Imagine this:
You’re on the eve of publishing a brutally honest memoir about how you saved your marriage. Oprah loves it. Everyone predicts it will hit the top of the bestseller lists.
Then you’re at a conference … and you see someone across the room.
Recognition hits you in the gut.
This is the person you’ve been waiting your entire life for.
The ONE.
But you’re married.
Even more, you’ve built a reputation as a Christian mother who blogs about family life.
Do you throw away ALL that…
For love at first sight?
“I’ve never believed in or understood romantic love,” Glennon Doyle explained. “Love at first sight was always a complete joke to me. But when Abby walked into that room, I actually felt the words There she is. This was just an absolute recognizing of the person I was supposed to be with forever.” [1]
For Glennon, the choice was even harder…
Because the person she fell in love with was another woman.
Most of us would stop and think before doing anything foolish. Throw away a marriage and quite possibly an entire career simply because of a gut feeling? Not a chance.
But Glennon was a self-proclaimed truth-teller. As long as she was hiding something, she wasn’t being real. And she was done with that.
No more covering up her feelings.
No more pretending everything was okay when it wasn’t.
So she texted her husband with that message no one wants to hear: We need to talk.
Her husband Craig rushed home, worried out of his mind. Did she have cancer? Was his wife going to die?
Instead, Glennon told him the truth. She’d met a woman. She was leaving him.
The news floored him. “I thought we had been doing things the right way,” he told Elle magazine. “Both of us had been working on ourselves. We’d entered a phase that was supposed to be a new life for us. It was a shock. It felt like the end of the world.” [1]
But Craig was no ordinary man. He was a Love Warrior. And the motto of Love Warriors is:
“We can do hard things.”
Today, Glennon and her love-at-first-sight Abby (you may know her as women’s soccer star Abby Wambach) are married. They comfortably co-parent with Craig, making a happy party of 6. Craig and Abby even coach a girls’ soccer team together.
Happily ever after?
If you’re like me, this story provokes a mess of complicated feelings.
I admire Glennon’s honesty, her courage, and her work on her marriage and herself. Last December, I bought Love Warrior as a Christmas gift to myself. It’s one of those books I’ll read over and over again. (That’s my copy in the photo above.)
But Glennon’s values aren’t mine. Some of her choices rub me the wrong way. And that’s fine. I’m grown up enough to know that I don’t have to agree with everything my heroes do. 😉 No one is all light, with no shadows. Heroes can be human.
And Glennon is lovably human. With all her foibles, neuroses, missteps and mistakes, she shows us it’s okay to be real. As the saying goes, the cracks are where the light gets through.
And that’s why she qualifies as a #BrilliantBabe.
She shows us that nothing takes away our right to shine.
After coming out as gay, Glennon lost 4,500 followers on her blog. 6,600 more signed up.
She’s not apologizing. She’s human, and she followed her heart. She’s okay if some people judge her for it. She’s not telling anyone else to do what she did. She’s just sharing her journey.
I wonder what stories each one of us could share, if we weren’t afraid to speak.
What truths lie hidden in our hearts, where no one will ever judge them.
Too many of us are one person at work or in public, and another person when we’re all alone at night, soaking in the bathtub, trying to make sense of a difficult day.
It can feel as if no one really knows the real you.
It can feel as if no one wants to know the real you, because they wouldn’t like her. They like the socially safe you, that smiles and says all the right things.
That’s where Glennon inspires me.
She inspires me to believe I can be real. I can be the same person on the outside that I am on the inside. Nothing can dim my light.
What would you share with the world, if you weren’t afraid?
[1] http://www.elle.com/culture/a44853/glennon-doyle-melton-profile/
Stay Tuned for More #BrilliantBabe Profiles
Here at Your Brilliance, we believe the best way to figure out how bright you’re able to shine is to look up to other woman who are doing what you’ve always wanted to do.
The women you see featured in glossy magazines, climbing sheer rock cliffs and heading Fortune 500 businesses and crafting unique Etsy art from the comfort of their own homes, got there on guts and faith.
They didn’t know if they’d be able to succeed at their dream. But each and every one made the decision to take the first step. And the second. And the third.
We hope these profiles of brilliant women inspire you to reach for your dreams.
Let us know what you think!