If you’re not familiar with Glennon Doyle Melton, allow me to introduce you. She calls herself a Recovering Everything. And I’ll let her take it from here in her own words:
For twenty years, I was lost to bulimia and alcoholism and bad love and drugs. I suffered. My family suffered. I had a relatively magical childhood, which added an extra layer of guilt to my pain and confusion. {Glennon, why are you all jacked up when you have no excuse to be all jacked up?} My best guess is that I was born with an extra dose of sensitivity to love and pain. I didn’t want to walk through the battlefield of life naked. So when I was ten years old, I made up my own little world called addiction and I hid there for decades. I felt safe. No one could touch me.
On Mother’s Day 2002, unwed and addicted, I found myself holding a positive pregnancy test. For the first time in my life – I wanted something more than I wanted to be numb. I decided to become a mother and vowed to never again have another drink, cigarette, drug, unhealthy relationship, or food binge. I found myself marrying my son’s father. Fourteen years later, I’m the mother to three kids, a couple of mutts, and two of the most majestic banyan trees you’ve ever seen. I’m a grateful member of this community of truth tellers, a Sunday School teacher, a #1 New York Times bestselling author, speaker, activist, and the founder and president of Together Rising.
Underneath and on top of all that, I’m a Recovering Everything…the title I’m prouder of than any other. Every morning, I open my eyes and immediately understand that I am still that girl on the bathroom floor, holding that pregnancy test like a terrifying invitation, trying to decide whether to stay down on the cold floor or get up and show up for my life. Most days I decide to show up, because I was right when I was little. Life is brutal. But it’s also beautiful. Brutiful, I call it. Life’s brutal and beautiful are woven together so tightly that they can’t be separated. Reject the brutal, reject the beauty. So now I embrace both, and I live well and hard and real.*
This is what I’m talking about, folks! This is what UnbridledACTS is all about, and why we post the Journal…week after week, month after month, year after year. My thanks to Glennon for being real and raw about her “jacked-up-turned-brutiful life.” I, for one, would like to be more like her.
Anybody with me?
* Glennon is the founder of Momastery, an online community reaching millions of people each week, and creator/president of NPO, Together Rising, that has raised seven million dollars for vulnerable women and children around the world through online Love Flash Mobs.