What a captive cheetah chasing a stuffed rabbit revealed about her own life

Two summers ago, Glennon Doyle took her daughters to a zoo and found a spot along a roped-off track for something called the Cheetah Run. A zookeeper explained that a cheetah named Tabitha had been raised alongside a Labrador retriever named Minnie, so that Tabitha would learn how to behave by copying her. Minnie chased a stuffed pink bunny tied to the back of a jeep. Then the cage opened, and Tabitha tore down the same track after the same bunny, crossed the line, and was rewarded with a steak she ate in the dirt while a crowd clapped.

Doyle didn't clap. She felt sick. Here was a wild animal running the exact same narrow path every single day, never looking left or right, never catching the bunny, settling for a store-bought steak and the mild approval of strangers. When a child in the crowd asked whether Tabitha missed the wild, the zookeeper said no, Tabitha was born in captivity, so she'd never known anything else, and this was actually a safer life for her.

But afterward, in a small fenced field away from the crowd, Doyle's older daughter noticed something: Tabitha's posture had changed. Her head lifted. She began pacing the fence line, staring at something beyond it, looking regal, and a little frightening. She looked, in other words, like she remembered.

That image became the spine of Doyle's argument in Untamed. Most of us are Tabitha. We were tamed early, taught which feelings we're allowed to have, what a good body looks like, who we're permitted to love, what kind of life we're supposed to want, and most of us adjust so thoroughly that we forget we were ever anything else. The restless, dissatisfied feeling so many people carry isn't a sign that something is wrong with them. It's evidence that the wild animal is still in there, still remembering, still pacing the fence.

Doyle's core claim is blunt: you are not crazy, broken, or too much. You were simply caged early, and cages can be found and left.

Start by picking just one rule you've been living by without ever really choosing it, something about how you're supposed to look, feel, or behave that got handed to you early. Trace it back: who taught you this, and when? Then check it against your own body, because your body has been keeping score longer than your mind has been willing to admit; notice whether that rule feels like relief or like holding your breath. Once you can name it clearly, say the true sentence out loud to someone you trust, the thing you actually want or feel underneath the training. Noticing the cage is already the beginning of leaving it.