How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Failure Throwback: Glennon Doyle

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Author of Untamed and fierce truth-teller Glennon Doyle joins me for a raw and revelatory episode, first recorded in July 2020. We dive into: Why we chase approval instead of trusting our inner voice Her struggles with body image, love, and emotional resilience The failures that shaped her—from family breakdowns to learning self-protection Every moment is unscripted and packed with wisdom. No edits. No filters. Just Glennon, exactly as she is. Listen when you're ready for honesty that hits like a lightning bolt. ✨ IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 01:59 Glennon Doyle's Early Life and Struggles 02:11 The Journey to Sobriety 02:35 Meeting Abby Wambach and Life Transformation 03:01 The Impact of 'Untamed' and Pandemic Challenges 07:47 Writing 'Untamed' and Embracing Wildness 12:54 Personal Transformation 17:11 Redefining Success and Family Dynamics 35:52 Generational Differences and Parenting 36:38 A Mother's Transformation 38:04 Struggles with Thick Skin 38:58 Navigating Feedback as an Artist 51:10 The Scarcity Mindset Among Women 55:52 Body Image and Control 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: "If a cheetah can be tamed to forget who she is, so can a woman." "This life is mine alone, so I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been." "The point of being human is not to feel happy—it’s to feel everything." 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Elizabeth’s upcoming one-off show at Cadogan Hall on 21 Sep for her new novel One of Us: ⁠https://www.fane.co.uk/elizabeth-day Elizabeth’s Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ Join the How To Fail community: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content 📚 WANT MORE? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – On feminism, failure, and the power of storytelling to reshape identity: https://link.chtbl.com/wqGlGUPi Mo Gawdat – Former Google exec turned happiness expert, sharing his journey through grief and self-discovery: https://link.chtbl.com/fnA5IzTi 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories Share with someone exploring neurodiversity or recovering their voice 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast where we stop fearing failure and start talking about what it really teaches us. I first recorded this very special episode when we were emerging from that deep, dark, gloomy lockdown in July 2020. During the recording, I remember feeling like, every sentence that came out of Glennon Doyle's mouth was a total revelation. So I released the episode at full length with no cuts because I wanted you, my cherished listeners, to hear exactly how it happened. I had just read her now a multi-million best-selling book Untamed, and it had moved me and radically shifted how I thought about life. So if you haven't had the opportunity yet to listen to this incredible woman speak, I promise you, you're in for a super

superb treat. And if this is a nostalgia trip for you, then please enjoy. Okay, a breaking news, because I absolutely have to tell you about my new TV obsession, the Real Housewives of London, streaming from the 18th of August only on Hey You. It's going to be the talk of the summer. Trust me, you are not going to want to miss it. I have seen the trailer. I've got the BTS Goss, and let me tell you, if you're already a superfan like me or a newbie, prepare to be totally hooked. You probably already know that I love the Real Housewise franchise. My favourites are Atlanta and Old School New York. Thanks so much for asking. And the Real Housewives of London is even more special as it's HAU's first original series

streaming every week. Why wait when you could join me and everyone else talking about it now? hey you now to start watching the real housewives of London and see the drama unfold. A subscription is required and you'll need to be 18 plus. I know from experience that starting your own business can be super intimidating and can feel really isolating. So I empathise with those of you who are currently feeling that way. However, I've got a tool for you that can simplify everything and make you feel less alone. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify. Shopify, is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US, from household names like Mattel to brands just getting started. Get started with your own

design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one pound per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com.com. UK slash fail. Go to shopify.com.com.uk slash fail. I have a habit of turning down the corners of a page in a book when I read something that strikes me. When I read Untained the third memoir by the author and activist Glennon Doyle, I found myself turning down so many page corners that the book has almost doubled in size. There are truth bombs in every sentence about how women live, how our liberties are

encroached, how society seeks to restrict and tame us so that we remain nice and pliant and never too demanding, so that we are not messy or explosive or wild or too threatening to the status quo. Doyle's writing is a rallying call to reclaim that wildness, just as she did. She was born in Virginia, one of two girls. For much of her childhood, she remembers trying to numb feelings of discontent. She had bulimia and then developed alcohol and drug addictions. She got sober when she found herself pregnant with her first child and married her then-boyfriend Craig, with whom she went on to have two more children. As a wife and mother, she started writing a blog in 2009, which went viral, and two best-selling memoirs followed. The second, Love Warrior, detailed how

she and Craig had recommitted to their marriage after he confessed to multiple infidelities. It had been picked for Oprah's book club and had a first print run of 150,000 copies. But while she was on tour promoting it in 2016, she met and fell in love with a woman, at first sight. Not just any woman either, but Abby Wambach, the former captain of the US women's soccer team and an Olympic gold medalist. Doyle's life imploded for the better. The story of what happens next and the journey of Doyle's own rewilding is recounted in Untamed, which became a number one New York Times bestseller despite being published in the middle of a global pandemic. Never one to fit into easy categorisation, Doyle is also the co-founder and president of Together Rising,

a grassroots non-profit that has raised over $25 million for women, children and families in crisis. Every life is an unprecedented experiment, Doyle writes. 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. Glennon Doyle, welcome to How to Fail. Elizabeth, I am sitting here and my greatest wish is for everyone on earth to have their life story read back to them by you. I am so moved by that. Thank you. Oh, there was so much I wanted to say, Glenn, because I'm not lying. Your book Untained has changed my life in such a profound way. Everything in it just spoke to me on such a profound level.

And I just want to thank you for that work and for the work that you have done on yourself, but for other people. I struggled to find a quote, but I did settle on that one about there being no map and every life being an unprecedented experiment. Do you feel like a pioneer today? I do. As women, I think it's hard to see examples of where we're going in front of us, mostly because we don't know where we're going. I don't see a lot of families like mine around me. I don't see a lot of love stories like the one that I have just lived. That is also a lost story, right?

And every day I wake up and I have no idea what's in front of me or what the hell I'm going to do next. So in that way, yes, I do feel like a pioneer. I read this amazing quote. You were interviewed before the coronavirus pandemic hit. I think it's by the New York Times. And you were talking about how there'd been a seismic life event, just pre-publication of Love Warrior, which we talked about in the introduction. And you said, I'm kind of scared about the publication of Untain because something big usually happens.

And there you have it. There's a global pandemic. Now we know whose fault it is. Exactly. It's my fault. I dared to release another thing. Yeah, I know. It's so unreal.

And that's another way we're all pioneers right now, right? We have no idea what the after is going to look like. And so we're all just waiting to see, yeah, what this new world will become. What was that like for you? Because I know that there was a big promotional tour planned. You were going to come to London with your sister for the first time. What was it like for you to have to reset those expectations? It was really sad, actually.

I was on the road on a tour that my amazing team had been planning for over a year, was going to have events all over the country and outside of the country was coming to you for the first time. We were so thrilled. And sometimes when you have a new project or thing in the world, you kind of think your thing is the most important thing in the world. And so that's how I was feeling. This was early on. It was before any of the stay-at-home orders started coming for America. But we just started reading stories about this weird thing that was happening. And And one night in the hotel room, I was with my team and I was feeling sorry for myself and I was saying, oh, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever created, untamed, and now look

what's happening. It was Abby actually who said, no, no, no, this isn't the most beautiful thing you've ever created. The most beautiful thing you've created in your career is this community of women who are going to show up at these places that you're asking them to and we might be putting them at risk. So it was this cool, annoying moment where things became very clear that the right thing to do was to cancel and switch from promotion to service. That's what my team kept saying to each other. Okay, just switch to service, switch to service, which for us meant doubling down

on Together Rising, you know, just serving the people who were writing to us that have lost so much. and then I just kind of started showing up on my social media feeds just as a place to have people find community and comfort. And the wild thing is that Untamed did what it needed to do anyway. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. And talk to me a little bit about how you wrote Untamed because it has a structural structure in a way that is unlike anything I've ever read and is a very, very brave thing to do. So it's not a memoir in the traditional linear chronological sense. You mash it all up and it works. But I know that you had a process to get to that point. Explain to us what happened. Well, speaking of failure, here's how to fail with the first draft

of a book. Okay. So I wrote untamed twice. Okay. I wrote untamed. I think maybe for a year I was working on it. And I knew I wanted to write a book about this kind of returning to ourselves, this way that after we're born, we have this wild in us, but the world has to assimilate us into categories and that categorizing of ourselves and the conditioning that comes along with growing up makes us feel caged and then we lose ourselves. And I wanted to write a book about how to get back to that wild. And so I set out to write many boring essays. about that subject. Okay? And listen, I knew when I was writing that I wasn't getting to the it of it. I knew it kind of sucked, okay? I knew it was dry, but I was kind of hoping that no one

would notice. I've done that so many times. So my dear friend, maybe they'll let me buy with this one, you know? And so one weekend, my dear friend Elizabeth Gilbert came to stay with me and Abby. And one night she said, okay, just read to me what you've got. And she was laying on my couch and I'll never forget it because I started reading her these essays. Now, as I'm reading, I know what Liz is going to say, but I'm watching her Elizabeth and she is literally sinking deeper and deeper into my couch as if she's slowly dying. Okay? Now, I think, okay, she looks like she's dying, but she's not actually dying. I stop reading, and she says these words to me. Glennon, when you tell me stories, I come to life. When you read me essays, I slowly die.

Wow. Yeah, so she's subtle. This Liz, she's very subtle. And Elizabeth, I just wanted to just, I knew it. I knew it. I mean, look, I'm used to a lot of feedback, and there's probably only a handful of people that I trust with their feedback deeply. Right. But the reason I trusted her feedback is because it's something I already knew deep inside, right? And so what we got to after I cried, because there's nothing like throwing away of years worth of work, is that I was writing a book about how to break out of existing structures inside of an existing structure of writing. Okay? So I was trying to write a book about wildness with no, Wildness at all. What we figured out is that, you know, we started with that Tabitha story about the Cheetah running. And I just looked at Liz and said, I need to write this like a cheetah running. So when the reader reads it, it feels like she's reading it with her body, with her toes, with all of her. I need to bring wildness to the medium. It can't just be the message. It has to

also be the medium, right? So Liz left and I started over. And what I realized is, I think as writers, we do this a lot, we're writing about the thing instead of writing the thing. Oh, totally, totally. And the story of the cheetah is what you open the book with. And it's about how you went with your daughter to see this caged cheetah who was allowed out to chase a horrible, like, pink rabbit toy. But you got the sense, you saw the cheetah skulking around the perimeter and you've got the sense that this cheetah was desperate to be, as you put it, a motherfucking cheetah. Yes. Fight.

It was this moment, Elizabeth, where I watched this cheetah who had been tamed. So the cheetah had been raised alongside a lab, okay? And this is how the zookeeper explained that they tamed the cheetah. They raised her alongside this lab so that the cheetah would think she was a lab, would behave like a lab, would chase pink bunnies like a lab, right? And I kept looking at this cheetah, this magnificent, majestic, all powerful animal thinking, oh my God, if a cheetah can be tamed to forget who she is, so can a woman, right? That's how I felt. Like, I felt like my whole life had been spent chasing dirty pink bunnies, like just chasing

these stupid-ass ideals that our culture gives women about being perfect and being pretty and being sexy and being accommodating and being pleasing and the hustle to chase these things I never even wanted had left me exhausted and overwhelmed and overwhelmed and completely forgetting who I actually was. I will talk about your failures in a second, but you talk in Untamed about this thing, the knowing. Will you explain to us what the knowing is? Okay, so the knowing, so hard to explain because it is, I think, by definition, beyond words. So when I was in the middle of trying to figure out how I would respond to my ex-husband's infidelity, I was so completely lost for what to do. I did not know what to do. I did everything, Elizabeth, that I thought

I was supposed to do to figure out how to know. Okay, I asked every single one of my friends what they would do. I googled every single article from an expert, from therapists, from ministers, from child psychologists. I read everyone else's opinions about this. I took BuzzFeed quizzes, of course, because that's what a wise woman does, until I found myself at three in the morning, Elizabeth, sitting on my bed, scooping ice cream into my mouth and Googling this sentence. What do I do if my husband is a cheater, but also a really good dad? And as I pressed enter, I just had one of those out-of-body experiences where I understood, okay, this is some kind of rock bottom, okay, that I am Googling my one wild and precious

life, that I am asking a bunch of bots and trolls what to do with the most important decision of my entire life. And I just sat there and thought, when did I lose myself? when did I start trusting everyone else on earth except besides myself? I didn't even know Elizabeth. Like I didn't even know what I wanted for dinner, much less what to do with these big things. And so through a series of experiences, I realized that if I was going to make this decision in a way that was true to myself and not to the rest of the world, in a way that had to do with my integrity and not people pleasing, that I was going to have to. have to find that self again. And the way that I started doing it is that I started quite literally

shutting myself into my closet, which now strikes me as so funny because I have since then come out of the closet in every way, yes. But I needed no distractions and I just forced myself to sit there and try to go inward instead of outward. Because all I knew how to do back then is go outward. And I think there's a very clear reason for that. I think little girls are taught to look outward for permission and consensus and approval instead of inward for wisdom. So just over a period of time, I tried to reverse that process, and over time, I figured out how to dive inward and kind of sense this knowing that, you know, people call this knowing, this thing inside that always tells us the truth, different things.

Like some people call it God, some people call it spirit, some call it intuition. My athlete wife calls it her gut instinct. I have a friend who call it Sebastian because she has some God issues. I think it's unbelievable that we spend so much time on this earth arguing about what to call it. Yeah. When all that matters is that we tell people how to call it, right? That it's just this process of diving inward and feeling around for this nudge, this directional pull, that always kind of guides me towards the next right.

thing. And I just started living my life that way, just in every moment of uncertainty, resisting the urge to look outward and instead turn inward and feel for that next right thing. And I figured out that while it's a scary way to live because it will never give you a five-year plan this knowing, it does seem to consistently nudge me toward the next right thing one thing at a time. And it becomes like this yellow brick road where you can find your way home just through the next right thing one thing at a time. It's so beautiful then that when you saw Abby, there was this knowing instantly, there she is. That's how you write about it in the book, that this inner voice came to you, there she is. And it's such an interesting thing because

it does bring us onto your first failure. And I'm super interested that you've chosen this as a failure because you've said, breaking up my family is a failure. Braintos, why you feel that? Because it feels to me from the little I know about you and what I've read about you, that actually it's turned out to be a really beautiful thing, the family that you formed through this honesty. Yeah. I mean, everything that is beautiful about me in my life, the world told me was a failure at first. Wow. All of the things. I have failed to have a perfect family with a man and a woman that live happily ever after. I have failed. to be a perfect, quiet woman, all of the things that the world has told me, I have failed to keep a

faith that has to do with not asking any questions and towing the line, right? Everything that I was told about how to succeed in every different area of my life, I have failed at, and that's why I'm happy. Yeah. So, yes, from this perspective of where I am, I can look back and see that breaking up my family was not at all an ultimate failure, but Elizabeth, when I was going through it, every minute and day felt like a failure. Because I was just tamed, you know, not just as a woman, but as a mother, as a woman of faith, whatever that means, as of all of these different roles, I just understood in my bones, whether it was told to me directly or just came to me through osmosis or example that my goal, my version of success was to marry and to remain married.

Yeah. That a successful marriage was one that lasts forever, regardless, regardless of even if the people are dying inside. Right? Yeah. Success is togetherness. Failure is a partnerness when it comes to marriage. And I was also taught that a good mother, that a successful mother does not break up

her family, right? Regardless of what that family is. It matters how it appears, not how it is. So, deciding that that was okay, that I would embrace that failure in order to fully live, which it really did feel that dire to me. I was in a broken marriage to a good man. And that is a really hard place for a woman to be because we are trained to just be grateful for good enough, right? And so I was just living and trying so hard and Craig was trying so hard. And we were both doing all of the things that any couple can be expected to do in the wake of infidelity. I mean, he worked his ass off. I worked my ass off. And we both just waited for this forgiveness thing to fall upon us from the skies, like as a reward for our hard work, right? And we had our moments where it felt

like okay but the truth is that I on the inside what was always angry I just had this like low level river of rage and did you sorry to interrupt but did you feel it as anger at the time or did it manifest as a more socially acceptable emotion no I felt it as anger I don't think I always expressed it as anger but I felt it I mean when you ask that question I immediately came to mind just kind of sitting on the couch, looking at Craig, knowing that he was doing everything he could do and still just feeling fiery hot rage. And there was nothing I could do about it, you know, just was there. Because you can add shame on top of your feeling if you want to, like you can tell yourself, I shouldn't feel this way. I should be grateful he's doing everything

he can do. But layering shame on top of an emotion doesn't change the emotion. It just makes it worse, you know. Glennon, so much of this is speaking my language. So I also got divorced. And I think that not one moment went by that I didn't feel like that was a failure. And yet it was absolutely the right thing. And I just think that that's such a profound thing for you to have explained there, that there is all of this sense of social disapproval and yet you still need to do it.

But the way that you talk about, and I know I say Craig, because I've got an English accent, but it's Craig in American, isn't it? I'm sorry about that. But the way that you talk about your ex in Untamed is so full of grace and it feels like there's a lot of grace on both sides. Was that something that you had to work on or was it there from the offing when you told him that you'd met Abby and what was happening? No, it wasn't always there. I mean, I think perspective and time has brought some of that. I also think that, you know, the first, time I felt real forgiveness with Craig was when we were in the elevator after we finished our divorce mediation. And I think that's so interesting. I just looked at him and for the first time felt true tenderness, like true friendship. And I felt safe maybe. I think this is what it was for me. I think I was expecting forgiveness to fall from the sky. Like it was something that would just happen. It didn't. And I kept thinking, you know, this refrain in my head, how could he abandon me

like this? How could he abandon me like this? And what I realized over time was what I should have been asking myself is, how can you abandon yourself like this, Glenn? You know that you don't feel safe. And the reason you're angry is you have not restored the boundaries you need to make yourself feel safe. Right? I needed to figure out a way to forgive the father of my children. And what I needed to do to forgive the father of my children was divorce him because that is when I felt safe again because I had restored the boundaries. I had honored myself, my own feelings. And what you said about it being, I mean, I think that's so important. I think that I still, Elizabeth, I mean, I have three kids and yesterday I had to pack them up as I have to do every single week. I

stopped by the foyer and all their little bags are in the foyer and their little shoes and I just look at that every time and think kids shouldn't have to do this. this is sad it aches me it brings up this ache and every time i just have to tell myself things can be very hard and painful and still be exactly right yes yes and you talk about that with your sobriety as well there's this line in the book i'm sorry i keep quoting it i can't albert where you talk about since getting sober you have not had a single day of feeling fine explain what you mean by that yeah well i think of that word fine all the time because that's just our refrain, right? How are you? I'm fine. As if our goal is to be fine, fine to me feels

like a straight jacket. It's like a way of holding your breath so you don't feel too much. It's kind of like half dead. And I get that because I was trying to be fine for so long. That's what I was doing with all the food and with all the booze and with all the drugs. I was trying to avoid feeling at all because I had this idea that I couldn't handle the feeling at all. That if I let myself feel the depths of my pain and my loss and my anger, that it would be like a black hole, that I had to do whatever it took to just keep that straight jacket on so I didn't fall into the abyss of feeling. And I think the difference between that way of life and sobriety for me is really just after a while in sobriety, you have to commit to feeling

it all because you have no escape anymore. And that's the miracle of sobriety, Because what you find out is you actually can feel the depth of your grief. You actually can feel the depth of your anger and you can survive it. I know that sounds so simple. When I say it, I'm like, duh. But it doesn't. It actually sounds really, really difficult. And I think some of the deepest thoughts are most simply expressed.

It's society that makes them seem more complicated so that we don't have access to the simple truths. But when I read that line, I was like, oh, yes. Yes, that's so true. It's about feeling everything. It's about realizing that life is not a constant quest to be quote unquote happy. It's about feeling lots of different things so that you can understand what happy is when you get there. Amen. I mean, that is one of the gaslighting of our entire world is this idea that being human is about being happy all the time. I think it's actually like from marketers. I mean, it's just incessant. And that is not it. The point of being human is not to feel happy. It's to feel everything, right? And we have to, I think, talk more about it. We have to teach children how to feel it all. One of the life-shifting moments of my life was I went to my fifth sobriety meeting and I just, Elizabeth, beginning early sobriety is just a nightmare. I mean, and it's kind of a double nightmare because you become sober because you think after a while your life is such shit and you've ruined everyone's life.

around you, right, when you get far enough into addiction. And so everyone speaks sobriety to you like it's some promised land, right? And then you get there and it's a nightmare. It's like all I could think of every day was, oh yeah, this is why I started drinking, right? This is awful because it's like you're recovering from frostbite. Everything hurts so much. And so I went to my fifth meeting and I finally stood up to speak. And I said, my name is Glennon and I feel awful. And I just have this hunch that everyone on earth has the secret to life that I never learned because I feel like life is harder for me than it is for everyone else. Thank you. That's all. And this woman came up to me afterwards. And I'll never forget her. She sat down next to me and she said,

honey, I have to tell you something that someone told me in early sobriety. And that is this. If there's a secret to life, it's that life is hardest when you're doing it right. You're just finally doing it right. You're finally feeling all of your feelings. And that's really hard, which is why so few people do it. But I promise you that all feelings are for feeling, even the hard ones. And And I'm telling you, Elizabeth, I know that also sounds simple, but I was like, what? Yeah. I thought I was supposed to be grateful and sweet and happy all the time, right? Yeah.

It was life-shifting for me. And how did that realization affect how you parented your children in the aftermath of your first marital breakup? up? Well, the way my life actually works is I say these wise things on podcasts and then I promptly forget everything in my real life, okay? So what I learned and know in my head is that all feelings are fulfilling and that beautiful people are not made through lack of pain and lack of struggle, that beautiful people are made from overcoming and overcoming. What that looked like in my parenting is I will protect my children from all pain forever, that they will never feel anything, that no raindrop will fall on top of their head, right? This is none of my spiritual

knowledge translated to my real life. Okay. So when I fell in love with Abby, even with all of the pain in my marriage, I initially decided that I would stay in my marriage. And I could give a lot of reasons for that, but mostly it was just that I felt that I could not hurt my children in that particular way. And then one day I was braiding my daughter Tish's hair and I looked at her and I realized, oh my God, I am staying in this marriage for her. But would I want this marriage for her? And if I would not want this marriage for her, then why am I modeling bad love and calling that good mothering? Yeah.

Right. And Elizabeth, the answer is simple. It's the same as every other message given to women. It's because through osmosis, through modeling, through overt messages, I was tamed into believing that a mother is a murder. Right? The good mothering is about slowly burying yourself. Yes.

Your dreams, your emotion, your personality, your ambition, your desires. And doing that in the name of. of your children, which is so ridiculous, right? It's such a burden and it's such a terrible legacy to pass on to our children, right? Because then they too believe that they have to become martyrs to prove their love, and it never ends.

It's why Carl Jung said, the greatest burden that a child can bury is the unlived life of her parent. Yes. So yeah, eventually I just decided, okay, I just have to reject these cultural messages of goodness. You know, we all want to be good. That's because we are good. It's just that we have to define what good means for ourselves because if we default to the cultural messages of good for women, those messages will always tell us in one way or another disappear.

So I decided for myself that what I wanted to be for my children, I don't want to slowly die for them. I wanted to show them how to bravely live, right? I wanted to be a model, not a martyr, and I decided that what that meant is that my children will only allow themselves to live. as fully as I give myself permission to live. So that means just trying to resist settling for any relationship, institution, et cetera, that is less true and beautiful than the one I would want for my children. Want to know the real story of how Oasis made Britain mad for it? How friends turned us on to coffee culture and super-layered hair.

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the island of your family and it's funny because you're friends with heroes of mine so the idea of you brene brown and liz gilbert all sitting around for dinner is enough to make me orgasm i'm like i want to be there best sentence ever yeah you were on brenny brown's amazing new podcast recently and you told the story of the island and i think it's so interesting that you were talking to her about it because she's been so influential for me in terms of setting boundaries and how setting a boundary is not a negative thing, but we as women have been taught that it is. We've been taught that it's selfish and self-indulgent and somehow unfriendly. But tell us about the island when it came to something your mother said about your new family set up. Yeah. First of all, telling women not

to have boundaries is same same, right? It's just another way to say a good woman disappears. don't have needs, don't have expectations, because that's all that boundaries are, is just saying, I have needs. But the thing about boundaries is that they're my best friend. Great loves of my life are Abby, the children, coffee, and boundaries. But the interesting thing about boundaries is that they are harder to hold with people that we deeply love. When I first told my parents about me and Abby, my mom was scared.

to death. Okay. My mom and I are best friends just completely codependent. We talk six times a day. Most of that I don't want to change. But she was so afraid and I could hear her fear in every conversation and every question. It was just, you know, what will the world think? How will the kids' friends treat them? What will the internet set? Just all this fear. Because mothers sometimes think that worrying is the same thing as love. It's not. But I fell into that trap too sometimes. So I found myself getting really defensive every time I talk to my mom, just like becoming seven years old again, you know, just incessantly explaining why I was allowed to do what I wanted, why I was okay. Because I don't think that it's the hatred from enemies that shakes us from our

knowing. I think it's the quiet concern of those that love us. That's what's the hardest. And one day I was talking to my mom and I heard her say, your dad and I are coming to visit next week. And I heard myself say, no, you can't come here because you are still afraid. And I can't let you bring your fear to my children because they are not afraid. Right. I taught them. They were raised to know that love in every form should be celebrated and that it is best to be yourself and let the world catch up.

But if you come and you bring your fear to our home, they will see it in your eyes and they will help you carry it because they love and trust you. So I have to tell you this really hard thing, Mom, which is that your fear is not my family's problem. And my job as the mother here is to make sure it never becomes their problem. So go figure out your problem. And when you are ready to come to the island of our family with nothing but love and celebration, we will lower the drop bridge for you, but not one second sooner. And that

was, out of all of the tellings, out of all of the telling the world about me and Abby, that was the moment, Elizabeth, that I became an adult. Yeah. Just hearing you talk about it, I would find that so terrifying, Abby to do. Isn't that stupid? That it's just that's the thing that terrifies us? No, it's not stupid. It's universal. I know some of the fiercest activists in the world. They get up on podiums in front of thousands of people. They say the things. They preach liberty and freedom.

They know it. And then they come home and they cry about their moms. Yeah. It feels like the ultimate untaming. It's just a reframing. It's like, of course the best way to honor our parents is to trustfully the women they raised. Right? And of course, if we're not doing anything they don't understand, we are not living

into our place in the world because we live in different worlds. Our parents were conditioned and programmed in a different world, right? And they had us for the future. It reminds me of that Khalil Gabran poem that's so beautiful on children that says your children are not your children. They are life's longing for itself. It's like we are, if we're not doing anything that our parents don't fully understand, we're not doing it right. And the terrible part of that is that if our children or eventually not doing anything that we don't understand. They're not living into their place. Right? And so eventually we will have to allow them to make their own islands and hopefully just approach them with nothing but love and celebration so that they will lower

the drawbridge for us. How did your mother take it? At first, on that phone call, she said, I hear you, and I will think about what you've said. I had the miraculous situation where my mother now, Elizabeth, for sure Abby is her favorite daughter, and she has two other ones. Okay? She has been to now more gay pride parades than we have. She is for certain the fiercest activists of our family. She works to plan trans remembrance ceremonies. She goes to every activist meeting in her town.

Something about watching me own myself. I just think that really at the heart of it, people, that love us just want us to be okay, right? Her fear was her desperation for my okayness. And it turns out that the only way we can convince people we are okay is to just go about being okay. And so her watching me trust myself, watching us walk through the pain, but watching my family come out the other side truer and more beautiful than we've ever been, it's like that thing where you see a cheetah and it makes you return to your cheetah, right? She needed to watch me untame my myself so that she could do the same thing. And yeah, it's been so beautiful. But I know a lot of people

who don't get that miracle. Right? And that doesn't mean that it wasn't the right thing to do. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I feel like this might be the longest podcast of all history. I'm sorry, but it's imagine me, because we're recording this remotely, obviously, because of lockdown, but imagine me sitting at your feet, just raising my face up to you to imbibe your pearls of wisdom, because that's what it feels like. But your second failure, and I'm so glad you chose this one, because I think a lot of people who listen to this can relate, myself included, is your failure to build up thick skin.

Oh, Lord have mercy, Elizabeth. Yeah. Yeah, I have failed to do whatever that thing is that they tell you to do, which is, what does it, keep a soft heart but thick skin? Like, I don't know what that means. I just, I want things to mean things. I don't understand that. It just feels like this easy thing to throw out that for me has been impossible to do.

All the things you're supposed to do as an artist or a public person, I don't do. You're not supposed to read your comments. I read every single comment because I've created a community, because I've been reading comments from my community for 10 years, right? Long before any of this, like, bigness happened. It's because it's like breathing to me. It's like I say things off or something on social media, and then I inhale. That's like the exhale. And then I inhale from what people say back.

Like it's a sharing thing. And because of that, I have to see some mean things. And I can't say it never gets easier because it does get a little bit easier. But it is supremely difficult, and by that I mean impossible, to be a artist whose entire being is about staying. sensitive, right? That's what an artist has to do, is stay sensitive to the world so that you can notice things, so you can see things, so you can hear things, so you can feel things, and also be insensitive to feedback. That's not how it works for me. And I've learned that that is another thing that I can survive, right? That I've had moments where I've done things on social media,

said things that have hurt people, so I've had moments where I just have had utter public failures. and what that looks like for me is not like a dusting off of it and a carrying on. It's usually like a couple days of the fetal position, right? It's like a process that is slow and painful every time. And even though there's a part of me that knows, oh, look, Glennon, look at you. You're in the time where you think that everyone will hate you forever and your life is over. I can see the process, but that doesn't make it hurt any less tragically. So yeah, I guess that is, I have learned that I'm just going to have to live that way the whole time.

You said it had got easier in some respects. How has it got easier to deal with? Okay, so I think because I have been through it enough times, so I know that it won't kill me, right? It's like that thing about feeling your feelings, when you realize after a time that you know that there's a process you're going through. So for me, the process looks like, first of all, if I read horrible feedback or someone hates me, first of all, I spend a little bit of time deciding that I am right and this person is wrong and that they are terrible people and that everyone is always out to get me and that no one understands me. So I have a good section of self-pity like a three-year-old.

And then it starts to feel a little bit just like exhaustion, like I just need to go to sleep, right? And then if I stay with it long enough, and let me be clear, Elizabeth, that here I'm talking about true feedback, okay? Like, when people tell me all of the things that they tell women, like most of my feedback can be sorted into four categories. The first one is it's about my appearance. If you're a woman who's going to show up in the world in any way, women are taught to define their worthiness by their appearance. So first, they'll say a million things like that. You're too ugly. You're too pretty.

You're too fat. You're too thin. you're too old, you're too young, you're too botox, you're not Botoxed enough, your hair's too like, it's just, it's never ending. Okay, I just thought of this one thing that I have to tell you I've never told you before. I've never told anyone before. So one of my friends, and by the way, don't do this. Don't send your friends terrible things the internet says about them. Okay, but this is what one of my friends did. She sent me this freaking, I don't know if it was an article or something, but it was a picture of me on my wedding day. And someone had zoomed in to my

armpit. And the commentary was about how gross my armpits were. Okay, so I tell you the story, Elizabeth, just to tell the audience, you cannot win, okay? If you want to spend your life perfecting every inch on your body, including your armpit, they will still find a way. Okay? So the category of appearance, that's junk mail to me. I don't pay attention to it at all. The second category, I have feedback I reject completely as anything about my relationships. Okay, women are also told that their worthiness lies in their standing in their relationships to other people. So incessant messages about how I'm a bad wife, about how I couldn't hold a marriage together, about how I have no friends, about how I'm a bad mom. They'll definitely

get you with bad mom. So as a woman out in the world, you can listen to none of that. Okay, when you receive ridiculous feedback about your relationships, you do not ask yourself, is this true? Okay? You ask yourself, is this feedback from a person that I'm in a relationship with? Nice. Yes. So you only take feedback about your relationships from people with whom you are in actual relationship. Okay. I literally noting this down, by the way. Yes. Yes. No, it's so great, Elizabeth. I tell this to anybody who will, my friends, anybody who will listen to me when they decide to put their voice out in the world because when you know what's coming, it's easier to sort. It's easier to know what to reject. The third category will be about your personality.

You will be too, oh God, I don't know, too loud, too quiet, too know it all, too ditsy, just all of the things that have to do with your personality that don't have to do with your work. Because you see what's happening here. When a man puts his work out in the world, the world tends to say, is his work worthy? But when a woman puts her work out into the world, the world tends to say, wait a minute, is she worthy of putting work out into the world? Yes, totally. Okay? So the work is lost. None of the feedbacks, even about the freaking work, it's about you. How dare you put your work out into the world. So first, we will pick you apart and just see if you're even worthy. It will not be about your work. So third category is your personality,

reject it, take none of it, which leaves you with this last category, this is really important, this is the feedback that's actually about your work. Okay? So one mistake I believe women can make is to reject all of it. Yeah. Okay, you have to reject 80% for sure. You have to reject 80% of your feedback in those other categories. But you also have to be brave enough to bring inside that feedback that is actually about your work, right, that will make you better. And do you take that feedback about your work from anyone. So from someone, nope, you don't know. Okay, good. Hell to the no. No. Believe it or not, that section is also divided up. Okay. Subsections. Right. Now, some people would say, like my dear brilliant sage friend, Bernay, would say, only take advice from like your five

people that you trust with your whole heart. I think she writes them down on an index card. I have a different situation because I have received criticism. Mostly it's about my activism, by the way. Art is art. So, like, if you don't like it, just find another artist. Like, I don't know. I'm not going to change my art for everyone. Like, everyone orders different things on the menu, right? But in terms of activism being a white woman speaking about injustice in the world, the feedback people give me about my activism is crucial. It's painful and crucial. And it often points out huge spots that I have. It often points out privilege that I have. It points out inherent racism that I have because of the way I was raised in this culture. It is painful, right? And if I can't take that

stuff that I'm not worthy of the title activist. So what I would say is in that category, I don't judge it by whether it's a friend or a stranger, but first I do judge it by whether it's mean-spirited or not. And this might be different for different artists and activists, but I do not take advice or feedback or criticism from anyone who's treating me poorly in the criticism. I feel very strongly that I'm a grown-ass woman. And if you don't know how to communicate with me, I'm certainly not going to take your advice about communication, right? So the reason why I don't internalize feedback from people who are being mean to me is because I don't have to, because I'm the boss of my own life and I just don't have to. And how do you judge that? You just know. Everybody knows. You

can read something that someone's written to you and you can tell in a minute whether it feels nasty or it feels like it's coming from a real true place from a person who, I'm not saying is kissing your ass at all. I'm just saying that you can tell when communication is direct or when it's nasty. Right? So I dismiss all nastiness. I am the judge of that and I don't explain myself. And then the ones that I can feel are delivered with respect. I can usually tell because they hurt in a different way. They hurt not in a mean way. They hurt in a true way. Like you know when someone says something. It's like in the very beginning when Liz was like, this sucks. And I was like, you are correct. This does suck. This is painful, but I already knew that, you know. So I would

say that truly, of course there are no real numbers here, but Elizabeth, out of a hundred pieces of feedback that I get, I'd say four of them, I will allow into my heart and head and work. Another thing that I know you have talked about in the past, which I find super interesting. So as well as this podcast, I wrote a book called How to Fail, in which I Oh, do you're so lovely, in which I detailed some of my own failures. And one of the most mean-spirited to use a word reviews that I ever had about that seemed to be complaining that I hadn't failed enough and I hadn't suffered enough. And I feel that there's such a thing. I mean, I know that you and I speak from a position of great privilege and that we're white women and we have a roof over our heads. But there does seem to be a thing where women aren't allowed a public voice unless they really suffered. And I didn't. know who gets to decide that. And what does that mean? Exactly. Yeah. It's the suffering Olympics. We are all competing in the suffering Olympics and only gold medalists are allowed to speak. To me, that's one of those and both things. I hear that kind of feedback a lot and I understand it. I get it.

I get how a woman who was raised in my country under completely different circumstances, my parents were both public school teachers. So we had enough money to have the things we needed, which gave me all kinds of opportunity. It gave me therapy. It gave me medicine that I needed. They had the skills to help me get into college, even though I was kind of a crappy student. They knew how to help me fill out forms. They were part of the educational system.

I had people to fall back on when I failed dramatically when my addiction took over to the point where I couldn't function on my own. I had people there who had resources to help me. So I really can understand how it would feel to look at that situation from outside and feel a certain way about it. And yet, I will never, ever let it stop me from speaking my truth about my life. so I just think that there are things in the world that we don't have to be either or about yeah right that we can say I see that I acknowledge that and yet I will continue and also

you continue in a way that takes that into account so you integrate that you integrate that into your work in a way that's why it was so important to me to make much of untamed so much of this work is about, yes, freeing yourself, but then also turning around and seeing in what ways you were freer than people who are standing right next to you. Right? It's like bringing that knowledge of people's different perspective into your work in ways that make you feel fiercer and not more afraid. Amazing. I mean, that's another lie that we're told is that we have to be competitive with each other as women. And actually, I think what your work is so good at doing is showing that a rising tide raises all boats particularly if you come from a marginalized experience oh first of all

we can be forgiven for that i mean whenever people are like oh i just i'm a guy's girl i don't like women first of all i want to call 911 okay i want to call freaking 911 when i hear that it makes me sweat when people say that you said that yeah oh my god hate it so much i know i know but i get it too i can understand because you know some people feel like i've experienced this You know, why are women such backstabbers? Why do we fight each other? Why, why, why? And, I mean, the answer is that there's a why.

The why is because if you experience life as a table, right? And there's 10 seats at that table. And at every single table, eight of those seats are for men and two are for women. You are going to, over time, be conditioned to fight other women for those two seats, right? Why are guys more relaxed? Why can they work better together? because they have eight fucking chairs. Yeah.

Okay? Right. It's like super simple. This idea of scarcity has, we've been tamed into it, right? It's been planted in us and among us. I don't know. The women that I work alongside with and work with, it's not that we don't feel that. I think it's important to admit that you feel that as a knee-jerk reaction.

I still, Elizabeth, after all of my decades-long resistance of that and working to lift up other women and I still can feel that knee-jerk reaction of, oh, my God, she got that. That's less for me. Oh, my God, she got that. Like, right? I'm so hard you're saying this because I feel that and I feel so ashamed that I feel that sometimes. Yeah, we all do. There's only two kinds of women, the ones who feel that way and the ones who are alike. Yeah. I'll feel that way. Because of our conditioning, like we feel that way. And part of my work is to just not settle on that knee-jerk reaction. I really really, think that what our knee-jerk reaction is, is our conditioning, is not our truest self, right? So when we can question that knee-jerk reaction and remind ourselves, this is the part where you

think that there's, you know, only a little bit in the world, and she's going to get the thing that you were meant for, and everyone's going to forget about you forever. Okay, take a second there. And then we move on, and the way that I have learned to move on is I just think that that feeling of scarcity, what it usually is when I look deeper is it's admiration. It's like admiration that's holding its breath, right? And what I have figured out is the way this manifests for me is I will read something amazing that a woman wrote or something amazing that a woman made and part of me will go, I wish I wrote that, I wish I made that, I wish I was getting the attention she's getting for

this, okay, yada, yada. What solves that for me, I'd say 90% of the time, is I either reach out to that woman and tell her what the thing meant to me. Or if she's out of reach and I can't do that, I share the thing that she made with my people. That is scary for me because mostly I'm thinking, but I just want my people to think I'm smarter than this person. It's never ending, okay? But what that does is it moves me from this feeling that I can only describe as like this tightness, this restrictiveness, this breath holding to this like wider place of like abundant. and there is enough room for all of us.

And we create the abundance. It's not just there. Like, we have to create it. And every time we share something beautiful that another woman has done or told her that the thing she made is beautiful or we actually create that abundance that we so wish were true.

What about if someone creates something that you don't think is that good, but it's getting loads of attention? Well, then you just secretly hate them. Okay. Elizabeth, that's what you do. Do you have people like that in your life? Just make me feel better. Yes. Okay, good. And I am sure that, you know, soon I'm going to become just evolved enough to also feel expansive about those particular people. Probably like next Tuesday, I think. I'm just going to nail that. But I do have a few of those sister. I sure do. And I talk to no one about those people except my sister and my wife.

Okay. Well, tell me when you've evolved to a place of total enlightenment. And then. and help. Come back. Okay, come back on Wednesday and tell me how to do it. Perfect. Your final failure is about your failure to love and trust your body. And you wrote in this email to me, even after all these oh so many years and therapists and books. So, yeah, I mean, clearly it's a historical issue for you because as a child, you were a very beautiful child. And yet it seems to me that you didn't believe it inside. Well, I think I did believe it when I was really little. And then every girl turns 12 and everything goes to hell. I think when you are taught that your existence and worthiness are based on your prettiness and then you lose it, it's devastating.

Whatever you're taught your worthiness is based on, if it's not just your existence, it's going to cause trauma in your life. So yeah, I don't know. I know that this message about you have to stay small. It's like I've freed myself in so many areas of that. I don't anymore believe that my voice has to stay small. I don't believe that my ambition has to stay small. But I have been thus far unable to get the memo about my body not having to stay small to really settle into my bones. And there are times in my life where it gets better and I feel freer and stronger and then it gets worse. And I think that maybe right now it's feeling really heavy because the more out of control things tend to get, the more I find myself obsessing about controlling my body. So I'm on kind

of like a long time here where, you know, I was preparing for the book tour and I was going to have to go out into the world and be super vulnerable for a long time. And that always makes me, we call it get weird in my family. Like I'm getting weird, which is like I'm thinking too much. I sort of a compulsive thinking. Yeah. I think like from the outside, it might look like I'm kind of normal in my eating and my exercise, but from the inside, it feels like kind of constantly being harassed by this incessant reminder that you need to worry about your food and your body.

And it's like this prank collar that's coming from inside the house all the time. And so I don't know. My hope is that at some point I will be able to try. truly love my body. And by the way, that doesn't mean to me anything that has to do with shape. Okay. I'm talking about like a deeper love that has to do with letting go of control. You know, I think control is the opposite of love. I used to think that I could control people and love people at the same time, but now I know I can't because love implies trust. And we only control things in people that we don't trust. So my wish for myself,

is that I will get to the point where I love my body, meaning that I trust it enough to just feed it, move it, and let it be whatever it is supposed to be. And what is your greatest fear if you don't do those things and if you don't exercise and you don't eat properly, what are you most scared of that will happen to your body? That's such a good question. I don't know.

I guess that it just gets out of control. I mean, this idea of control, control has been a theme of my life. I've learned it in my marriage. My second marriage, I'm doing so differently than my first. I think I tried to control every aspect of my first marriage. I would have just called myself a leader. Okay. But when I married Abby, one day she said, I was doing my controlling thing where I think that no one notices, but I'm like manipulating things behind the scenes. And she said, you know, when you do that, it makes me so sad because it makes me feel like you don't trust me. And I trust you so much and respect you so much. And I want you to trust

and respect me. And I was like, damn, I guess I have not really been loving before. Because I've always been trying to control things behind the scenes. I've never really fully trusted anybody. I thought I had to plan, control, worry my way to everyone's happiness. Like I was earning it. Yeah. Right. And so I don't know. All I can tell you is, that I have like this control issue with my body, which I know has to do with, it has something to do with like this wider idea of just embracing things falling apart. You know that term wabi-sabi in Japanese culture just means like just letting things be what they are and decay in the beautiful way that they're supposed to and finding beauty in the uncontroll? It must be

enlightenment, which is coming next Tuesday. I just think that is the message. I mean, we've been talking so much about the cages women are held in and the social conditioning. And I think weight and body image is one of the deepest, most ingrained messages that is so difficult to get rid of. And I relate to exactly what you're saying. And I think for me, the fear of losing control, whatever that means over my body, is the fear of ending up unlovable, which is such a strange thing. think it's because I've had a number of intimate relationships that have just ended without explanation from nowhere for me. And so a lot of my life was spent trying to mitigate against that in advance.

Like if I could be totally perfect, then no one would ever have an excuse to leave me. And that included how I looked. And it's a very difficult thing to rid yourself of, even though my relationship now, as I'm sure yours is, is with this wonderful, secure person who loves me for the person I am, other than the shape I come in. I hope. Anyway, better ask. Don't ask. Don't ask.

No, exactly. That's so freaking beautiful that it all comes down to lovability. Yeah, and worthiness. And how that really, at the end of the day, it has to do with our own lovability. Yes. Which, it's proof because you know that your person. I mean, dear God, Abby would be so freaking happy if I just eat more burgers with her. Like if I would just, she wants me to be free more than anything, you know.

So we know that it really doesn't have at the end of the day to do with anybody else. It's about self-love and self-worthiness. Oh, Glennon, I mean, as I said, I could talk to you for weeks on end, but you're going to come back on next Wednesday and just tell me the truth of enlightenment, so it's fine. Exactly. Do you Brennan and Elizabeth Gilbert ever have dinner, the three of you? Oh, God, I feel like I haven't had dinner with anybody for a long time.

You know what? The three of us have never sat down for dinner together. But I'm going to email them after this happens and tell them that it is now a must. It's destined. And if that ever happens, please can I come? I don't have to speak. I wouldn't eat. I'll just like, I'll just like, crank them in the corner. I will add that to the email. I think you are as close a woman as I know to a guru. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for Untamed, which is a beautiful work, and it's been so brave and honest of you to write it. And I thank you especially for coming on How to Fail and just making my day. Thank you so, so much, Glennon Doyle.

This conversation has made my day. I have to tell you, I loved every minute of it. You are beautiful and wonderful, and thank you for this opportunity.