Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,20

is the truest, most beautiful story about your life you can imagine?”

Sasha wrote to tell me about her marriage. She married a guy who is distant and cold, just like her father had been. Sasha spent most of her days hustling to earn her husband’s love, just like her mom had done to earn her dad’s. She wrote, “I’m so tired and lonely. What’s the right thing to do here?”

I replied, “Sasha, can you tell me a story about the truest, most beautiful marriage you can imagine?”

Danielle, a thirty-four-year-old former kindergarten teacher, wrote to me recently. She spends her days and nights watching her seven-year-old die slowly in her arms, tortured by the same disease that killed her first son three years ago. Night and day, she sits by her son’s bedside—feeding him, singing to him, soothing him. “I’m broken, Glennon,” she wrote. “I don’t know what to do.”

I wrote back, “Danielle, what is the truest, most beautiful story you can imagine about a mother and her sons?”

Each of them replied to me. Clare wrote a story about a woman who never abandoned herself, who faced life on life’s terms and was present for herself, her people, her life. She believed in that vision enough to begin therapy and to safely let rise to the surface all the pain she was trying to drown out with wine. Months later she wrote to say that her new way of being is harder than ever, but it’s the right kind of hard. She’s not missing her own life anymore. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she no longer needs to look away. She is now a woman who can look into her own eyes.

Sasha spent several evenings writing a story about the truest, most beautiful marriage she could imagine. She spent a week mustering the courage to send it to me because she was scared to let someone on the outside see what was on her inside. Eventually she printed it out and left it on her husband’s pillow. She was heartbroken when he didn’t mention it for three weeks. Then, one night, she found an invitation from him, asking her to go to a marriage retreat. They could both imagine something more beautiful, it turned out. They were ready to try to make it real.

Danielle wrote back to me from her son’s hospital bedside after I asked her about the truest, most beautiful story about parenting she could imagine.

She said this: “I’ve spent the past week considering your question. I can imagine a thousand easier stories about mothers and sons. I can think of a million happier ones. But I cannot imagine a single story truer or more beautiful than the heartbreaking one I’m living now, with my boys.”

“Me neither,” I wrote back. “Me neither.”

The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be.

Each of those women has begun to live from her imagination. Here’s how: Each honored her own discontent. She did not dismiss it, bury it, deflect it, deny it, blame it on someone else, or tell herself to shut up and be grateful. She heard her Knowing whisper “Not this,” and she admitted to herself that she heard it. She sat with it for a while. Then she dared to utter her inner whisper out loud. She shared her discontent with another human being.

Then, when she was ready to move from Not this to This instead, she dared to call upon her imagination to tell her the story she was born to tell with her life. She dreamed up what it would look like to have her specific version of truth and beauty come to life. She looked for the blueprint she’d been born with, the one she’d forgotten existed. She unearthed her unseen order: her original plan.

Then—and this is crucial—she put pen to paper. The people who build their truest, most beautiful lives usually do. It’s hard to jump from dreaming to doing. As every architect or designer knows, there is a critical step between vision and reality. Before imagination becomes three-dimensional, it usually needs to become two-dimensional. It’s as though the unseen order needs to come to life one dimension at a time.

Women have sent me so many of their two-dimensional dreams over the years. They say: “For me, the truest, most beautiful life, family, world looks like…”

I marvel at how wildly different each of their stories