by Glennon Doyle Melton, 2016
Memoir by a woman who was bulimic starting at age 10, then an alcoholic. She finds out she is pregnant for the 2nd time and decides to have this baby. She marries her boyfriend, they try to make a go of it, having 3 children, moving to Naples, Florida. She becomes a writer. One day, she clicks on a file on his computer and finds porn. It is the last straw. She kicks him out. Then starts an 18-month journey of finding herself. Her husband, Craig, is really sorry and really wants to save their marriage and he starts counseling, too. After a long journey, they do and it’s good.
When she was 10, she discovered bulimia. She thought she was huge, ugly, a monster. She could hide and be in control by bingeing and purging. Then in high school and college, she became what the world told her to become–thin and sexy. She was in a sorority where they had to remind the girls to flush the toilets when they threw up because so many of the girls were bulemic. The fraternities would put up signs, “No Fat Chicks.” She became an alcoholic on top of her bulimia. Her boyfriend, Craig, seems like a nice guy. When she finds out she’s pregnant the first time, he goes with her to have an abortion, but then leaves her by herself after she insists she’s okay. When she finds out she’s pregnant the 2nd time, she goes to a church and walks barefoot on the carpet towards a statue of Mary and God finds her there – She feels unconditional love for the first time. There starts a very long journey of discovering her true self through the lies that she has believed for too long. Mainly that we are beautiful and loved just the way we are.
When she is in the midst of her alcoholism and starting to drink all day long, her parents ask her to come see them right now (she’s living on her own). They ask her questions and then, “Do you even love us?” She writes: “I do love them. I love them and I love my sister and I love my friends. I think I love my peole more than normal people love their people. My love is so overwhelming and terrifying and uncomfortable and complicated that I need to hide from it. Life and love simply ask too much of me. Everything hurts. I don’t know how people can just let it all hurt so much. I am just not up for all this hurting.” Her parents are desperate so they tell her to go see the priest at their Catholic church. She does. She finds unconditional love and comfort in the sanctuary, in the softness and love she feels coming from Mary. Then the priest orders her into his office where it’s cold and mean: “Just a moment ago, I was with Mary, who seemed to understand that sometimes love hurts so much that you have to cut it off with booze and food and abortions. … I wonder if he knows that all I do is apologize. That’s all I do. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry for being me. My whole life is an apology, and that hasn’t made a damn thing better. Mary had known. She had understood: A woman doesn’t need to be told, yet again that she’s bad. She needs to be told that she’s good. Mary didn’t ask me to repent. She asked me to rest.”
More on finding unconditional love and forgiveness: “The ice cream man is selling Popsicles for a dollar each, while a high school kid who has broken into the truck is passing out free Popsicles from the back. The ice cream man hasn’t a clue what’s going on behind him. I wonder if the priest knows that while he’s up here charging for forgiveness, Mary’s back there handing it out for free. He must not know, which is why he is insisting that God’s forgiveness has a price. I am pretending to believe this and promising to pay so I can get back to Mary, who is at the back of the truck hosting a free-for all.”
“I cry the whole way home. I do not cry because of my abortion or my parents or my alcoholism. I cry because I wanted to stay with Mary. As I cry, I realize that I am not acting sad. I am not acting. I am just sad. I feel sad, but real. Mary saw the good me trapped inside. Someone saw, and that makes me feel like the good me is real. I wish so much that the priest wasn’t in charge over there. I wish I’d lit a candle for myself. I wish I’d asked Mary to remember me.”
When she finds out she is pregnant again, she’s on the bathroom floor. “I become aware, there on the floor, that I will have this baby. I am hit with a wave of shame at this decision–more shame, even, than I had ending my last pregnancy. I look down and see my shaking hands, my dirty pants, the filthy bathroom floor. I am a drunk. I am a bulimic. I cannot love a child, because all I do is hurt the people I love. I cannot teach someone else how to live because I am only half alive. There is no one on earth, including me, who’d consider me worthy of motherhood And yet. As I stare at that little blue cross, it is impossible for me to deny that someone decided I was worthy. Someone, something, sent this invitation. So many things are true at once: I am empty, alone, addicted–and still, invited. I wonder who this persistent inviter is. I think of Mary and her baby and her approval of me. I think of how she invited me toward her just as I was. I think about how she passed out forgiveness and worthiness like grace was a free-for-all. And I get stuck on that phrase as it runs through my mind. Free-for-all. Maybe grace is free. Free for the taking. Maybe it’s even free for me. This free-for-all overwhelms me, fills me, covers me, convinces me. I decide to believe. Something in me says yes to the idea that there is a God and that this God is trying to speak to me, trying to love me, trying to invite me back to life. I decide to believe in a God who believes in a girl like me.
“The God I decide to believe in is the God of the bathroom floor. A God of scandalously low expectations. A God who smiles down at a drunk on the floor, wasted and afraid, and says, There you are. I’ve been waiting. Are you ready to make something beautiful with me?”
“I feel warmth and a perfect peace until the next truth surfaces as slowly and solidly as the little blue cross had: Having this baby will mean getting sober. Oh, my God. This is the difference between God and booze. God requires something of us. The booze numbs the pain but God insists on nothing short of healing. God deals only with truth and the truth will set you free, but it will hurt so badly first. Sobering up will be like walking toward my own crucifision. That’s what it will take, though. That’s what it will take to rise.”
Here she is talking about her need for meaningful conversation and her husband, Craig, (they are married now) is an utter failure at conversation:
“In all my close friendships, words are the bricks I use to build bridges. To know someone I need to hear her, and to feel known, I need to be heard by her. The process of knowing and loving another person happens for me through conversation. I reveal something to help my friend understand me, she responds in a way that assures me she values my revelation, and then she adds something to help e understand her. This back-and-forth is repeated again and again as we go deeper into each other’s hearts, minds, pasts, and dreams. Eventually, a friendship is built–a solid, sheltering structure that exists in the space between us–a space outside of ourselves that we can climb deep into. There is her, there is me, and then there is our friendship–this bridge we’ve built together.
“This process seems foreign to Craig. Instead of taking my words in, thinking them over, and building upon them, he seems to let them bounce off of him and fall away….”
One night, she writes a list of 25 things – real truths about herself – and posts it on Facebook. The first: “#1. I’m a recovering bulimic and alcoholic, but I still find myself missing bingeing and booze in the same twisted way a woman can miss someone who repeatedly beats her and leaves her for dead.”
The responses are phenomenal. Many friends pour out their hearts. She writes: “I marvel at the honesty and pain. Many messages are from people I’ve known for years, but I’m discovering that I never really knew them. We’ve spent our time together talking about everything but what matters. We’ve never brought to each other the heavy things we were meant to help each other carry. We’ve only introduced each other to our representatives, while our real selves tried to live life alone. We thought that was safer. We thought that this way our real selves wouldn’t get hurt. But as I read these messages, it becomes clear that we are all hurting anyway. And we think we are alone. At our cores, we are our tender selves peeking out at a world of shiny representatives, so shame has been layered on top of our pain. We’re suffocating underneath all the layers.”
They move their family to Naples, Florida, thinking they will have a fresh start at a new life. “The flaw in this thinking is the fact that wherever you go, there you are. We did not escape the mine. We prought our poison with us. There is no becoming, only continuing.”
After she find porn on her husband’s (and childrens!) computer, she kicks him out, and they start counseling, and she finds out he has been unfaithful starting three months after they were married. He is heartbroken and really wants to get back together. She goes a long while living without him, and then, she starts to realize he is truly serious about wanting to work on things and save their marriage. She thinks she might take him back. Then no, she’ll never take him back. Then: “The only way to survive is to make no sudden movements, to get comfortable with discomfort, and to find peace without answers….”
“There is only one strategy I can count on during this time, and it’s the same one that helped me get sober: Just Do the Next Right Thing, One Thing at a Time…The way I squint is to sit in the quiet for a few minutes every day, block out all the other well-meaning voices, and say, Give me today my daily bread. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but today, give me enough energy and wisdom and strength and peace to handle what comes. Help me ignore the big decisions, which will make themseves, and just help me focus on the small ones. And then, just for the day, I try to do what feels true, trusting that the next day I’ll be given a fresh batch of whatever tomorrow requires of me.”
She describes women’s reactions when she tells them about the breakup of her marriage: First, the “Shover:” “…she uses these tired platitudes like a broom to sweep my shattered life into a tidy pile she can sidestep. She needs me to move forward, to make progress, to skip through the hard parts and get to the happy ending…she puts her hand on my back and shoves me toward the door of hope. I don’t want to be shoved. I want to turn toward that door in my own time. But she can’t stand waiting, so she steps into the spotlight and becomes the hero of my story.”
Second is the “Comparer:” “If she is a Comparer, she nods while “listening,” as if my pain confirms something she already knows. When I finish she clucks her tongue, shakes her head, and responds with her own story. … She tells me how we are the same, she and I, because she had a bad breakup in college. Or how actually, I am more like her friend Jody, who went through something “just like this.””
Third type of person is the “Fixer:” “The Fixer is certain that my situation is a question and she knows the answer. All I need is her resources and wisdom and I’ll be able to fix everything. … There is a foolproof marriage formula and her security is dependent on believing that Craig and I simply haven’t followed the formula.”
Fourth is the “Reporter:” “The Reporter seems far too curious about the details of the shattering. There is a line between concerned and excited, and the Reporter steps over it. She asks inappropriate, probing questions and her eyes glisten as she waits for the answers She is not receiving my story, she is collecting it. I learn later that she passes on the breaking news almost immediately, usually with a worry or prayer disclaimer. “You guys, I’m so worried about Craig and Glennon. Did you hear what happened? Keep them in your prayers.” Our story is the only thing we have that is completely our own. A person who steals it and uses it to entertain is the worst kind of thief.”
Next are the “Victims:” “A few people write to say they’ve heard my news secondhand and they are hurt I haven’t told them personally. They thought we were closer than that. As if grieving people, upon hearing their news, begin making lists in descending order of how close they are to everyone they know so they can disseminate information in an orderly, fair fashion. As if etiquette exists inside grief. As if mothers dealing with shattered families are mostly concerned with how their friends feel about their pain. Upon receiving messages from these Victims, I learn what the phrase “my blood turned cold” means.”
Lastly, the “God Reps:” “They believe they know what God wants for me and they “feel led” by God to “share.””
She writes about the church they attended that she began to see in its true light as caring more about maintaining the institution than helping the hurting and the lost outside its walls. Then some lady accosts her and tells her about her Bible study discussing her and they want to warn her about the dangers of divorce. She writes: “My fury is for every woman who’s been told by the church that God values her marriage more than her soul, her safety, her freedom. My fury is for every woman who has been taught that God is man and man is God. My fury is for every woman who has been told that her bad marriage is the cross upon which she should hang herself.” She sees her little girl in line for the Sunday School class and writes: “…I realize I owe nothing to the institution of Christianity–not my health, not my dignity, not my silence, not my martyrdom. I do not answer to this place, I answer to God, to myself, and to the little girl in that line….She needs to learn from me that these four walls don’t contain God and that the people inside them don’t own God, that God loves her more than any institution God made for her…The still, small voice inside me arises and says, Get the hell out of here. I turn back toward the woman, and my eyes fall upon a picture above her of Mary and baby Jesus. I find my words. “Why are you so certain that God prefers the nuclear family? Judging by that picture above you, God chose an unwed teen girl to be God’s mom. Maybe God has broader ideas of what constitutes a good family than this church does…I left Craig because I know the difference between right and wrong, not because I don’t. God and I talk every night, every morning, and sometimes every twenty minutes. Don’t you think God is more likely to speak directly to me about me than to you about me? Good luck to you and good-bye. My girl and I are leaving.”…I never go back to that church, and I stop talking to anyone outside of my family about my marriage. I stop asking for advice and pretending I don’t know what to do. I do know what to do, just never more than one moment at a time…God speaks to folks directly and one at a time, so I just listen and follow directions. And when I need to work anything out, I turn to the blank page.”
In the midst of the pain, she takes a break and goes to a hotel by the beach and sits on the beach for 8 hours – just herself, her blanket, and her mug. She watches the ocean for hours, then the sunset, then the moon rise until she is the only one left. She realizes there is never a time we are without light. “We are never without light. There is no true disaster.”
She starts seeing a counselor. The counselor tells her the way our brains work – we make a hypothesis and then look for things to confirm it. She has made a hypothesis that her husband, Craig, is a fool and unworthy of her love. She challenges to, just for a week, change her hypothesis: “…Craig is a deeply flawed but good man who loves you and is working hard to keep you.” And to take three deep breaths when she feels anxious.
She writes about love: “But now I wonder, is love not a feeling but a place between two present people? A sacred place created when two people decide it’s safe enough to let their real selves surface and touch each other?”
Then, she starts taking yoga classes and learns about the warrior stances and writes: “Wait, what? I’ve been trying to find my balance by eliminating pressure from my life. The demands of work, friendship, and family all felt so heavy. But what if all this pressure isn’t what’s throwing me off, but what’s holding me steady? What if pressure is just love and love is what keeps me anchored? Complete shift. My body is teaching my mind.”
She comes to the realization that life is pain but the world sells us pain-relievers that don’t take away the pain, only mask it, and end up causing more pain. Both she and Craig were pushing those “easy buttons;” hers was booze and Craig’s was other women. “Finally, I was being quiet and still enough to hear the truth: You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it’s hard. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody. Don’t avoid the pain. You need it. It’s meant for you. Be still with it, let it come, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you’ll burn to get your work done on this earth.”
She finds a place that teaches her how to breathe deeply, not in her chest, but deep down. It is really hard for her at first but she stays on her mat and the teacher helps her find her breath in her belly. She finds God – “For the first time in my life, I feel the utter absence of fear. I am completely comfortable. I am at peace. And understand that I am in the middle of a reunion with God. … I have never been separated from this love, I have only convinced myself I was.” A pastor taking part in the training starts to cry and confesses that she has tried for 30 years to experience God and it wasn’t until today that it happened. She discovered she is forgiven, loved and beautiful, just as she is.
“Just as I am, she’d said. I’m loved just as I am. She sounded so surprised. Me, too. It strikes me that it’s always religious people who are most surprised by grace. Those hoops we become so exhausted from jumping through? We created them. … I think about how the people who seem closest to God are often not dressed up and sitting in pews, but dressed down and sitting in folding chairs in recovery meetings. They have refused to cover themselves up any longer. They are the ones who are no longer pretending. They are the ones who know. Pain led them to their rock bottom, and rock bottom is the beginning of any honest life, any spiritual journey. … God’s yes to us is free and final. Our yeses to each other are harder to come by.”
She wondered if she was worthy of love. God answered Yes through Mary and her parents and the Gulf of Mexico and the sky. “The truth is grace and grace makes no exceptions. I am not what I’ve done. And if I claim that as true, then I must also claim as true that Craig is not what he has done. … And that’s when I understand that grace is a beautiful, terrible thing. That the price of love is high indeed. That for me, the price is this: I must stop pretending that I am any different from Craig and those women. My unforgiveness is just another easy button. We aren’t different. We are exactly the same. We are individual pieces of a scattered puzzle and we are just a little lost down here. We are all desperate for reunion and we are trying to find it in all the wrong places. We use bodies and drugs and food to try to end our loneliness, because we don’t understand that we’re lonely down here because we are supposed to be lonely. Because we’re in pieces. To be human is to be incomplete and constantly yearning for reunion.”
She tells Craig that they are the same. “You thought sex was love and I thought booze and food were love and we got really lost. But that doesn’t mean we’re not loved. We are. You are. You’re forgiven and you always were and you’re loved–just as you are. It’s all going to be okay…You, me, the kids–we’re going to be fine. Nobody wants to punish us. We’re totally, completely safe. The end of whatever road we choose will be redemption–love will win either way.”
She learns that the word for woman in the Bible that is translated helper is really best translated as warrior. “God created woman as a Warrior.”
She gives a talk and tells about the time she was in the mental hospital: “Since it was a smaller world with gentler rules, I felt safe being vulnerable. People wore their scars on the ouside, so you knew where they stood. There were no representatives there. It was such a relief to stop acting…I tell them that twenty years later I still feel naked and overly vulnerable in the big world, so I seek out smaller worlds with kinder rules–places like recovery meetings, my blog community, marriage, friendship, faith, art, family–places where it’s safe to be fully human and fully known.”
At her new church, she becomes the Sunday School teacher. She’s talking with the pastor: “I tell her that we need a church that will help us practice loving ourselves without shame, loving others without agenda, and loving God without fear.”
She teaches them: “I teach them that the two most repeated phrases in the Bible are “Do Not Be Afraid” and “Remember.” Our human family is dismembered because we have been taught to fear each other. To have peace, we must allow love to bring us back to each other. To Re-member. I promise them that we are just scattered pieces of the same puzzle, so when we hurt each other, we hurt ourselves. I explain that my idea of heaven is the completion of the scattered puzzle–but I ask them not to wait for some other-worldly reunion. I ask them to bring heaven to earth here and now–to invite the Kingdom of God today–by treating every last one of God’s people like kin. …I teach them that they are loved by God-wildly, fiercely, gently, completely, without reservation.”