In Untamed by Glennon Doyle, Language as a Bridge to Becoming

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By publicly navigating her own personal struggles, Glennon Doyle becomes the voice for many in crisis who feel unheard. Understanding the emotional and psychological journey of others gives a courageous blueprint to those in similar circumstances. Doyle states, “Language is my favorite tool, so I use it to help people build a bridge from what’s in front of them and what’s inside them. I have learned that if we want to hear the voice of imagination, we must speak to it in a language it understands, if we want to know who we were meant to be before the world told us who to be, if we want to know where we were meant to go before we were put in our place. If we want to taste freedom instead of control, then we must relearn our soul’s native tongue...The truest and most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be.”


Doyle’s words, a refusal to go gently into that good night, become lifelines affirming the good fight. Doyle adds, “I learned I’d never be free of pain, but I could be free of the fear of pain...I’m like that burning bush. The fire of pain won’t consume me. I can burn and burn, and live. I can live on fire. I’m fireproof. I can use pain to become. I’m here to keep becoming truer and more beautiful versions of myself, again and again, forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution.”


Lives that resurrect themselves from the fires of fear, self doubt, and spiritual exhaustion are things of great beauty, living sculptures of such strength, it takes my breath away. Doyle affirms, “Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next, is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I don’t extinguish myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming...There is no glory except straight through your story. Pain is not tragic, pain is magic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain, and consequently, miss our becoming.”


Doyle speaks with an unmistakable and powerful voice. Our journeys unfold throughout the years, continuing to evolve, unique but with commonalities. Recognizing and relating to our shared experiences, make us stronger overall, a function of empathic stretching.


Doyle’s truth is not everyone’s truth, but freedom to live an authentic life can only make us stronger as a community. It would be impossible to read this book without discovering insights that resonate and elevate. For many, fear is often the fuel of anger, and anger the impetus for change; like the irritation of sand in an oyster, this book becomes a product of friction, a lexicon of experiential synthesis and passion, yielding a luminosity borne of learning that hard things are not impossible to do.

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