Untamed, Glennon Doyle

Highlights from my first read of Glennon Doyle’s “Untamed”, which I firmly believe the entire world should read.

• Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming. That is what I can and must avoid: missing my own evolution because I am too afraid to surrender to the process. Having such little faith in myself that I numb or hide or consume my way out of my fiery feelings again and again. So my goal is to stop abandoning myself—and stay. To trust that I’m strong enough to handle the pain that is necessary to the process of becoming. Because what scares me a hell of a lot more than pain is living my entire life and missing my becoming. What scares me more than feeling it all is missing it all. These days, when pain comes, there are two of me. There is the me that is miserable and afraid, and there is the me that is curious and excited. That second me is not a masochist, she’s wise. She remembers. She remembers that even though I can’t know what will come next in my life, I always know what comes next in the process. I know that when the pain and the waiting are here, the rising is on its way. I hope the pain will pass soon, but I’ll wait it out because I’ve tested pain enough to trust it. And because who I will become tomorrow is so unforeseeable and specific that I’ll need every bit of today’s lessons to become her. I keep a note stuck to my bathroom mirror: Feel It All. It reminds me that although I began to come back to life eighteen years ago, I resurrect myself every day, in every moment that I allow myself to feel and become. It’s my daily reminder to let myself burn to ashes and rise, new.
• So how can we get from Not this to This instead? How can we move from feeling discontent to creating new lives and new worlds? In other words: How can we begin to live from our imagination instead of our indoctrination? Language is my favorite tool, so I use it to help people build a bridge between 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 the 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. When women write to me in the language of indoctrination—when they use words like good and should and right and wrong—I try to speak back to them in the language of imagination. We are all bilingual. We speak the language of indoctrination, but our native tongue is the language of imagination. When we use the language of indoctrination—with its should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad—we are activating our minds. That’s not what we’re going for here. Because our minds are polluted by our training. In order to get beyond our training, we need to activate our imaginations. Our minds are excuse makers; our imaginations are storytellers. So instead of asking ourselves what’s right or wrong, we must ask ourselves: What is true and beautiful? Then our imagination rises inside us, thanks us for finally consulting it after all these years, and tells us a story.
• The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be.
• Each of those women has begun to live from her imagination. Here’s how: Each honored her own discontent. She did not dismiss it, bury it, deflect it, deny it, blame it on someone else, or tell herself to shut up and be grateful. She heard her Knowing whisper “Not this,” and she admitted to herself that she heard it. She sat with it for a while. Then she dared to utter her inner whisper out loud. She shared her discontent with another human being.
• Then, when she was ready to move from Not this to This instead, she dared to call upon her imagination to tell her the story she was born to tell with her life. She dreamed up what it would look like to have her specific version of truth and beauty come to life. She looked for the blueprint she’d been born with, the one she’d forgotten existed. She unearthed her unseen order: her original plan.
• Then—and this is crucial—she put pen to paper. The people who build their truest, most beautiful lives usually do. It’s hard to jump from dreaming to doing. As every architect or designer knows, there is a critical step between vision and reality. Before imagination becomes three-dimensional, it usually needs to become two-dimensional. It’s as though the unseen order needs to come to life one dimension at a time.
• Women have sent me so many of their two-dimensional dreams over the years. They say: “For me, the truest, most beautiful life, family, world looks like…”
• I marvel at how wildly different each of their stories is. It’s proof that our lives were never meant to be cookie-cutter, culturally constructed carbon copies of some ideal. There is no one way to live, love, raise children, arrange a family, run a school, a community, a nation. The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal. We can throw out all the rules and write our own. We can build our lives from the inside out. We can stop asking what the world wants from us and instead ask ourselves what we want for our world. We can stop looking at what’s in front of us long enough to discover what’s inside us. We can remember and unleash the life-changing, relationship-changing, world-changing power of our own imagination. It might take us a lifetime. Luckily, a lifetime is exactly how long we have.
• Let’s conjure up, from the depths of our souls:
• The truest, most beautiful lives we can imagine.
• The truest, most beautiful families we can fathom.
• The truest, most beautiful world we can hope for.
• Let’s put it all on paper.
• Let’s look at what we’ve written and decide that these are not pipe dreams; these are our marching orders. These are the blueprints for our lives, our families, and the world.
• May the invisible order become visible.
• May our dreams become our plans.
• If we feel, know, and imagine—our lives, families, and world become truer versions of themselves. Eventually. But at first it’s very scary. Because once we feel, know, and dare to imagine more for ourselves, we cannot unfeel, unknow, or unimagine. There is no going back. We are launched into the abyss—the space between the not-trueenough life we’re living and the truer one that exists only inside us. So we say, “Maybe it’s safer to just stay here. Even if it’s not true enough, maybe it’s good enough.” But good enough is what makes people drink too much and snark too much and become bitter and sick and live in quiet desperation until they lie on their deathbed and wonder: What kind of life/relationship/family/world might I have created if I’d been braver?
• The building of the true and beautiful means the destruction of the good enough. Rebirth means death. Once a truer, more beautiful vision is born inside us, life is in the direction of that vision. Holding on to what is no longer true enough is not safe; it’s the riskiest move because it is the certain death of everything that was meant to be. We are alive only to the degree to which we are willing to be annihilated. Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.
• I have lost identities, beliefs, and relationships it has hurt to lose. I have learned that when I live from my emotions, knowing, and imagination, I am always losing. What I lose is always what is no longer true enough so that I can take full hold of what is.
• For a long while I contorted myself to live according to a set of old memos I’d been issued about how to become a successful woman and build a strong family, career, and faith. I thought those memos were universal Truth, so I abandoned myself to honor them without even unearthing and examining them. When I finally pulled them out of my subconscious and looked hard at them: I learned that these memos had never been Truth at all—just my particular culture’s arbitrary expectations. Hustling to comply with my memos, I was flying on autopilot, routed to a destination I never chose. So I took back the wheel. I quit abandoning myself to honor those memos. Instead, I abandoned the memos and began honoring myself. I began to live as a woman who never got the world’s memos.
• I burned the memo that defined selflessness as the pinnacle of womanhood, but first I forgave myself for believing that lie for so long. I had abandoned myself out of love. They’d convinced me that the best way for a woman to love her partner, family, and community was to lose herself in service to them. In my desire to be of service, I did myself and the world a great disservice. I’ve seen what happens out in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet, and small. Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.
• I burned the memo presenting responsible motherhood as martyrdom. I decided that the call of motherhood is to become a model, not a martyr. I unbecame a mother slowly dying in her children’s name and became a responsible mother: one who shows her children how to be fully alive.
• I burned the memo insisting that the way a family avoids brokenness is to keep its structure by any means necessary. I noticed families clinging to their original structures that were very broken, indeed. I noticed other families whose structures had shifted and were healthy and vibrant. I decided that a family’s wholeness or brokenness has little to do with its structure. A broken family is a family in which any member must break herself into pieces to fit in. A whole family is one in which each member can bring her full self to the table knowing that she will always be both held and free.
• I decided to let my family’s form become an evolving ecosystem. I unbecame a woman clinging to a prescribed family structure and became one clinging to each of her family member’s right to their full humanity: including me. We would break and rebreak our structure instead of allowing any of us to live broken.
• I quit buying the idea that a successful marriage is one that lasts till death, even if one or both spouses are dying inside it. I decided that before I ever vowed myself to another person, I’d take this vow to myself: I’ll not abandon myself. Not ever again. Me and myself: We are till death do us part. We’ll forsake all others to remain whole. I unbecame a woman who believed that another would complete me when I decided that I was born complete.
• I let burn my cherished, comfortable idea of America as a place of liberty and justice for all. I let a truer, wider perspective be born in its place, one that included the American experience of people who don’t look like me.
• I wrote myself a new memo about what it means to have strong faith. To me, faith is not a public allegiance to a set of outer beliefs, but a private surrender to the inner Knowing. I stopped believing in middlemen or hierarchy between me and God. I went from certain and defensive to curious, wide-eyed, and awed; from closed fists to open arms; from the shallow to the deep end. For me, living in faith means allowing to burn all that separates me from the Knowing so that one day I can say: I and the Mother are one.
• The memos I’ve written for myself are neither right nor wrong; they are just mine. They’re written in sand so that I can revise them whenever I feel, know, imagine a truer, more beautiful idea for myself. I’ll be revising them until I take my last breath.
• I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths. My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation, and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself. The goal is to surrender, constantly, who I just was in order to become who this next moment calls me to be. I will not hold on to a single existing idea, opinion, identity, story, or relationship that keeps me from emerging new. I cannot hold too tightly to any riverbank. I must let go of the shore in order to travel deeper and see farther. Again and again and then again. Until the final death and rebirth. Right up until then.
• The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love.
• The Ache was never warning me: This ends, so leave. She was saying: This ends, so stay.
• Since I got sober, I have never been fine again, not for a single moment. I have been exhausted and terrified and angry. I have been overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. I have been amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. I have been reminded, constantly, by the Ache: This will pass; stay close.
• I have been alive.
• If you are uncomfortable—in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused —you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy. I will not call myself broken, flawed, or imperfect anymore.
• I will quit chasing ghosts, because the chase left me weary. And because I am a woman who no longer believes in ghosts.
• Allow me to rewrite my own self-description: I am forty-four years old. With all my chin hairs and pain and contradictions, I am flawless, unbroken. There is no other way.
• I am haunted by nothing
• I was. I was so good. I was also exhausted, anxious, and lost. I assumed that was because I wasn’t good enough yet; I just had to try a little harder.
• My husband’s infidelity was a jagged gift, because it forced me to see that being a good wife wasn’t enough to keep my marriage together. Being a good mother wasn’t enough to keep my kids from pain. Being a good world saver wasn’t enough to save my own world.
• Being bad had almost killed me. But so had being good.
• I was talking to a dear friend around that time. She said, “G, remember that amazing Steinbeck quote? ‘And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.’ I’ve kept it on my desk for years.
• I looked at it last night and thought: I’m tired of being good. I’m so tired. “Let’s change it to: “And now that we don’t have to be good, we can be free.”
• Brave does not mean feeling afraid and doing it anyway.
• Brave means living from the inside out. Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud.
• Since the Knowing is specific, personal, and ever changing, so is brave. Whether you are brave or not cannot be judged by people on the outside. Sometimes being brave requires letting the crowd think you’re a coward. Sometimes being brave means letting everyone down but yourself. Amma’s brave is often: loud and go for it. Tish’s brave is often: quiet and wait for it. They are both brave girls, because each is true to herself. They are not divided between what they feel and know on the inside and what they say and do on the outside. Their selves are integrated. They have integrity.
• Tish showed tremendous bravery that day because keeping her integrity required her to resist the pressure of the crowd. She trusted her own voice more than she trusted the voices of others. Brave is not asking the crowd what is brave. Brave is deciding for oneself.
• “If you keep living with confidence, the rest of your life will unfold exactly as it is meant to. It won’t always be comfortable. Some will recognize your brave; others won’t. Some will understand and like you; others won’t. But the way others respond to your confidence is not your business. Your business is to stay loyal to you. That way, you will always know that those who do like and love you are really your people. You’ll never be forced to hide or act in order to keep people if you don’t hide or act to get them.”
• To be brave is to forsake all others to be true to yourself.
• That is the vow of a confident girl.
• P108: “I’ve always known I wanted to live by the beach. I guess women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want.”
• She said, “Yes, everyone you love would be uncomfortable for a long while, maybe. What is better: uncomfortable truth or comfortable lies? Every truth is a kindness, even if it makes others uncomfortable. Every untruth is an unkindness, even if it makes others comfortable.”
• I have decided, once and for all, that just because someone texts me does not obligate me to respond. If I believed differently, I’d walk around all day feeling anxious and indebted, responding instead of creating. Now that we’ve established why I have no friends, let’s return to Erika
• Why do women find it honorable to dismiss ourselves?
• Why do we decide that denying our longing is the responsible thing to do?
• Why do we believe that what will thrill and fulfill us will hurt our people?
• Why do we mistrust ourselves so completely?
• We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless.
• Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely.
• I had been deceived. The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me. I quit spending my life trying to control myself and began to trust myself. We only control what we don’t trust. We can either control our selves or love our selves, but we can’t do both. Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.
• I love myself now. Self-love means that I have a relationship with myself built on trust and loyalty. I trust myself to have my own back, so my allegiance is to the voice within. I’ll abandon everyone else’s expectations of me before I’ll abandon myself. I’ll disappoint everyone else before I’ll disappoint myself. I’ll forsake all others before I’ll forsake myself. Me and myself: We are till death do us part.
• What the world needs is more women who have quit fearing themselves and started trusting themselves.
• What the world needs is masses of women who are entirely out of control
• We don’t control the turbulence or tragedy that happens to our families. The plot of our lives is largely out of our control. We decide only the response of the main character. We decide whether we will be the one who jumps ship or the one who stays and leads.
• Family is: Whether we’re falling or flying, we’re going to take care of each other through the whole damn ride.
• Because people who do not suck are people who have failed, dusted themselves off, and tried again. People who do not suck are people who have been hurt, so they have empathy for others who are hurt. People who do not suck are those who have learned from their own mistakes by dealing with the consequences. People who do not suck are people who have learned how to win with humility and how to lose with dignity.
• Our memo has led us to steal from our children the one thing that will allow them to become strong people: struggle.
• TISH: Chase wants me to join the same club he joined in middle school. I don’t want to.
• ME: So don’t.
• TISH: But I don’t want to disappoint him.
• ME: Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself. TISH: Even you?
• ME: Especially me.
• It’s not the cruel criticism from folks who hate us that scares us away from our Knowing; it’s the quiet concern of those who love us. My mom’s fear started to pull me away from my Knowing. I lost my peace. I became defensive and angry.
• We hung up, and I thought: My mother loves me. And she disagrees with me about what is best for me. I am going to have to decide who I trust more: my mother or myself. For the first time in my life, I decided to trust myself—even though that meant moving in direct opposition to my parents. I decided to please myself instead of my parents. I decided to become responsible for my own life, my own joy, my own family. And I decided to do it with love. That is when I became an adult.
• We are dumbfounded. We feel like we are always saying the wrong things and that people are always getting upset about that. But I do not think people become upset just because we say the wrong things. I think people are upset—and we are defensive, hurt, and frustrated— because we have fallen into the trap of believing that becoming racially sober is about saying the right thing instead of becoming the right thing; that showing up is based in performing instead of T transforming. The way we show up reveals that we haven’t yet done the studying and listening required to become the right thing before trying to say the right thing.
• Every white person who shows up and tells the truth—because it’s her duty as a member of our human family—is going to have her racism called out. She will have to accept that others will disagree with how she’s showing up and that they will have every right to disagree. She will need to learn to withstand people’s anger, knowing that much of it is real and true and necessary. She will need to accept that one of the privileges she’s letting burn is her emotional comfort. She will need to remind herself that being called a racist is actually not the worst thing. The worst thing is privately hiding her racism to stay safe, liked, and comfortable while others suffer and die. There are worse things than being criticized—like being a coward.
• When I got sober, I learned that hard feelings are doorbells that interrupt me, send me into a panic, and then leave me with an exciting package. Sobriety is a decision to stop numbing and blaming away hard feelings and to start answering the door. So when I quit drinking, I began allowing my feelings to disturb me. This was scary, because I had always assumed that my feelings were so big and powerful that they would stay forever and eventually kill me. But my hard feelings did not stay forever, and they did not kill me. Instead, they came and went, and afterward I was left with something I didn’t have before. That something was self-knowledge.
• A boundary is the edge of one of our root beliefs about ourselves and the world.
• We are like computers, and our beliefs are the software with which we’re programmed. Often our beliefs are programmed into us without our knowledge by our culture, community, religion, and family. Even though we don’t choose those subconscious programs, they run our lives. They control our decisions, perspectives, feelings, and interactions, so they determine our destiny. What we believe, we become. There is nothing more important than unearthing what we really believe to be true about ourselves and our world—and nothing unearths what we really believe faster than examining what pisses us off.
• My anger was delivering a package with one of my root beliefs in it—a belief that was programmed into me during childhood: Resting is laziness, and laziness is disrespect. Worthiness and goodness are earned with hustle.
• I want to be able to rest and still feel worthy, too. I didn’t want to change Abby. I wanted to change my belief about worthiness. Anger rings our bell and delivers one of our root beliefs. This is good information, but the next part is more than informative, it’s transformational: All of the beliefs that anger delivers come with a return label.
• Hard work is important. So are play and nonproductivity. My worth is tied not to my productivity but to my existence. I am worthy of rest.
• Changing my root belief about worthiness has changed my life. I sleep a little bit later. I schedule in time for reading and walks and yoga, and sometimes (on the weekend), I even watch a TV show in the middle of the day. It’s heavenly. It’s also an ongoing process: Still, when I see Abby relaxing, my knee-jerk reaction is annoyance. But then I check myself. I think: Why am I activated here? Oh, yes, that old belief. Oh, wait, never mind. I’ve exchanged that one. And when Abby asks, “What’s wrong?” I can say, “Nothing, honey,” and mean it, mostly.
• Anger delivers our boundaries to us. Our boundaries deliver our beliefs to us. Our beliefs determine how we experience the world. So even though it can be scary, we’d be wise to answer the door.
• Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new.
• I’ve got these conditions—anxiety, depression, addiction—and they almost killed me. But they are also my superpowers. The sensitivity that led me to addiction is the same sensitivity that makes me a really good artist. The anxiety that makes it difficult to exist in my own skin also makes it difficult to exist in a world where so many people are in so much pain—and that makes me a relentless activist. The fire that burned me up for the first half of my life is the exact same fire I’m using now to light up the world.
• Don’t forget: We need their science because they need our poetry. We don’t need to be more pleasant, normal, or convenient, we just need to be ourselves. We need to save ourselves because we need to save the world.
• I’ve also learned that while choosing joy makes it easier for me to love myself and my life, it seems to make it harder for the world to love me.
• I sat with my feelings and I realized: The knee-jerk reaction I’m having to this girl is a direct result of my training. I have been conditioned to mistrust and dislike strong, confident, happy girls and women. We all have. Studies prove that the more powerful, successful, and happy a man becomes, the more people trust and like him. But the more powerful and happy a woman becomes, the less people like and trust her. So we proclaim: Women are entitled to take their rightful place! Then, when a woman does take her rightful place, our first reaction is: She’s so…entitled. We become people who say of confident women, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it—it’s just something about her. I just don’t like her. I can’t put my finger on why.”
• I can put my finger on why: It’s because our training is kicking in through our subconscious. 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 into 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 apologize 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.
• I once sat with Oprah Winfrey at her kitchen table, and she asked me what I was most proud of in my life as an activist, writer, mother. I panicked and started mumbling something like “Oh. I don’t feel proud, I feel grateful. None of it’s really me. I’m surrounded by great people. I’m just incredibly lucky and…”
• She put her hand on mine and said, “Don’t do that. Don’t be modest. Dr. Maya Angelou used to say, ‘Modesty is a learned affectation. You don’t want modesty, you want humility. Humility comes from inside out.’ ”
• I think of what she said to me every day. She was saying: Playing dumb, weak, and silly is a disservice to yourself and to me and to the world. Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully. Don’t mistake modesty for humility. Modesty is a giggly lie. An act. A mask. A fake game. We have no time for it.
• The word humility derives from the Latin word humilitas, which means “of the earth.” To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become—to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It is not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to, either.
• I’ve never pretended to be stronger than I am, so I’m sure as hell not going to pretend I’m weaker than I am. I’m also going to quit requiring modesty from other women. I don’t want to find comfort in the weakness and pain of other women. I want to find inspiration in the joy and success of other women. Because that makes me happier, and because if we keep disliking and tearing down strong women instead of loving them, supporting them, and voting for them, we won’t have any strong women left.
• When I see a joyful, confident woman moving through the world with swagger, I’m going to forgive myself for my first reaction because it’s not my fault, it’s just my conditioning.
• First reaction: Who the hell does she think she is?
• Second reaction: She knows she’s a goddamn cheetah. Halle-fucking-lujah.
• I replied, “It’s true. We are terribly lucky. It is also true that we imagined this life before it existed and then we each gave up everything for the one-in-a-million chance that we might be able to build it together. We did not fall into this world we have now, we made it. I’ll tell you this: The braver I am, the luckier I get.”
• The more often I do things I want to do, the less bitter I am at people for doing what they want to do.
• I am very controlling. I want to control things. This is because I am afraid. Things feel so precarious. When I was young, I made myself feel safer by controlling my food and body. I still do that. But as I got older and became a wife and a mother, I found another thing to try to control to create safety: my people. Since life is scary and precarious, controlling people I love felt like the responsible thing to do.
• In addition to the fear factor, there is something else that leads me to want to control things, and that is my belief that I am very smart and creative. I really do believe I have very good ideas and that people would do best if they got on board. This kind of control is called leadership.
• For a long while, I have controlled and led my people and called that love. I “loved” my people to a bloody pulp. My role in the lives of the people I love has been as follows: I exist to make all your hopes and dreams come true. So let’s sit down and take a look at this comprehensive list of hopes and dreams I’ve created for you. I have been paying very close attention and trust me, I SEE you and know you better than you know yourself. You can do anything I put your mind to! Let us begin!
• But we cannot feel and know and imagine for other people. This is what I am trying to understand. The person who is teaching me this is my wife. My wife is uncontrollable.
• Are you sad? Are you Christian? Are you a heretic? Are you a believer? Are you a doubter? Are you young? Are you old? Are you good? Are you bad? Are you dark? Are you light? Are you right? Are you wrong? Are you deep? Are you shallow? Are you brave? Are you weak? Are you shattered? Are you whole? Are you wise? Are you foolish? Are you sick? Are you healed? Are you lost? Are you found? Are you gay? Are you straight? Are you crazy? Are you brilliant? Are you caged? Are you wild? Are you human? Are you alive? Are you sure?
• I am. I am. I am.