I’m here too! Glennon Doyle and me.

On very real relationships with people / voices we do not know

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I get the notification that Glennon Doyle has joined Substack yesterday and she might has well have announced she was moving to Co. Tipperary, for the reaction it provokes in me. I’ve just joined Substack, ffs! And Glennon Doyle and I share a connection. I could go on about this connection, of which Doyle is sadly unaware because I don’t believe in putting myself ‘out there’ and also, I kind of don’t believe in famous people? (My experience of Doyle thus far is of a disembodied voice on my device or as words on a page – lovely words, true words, in fairness - so it feels possible she doesn’t in fact exist IRL. Really?, I’ve thought, the few times I’ve seen a clip of her speaking and witnessed via a screen her voice commune with her expressive face and body. Not that there’s anything particularly dissonant about the combination – she looks absolutely lovely, but really?)

In honour of her move to Substack, the following is an inventory of ways Glennon Doyle has affected my life in the last five years.¹ And it isn’t even exhaustive! (Though spoiler alert it may prove exhausting to read. It was certainly exhausting to live through.)

Some of the ways Glennon Doyle has affected me:

1. THE TIME SHE NEARLY MADE ME LEAVE MY HUSBAND…

Well fuck, I think, when I read her words ‘Once you know, you can’t unknow’, Well fuck it anyway. I’m at the precipice of an early midlife jig at the crossroads (small shit like mothers dying, global pandemics and upcoming fortieth birthdays). I feel caught out, fearful. I’m ignorant of what the fear is about, what it is I suddenly know, but I worry it’s big, disruptive. I worry I will have to leave my husband now. I trust these American doyennes of the self-actualisation literature who, like Doyle, have tried men and found them wanting. (I have tried one man and regularly find him wanting.) The depiction of same sex marriage in Untamed is enough to turn me. I get off on all the Deep and Meaningfuls, the intuiting each other’s feelings, the gentle nudging of the other towards their own best selves. But I don’t have the energy for this level of self-improvement. There’s a lice notice from the school in my inbox, a child pulling at my pants leg. I can barely sustain a grudge against my husband these days, never mind instigate an assault. Doyle makes me feel bad about my lack of ambition.

2. THE TIME I DECIDED I COULDN’T TRUST HER…

It’s scary to think but early on in my relationship with Doyle I nearly give up on her altogether (imagine!). I’m aware of her addiction and eating disorder struggles and I trust her. (I trust people who are upfront about their troubles, about their troubledness, women who ‘trouble’ things.) But then early on in her memoir she confesses to (FYI, she might say ‘mentions’) the fact that her mother used to tuck her into bed at night. I’m at a stage of my life, one I wouldn’t recommend, where I am just coming to terms with the fact that I am full of unmet mothering needs and am full of shame / pain for them. Where I’ve realised, like Gloria Steinem, that I miss my mother, but no more so now than when she was alive. I’m writing an essay titled ‘Mother Hole’ (eventually published by Sonder Magazine) but I’m still not there, in the place where I can hold someone burning with needs like these with tenderness. Someone like me, for instance. When I learn that Doyle’s mother used to, or at least once - it may have just been the once - tucked her into bed at nighttime, I go straight to What the fuck do you have to cry about? This is a place I visit often (one might even call it my comfort zone) when confronted with the suffering / complaints of women whose mothers go places with them or read their school reports or help out with their kids or buy them nice tops in Dunnes.

3. THE TIME SHE BLEW MY FUCKING MIND... And also, made me think I might finally be fully cooked (I was wrong of course, but still)…

I’m about €800 worth of overpriced pretty journals into the shitshow that is my healing journey (even Irish women can use words like ‘healing journey’ when writing about Glennon Doyle, I checked) and I’m out walking with Doyle in my ears when she states, by-the-by, like it’s no big deal, ‘I am a person who needs a lot of tenderness’. In the same way one might pronounce, I am a person who likes dogs, she is unapologetic, there is no hint of justification. My mouth and brain unite in WTF? This is an FU to bubble-bath by candlelight self-compassion. This is elite level self-acceptance, blatant in-your-face loyalty to oneself and one’s needs. The €800 was well-spent, apparently, because instead of my instinctual Would you ever get over yourself? eyeroll or my fetching Isn’t it well for you? harumph of resentment, I find myself filled with respect and admiration for this woman who has bothered to get to know herself and isn’t repulsed or mortified by what she’s found. It will prompt a tentative shift in me, a space in which to entertain a novel idea - Am I a person who needs a lot of tenderness? And a radical follow-up, Am I allowed to own it, just like that?

1. Note. If any of my friends / stalkers would like to compose a similar ‘How Helena has added to my life’ in honour of my joining Substack I would be very embarrassed but I would also try be a bigger person and get over it. Just saying.