Meeting my sheroes
*Originally published in my May/June 2026 Newsletter
Now that I know this kind of love exists, I can’t pretend it doesn’t anymore.
~ Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Through most of 2019, I had been reeling from the momentous choice to leave a 19-year relationship, which had been steadfast but stagnant for at least half that time. I had fallen precipitously in love with Curt, who I realized immediately was the first human I had enountered who showed me what it was like to feel utterly seen. From the outside, I knew that my departure from Marriage #1 looked impulsive, indecent, greedy - all the things a “good-girl-turned-good-wife” must avoid at all costs. But from the inside, my departure felt…freeing, hard-earned, necessary. It felt like an arrival into who I had been becoming all along.
A year later, still contending with intermittent twinges of guilt and shame, I read Untamed. Glennon details the moment she saw Abby Wambach for the first time and whispered to herself “There she is…” Glennon hastily exited her conventional marriage, upon which she had built her writing career as a redemptive, former addict, Christian mommy-blogger, to answer the call of her own long-denied truth made manifest in the form of a newly sober, world-renowned women’s soccer hero. For the second time in a year, I felt utterly, profoundly seen.
On April 5th of this year, I submitted my capstone paper that signified the completion of my Masters of Arts in Counselling Psychology. For this final project, I devoted months of academic research and clinical practice into the impact of the peri/menopausal transition on mental health.
On April 11th, I met Glennon and Abby at the In Bloom summit in Vancouver, hosted by Real Love Ready. I got to tell Glennon in person how her book influenced the most consummate shifts in my adult life, how grateful I was that she opened the gate and set all the “goddamn cheetahs” - including me - free, how the wisdom I gained from listening devotedly to their podcast galvanized my commitment to completing my Masters program. I got to tell Glennon that I quoted her words, “Now that I know this kind of love exists, I can’t pretend it doesn’t anymore”, in my wedding vows to my beloved, whose unwavering championship has enabled me to rise into my own potential, whose seeing me illuminated the path to see myself.
I know it is uncommon, and thus uncomfortable, to hear a woman express pride in her accomplishments, and so I am honoured to share that I earned a solid A on my capstone paper, and overall I completed the program with a 3.97 GPA, despite having delved into an entirely new field of study while relying on my own perimenopausal foggy brain. All the while, my mantra had been “We can do hard things.”
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.
~ Glennon Doyle, Untamed
