I blogged yesterday that I am going to write some posts inspired by Glennon Doyle’s new memoir Untamed so by god, that is what I am going to do.

My inner Resistance is putting up a hell of a fight. I love the idea of Resistance. Steven Pressfield first introduced me to the concept (and I think he coined the term as well). I have read a lot of Pressfield’s books, but I am 90% certain it’s in The War of Art. If you are a creative, you should read something by Pressfield. ANYWAY, Resistance is the force that keeps you from doing the creative work you are meant to do. Sometimes it manifests as the voice in your head. Sometimes it manifests as physical illness. Or sometimes it manifests as a series of ridiculous events that consume your time and keep your butt away from the desk, easel or wherever it is that you create.

Resistance is a bitch.

And she has been putting up a helluva fight ever since I decided yesterday that I should start blogging about the books that inspire me. First, she tempted me with blog post ideas that are less personal. Blog about your favorite pandemic hobbies! That would help someone. Or, ooh, I know! Blog about the health benefits of cardio. I added the ideas to my list of possible future posts, and then told my Resistance that I was still going to blog about Untamed.

Then my Resistance got personal.

You are not ready, she said. This is too vulnerable and uncomfortable. You have a lot of ideas and you need to think them through. Write about them in your journal, if you must, but don’t put them on your blog. Then you are committed to what you have blogged and if you change your mind-

Then I might as well never write another word, because as Doyle writes so beautifully:

I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths. My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself. The goal is to surrender, constantly, who I just was in order to become who this next moment calls me to be.

Untamed, pg. 77.

This. Wow. All my adult life, I have clung to the idea that I would make one more change and that change would be The Getting Together Of All My Shit and then I’d be done with self-transformation. I’d have everything figured out, end movie, play the credits, nothing more to see here.

I went to law school convinced I had figured out my career and life.

But being a lawyer made me miserable. I could feel my soul screaming for fresh air. So I left the law — sort of, that’s a long story — and started a novel. I was making some money working part-time as a lawyer from home while having plenty of time to write things that lit me up inside. I felt better than I had in years. Surely I had figured everything out.

But then I had a baby and fell into the darkness of postpartum depression. That experience transformed me. I emerged from the darkness less anxious, less apologetic, more me. I published a memoir about it, so surely that meant it was time to roll the credits on the story of my life. At last, I could get down to the business of Happily Ever After and not be so preoccupied with personal transformation.

Except now I am 41, and I realize that Happily Ever After is not what I want. What I want is the work of personal transformation until the day I draw my final breath. Glennon Doyle says it perfectly:

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.

Untamed, pg. 51

I am meant to write about my personal journey and transformation. And that means things I write today may not hold true for me tomorrow. Hell, writing this post might lead to the realization that I am meant to not write about my personal journey and transformation.

This makes me uncomfortable, but hey, I was also uncomfortable the first time I told a group of women that I had postpartum depression. Those first months of my recovery from PPD, every time I told someone that I had a mental illness, I felt as if I was confessing some great crime. But the discomfort eventually faded, and now telling someone that I had PPD feels as comfortable as wearing my favorite sweatshirt. Maybe this sort of writing will eventually become comfortable as well.

Here is something I have learned: the more Resistance fights something I want to do, the more important it is that I roll up my sleeves and get to work.

I am so grateful that Glennon Doyle had the courage to write not one, not two but three memoirs. I have only read her second and third books, but wow, the difference between the two is so great, they could have been written by two different people.

And that is incredible. Doyle wrote a wildly successful memoir and it would have been so easy for her to stay stagnant, and keep writing the same thing, rather than disappoint her followers. I confess, I have sometimes felt paralyzed by the work I have done as an advocate for maternal mental health. My spirituality has been exploding, but I thought: how can I write about spirituality if it’s not helpful for moms with PPD? So instead of writing about my spirituality, and current adventures, I ended my PPD podcast and blogged very, very rarely.

Fortunately, the crisis of sheltering-at-home during the Covid-19 pandemic pushed me to a point where I could no longing ignore my call to blog.

And now, with her memoir Untamed, Glennon Doyle has shown me how to be a writer in a flow of “perpetual becoming.” I can write what I feel called to write today, and not worry about how if it fits perfectly with Future Courtney. All this work is necessary to keep becoming my truest, most beautiful self.