Untamed

 A book reader’s to-be-read list is often built from their soul. Sometimes, you will pull a book from the shelf to read that has been sitting for a long time, but as you get into it, you realize that your soul needs that book at that moment. For me, this year, that book was Untamed by Glennon Doyle.

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It is a memoir in essays that relays Doyle’s story and transition of becoming a woman who is comfortable in her skin and confident in who she is as a person, a wife, and a mother. She shares some of her most vulnerable moments and thoughts with readers and how she has lived, grown, and learned from them. She talks of marriage, addiction, parenting, mental health, career shifts, and more.

What’s beautiful about her writing is her willingness to be vulnerable. In that vulnerability, she doesn’t hold back, she lays it all out–the ugly and the pretty–and we see the growth in her life in her writing. I wish that I could allow myself to be that vulnerable in my writing; maybe one day.

So many of her essays hit me deep in my soul. Some days, I could only read one because her words resonated so much that all I could do was sit and be in my thoughts and feelings for a while. That this book had been on my shelf for about nine months before I started reading it and that I began reading it as I began the process of a career and life shift is no coincidence. Again, my soul was in deep need of this book at this moment.

Everyone should read this book, especially women, but everyone would be better. We all have things that hold us back that we have to work through, things that have tamed us. Using her stories and experience, Doyle shows the world that we can be untamed and retrained to break free from what has been holding us back from being our authentic selves.