Untamed

Key Three: Dare to Imagine

When I was twenty-six years old, I found myself sitting on a dirty bathroom floor holding a positive pregnancy test. I stared at the little blue cross and thought: Well, this is impossible. There could not be a worse candidate for motherhood on Earth. I’d binged and purged several times a day for sixteen years. I’d been drinking myself to blackout every night for the previous seven. I’d destroyed my liver, my credit, my record, my tooth enamel, and all of my relationships. My aching head, the empty beer bottles on the floor, my bank account, my ringless, trembling fingers, they all screamed: No. Not you.

Yet something inside me whispered: Yes. Me.

All evidence to the contrary, I could imagine myself as a sober, thriving mother.

I became sober, and then I became a mother, a wife, and a writer.

Fast-forward fourteen years. Reminder: I’m forty years old now. I’ve got one husband, two dogs, and three children who adore their father. I also have a skyrocketing writing career, based partly on my traditional family and Christianity. I’m at an event to launch my new book, the highly anticipated memoir about my marriage’s redemption. At that event, a woman walks into the room, and I look at her and fall madly in love within the same moment. My circumstances, my fear, my religion, my career—they all scream: No. Not her.

And yet something inside me whispered: Yes. Her.

The something inside me was my imagination.

All evidence to the contrary, I could imagine myself as Abby’s partner. I could imagine the kind of love in which I was fully seen, known, and cherished.

The facts were right there in front of me to see.

But the truth was right there inside of me to feel.

Swelling, pressing, insisting: There is a life meant for you that is truer than the one you’re living. But in order to have it, you will have to forge it yourself. You will have to create on the outside what you are imagining on the inside. Only you can bring it forth. And it will cost you everything.

I have learned to live by faith, which does not mean that I live by a set of unwavering beliefs or dogma that men laid down ages ago to keep their power by controlling others. My faith has nothing to do with religion anymore. To me, living by faith is allowing the swelling and pressing inside me to direct my outward words and decisions. Because to me, God is not a being outside of me: God is the fire, the nudge, the warm liquid gold swelling and pressing inside me.

In fact, my favorite idea of faith is a belief in the unseen order of things.

There are two orders of things:

There is the seen order unfolding in front of us every day on our streets and in the news. In this visible order, violence reigns and children are shot in their schools and warmongers prosper and 1 percent of the world hoards half of all we have. We call this order of things reality. This is “the way things are.” It’s all we can see because it’s all we’ve ever seen. Yet something inside us rejects it. We know instinctively: This is not the intended order of things. This is not how things are meant to be. We know that there is a better, truer, wilder way.

That better way is the unseen order inside us. It is the vision we carry in our imagination about a truer, more beautiful world—one in which all children have enough to eat and we no longer kill each other and mothers do not have to cross deserts with their babies on their backs. This better idea is what Jews call shalom, Buddhists call nirvana, Christians call heaven, Muslims call salaam, and many agnostics call peace. It is not a place out there—not yet; it’s the hopeful swelling in here, pressing through our skin, insisting that it was all meant to be more beautiful than this. And it can be, if we refuse to wait to die and “go to heaven” and instead find heaven inside us and give birth to it here and now. If we work to make the vision of the unseen order swelling inside us visible in our lives, homes, and nations, we will make reality more beautiful. On Earth as it is in heaven. In our material world as it is in our imagination.

Tabitha.

She was born into captivity. The only visible order she’s ever known includes cages and dirty pink bunnies and weak, bored applause. Tabitha never knew the wild. Yet Tabitha knew the wild. It was in her. She sensed the pressing of the unseen order like a relentless hunch. Perhaps for us, as for Tabitha, the deepest truth is not what we can see but what we can imagine. Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it. Perhaps when we want to know the original plan for our lives, families, world, we should consult not what’s in front of us but what’s inside us.

Imagination is how personal and worldwide revolutions begin.

“I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning,” said Gloria Steinem.

In order to move our culture forward, revolutionaries have had to speak and plan from the unseen order inside them. For those of us who were not consulted in the building of the visible order, igniting our imagination is the only way to see beyond what was created to leave us out. If those who were not part of the building of reality only consult reality for possibilities, reality will never change. We will keep shuffling and competing for a seat at their table instead of building our own tables. We will keep banging our heads on their glass ceilings instead of pitching our own huge tent outside. We will remain caged by this world instead of taking our rightful place as cocreators of it.

Each of us was born to bring forth something that has never existed: a way of being, a family, an idea, art, a community—something brand-new. We are here to fully introduce ourselves, to impose ourselves and ideas and thoughts and dreams onto the world, leaving it changed forever by who we are and what we bring forth from our depths. So we cannot contort ourselves to fit into the visible order. We must unleash ourselves and watch the world reorder itself in front of our eyes.

My job is to listen deeply to women. What many tell me is that they harbor an achy, heavy hunch that their lives, relationships, and world were meant to be more beautiful than they are.

They ask, “Shouldn’t my marriage feel more loving than this? Shouldn’t my religion be more alive and kind than this? Shouldn’t my work be more meaningful and my community be more connected? Shouldn’t the world I’m leaving to my babies be less brutal? Isn’t it all just supposed to be more beautiful than this?”

The women asking these questions remind me of Tabitha. They are stalking the periphery of their lives, feeling discontent. To me, this is exciting, because discontent is the nagging of the imagination. Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: “Not this.”

“Not this” is a very important stage.

But knowing what we do not want is not the same as knowing what we do want.

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.

Clare wrote to me recently. She’s a lawyer and the daughter of an alcoholic. When she sat down to email me, she had just woken up, still woozy from her nightly “take the edge off” glasses of wine. She wrote that she spends most of her time numb or foggy or ashamed. “G, I feel like I’m wasting my life,” she wrote. “What should I do?”

“Clare,” I wrote. “What is the truest, most beautiful story about your life you can imagine?”

Sasha wrote to tell me about her marriage. She married a guy who is distant and cold, just like her father had been. Sasha spent most of her days hustling to earn her husband’s love, just like her mom had done to earn her dad’s. She wrote, “I’m so tired and lonely. What’s the right thing to do here?”

I replied, “Sasha, can you tell me a story about the truest, most beautiful marriage you can imagine?”

Danielle, a thirty-four-year-old former kindergarten teacher, wrote to me recently. She spends her days and nights watching her seven-year-old die slowly in her arms, tortured by the same disease that killed her first son three years ago. Night and day, she sits by her son’s bedside—feeding him, singing to him, soothing him. “I’m broken, Glennon,” she wrote. “I don’t know what to do.”

I wrote back, “Danielle, what is the truest, most beautiful story you can imagine about a mother and her sons?”

Each of them replied to me. Clare wrote a story about a woman who never abandoned herself, who faced life on life’s terms and was present for herself, her people, her life. She believed in that vision enough to begin therapy and to safely let rise to the surface all the pain she was trying to drown out with wine. Months later she wrote to say that her new way of being is harder than ever, but it’s the right kind of hard. She’s not missing her own life anymore. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she no longer needs to look away. She is now a woman who can look into her own eyes.

Sasha spent several evenings writing a story about the truest, most beautiful marriage she could imagine. She spent a week mustering the courage to send it to me because she was scared to let someone on the outside see what was on her inside. Eventually she printed it out and left it on her husband’s pillow. She was heartbroken when he didn’t mention it for three weeks. Then, one night, she found an invitation from him, asking her to go to a marriage retreat. They could both imagine something more beautiful, it turned out. They were ready to try to make it real.

Danielle wrote back to me from her son’s hospital bedside after I asked her about the truest, most beautiful story about parenting she could imagine.

She said this: “I’ve spent the past week considering your question. I can imagine a thousand easier stories about mothers and sons. I can think of a million happier ones. But I cannot imagine a single story truer or more beautiful than the heartbreaking one I’m living now, with my boys.”

“Me neither,” I wrote back. “Me neither.”

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.