🧠 How to Untame and Reinvent Your Creative Rebel
The Art of Truth
Who are you?
No… the real you.
Not the one who performed to be accepted.
The one you buried to belong.
That’s the version of herself Glennon Doyle untamed.
She went from a broken, alcoholic third-grade teacher with bulimia…
To an author selling millions of books and raising over $50 million through her charity, Together Rising.
( side note: And it all started with one viral blog post sharing her truth…)
In her 3 million copy-selling memoir, Untamed, she shares her reinvention story
from a Christian wife and mother
to queer activist + creative rebel.
How?
“I used to numb my feelings and hide them.
Now I feel my feelings and I share them.” — Glennon Doyle
It was numbing and hiding her feelings that got her incarcerated in a mental institution.
It was feeling her feelings and sharing them with creativity that liberated her.
This is the key lesson for highly sensitive, creative rebels:
We suffer when we deny our highly sensitive inner world.
Every feeling we hide becomes a barrier.
Every feeling we feel and express becomes a bridge
back to ourselves and others.
This is where the Wounded Healer meets the Authentic Creator archetype.
Because shame feeds on secrecy
But when we create from truth, others feel seen and heard
And in helping them…we finally feel seen.
And we all want to be truly seen, right?
It’s the difference between a life spent hiding from pain and shame…
And a creative life fueled by curiosity and generosity.
This isn’t just Glennon’s story.
It’s the story of the highly sensitive creative rebel, the empath, the deep feeler.
It’s my story.
Maybe it’s yours too?
As Rick Rubin said to André 3000:
“It’s the hypersensitivity that makes you a great artist. It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s harder to be in the world but that’s the gift.”
The gift is to see and feel what others can’t articulate.
Pain is a message.
Not a malfunction.
When expressed through your creativity, your content becomes a human connection.
It becomes your self-care.
Pain is the teacher of the Wounded Healer.
The fuel of the Authentic Creator.
It births wisdom.
It shapes your creative work.
It connects us, where others divide us.
Glennon’s 6 Steps to Untame Herself:
1. Be Still and Know
Truth requires silence.
But we hide from our truth, we numb it with:
Workaholism
Doomscrolling
Alcohol
Drugs
Food
Shopping
People pleasing
Stillness is where buried truth resurfaces.
2. Trust the Knowing
Glennon calls her intuition The Knowing.
We all have it.
We do know who we are meant to become.
We’re just afraid it’ll cost us the life we built to please others.
3. Feel It All
Pain is a compass.
If you’re unfulfilled, it’s not because you’re broken; it’s because you’re suppressing your truth.
Numbness blocks transformation.
4. Burn the Memo
Reject society’s scripts:
Stop playing the Good girl. Good boy. Quiet one.
Burn the rulebook. Write your own.
Life is short, live your truth, not their expectations.
5. We Can Do Hard Things
Change is scary, staying the same is terrifying
Courage isn’t fearlessness.
It’s showing up anyway.
Glennon found her voice by telling the truth.
And in helping others feel seen…
She finally saw her true self.
That’s the essence of a creative life:
Human connection through sharing human experiences, good and bad
6. Be a Goddamn Cheetah
In Untamed, Glennon sees a cheetah at the zoo chasing a fake pink bunny tied to a jeep to please the crowds of visitors
She realises that this is a metaphor for the human experience
We’ve been trained to chase illusions:
Approval
Control
Certainty
Safety
That’s the cage.
She broke free.
So can we…
Reinvention isn’t Rebellion.
It’s remembrance.
It’s remembering the weird, free, creative kid you once were —
Before they taught you to stay small and colour between the lines.
You’ve just been conditioned to hide away so as not to displease others
“Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else.” — Glennon Doyle
Every decision is binary:
Stay stuck in fear, numbing your pain or follow your truth with curiosity
Chase approval from others or approval from yourself.
To untame yourself is to stop disappointing yourself —
Even if it means disappointing everyone else.
Final Thought:
Most people don’t chase their dreams because they fear uncertainty.
But uncertainty is already here.
The world is changing fast.
Job disruption is inevitable.
We’re all going to reinvent ourselves to adapt.
So we might as well bet on our truth.
Bet on our creativity.
Bet on our curiosity.
Bet on our weird.
Because the real risk isn’t uncertainty—
It’s staying numb.
It’s hiding our truth instead of sharing it.
And in an AI world,
true human connection is the most valuable currency.
Be more weird, be more true.