I can’t remember the last time I finished a book over one weekend! Glennon Doyle’s Untamed was a good airplane read for me as I flew to and from Denver, CO to visit Sage. Doyle delivers a wonderful message about ~finding herself~ and what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society, but the book overall was a little… messy (also very “look at me, I’m a woke white woman!”). For me personally, it was too TED-talk-y at times, and I couldn’t really relate to some of Doyle’s struggles; the unorganized delivery didn’t really help either. Nonetheless, I think that most — if not all — books have something for me to take away from, regardless of the quality of writing.
Passages/Quotes that Made Me Think:
- “I looked hard at my faith, my friendships, my work, my sexuality, my entire life and asked: How much of this was my idea? Do I truly want any of this, or is this what I was conditioned to want? Which of my beliefs are of my own creation and which were programmed into me? How much of who I’ve become is inherent, and how much was just inherited? How much of the way I look and speak and behave is just how other people have trained me to look and speak and behave? … Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?”
- “I understand now that no one else in the world knows what I should do. The experts don’t know, the ministers, the therapists, the magazines, the authors, my parents, my friends, they don’t know. Not even the folks who love me the most. Because no one has ever lived or will ever live this life I am attempting to live, with my gifts and challenges and past and people. 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. There is no map. We are all pioneers.”
During my internship at HHS, I’ve been talking to a lot of other interns as well as career staff about their academic and professional paths, and asking them if they have any advice for me. While I find these conversations to be incredibly helpful and insightful, in the end, it’s true that no one really knows what I should do. Instead of having these types of conversations to find out what I should do — because no one knows the answer to that — I’ve been listening to other people’s stories to gain insight into why other people made the choices they made, and what they took away from their experiences.
- “Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. … We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves.”
Selflessness as a virtue — especially when expected from women, which is the way in which this virtue is most frequently invoked — is overrated.
- “I decided that the call of motherhood is to become a model, not a martyr.”
Sacrifice is inherent to motherhood, but that doesn’t mean that moms should feel like they need to give up themselves and become a ‘martyr.’
- “Anything or anyone I could lose by telling the truth was never mine anyway. I’m willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.”
- The words of Dr. Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
I enjoyed reading Doyle’s description of her takeaways from some of the criticism she received while she was trying to be an ally to the Black Lives Matter movement. I was actually surprised by how much I could relate to some of her sentiments while also kind of cringing at some parts.
