What's in it for me? Become inspired to free yourself and live life on your own terms.
Have you ever felt encaged by your own life? Like you've built a life designed to please other people and neglected your own desires? Glennon Doyle was very familiar with that feeling. Dead-set on becoming the perfect mother, partner, Christian, and writer, she'd completely forgotten to ask herself, “Is this really what I want?”
When she fell madly in love with another woman, Doyle was forced to unlearn everything she'd been programmed to believe about living a good life and start listening to her intuition instead. That intuition helped her build a new life full of love, family, inspiring work, and activism – a life that, for the first time, truly fit with who she was.
These blinks detail just how she did it and will empower you to hold a mirror up to your own life, allowing you to identify places where you don’t feel fully free. They’ll also give you some inspiring strategies for becoming untamed, embracing your desires, and designing the wildest and most fulfilling life you can imagine.
In these blinks, you’ll discover
why embracing her sexuality brought Glennon Doyle closer to God;
how she was able to start detoxing from her racist beliefs; and
why getting pregnant saved her life.
While promoting a memoir about her marriage, Glennon Doyle fell in love with another woman.
Have you ever had an experience that changed your whole life in the blink of an eye? Glennon Doyle certainly has. When she met American soccer player Abby Wambach, it turned her life upside down.
Doyle was a married woman and a successful Christian writer. She’d never been attracted to another woman before. But as soon as she laid eyes on Abby, she was gripped by a fierce longing that she couldn't ignore.
The key message here is: While promoting a memoir about her marriage, Glennon Doyle fell in love with another woman.
As a Christian “mommy blogger” and writer, Doyle had a loyal following; millions of women relied on her for honest counsel on marriage and parenting. What’s more, she was about to publish a book, Love Warrior, that described how she and her husband had finally managed to heal their marriage in spite of his multiple affairs. It painted a picture of a perfect family and a newly harmonious marriage.
In truth, though, things weren't great. Doyle’s marriage lacked a vital spark. Although she and Craig were great co-parents, she didn't actually feel attracted to him physically and she hated having sex.
Her ambivalence about her marriage made Doyle reluctant to promote Love Warrior, but there was no getting out of it. As part of her promotional duties, she was scheduled to give a presentation at a national book conference. At a dinner beforehand, a woman suddenly walked into the room. Doyle couldn’t take her eyes off her. The woman was Abby Wambach, a retired professional soccer player, and she was at the conference to launch her own memoir.
As soon as she saw Abby, Doyle heard a clear voice in her head, saying, “There she is.” Abby went around the room shaking hands with everyone. When Abby approached, Doyle stood up and wrapped her in a long hug, even though they’d never met before. It was as if her body was acting of its own volition. Wrapped in Abby’s arms, she felt a shock of recognition: it felt like she’d finally come home.
Abby and Doyle started talking and realized they had a lot in common. The chemistry between them was intense, and they couldn’t stop looking at each other. When Doyle touched Abby’s arm, she felt like she’d had an electric shock. Her body had been numb for a very long time, but it had finally begun to come back to life.
Doyle repressed her true nature to fit in with a sexist society.
A couple of years after she met Abby, Doyle and her children took a trip to the zoo. There, she saw a beautiful cheetah reduced to chasing after fluffy toy animals for the entertainment of the watching crowds. The cheetah was restricted to a small cage, all her wildness stamped out of her.
Watching her, Doyle felt a pang of recognition. For most of her life she, too, had lost touch with her untamed nature. She'd contorted herself into smaller and smaller cages to try and become the perfect woman that society expected her to be.
The key message here is: Doyle repressed her true nature to fit in with a sexist society.
When Doyle was a young child, she’d been completely unselfconscious – she played freely and followed her impulses. But at age ten, she started internalizing societal messages about how a “good girl” should look and behave. She started to buy into the idea that she should be obedient and pleasing, as well as thin and beautiful.
As soon as she did, she lost a vital connection with who she really was. She became depressed, anxious, and eventually, bulimic. Binging and purging was one way of numbing the pain and drowning out her feelings. Another was drinking heavily and taking drugs, something she did throughout her teens and into her early twenties; it dulled her senses to her constant anxiety and discomfort.
But then, when she was 26, she got pregnant. Standing in the bathroom holding the pregnancy test, she realized she'd reached a crossroads. If she wanted to keep the baby, she’d have to completely change her life. She decided to get sober and married the baby's father, Craig. She set about becoming the best mother, wife, and Christian she could be.
Sobriety gave her her life back. But she was still living it according to other people's expectations. She hadn't managed to escape the sexist cages she lived in. She felt a wildfire burning under the surface of her skin, but she was scared that acknowledging it would destroy her and her family. So she suppressed that fire for as long as she could.
When Doyle met Abby, she knew the animal nature of her body wouldn't be silenced anymore. It was as though the cheetah in captivity had caught the scent of the Serengeti. Doyle’s inner ten-year-old, the little girl who lived according to her own wishes and trusted her own body, was taking over the show.
To become a good mother, Doyle had to learn to put her own needs first.
Like people in an old-fashioned courtship, Doyle and Abby started writing letters back and forth. With each letter they exchanged, they fell deeper and deeper in love. Even though they’d only met once, their connection was undeniable.
But how could they be together? They lived on opposite coasts and were both married to other people, although Abby was in the process of splitting up with her wife. Doyle knew that if she really wanted to be with Abby, she’d have to leave her husband, but the prospect terrified her. There was no guarantee that things would work out, and breaking up her family went against everything Doyle believed about being a good mother. One important thing cut through her doubts: imagining how she’d feel if one of her daughters came to her in the same predicament.
The key message here is: To become a good mother, Doyle had to learn to put her own needs first.
Thinking about her daughters led Doyle to an important realization: she'd been using her children to justify staying in her marriage, but she would be devastated if one of them were to end up in a similarly unhappy situation. Inadvertently, she'd been teaching them that women should repress their needs and desires and become martyrs for their families.
Doyle decided that even if things didn't work out with Abby, she was no longer willing to be trapped in an unhappy marriage. She’d seen what real love could look like and she refused to settle for less. So she sat down and told Craig that she had met someone else; she was leaving, she said. Later they told their children, who were shocked and devastated. However, Doyle and Craig promised that, together, they would build a new kind of family. Craig also spoke warmly about Abby, making it clear to the children that they didn't have to choose a side. That meeting was the first step toward creating a new, blended family.
Finally, Doyle had put her desires first and been honest with the people she loved the most. But she still had to reckon with publicly coming out to the millions of people who admired her for her Christian values and dedication to her marriage.
Doyle came out to the world even though it meant risking her career.
About to embark on a promotional tour for Love Warrior, Doyle found herself facing a tough decision. She'd publicized her separation from her husband, but hadn’t mentioned that she’d fallen in love with a woman. Should she hide the truth, or tell her readers what had really happened?
Her publishing team was panicking. Love Warrior had been selected for Oprah’s book club and was almost guaranteed to be a best seller. They were certain that revealing the truth would derail Doyle’s career and counseled her to keep things under wraps until after the tour.
But Doyle knew that that would feel like lying, and lying wasn't an option for her. Ever since getting sober, she'd taken a vow of integrity. That meant taking responsibility for her decisions and never deliberately telling an untruth. Standing on stage talking about marriage redemption would be a bald-faced lie.
The key message here is: Doyle came out to the world even though it meant risking her career.
Lying wouldn’t just go against Doyle’s vow. It would also be a betrayal of her community. In her first memoir, Carry on Warrior, and on her blog, Momastery, Doyle had been completely honest and vulnerable with her readers. She would bare her soul to them, and they would reciprocate, sending her intimate letters that shared every detail of their lives. If she lied to her readers, she’d betray their trust and undermine her own credibility.
So she decided to open up about what was really happening. Taking a deep breath, she posted a photo of her and Abby on Facebook. She included a short caption saying that she and Abby had fallen in love and that they would be building a new kind of family, co-parenting their children together with Craig.
She logged off and waited for the worst. But the worst never came. Instead, she was showered with supportive messages. Even if her followers didn't understand her decision, they were still on her side.
This extended to her book, too. When it was released, Love Warrior flew off the shelves! Coming out definitely didn’t derail her career. Doyle still promoted her book all over the country. But instead of peddling a lie about the perfect marriage, she had deeper and more authentic conversations with her readers. She talked about how marriage is complicated and how sometimes the best way to save your family is to get a divorce.
To build a new life, Doyle had to learn to listen to her own intuition.
While coming out publicly had been easier than she'd expected, Doyle still faced lots of opposition to her decision. Some prominent Christian leaders claimed that she had abandoned her faith. Many in her community found it hard to understand why she was leaving her husband. Hardest of all, her mom believed that Doyle’s relationship with Abby was a mistake.
Doyle counted her mother among the people who knew her best. Ordinarily, she took her opinions very seriously. But now that she'd gotten back in touch with her ten-year-old self, she knew how dangerous it was to be swayed by outside opinions.
The key message here is: To build a new life, Doyle had to learn to listen to her own intuition.
Doyle knew that she had to develop a way to decide for herself. But how? A particular motto – “be still” – inspired her to retreat to a closet in her house for ten minutes every day. There, she would be as quiet as possible and just listen to herself. In the beginning, it was torture. She felt like an “input junkie” going into detox. But she persisted.
Eventually, she was able to sink down into a very quiet, still place in herself. A primal intuition lived there, something she would come to call the Knowing. Whenever she was anxious or uncertain about something, she could get still and access the Knowing; it would give her a soft nudge, guiding her. When she moved in the direction the Knowing suggested, she felt like “warm liquid gold” was flooding her veins.
In effect, the Knowing became Doyle’s personal guide deep inside herself. Armed with its wisdom, she dredged up all the core beliefs that had been instilled in her since childhood, and asked herself, “Do I really believe this? Is it true for me?”
She realized that some of her beliefs were completely outdated. For example, she’d been raised to believe that being worthy meant always being busy and productive. This belief colored her daily interactions – she’d find herself enraged when she discovered Abby relaxing on the couch in the middle of the day. But realizing that she no longer truly believed that productivity trumped all allowed her to dismiss the irritation whenever it came up.
Doyle had once been so desperate for external validation that she’d even asked Google whether she should stay with her husband after he’d cheated. But after reconnecting with her intuition, she didn’t need to crowdsource her decisions anymore.
Doyle lost faith in the church when she strengthened her relationship with God.
Doyle’s new relationship with Abby affected all areas of her life. It especially affected how she approached her religion. Doyle was an established member of the Christian community, but now she was in a relationship with a woman – something that many Christians believe to be an enormous sin. How could she possibly reconcile those different identities?
When her children were young, Doyle had attended a church service, one that seemed very welcoming – until the pastor proclaimed that being Christian meant believing that homosexuality and abortion were sins. When she tried to discuss it with him afterward, he shut her down. To be really faithful, he argued, Doyle should simply trust that what he said was the truth. Even before coming out, she had a problem with that approach. Why should she allow a pastor to be a middleman between her and God?
The key message here is: Doyle lost faith in the church when she strengthened her relationship with God.
Doyle had studied the Bible and was captivated by the story of Jesus and his dedication to social justice. Jesus was pro-immigrant and pro-poor. He spent his life trying to uplift communities. So why have so many translated his message into an obsession with discriminating against the LGBTQ community and fighting against abortion rights?
When she did some research, Doyle discovered that these issues only became prominent in the 1970s, when a small group of evangelical leaders decided to push a conservative political agenda. Today, evangelical voters are extremely influential in politics, and they’re partially responsible for electing leaders such as Donald Trump, who uphold the anti-gay, anti-abortion agenda.
After some reflection, Doyle decided not to stop calling herself a Christian; she still calls herself one today. For her, there's no contradiction between being faithful and being with a woman. In fact, she believes that her decision to be with Abby has actually brought her closer to God. She believes that God lives inside her, in that deep, compassionate Knowing. Falling in love is part of what allowed her to reconnect with that inner voice.
Although her relationship with God has grown stronger, Doyle has become more skeptical of organized religion. She won't blindly accept any version of religious teaching that asks her to numb her critical faculties. But she will always be a believer and continue fighting to honor the story of Jesus through her commitment to social justice.
Accepting pain and suffering allowed Doyle to live fully.
When Doyle's eldest daughter, Tish, wanted to try out for a soccer team, Doyle’s heart sank. Tish was sensitive and easily upset. She’d never been particularly athletic. Doyle feared that she would be crushed if she didn't make the team.
But Abby was convinced that Tish had potential and encouraged her to give it a try. Day after day, Tish and Abby went through a grueling training regimen together. Tish grumbled all the time, but she kept at it. Eventually, she made it onto the soccer team, to everyone's surprise and delight.
In trying to protect Tish, Doyle had almost prevented her from doing one of the things that now makes her feel most alive – the very mistake that had caused Doyle so much pain in her own life.
The key message here is: Accepting pain and suffering allowed Doyle to live fully.
For 16 years, Doyle had tried to protect herself from pain, numbing her feelings with drugs and alcohol. Staying numb meant that she never had to risk losing people because she never got close to them in the first place. She was so scared of pain, discomfort, and disappointment that she dulled all her feelings.
When she got sober, she started confronting the pain and fear she'd been numbing with alcohol for years. She realized that being unhappy, fearful, or anxious simply means that you’re alive. She memorized a motto she’d seen on a classroom wall when she’d been working as a teacher: “We can do hard things.” Instead of turning away from pain, she started to let it open her up.
When she became attuned to her own pain, she was also able to empathize with the wider world around her. Instead of turning away from social injustice and catastrophes, she used heartbreak and despair to galvanize herself and others into action.
Together with trusted friends, Doyle founded the nonprofit Together Rising. The organization raises funds to support people fighting for change all over the world. In total, they've raised over $20 million using a grassroots fundraising model, with an average donation of $25.
Together Rising doesn't only benefit those who receive funding. It also benefits the people who donate money and volunteer their time. They get to experience their own power and see how much can be done when you work together to address pain and suffering, rather than running away from it.
To detox from white supremacy, Doyle had to confront her own racism.
When racism and violence against people of color increased in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, Doyle was motivated to teach her daughters about the civil rights movement. When they studied a photo of a protest that showed a crowd of black civil rights activists and a lone white woman holding a protest sign, her youngest daughter asked if they would have gone to the march. Doyle was about to say, “Yes, of course!” when her older daughter replied, “No, we don't march now. Why would we have marched then?”
Doyle realized that her daughter was right. She believed in racial equality. But she didn't show up to Black Lives Matter marches to fight for it.
The key message here is: To detox from white supremacy, Doyle had to confront her own racism.
The truth was that most of the time, Doyle didn't even see how deeply white supremacy affected the country she lived in. Her news feed reflected white faces back to her, living their privileged lives largely untouched by racism. Doyle realized that she could believe in racial equality and still be a racist. That's because racism, like sexism, isn't about individual beliefs. It's about what we grow up absorbing. It's in the air we breathe.
Doyle remembered how many racist jokes she'd grown up listening to. She remembered how her family had watched endless evening news coverage of black people getting arrested as part of the War on Drugs. Then they’d watched more black people getting arrested on TV shows like Cops. She realized that she'd been raised on a diet of racist images, training her to believe that black men are criminals and black women don't matter.
Unlearning her racist beliefs was just as hard as getting sober. She had to detox from all the ways she had been brainwashed into believing in white supremacy. She started reading everything she could by writers and activists of color. She learned about police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the way immigrants are treated in detention centers.
After reading everything she could and working with activists of color, Doyle started speaking up about white supremacy and her own complicity in it. Today, she shares her own experiences of working toward “racial sobriety,” trying to show other white women a way to do the same.
Doyle lost the plot and gained the life of her dreams.
Like any good writer, Doyle wanted to be able to control the narrative of her life. That was partly why she'd felt so furious with her husband. When he cheated, he'd “fucked up her story” of having the perfect family. By writing her memoir Love Warrior, she’d tried to repair the damage and use the story to affirm that they were still the perfect family – after all, they could survive betrayal and emerge stronger.
But if her husband's betrayal was a plot twist, Abby's arrival in her life was a narrative catastrophe. It forced Doyle to reconsider the stories she’d been telling herself her whole life, ones about what it meant to be in a good marriage. For the first time, she had no idea where her story might go next.
The key message here is: Doyle lost the plot and gained the life of her dreams.
Without a familiar script to force onto reality, she had to start using the power of her imagination. If everything in her life had broken down, how could she rebuild it? What was the truest, most beautiful view of marriage and family that she could imagine? What was the wildest, most freeing way of being faithful to God? Imagination offered a tool for creating a new story, looking past the present and the status quo, and imagining the world as it could be.
Her relationship with Abby faced constant opposition, but Doyle kept imagining that their love was untouchable, that they were an island; she imagined a time when she and Abby would build a safe and loving home together. In 2017, they got married, and since then, they've been building a thoroughly modern marriage together – a marriage full of love, respect, fun, adventure, and sex. A marriage that keeps evolving according to their dreams about how it could be.
They've created a family life that’s richer than anything Doyle would have been able to comprehend back when she was pining for an ideal nuclear family. Doyle's ex-husband lives down the road and comes over for dinner often. He and Abby play soccer, and the three of them actively parent their children together.
It hasn't always been easy. They've all had to work very hard to make their dreams a reality. But today, they're living lives by design, not default. And Doyle feels like she can stop repressing the fire inside her, channeling it into her desires instead.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
We all have a wild, untamed being inside of us. But it becomes caged when we try to please other people instead of pursuing our own desires. Glennon Doyle’s story shows us that in order to regain our freedom, we need to tune in to our intuition and start listening to our bodies. By questioning the societal beliefs she’d internalized, Doyle was able to stop living life by default and design the partnership and family that fulfills her most.
Actionable advice:
Keep a mood diary.
Sometimes, when you’re feeling down and anxious, it can be impossible to remember what it’s like to feel good and enjoy life. The same is true the other way around. When you’re on top of the world, those days when you can’t get out of bed seem like a bad dream. Keeping a diary and taking note of how your moods fluctuate can give you some perspective and help you get help for the down days if you need it.
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What to read next: WOLFPACK, by Abby Wambach
You’ve just been inspired by Glennon Doyle’s intimate and joyful story of reawakening her untamed spirit, and creating a life by design. If you want to learn more about how women can spur each other on to new heights of achievement, then check out the blinks to WOLFPACK, by Abby Wambach.
As co-captain of the US Women’s World Cup Champion Team, Wambach led her soccer team to a resounding FIFA World Cup victory in 2015. In WOLFPACK, she shares her secrets for creating powerful teamwork on the field and in the boardroom, including unique strategies for turning failure into fuel, showing leadership wherever you are, and learning to celebrate your teammates’ successes as if they were your own. If you’re ready to discover how women can step into their true power together, then head on over to the blinks to WOLFPACK.