Read: Untamed.

Glennon Doyle’s new book UNTAMED is incredible and should be essential reading for everybody. Much of this year’s lessons are around finally fucking giving up playing small, minimising and reducing potentially offending or abrasive traits in an effort to keep the peace, or to be liked. Men don’t have this quality, an unencumbered state that I envy. How great to never have had to work actively to shed a learned tendency to play small, but I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is; when do little girls learn to brush off achievements, or learn to justify things they don’t need to?

“Strong, happy, confident girls and women are breaking our culture’s implicit rule that girls should be self-doubting, reserved, timid, and apologetic. Girls who are bold enough to break those rules irk us. Their brazen defiance and refusal to follow directions make us want to put them back in their cage. Girls and women sense this. We want to be liked. We want to be trusted. So we downplay our strengths to avoid threatening anyone and invoking disdain. We do not mention our accomplishments. We do not accept compliments. We temper, qualify, and discount our opinions. We walk without swagger, and we yield incessantly. We step out of the way. We say, “I feel like” instead of “I know.” We ask if our ideas make sense instead of assuming they do. We apologise for...everything. Conversations among brilliant women often devolve into competitions for who wins the trophy for hottest mess. We want to be respected, but we want to be loved and accepted even more. Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. We do not need any more selfless women. What we need right now are more women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself no longer internalises the world’s memos and expectations. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done and let the rest burn. She will have to understand that one of the privileges she’s letting burn is her emotional comfort. She will have to remind herself that there are worse things than being criticized-like being a coward.”

I read this passage and had to stop short to take a deep breath.
Fucking... mic drop.

It’s all there, from the learned language and the apologising, god so much apologising. I am lucky to have been raised in a household with two incredible, strong parents who taught my sister and me how to be individuals, to have opinions, to express them, and to be financially independent. And still, I imbibed so much of our culture’s teachings, which makes my heart sink for those who did not have at least this solid footing at home. Find Untamed on Amazon here.