We Can Do Hard Things is a guidebook for navigating life’s hardest
roads – love, grief, parenting, aging, and everything in between.
Glennon Doyle, alongside her sister Amanda and wife Abby, turned
to honest conversations during a year of crisis, asking 118 remarkable
people to share hard-won wisdom. What they found is simple but
profound: no matter what we’re going through, someone else has
been there too. Their insights – funny, raw, and deeply human – are
gathered here as a reminder that while life is hard, we’re never truly
alone. This is the book to reach for when you need light on a dark path.
Why Am I Like This?
I am a great mystery to me.
Understanding why I do the things I do is important to me because the things I do affect the people I love. So I don’t want to live on autopilot. I want to choose carefully which patterns to pass on. I want to break cycles. I want to live with freedom and agency and intentionality. This means I have to look under my own hood and tinker with and examine my programming.
Responsible adulthood is being both the engine and the mechanic.
I’m the mystery and the detective.
Tricky.
GLENNON
As soon as we’re born, we enter into cultural and familial systems that say:
You cannot trust your appetite. You cannot trust your desire. You cannot trust yourself. Since you cannot trust yourself, here’s a list of rules for you to follow instead.
So we lost vital parts of ourselves. We had to lose those parts of ourselves to survive in families, institutions, and societies that denied us access to our history, power, and innate wisdom.
We’ve been losing and losing and losing parts of ourselves for our entire lives. So of course we are not fully present now. Of course we are not able to be present in an authentic, whole way. The very path that we’ve taken to survive leaves us here, fractured.
AMANDA
I am aware now, more than ever, of the boxes I’ve placed myself into.
The ones that were introduced to me by my family and by my culture. I consciously stepped into them and closed the lid in order to stay safe, in order to be liked, in order to fi t in. Now I’m pushing the boundaries I’ve set for myself so that I can settle into a new acceptance of who I am. It’s almost like I’m stuck in a flowerpot and I’m expanding while it’s breaking. It’s breaking. But in order to do that, in order to break out of my molds, I need to understand what they are and why they were made in the first place.
ALEX HEDISON
I’m like this because I carry the patterns of my family of origin.
The moment we’re born, we look up at our caretakers. We notice— before we even have language— what makes them smile and come close, what makes them frown and turn away. We notice— and we keep noticing— and then we adapt to survive. We magnify the parts of ourselves that earn us love and protection, and we hide what doesn’t. We know instinctively that we need our caretakers to survive— so we become what we believe they want us to be.
And then we grow up and one day we look in the mirror and wonder: Why am I still hiding so much of myself? Have I ever even met my real self?
GLENNON
I became an athlete to get my mother’s love.
All I really wanted was love, full acceptance, and attention from my mom. But because I had this deep knowing about my gayness, I felt like my mom would never accept this part of me. So I developed an athlete persona to make up for my gayness. It worked! I was celebrated. But that kind of affirmation was something I could never really latch on to. I’d come home from soccer and my family would be so amazed at all my goals. But I always felt like: What if I stop scoring goals? Will they be able to love what’s left?
ABBY
Extracted from We Can Do Hard Things, out now.
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