Glennon Doyle Quotes

When I was a child, I felt what I needed to feel and I followed my gut and I planned only from my imagination. I was wild until I was tamed by shame. Until I started hiding and numbing my feelings for fear of being too much. Until I started deferring to others' advice instead of trusting my own intuition. Until I became convinced that my imagination was ridiculous and my desires were selfish. Until I surrendered myself to the cages of others' expectations, cultural mandates, and institutional allegiances. Until I buried who I was in order to become what I should be. I lost myself when I learned how to please.

Whether you are brave or not cannot be judged by people on the outside. Sometimes being brave requires letting the crowd think you're a coward. Sometimes being brave means letting everyone down but yourself.

The boys looked inside themselves. The girls looked outside themselves. We forgot how to know when we learned how to please. This is why we live hungry.

In the past eighteen years, I have learned two things about pain. First: I can feel everything and survive. What I thought would kill me, didn't. Every time I said to myself: I can't take this anymore — I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all — and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life. I learned that I'd never be free from pain but I could be free from the fear of pain, and that was enough. I finally stopped avoiding fires long enough to let myself burn, and what I learned was that I am like that burning bush: The fire of pain won't consume me. I can burn and burn and live. I can live on fire. I am fireproof. Second: I can use pain to become. I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I'm meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.

The voice I finally heard that day was my own — the girl I'd locked away at ten years old, the girl I was before the world told me who to be — and she said: Here I am. I'm taking over now.

Discontent is the nagging of the imagination. Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: "Not this."

Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new.

Progress is just perpetually undoing our no longer true enough systems in order to create new ones that more closely fit people as they really are. People aren't changing, after all. It's just that for the first time there's enough freedom for people to stop changing who they are. Progress is the acknowledgment of what is and what has always been. Progress is always a returning.

Every life is an unprecedented experiment. This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they've never been.

I've done my research and learned this : Ten is when we learn how to be good girls and real boys.Ten is when children begin to hide who they are in order to become what the world expects them to be.Right around ten is when we begin to internalize our formal taming.Ten is when the world sat me down, told me to be quiet, and pointed toward my cages: These are the feelings you are allowed to express.This is how a woman should act.This is the body you must strive for.These are the things you will believe.These are the people you can love.Those are the people you should fear.This is the kind of life you are supposed to want.Make yourself fit.You'll be uncomfortable at first, but don't worry-eventually you'll forget you're caged.Soon this will just feel like: life.

I hate how people stand in circles. I wish we'd all agree to stand around in horseshoes, with room available for awkward outsiders to join.

I'm a grown-ass woman now and I do what the fuck I want. I mean this with deep respect and love — and with the desire that you, too, will do what the fuck you want with your own singular precious life. The truth is that it matters not at all what you think of my life — but it matters supremely what you think of your own. Judgment is just another cage we live in so we don't have to feel, know, and imagine. Judgment is self-abandonment. You are not here to waste your time deciding whether my life is true and beautiful enough for you. You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you. And if they are not and you dare to admit they are not, you must decide if you have the guts, the right — perhaps even the duty — to burn to the ground that which is not true and beautiful enough and get started building what is.

And what if I demand freedom not because I was "born this way" and "can't help it" but because I can do whatever I choose to do with my love and my body from year to year, moment to moment — because I'm a grown woman who does not need any excuse to live however I want to live and love whomever I want to love?

I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and I let the world adjust.

It struck me that in every family, culture, or religion, ideas of right and wrong are the hot cattle prods, the barking sheepdogs that keep the masses in the herd. They are the bars that keep us caged. I decided that if I kept doing the "right" thing, I would spend my life following someone else's directions instead of my own. I didn't want to live my life without living my life. I wanted to make my own decision as a free woman, from my soul, not my training. But the problem was, I didn't know how.