to her lover but feels totally alone. I see the rage in the eyes of a woman who is not happy but smiles anyway. I see the resignation in the eyes of a woman who is slowly dying for her children instead of living for them. And I hear it. I hear it in the bitterness of a woman who describes faking it so she can get up and finish folding the laundry. I hear it in the desperate tone of a woman who has something to say but has never said it. In the cynicism of a woman who has accepted the injustice she could help change if she were braver. It’s the pain of a woman who has slowly abandoned herself.
I’m forty-four years old now, and I’ll be damned if I’ll choose that kind of pain ever again.
I left my husband and I am building a life with Abby because 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.
That is what I want to model now, because that is what I want for all of us. I want us all to grow so comfortable in our own feelings, our own Knowing, our own imagination that we become more committed to our own joy, freedom, and integrity than we are to manipulating what others think of us. I want us to refuse to betray ourselves. Because what the world needs right now in order to evolve is to watch one woman at a time live her truest, most beautiful life without asking for permission or offering explanation.
* * *
So the next morning, I woke up, poured myself some coffee, opened my computer, and took a long, deep breath. Then I posted—to a million people—a picture of Abby and me snuggling on our front-porch swing, her strumming a guitar, both of us looking directly into the camera. We looked certain. Content. Settled. Relieved. I wrote that Abby and I were in love and planned to build a life together, along with the kids and their father. I didn’t write much more than that. I was careful not to apologize or explain or justify. I just let it stand. Then I walked away and reminded myself that I was responsible for telling the truth but not for anyone’s reaction to it. I’d done my part.
My sister called me an hour later, and her voice was trembling. “Sissy,” she said. “You won’t believe what’s happening. Please sit down and read what our people are saying. What they’re doing. How this community is showing up for you and Abby.”
I logged on and saw thousands of gorgeous, kind, gracious, intelligent, spacious, gentle, nuanced comments. They were from a community of people who understood that they did not have to understand me to love me. It was not a bloodbath. It was more of a baptism. They seemed to say, “Welcome to the world, Glennon. We’ve got you.”
That night, a friend called and said, “Glennon, here’s what I’ve been thinking about all day: You made this community for other women. But maybe it was actually for you. All this time you’ve been creating the net that one day you’d need to fall into.”
May we all live in communities where every person’s truest Self is both held and free.
I was eleven years old when I started treatment for bulimia. Back then, the mental health world treated eating disorders differently than it does now. When a child got sick, it was assumed that she was broken. We didn’t yet understand that many sick children are canaries in coal mines,