Do you ever find those books that make you cry at every page–not with a depressing story line like a Nicholas Sparks novel, but cry with truth? You feel so emotional because it’s the words you’ve never read before but somehow deeply, deeply know. For me, one of those books was Untamed by Glennon Doyle. To be honest, I’m a sucker for memoirs because it’s my dream to write my own some day, but Untamed didn’t stand out to me as anything special (I was used to celebrity memoirs and just finished Michelle Obama’s…who is Glennon Doyle anyway?). But after finishing the first chapter, I knew it was going to be a messy book–you know the kind: where you don’t read without a highlighter in hand, underline paragraphs, and dog-ear until most pages of the book are dog eared and it loses the purpose of dog-earing. I recommend this book to anyone–namely parents, women, people who living in cages without even realizing it. Below are just some of the quotes from the book that I double underlined and highlighted, that made me feel seen and will maybe make you feel seen too.

Quotes That Changed My Life

On being tamed “Age ten is when we learn how to be good girls and real boys. Ten is when children begin to hide who they are in order to become what the world expects them to be…Ten is when the world sat me down, told me to be quiet, and pointed toward my cages.”
On empathy and feeling “The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It’s not brave to refuse to pay attention to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine.”
On hard feelings “It’s OK to feel all the stuff you’re feeling. You’re just becoming human again. You’re not doing life wrong; you’re doing it right. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones…I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and that pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere–but being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything.”
On pain “I can use pain to become. Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold…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.”
On being selfless “Selfless women make for an efficient society, but not a true, beautiful, or just one. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely of 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.”
On bravery “We tell our children that brave means feeling afraid and doing it anyway, but is this the definition we want them to carry as they grow older? No. I do not want my children to become people who abandon themselves to please the crowd. Brave does not mean feeling afraid and doing it anyway. Brave means living from the inside out; in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud.”
On disappointing others “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.”
On parenting “What if parenting became less about telling our children who they should be and more about asking them again and again forever who they already are? It’s not: I love you no matter which of my expectations you meet or don’t meet. It’s": My only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.”
On romantic love “I have decided that I want to be in love with a person, not a feeling. I want to be found in love, not lost in it. I’d rather exist than disappear.”