man you know. It is just brilliant. I adore you, I love you and thank you so much for coming on today.

Glennon Doyle: Thank you. Thank you, Marie.

Marie Forleo: Now, Glennon and I would love to hear from you. So I actually want everyone to answer a question that we talked about in today’s episode, and I’m going to read it to make sure I get it right. So I would love to hear from you, what is the truest, most beautiful story about your life that you can imagine? Now, as always, the best conversations happen over at marieforleo.com. So go on over there and leave a comment now, and while you’re there, be sure to subscribe to our email list and become an MF Insider.

Marie Forleo: You’re going to get a jolt of positivity and really good tools and actionable ideas each and every week in your inbox. Stay on your game and keep going for your dreams because the world really does need that very special gift that only you have. Thank you so much for watching, and we’ll catch you next time on MarieTV.

Hey you having trouble bringing your dreams to life? Well guess what. The problem isn’t you. It’s not that you’re not hard working or intelligent or deserving. It’s that you haven’t yet installed the one key belief that will change it all: Everything is Figureoutable. It’s my new book and you can order it now at everythingisfigureoutable.com.