Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,19
and worldwide revolutions begin.
“I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning,” said Gloria Steinem.
In order to move our culture forward, revolutionaries have had to speak and plan from the unseen order inside them. For those of us who were not consulted in the building of the visible order, igniting our imagination is the only way to see beyond what was created to leave us out. If those who were not part of the building of reality only consult reality for possibilities, reality will never change. We will keep shuffling and competing for a seat at their table instead of building our own tables. We will keep banging our heads on their glass ceilings instead of pitching our own huge tent outside. We will remain caged by this world instead of taking our rightful place as cocreators of it.
Each of us was born to bring forth something that has never existed: a way of being, a family, an idea, art, a community—something brand-new. We are here to fully introduce ourselves, to impose ourselves and ideas and thoughts and dreams onto the world, leaving it changed forever by who we are and what we bring forth from our depths. So we cannot contort ourselves to fit into the visible order. We must unleash ourselves and watch the world reorder itself in front of our eyes.
* * *
My job is to listen deeply to women. What many tell me is that they harbor an achy, heavy hunch that their lives, relationships, and world were meant to be more beautiful than they are.
They ask, “Shouldn’t my marriage feel more loving than this? Shouldn’t my religion be more alive and kind than this? Shouldn’t my work be more meaningful and my community be more connected? Shouldn’t the world I’m leaving to my babies be less brutal? Isn’t it all just supposed to be more beautiful than this?”
The women asking these questions remind me of Tabitha. They are stalking the periphery of their lives, feeling discontent. To me, this is exciting, because 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.”
“Not this” is a very important stage.
But knowing what we do not want is not the same as knowing what we do want.
So how can we get from Not this to This instead? How can we move from feeling discontent to creating new lives and new worlds? In other words: How can we begin to live from our imagination instead of our indoctrination?
Language is my favorite tool, so I use it to help people build a bridge between what’s in front of them and what’s inside them. I have learned that if we want to hear the voice of imagination, we must speak to it in the language it understands.
If we want to know who we were meant to be before the world told us who to be—
If we want to know where we were meant to go before we were put in our place—
If we want to taste freedom instead of control—
Then we must relearn our soul’s native tongue.
When women write to me in the language of indoctrination—when they use words like good and should and right and wrong—I try to speak back to them in the language of imagination.
We are all bilingual. We speak the language of indoctrination, but our native tongue is the language of imagination. When we use the language of indoctrination—with its should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad—we are activating our minds. That’s not what we’re going for here. Because our minds are polluted by our training. In order to get beyond our training, we need to activate our imaginations. Our minds are excuse makers; our imaginations are storytellers. So instead of asking ourselves what’s right or wrong, we must ask ourselves:
What is true and beautiful?
Then our imagination rises inside us, thanks us for finally consulting it after all these years, and tells us a story.
Clare wrote to me recently. She’s a lawyer and the daughter of an alcoholic. When she sat down to email me, she had just woken up, still woozy from her nightly “take the edge off” glasses of wine. She wrote that she spends most of her time numb or foggy or ashamed. “G, I feel like I’m wasting my life,” she wrote. “What should I do?”
“Clare,” I wrote. “What