Feeling caged but staying sane-ish — and wild-ish

If you’re like me these days, you are feeling a little caged, but doing everything in your power to remain

• informed & safe,
• kind & gentle with yourself & others,
• open to the present moment (but not overwhelmed by it),
• reasonably healthy,
• reasonably creative, and
• reasonably sane.

And also like me, you’re probably succeeding at many moments and failing miserably at others. Halfway through the afternoon, you catch yourself staring moodily out the window. After half an hour, you sigh, do some stretches, and go wash your hands again. Then you get back to sewing masks, digging in the garden, writing fiction, baking bread, or whatever else makes you feel useful and happy.

As a friend put it recently, we are managing to stay sane-ish. And in my view, that’s pretty darned good.

For me, one part of the project of staying sane-ish is journaling. And one aspect of successful journaling is reading self-help books. Yes, I said self-help books. I love reading subtle, elegant literature. I love reading powerful, half-crazy literature. And I love reading self-help books. They rarely offer moving prose, but they often remind me of nuggets of hard-won wisdom or present me with fresh angles on my struggles. Sometimes they inspire me. Sometimes they pose uncomfortable questions.

This week I’m reading – and wrestling with – Glenna Doyle’s new book, Untamed. Like her earlier books, this one occupies the borderland between memoir and self-help: she offers up her experiences and insights in short chapters that feel honest, real, and raw. And Doyle definitely has good material: she binged and purged her way through high school, drank her way through college, and only got sober the day a pregnancy stick showed her a little blue yes. As she became sober, she became a good mom, a good wife, a Christian, a passionate writer, and an engaged activist for women and children. In Carry On, Warrior, she told us the story of her recovery without covering up how hard and complicated it had been. Then in Love Warrior, she showed us how she and her husband navigated their way through a rough patch in their marriage. In the process, Doyle evolved a new understanding of marriage: one less driven by Christian or social orthodoxies and more grounded in mutual openness. Now everything has gotten up-ended again: she’s fallen in love with a woman.

The central image of Untamed comes from a visit to the zoo. Glenna, her new wife, and her daughter go to watch a Cheetah Run. Tabitha, a sleek, gorgeous cheetah, has been raised with a friendly Lab. Imitating her friend, Tabitha chases a pink bunny tied to the back of a jeep. The crowd watches her race across the enclosure in a display of grace and power, chasing that dirty pink bunny.

Once fed and back in her cage, though, Tabitha prowls the perimeter of the fence, and her head lifts. She regains her wild, regal bearing. She looks dangerous again. In Doyle’s view, most of us – but especially girls and women – have been trained since birth to chase the pink bunny. We’ve forgotten how alive we’re supposed to be. Doyle wants us to find our inner cheetah.

Part of me flinches from that kind of metaphor, just as it did when I read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, in 1992. Such metaphors seem to me melodramatic and over-the-top, a romanticized embrace of nature and the wild by women who probably don’t even camp outdoors overnight. In Doyle’s story, my heart is with the happy Lab who actually enjoys chasing that pink bunny, wags its tail for the kids at the zoo, and curls up contentedly with the cheetah. If I had to choose any wild animal to be, I wouldn’t choose a cheetah. I’d choose to be an elephant. (Long-lived, solid, connected to its herd, mostly calm and peaceful. You get the idea.)

                                                                                                                           

On the other hand.

On the other hand, there’s also a part of me that knows exactly what Doyle is getting at. I spent years fighting my way out of the gender stereotypes I was raised in. I was lucky to be raised by a mom who earned her BA while I was in middle school and her master’s while I was in high school. (In the early sixties, most of my friends’ moms stayed at home.)

But even with an ambitious professional mom (and a dad who encouraged her), I struggled with how “girly” I was willing to be. I liked climbing trees, reading books, and riding my bike down steep slopes; I also liked ballroom dance and clumsy flirtations with boys. Luckily, I was tracked into Algebra I in eighth grade, and those of us in that class bonded as a pack of awkward super-nerds. The friendships I made that year allowed me to be myself, mostly.

That self-definition carried me through to the end of college. Then other problems with gender roles started to kick in. The Episcopal Church wasn’t ready for women priests. The Theology BA at Oxford was hostile to female students. I married one of my professors, partly because he admired my academic successes. I worked at a liberal-arts college that hired female junior professors and expected them to publish but didn’t want to hear anything feminist they had to say. Worst of all, I lacked the savvy that would have allowed me to navigate the institutions with some skill — or the “wildness” to go outside the institutions altogether.

I wasn’t so much tamed as trained — like a performing seal. I worked for rewards and approval. (Also, like seals, for the fun of it.) I could often win the rewards and the approval, but the price was high: the training that let me jump through hoops also taught me to ignore my gut instincts. Because I never honed my intuitions, I could never trust them. I got what I’d though I’d wanted — and became very, very unhappy. Finally I encountered a brilliant therapist. She helped set me on a long journey to being more centered in myself and more accepting of the oddities that make me me.

Two crucial parts of that journey have been journaling and reading self-books — including ones about finding one’s “inner wild.” So, skeptical though I remain about the central metaphor of Glennon Doyle’s title, I will also note that the book is is not only energetic and thought-provoking but also much more nuanced and self-aware than its title suggests.

So I won’t be seeking inside myself for some inner cheetah. It isn’t there. Instead, I’ll be found on a trail through the woods, quietly cultivating my inner elephant: hanging out with my herd, trekking across the wide-open grasslands, splashing around in cool water. And, every once in a while, trumpeting at the top of my voice, just for the fun of it.