Untamed

I met Liz at an airport. We were speaking at the same event somewhere out west. I flew all night to get there and then found myself in a small terminal, standing outside a circle made up of other speakers waiting to be picked up and delivered to the event. I hate how people stand in circles. I wish we’d all agree to stand around in horseshoes, with room available for awkward outsiders to join.

A woman walked over from baggage claim and stood next to me. I smiled and stayed quiet, which is my strategy for making it through. She smiled back, but her smile was different from mine. My smile says: Hello, I am warm, polite, and unavailable. I smile like a period. Liz smiles slowly and openly, like a question mark.

“Hi. I’m Liz.”

“I know,” I said. “I adore your work. I’m Glennon.”

“Oh my gosh! I know you. I adore your work, too. Where are you from?”

“I live in Naples, Florida.”

“What’s it like to live there?”

“It’s slow. It’s a retirement city. I’d say the average age in my neighborhood is eighty. The cool thing is that most of my friends are turning forty and worried about starting to look old. Not me. I feel fantastic. Like a spring chicken. I go to the gym, look around at all the grandparents, and think ‘Actually, I don’t need to work out after all. I look amazing.’ It’s all perspective, right? I tell my friends to skip the Botox and just move to Naples.”

Liz says, “Wonderful. How did you end up there?”

“I got neurological Lyme disease a few years ago. My entire body shut down, and I was in bed for two years and popping fifty pills a day. I went to stay in my friend’s place in Naples, and I felt so much better. I moved there temporarily, and I was able to ditch the pills, so I just stayed. 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.”

Liz put her hand on my arm and said, “Wait. Wow. That last thing you said—about having to almost die—can you say that again?”

I said, “I don’t think so. I’m a little nervous. I have no idea what I just said.”

She smiled and said, “I like you.”

“I like you, too.”

The next night, along with everyone else at the convention, I went to see Liz speak. I got to the event early and claimed a seat in the front but off to the side—close enough to see her clearly but not close enough for her to see me clearly. She was standing behind the podium wearing a black shirt with a high white collar, and she reminded me of a priest at a pulpit. When she started speaking, I found myself holding my breath. She spoke with gentleness and authority. A man in the front row kept talking to the woman beside him, and Liz paused midsentence, turned to him, and asked him to stop talking. He did. Something about the way she spoke, the way she carried herself, made my heart beat quicker than usual. She seemed certain, steady, free, relaxed. She was not complying and she was not rebelling. She was creating something new. She was original. I wanted to ask “Can you say all of that again?”

The next night, all the speakers attended a fancy banquet in a ski lodge at the top of a mountain. Snow was flurrying outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and people were flurrying inside, trying to figure out where to stand and who was important enough to talk to.

I saw Liz in a corner across the room, surrounded. My general policy is to honor people I admire by leaving them alone. I didn’t that night. I walked over to her, and when she saw me she smiled like another beginning. I drew closer, joined the huddle. The entire circle was pressing Liz with questions and requests for advice like she was a vending machine. I wanted to step on their toes.

After a while, the host of the event walked over and said to Liz, “It’s time to take our seats for dinner. May I lead you to your table?”

Liz pointed to me and asked, “Can I sit with my friend?”

The woman looked nervous, then apologetic. “I’m sorry. We’ve promised the donors that you’d sit with them.”

“Okay,” she said. She looked forlorn. She squeezed my arm and said, “I’ll miss you.”

During the dinner I thought about how much I liked Liz and how sad it was that we wouldn’t actually be able to be friends. Attempting to be her friend would be like intentionally writing a bad check. I am not a good friend. I have never been capable of or willing to commit to the maintenance that the rules of friendship dictate. I cannot remember birthdays. I do not want to meet for coffee. I will not host the baby shower. I won’t text back because it’s an eternal game of Ping-Pong, the texting. It never ends. I inevitably disappoint friends, so after enough of that, I decided I would stop trying. I don’t want to live in constant debt. This is okay with me. I have a sister and children and a dog. One cannot have it all.

A few weeks after the event, Liz sent me an email saying she thought we should try friendship. She sent along this poem:

I honor your gods,

I drink at your well,

I bring an undefended heart to our meeting place.

I have no cherished outcomes,

I will not negotiate by withholding,

I am not subject to disappointment.

She offered a new friendship memo: that for us there would be no arbitrary rules, obligations, or expectations. We would not owe each other anything other than admiration, respect, love—and that was all done already. We became friends.

A while later, I invited Liz to come stay with me. It was shortly after I’d met Abby, and I was walking through my days stunned. I was deeply in love for the first time in my life, and I had told no one except my sister about any of it. Liz and I stayed up late that first night, talking about everything but my desperate heart and aching body and muddled mind.

The next morning, my alarm rang at 5:30, which didn’t matter because I didn’t sleep anymore. I rolled over and tiptoed to the kitchen so I wouldn’t wake Liz upstairs. I took my coffee outside and stood in my backyard. It was still dark and cold, but the pink-tinged horizon hinted at the coming sun. I stood there, stared at the sky, and, as I’d done each day since I’d met Abby, I thought: Help, please.

In that moment, I was reminded of a story about a woman who had become stranded on top of an icy mountain. She frantically prayed that God would rescue her before she froze to death. She called to the heavens, “If you exist, God, send help!”

A little while later, a helicopter circled above and dropped a ladder.

“No,” the woman said. “Go away! I’m waiting for God!”

Then a park ranger walked by and asked, “Need some help, sister?”

“No! Go away! I’m waiting for God!”

The woman froze to death. She showed up at the gates of heaven—pissed—and demanded, “WHY, GOD? Why did you let me die?”

God said, “Honey. I sent a helicopter. I sent a park ranger. What the hell were you waiting for?”

I thought: I am freezing to death while Liz Freakin’ Gilbert, a friend I admire, trust, and love—who happens to also be a world-renowned spiritual teacher—is asleep upstairs. Maybe Liz is my park ranger.

When she woke up, Liz found me at the bottom of the stairs in my pajamas, teary, desperate, humbled.

I said, “I need you.”

She said, “Okay, Honeyhead.”

We sat down on my couch, and I spilled it all. I told her about how Abby and I had met, how we’d spent the past weeks falling deeper in love through emails, how our letters felt like blood transfusions. Each one I read and wrote pumped fresh life through my veins. I told her how ridiculous and impossible it all was. It was thrilling and terrifying to hear the words fall out of my mouth, like I was crossing some point of no return. I was expecting her to be shocked. She was not shocked. Her eyes were sparkly, lovingly amused, soft, smiling. She looked relieved somehow.

I said, “It will never work out.”

She said, “Maybe not. Maybe she’s just an Abby-shaped door inviting you to leave what’s not true enough anymore.”

I said, “It will ruin Craig.”

She said, “There is no such thing as one-way liberation, honey.”

I said, “Can you imagine the havoc this would wreak on my parents, on my friends, on my career?”

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 said, “I barely know her.”

She said, “But you do know yourself.”

I said, “What if I leave for her and this isn’t even real?”

She looked at me. She did not say anything.

We sat together in the quiet. She held my hand, lightly, lovingly.

I said, “I am real. What I feel and want and know. That’s all real.”

“Yes,” Liz said. “You are real.”

It is a blessing to know a free woman. Sometimes she will stop by and hold up a mirror for you. She will help you remember who you are.