Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now.

-Glennon Doyle

I have come back to Glennon’s book Untamed many times since first devouring it at the beginning of our quarantine here. Her writing has a way of getting to the bones of things. She writes through her story, very different than writing about her story and in turn, gifts us a remembering that “to be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution.”

Here is the full passage from the Keys section titled “Feel”:

I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution. 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. I will continue to become only if I stop extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.

Don’t avoid it. You need to evolve, to become. And you are here to become [again and again forever.]

I love this. I love the idea that there is no arrival. No final destination I can potentially check off a to do list. No set structure to fall into, to keep my self organized and on track. It feels like possibility, like freedom, like power and quite honestly like a deep full breath of relief.

To “become truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever” is the ride. It is the opportunity we hold as humans. It’s a beautiful, whole-hearted ride if and only IF I can be brave enough to sit with myself in the fire… in the raw emotions, the uncertainty, the doubt, the desperate desire to cling and grab and control this rolling ball of potential that’s between me and whatever is to be next.

I commit to “stop extinguishing myself a million times a day.” I will sit in my fires, let them burn and lean into this perpetual state of revolution because

“Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now.”

Be in your now. Evolve your truth. Breathe. It’s all right here.

-Kim