The Woman Who Numbed Everything Until She Couldn't

She learned early that she was too much.

Too sensitive. Too loud. Too needy. Too hungry. Too everything.

So she made herself small. She watched what good girls did and she did it better. She smiled when she didn't mean it. She said "I'm fine" when she wasn't. She held her breath to fit inside the tiny life the world handed her.

And when the feelings got too big anyway, she found ways to make them stop.

The Loop

The Sensitive Kid Who Became "Too Much"

Glennon was born in 1976 into a loving Catholic family in Virginia. But from the beginning, she noticed things other kids didn't seem to notice. She paid attention to who got to speak in church (only men). She watched people smile in uncomfortable clothes in ways that didn't feel real. She felt everything, all the time.

Her sensitivity wasn't the problem. The problem was what the world did with it.

That age keeps coming up. Ten. The moment of taming.

She describes it in Untamed: the world sat her down, told her to be quiet, and pointed toward her cages. These are the feelings you may express. This is the body you must strive for. This is the version of womanhood you will become. Make yourself fit. You'll be uncomfortable at first, but eventually you'll forget you're caged.

The specific rules she internalized: be quiet, be small, be pleasing, be accommodating, be nice, be humble, be perfect, be thin. In her family, being controlled and disciplined and pretty and tiny was extremely important.

Years later, she watched her own children and noticed something. When she asked a group of boys if they were hungry, they answered immediately without looking up. The girls said nothing. They took their eyes off the TV and started looking at each other's faces for consensus.

"A girl who at 10 years old can't tell you if she's hungry or not becomes a woman at 40 years old who is still asking her friends if they approve of the person she's dating."

Numbing as Survival

At eight years old, Glennon binged and purged for the first time. She would continue every single day for the next eighteen years.

Here's how she described it in her TED talk: "Every single time that I got anxious or worried or angry, I thought something was wrong with me. So I took that nervous energy to the kitchen and I stuffed it all down with food and then I panicked and I purged. And after all of that, I was laid out on the bathroom floor and I was so exhausted and so numb that I never had to go back and deal with whatever it was that made me uncomfortable in the first place."

The bulimia was what she later called "a way of being like a bad girl and a good girl at the same time." The binge was rebellion. Animal hunger. Rage. Need. The purge was the correction. The return to smallness.

Highly contained rebellion. Wild on the inside, tame on the outside.

At thirteen, she discovered alcohol. From that day until she got sober at twenty-six, not a day went by when she wasn't in a blackout. College brought full-blown alcoholism: waking up grabbing a beer, maxing out credit cards, chain-smoking, cocaine.

What was she running from? In Love Warrior, she named it: the hot loneliness.

The core belief underneath all of it: something was fundamentally wrong with her for feeling so much. The solution: stop feeling. Food, alcohol, and drugs were simply the technology of numbing.

The Bathroom Floor

The moment of reckoning came on a cold tile floor.

Glennon was twenty-five, shaking from terror and withdrawal and hangover, holding a positive pregnancy test. She'd met Craig Melton at a bar crawl in D.C. They'd slept together that first night and started drinking and drugging constantly. She'd gotten pregnant once before, had an abortion, kept using.

Now, on Mother's Day 2002, she was pregnant again.

"I just found myself one morning, just sitting on a bathroom floor, holding a positive pregnancy test and just shaking from terror. Something about that day, I think I was so sick and so broken and I had burned every bridge in my life. And I just think I really understood that moment as maybe a last chance to come back to life."

What changed? "For the first time, I wanted something more than I wanted to be numb."

She called her sister Amanda from that bathroom floor. Amanda came, picked her up, took her to her first recovery meeting. In that meeting, people told the truth about their feelings in a way Glennon had never witnessed. They were honest about anger, fear, shame. And when they shared, something happened: they became more free.

She married Craig and built what looked from the outside like a perfect life. Christian mommy blogger. Three kids. Disney-film perfection. But inside, she was scared, lonely, confused. The performance had shifted venues. It hadn't stopped.

The Marriage That Looked Right

The week before Glennon was supposed to promote her first book, Craig confessed: he'd been having serial one-night stands throughout their marriage.

Her response was to do what good girls do. Find the redemption narrative. She would stay. She would heal the marriage. She would write about it.

Love Warrior became an Oprah Book Club selection. A story of a woman learning to trust herself while rebuilding her marriage alongside a man willing to do the hard work. The book ends with Craig and Glennon on a beach, renewing their vows.

But by the time of publication, reality had already shifted.

"There She Is"

In fall 2016, Glennon was at a librarian convention in Chicago promoting Love Warrior. Abby Wambach, the retired soccer star, was there promoting her own memoir. What happened next, Glennon captured in Untamed:

A woman appeared where nothingness used to be. She took up the entire doorway, the entire room, the entire universe. Short hair, platinum on top, shaved on the sides. Long trench coat. Red scarf. Warm half smile. Cool, still confidence.

Glennon's whole being said: There she is.

She lost control of her body. She stood up, opened her arms wide. Then panicked and sat back down. Abby, noticing the awkward gesture, walked around the entire table to her. They spoke for ten minutes.

"I'd never even kissed a girl. I had no context for this experience at all."

A month after that meeting, they started corresponding. A month after that, Glennon sat Craig down and told him it was over. She was in love. She and Abby had never seen each other outside that room. They had spent ten minutes together and were about to dismantle their entire lives.

The decision wasn't really about Abby versus Craig.

The Cheetah

The central image of Untamed comes from a zoo visit where Glennon watched Tabitha, a captive cheetah trained alongside a Labrador named Minnie. Whatever Minnie did, Tabitha wanted to do. She chased a dirty pink bunny down a narrow, worn path, never catching it. She settled for a store-bought steak and the approval of sweaty strangers.

When a child asked if Tabitha missed the wild, the zookeeper said she'd been born in captivity. She didn't know any different.

But Glennon's daughter noticed something: when Tabitha turned away from her handlers, her posture changed. "Mommy. She turned wild again."

The metaphor crystallized everything: if a cheetah can be tamed to forget who she is, to forget her power and spend her entire life chasing dirty pink bunnies, then so can a woman.

The dirty pink bunnies are what women are trained to chase. Thinness. Approval. Perfection. Accommodation. The cage is the conditioning that begins at ten. The wild is what's waiting underneath.

"Tabitha. You are not crazy. You are a goddamn cheetah."

What She Knows Now

When Abby proposed and went to speak to Glennon's parents first, her mother's response validated the entire journey:

Tamed at ten. Untamed at forty-three.

The pattern Glennon ran for 35 years was this: numbing everything that made her feel "too much" while performing a version of womanhood so small she had to hold her breath to fit inside it. The breakthrough wasn't a single moment but a series of surrenders. To sobriety. To truth-telling. To desire. To self.

What she learned about feelings: "I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and that pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring."

What she believes now: "Being fully human is not about feeling happy. It's about feeling everything."

She keeps a note on her bathroom mirror: Feel It All.

The Plot Twist

She was never too much. She was a goddamn cheetah.

See your own version of this loop? Sometimes the cage we build to protect ourselves becomes the thing that keeps us small. Start mapping your patterns →