Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,24

any interruption at all. There is no remembering, no Ache, nothing but the binge. Then, just as I’m stuffed to the point of more nothingness, the purge. Another waterfall. More noise. Nothing but noise until I am on the floor, laid out, wracked, too tired to feel or think or remember anything at all. Perfect.

Bulimia is private. I need a way to silence the Ache in public, too. That’s what booze is for. Booze overpowers the Ache. Instead of just interrupting love, it blocks it completely. No connection is real, so there is nothing risky for the Ache to bother interrupting. Over the years I learn that the bonus of booze is that it destroys all of my relationships before I can. You can’t lose people who never even found you.

By the time I turn twenty-five, I have been arrested repeatedly. I cough up blood on a regular basis. My family has distanced themselves from me for their own protection. I have no feelings left, and I am nowhere near the land of the living, which is for fools and masochists. I am no fool. I have beaten life at its own game. I have learned how to exist without living at all, and I am completely free—with nothing left to lose. I am also almost dead, but by God, I am safe. Take that, Life.

And then, that May morning, I find myself staring at that positive pregnancy test. I am certainly surprised by the pregnancy, but I’m absolutely stunned by my reaction to it. I feel inside me a deep desire to grow and birth and raise a person.

These thoughts are foreign and baffling. I stand up and stare at my puffy, dirty face in the mirror and think: Hold up. Wait, what? You, there in the mirror. You don’t even LIKE life. You don’t even find it worth trying yourself. Why, then, are you suddenly desperate to bestow life upon another being as though it’s some kind of gift?

The only answer I have is: Because I love it already. I want life for this being because I love this being. Why don’t I want life for myself, then? I want to be a being that I love, too.

The Ache sweeps in with a ferocity. Danger! Danger! Don’t be ridiculous! It becomes difficult to breathe. Yet there in that bathroom—dirty, sick, broken, aching, gasping—I still want to become a mother. That is how I learn that there is something deeper and truer and more powerful inside me than the Ache. Because the deeper thing wins. The deeper thing is my desire to become a mother. This is what I want more than I want to stay safe: I want to be this being’s mother.

I decide, right there on the floor, to get sober and reenter the land of the living. I suspect that the courage I muster up to make this decision is due, in large part, to the fact that I’m still wasted from the night before. I stand up and wobble out of the bathroom and into life.

Life is exactly as I remembered it: just the fucking worst.

While I attempt to both become a human and grow a human at the exact same ridiculous time, I am also teaching third grade. By noon each day, I am dizzy with several sicknesses at once: morning sickness, withdrawal sickness, and the sickness of living without a daily escape plan. Each day at noon, I walk my class the long way to lunch so I can peek into my friend Josie’s classroom and see the sign hung above her window, which says in big black block letters: WE CAN DO HARD THINGS.

“We can do hard things” becomes my hourly life mantra. It is my affirmation that living life on life’s own absurd terms is hard. It isn’t hard because I’m weak or flawed or because I made a wrong turn somewhere, it is hard because life is just hard for humans and I am a human who is finally doing life right. “We can do hard things” insists that I can, and should, stay in the hard because there is some kind of reward for staying. I don’t know what the reward is yet, but it feels true that there would be one, and I want to find out what it is. I am especially comforted by the We part. I don’t know who the We is; I just need to believe that there is a We somewhere,