A Memoir
By Glennon Doyle
I sit and stare at my hands and I remember a story I saw on the news about a woman who had a stroke and lost all her language overnight. When she woke up, her mind functioned perfectly, but she couldn’t speak. So she just lay there and tried to use her eyes to communicate her terror about being trapped inside herself. Her family couldn’t translate what her eyes were saying. They thought she was brain-dead. It’s like that for me, too. I’m here. I am good on the inside. I have things to say. I need help getting out. I do love you. My secret is that I’m good in here. I am not heart-dead. This is a secret that no one knows but me. And now, even the people who love me the most are tired of searching for me inside here. They are giving up hope that I’m still alive. They are thinking about calling off the rescue effort. Because even if I am still alive, I am not a sympathetic case. I did not have a stroke. I’ve done this to myself. I’ve trapped myself. And maybe I’m not in there after all. Maybe this me they can see is all there is, all there ever was.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 49-50)
In all my close friendships, words are the bricks I use to build bridges. To know someone I need to heart her, and to feel known, I need to be heard by her. The process of knowing and loving another person happens for me through conversation. I reveal something to help my friend understand me, she responds in a way that assures me she values my revelation, and then she adds something to help me understand her. This back-and-forth is repeated again and again as we go deeper into each other’s hearst, minds, pasts, and dreams. Eventually, a friendship is built – a solid, sheltering structure that exists in the space between us – a space outside of ourselves that we can climb deep into. There is her, there is me, and then there is our friendship – this bridge we’ve built together.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 93-94)
I marvel at the honesty and pain. Many messages are from people I’ve known for years, but I’m discovering that I never really knew them. We’ve spent our time together talking about everything but what matters. We’ve never brought to each other the heavy things we were meant to help each other carry. We’ve only introduced each other to our representatives, while our real selves tried to live life alone. We thought that was safer. We thought that this way our real selves wouldn’t get hurt. But as I read these messages, it becomes clear that we are all hurting anyway. And we think we are alone. At our cores, we are our tender selves peeking out at a world of shiny representatives, so shame has been layered on top of our pain. We’re suffocating underneath all the layers.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 113)
We are easier to understand as characters than as real people.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 115)
There is no way to be as honest in spoken words as I can be in written words. I wonder why it’s so much easier to be honest with strangers than with family.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 115)
Pain splits us into two. When someone who is suffering says, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” it is not because she is fine, it is because her inner self told her outer self to say the words “I am fine.” Sometimes she will even slip and say, “We’re fine.” Others assume she’s referring to herself and her people, but she is not. She is referring to both of her selves her hurt self and her representative, the one fit for public consumption. Pain transforms one woman into two so that she has someone to walk with, someone to sit with her in the dark when everyone else leaves. I am not alone. I have my hurt self, but I also have this representative of me. She will continue on. Maybe I can permanently hide my hurt self and send our rep out into the world and she can smile and wave and carry on as if this never happened. We can breathe when we get home. In public, we will just pretend forever.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 131-132)
Grief is nothing but a painful waiting, a horrible patience. Grief cannot be torn down or scaled or overcome or outsmarted. It can only be outlasted. Survival is surrender to the brick wall.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 142)
Spoken words make what happened to us too tidy, too palatable, too ordinary. I can’t describe the ferocity of the fear and rage inside me with words tame enough for the light of day.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 145-146)
If the receiver of my story is a Shover, she listens with nervousness and then hurriedly explains that “everything happens for a reason,” or “it’s darkest before the dawn,” or “God has a plan for you.” Standing inside the wreckage of my marriage is too uncomfortable, so she uses these tired platitudes like a broom to sweep my shattered life into a tidy pile she can sidestep. She needs me to move forward, to make progress, to skip through the hard parts and get tot he happy ending. She needs to edit my story so that it fits inside her story about how good things happen to good people and life is fair and things tend to work our nicely in the end. I see what this is. This is an opportunity for greatness! The biggest challenges happen to the strongest people, after all! This will be a blessing, you’ll see. With these declarations, she puts her hands on my back and shoves me toward the door of hope. I don’t want to be shoved. I want to turn toward that door in my own time. But she can’t stand waiting, so she steps into the spotlight and becomes the hero of my story. I wither in the face of her optimism and clarity and slink offstage. Yeah. I guess you’re right. Everything happens for a reason.
If she is a Comparer, she nods while “listening,” as if my pain confirms something she already knows. When I finish she clucks her tongue, shakes her head, and responds with her own story. Comparers need to deflect my personal pain by refusing to accept that any of this is personal. So instead of making a new file for my story, she files me into some category for which she already has a reference. She tells me how we are the same, she and I, because she had a bad breakup in college. Or how actually, I am more like her friend Jody, who went through something “just like this.” So I find myself listening to a story about some lady named Jody – nodding, coo-ing, oh no-ing, poor Jody-ing. My hopelessness is too intense, so the Comparer’s strategy is to hijack the moment. Let’s make this about Jody – because dealing with you right now is too much to handle. And so I become just another story in a long line of stories and my family becomes just another family. My children become just like Jody’s poor children and my husband is just like Jody’s husband. But the paradox of pain is that it is only universal in retrospect. In the present, it is fiercely personal. In the immediacy of my fresh grief, I am nothing like Jody, and Jody’s pain is nothing like mine. But this is the Comparer’s show now and she insists it is all the same. Only special people have the right to grieve, and my story just isn’t all that special. She refuses to be surprised. This is nothing new. Just ask Jody.
The Fixer is certain that my situation is a question and she knows the answer. All I need is her resources and wisdom and I’ll be able to fix everything. She tells me that I just need to pray harder. I need to be more sexually available. I should leave. I have to stay. I really, really need to read this amazing book that worked miracles for her friend. The Fixer insists that there are definitive ways in and out of this mess, because to consider it random means that her life is also vulnerable to disaster. No, no, no. There is a fool-proof marriage formula and her security is dependent on believing that Craig and I simply haven’t followed the formula. I don’t have the energy to tell her that I’ve attended the same conferences and read the same books she has. I do not have the heart to suggest that maybe life doesn’t respect the boundaries of our tidy formulas, and that knowledge is not a fortress that keeps our pain. “Sure,” I say. “I’ll be sure to read that book. Thanks.”
The Reporter seems far too curious about the details of the shattering. There is a line between concerned and excited, and the Reporter steps over it. She asks inappropriate, probing questions and her eyes glisten as she waits for the answers. She is not receiving my story, she is collecting it. I learn later that she passes on the breaking news almost immediately, usually with a worry or prayer disclaimer. “You guys, I’m so worried about Craig and Glennon. Did you hear what happened? Keep them in your prayers.” Our story is the only thing we have that is completely our own. A person who steals it and uses it to entertain is the worst kind of thief.
Then there are the Victims. A few people write to say they’ve heard my news secondhand and they are hurt I haven’t told them personally. They thought we were closer than that. As if grieving people, upon hearing their news, begin making lists in descending order of how close they are to everyone they know so they can disseminate information in an orderly, fair fashion. As if etiquette exists inside grief. As if mothers dealing with shattered families are mostly concerned with how their friends feel about their pain. Upon receiving messages from these Victims, I learn what the phrase “my blood turned cold” means.
And finally, there are the God Reps. They believe they know what God wants for me and they “feel led” by God to “share.” Lord, have mercy.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 146-149)
I consider the question people ask me again and again when they hear the News: Glennon, are you in love with him? This question baffles and frustrates me. What do they mean? Do they even know what they mean? What the hell does in love mean? I’d always assumed that in love was some perfect storm of feelings that some couples were just lucky enough to have. But now I wonder, is love not a feeling but a place between two present people? A sacred place created when two people decide it’s safe enough to let their real selves surface and touch each other? Is that why it’s called in love? Because you have to visit there? And was I unable to grasp this concept because I was trying to understand it with my hovering mind – and love can’t be known that way? Can the place in love only be experienced, traveled to? Maybe the cost of being a hoverer and a diver – someone who thinks about love and analyzes love and admires love from a distance – is that I cannot be in love. Because I don’t go there. I stay removed. I have somehow decided that if I’m not truly present, I can’t be hurt by people, but what if I can’t be loved by them either? What if my body is the only vessel I have that can bring me to love?
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 189-190)
We think our job as humans is to avoid pain, our job as parent is to protect our children from pain, and our job as friends is to fix each other’s pain. Maybe that’s why we all feel like failures so often – because we all have the wrong job description for love. What my friends didn’t know about me and I didn’t know about Amma is that people who are hurting don’t need Avoiders, Protectors, or Fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpless vigil to our pain.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 205)
Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I loved well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 205)
The original Hebrew word for woman, a word that is used twice to refer to the first woman, three times to refer to strong military forces, and sixteen times to refer to God, is this:
Ezer.
And the tingly, awake feeling I’d had in the breathing class comes back as I read article after article written by other God smugglers – women who’d started printing their own money instead of waiting in line, other women who’d decided to walk around to the back of the ice cream truck. That translation is wrong, they all tell me. It’s wrong. I learn this: “The word Ezer has two roots: strong and benevolent. The best translation of Ezer is: Warrior.”
(Doyle and Melton 2017, 222)
References
Doyle, Glennon, and Glennon D. Melton. 2017. Love Warrior: A Memoir. N.p.: Flatiron Books.
ISBN 978-1-250-07573-4
Benjamin’s Book Joural 
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