GLENNON DOYLE
Champion of women's empowerment and emotional honesty
Creating community through the power of truth.
Image via: Dahlia4519, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
“Life is freaking hard. We are all doing hard things every day – we love and lose; we forge and end friendships; battle addiction, illness, and loneliness; care for children and parents; struggle in our jobs, our marriages, our divorces; we try to set and hold boundaries – and we fight for equality, purpose, joy, and peace right in the midst of all the hard.”
— We Can Do Hard Things podcast
Glennon Doyle is an American writer, broadcaster and activist who has gone through a series of very public transformations, from being a blogger on the topic of motherhood to a queer host of the multiple award-winning podcast series “We Can Do Hard Things” which was launched in May 2021, with over 260 episodes. It is listened to by over 500,000 people per month.
“If our goal is to be tolerant of people who are different than we are, then we really are aiming quite low. Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated.”
Glennon is known for her powerfully honest best-selling books Carry On, Warrior; Love Warrior, and Untamed. Earlier, she also created the online community Momastery, about her life as a progressive Christian raising three children, and is the founder and president of Together Rising, an all-women-led nonprofit organization supporting women, families, and children in crisis.
“Here's my hunch: nobody's secure, and nobody feels like she completely belongs. Those insecurities are just job hazards of being human. But some people dance anyway, and those people have more fun.”
— Carry On Warrior
Her own struggles with bulimia, addiction and anorexia have fueled honest introspection and searching conversations with the wide range of guests on the podcasts; writers, artists, healers and activists from Jane Fonda to Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey.
Key to her ability to touch audiences is Glennon’s openness and vulnerability as she takes her audience with her on the journey to self-love, self-acceptance, and empowerment. It’s because of the messiness she so openly shares that readers or listeners can connect and feel understood on their own messy journeys. Her life has been dramatic: for instance, on the eve of the publication of her first book, Carry On Warrior, she discovered her husband’s infidelity, then, while on tour with her second book, Love Warrior, about rebuilding her marriage, she fell full-on in love with the woman who is now her wife, US soccer legend Abby Wambach.
“On ‘We Can Do Hard Things,’ my wife Abby Wambach, my sister Amanda Doyle, and I do the only thing that has ever made life easier: We talk honestly about the hard. We laugh and cry and help each other carry the hard so we can all live a little bit lighter and braver, free-er, less alone.”
— Glennon Doyle
Glennon is passionate about encouraging women to open themselves to both love and pain, to defy the patriarchy, stand against white supremacy, and honor their intuition.
“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 …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.”
In Untamed, she tells the story of a visit to the zoo, when she and her family see a tame cheetah called Tabitha. She imagines what the animal would tell her if she could talk: “‘I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this.’... She’d sigh and say, ‘I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t even exist.’ I’d say: Tabitha. You are not crazy. You are a goddam cheetah.”
Quotes from Glennon Doyle
“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 me 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.”
— Love Warrior
“Kind people are brave people. Brave is not something you should wait to feel. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.”
— Carry on Warrior
