Feeling restless about your life might be a signal worth trusting

Picture writing back to three different women, each convinced her life has gone badly wrong, and asking every one of them the exact same question. Glennon Doyle actually did this. A lawyer named Clare wrote that she felt like she was wasting her life in a fog of nightly wine. A woman named Sasha wrote that she was exhausted from hustling for a cold husband's love, just as her mother had hustled for her father's. A former kindergarten teacher named Danielle wrote from her dying son's hospital bedside, watching the same disease that had already killed her first child. Each asked some version of: what should I do?

Doyle didn't answer any of them with advice. She asked each one instead: what is the truest, most beautiful story you can imagine about this part of your life?

That question is the center of what Doyle calls daring to imagine. Her argument is that the discontented, restless feeling so many people try to talk themselves out of, the sense that a marriage, a job, or a life should be more beautiful than it is, isn't ingratitude. It's the imagination refusing to give up. She calls this the gap between the seen order of things, meaning the world exactly as it currently operates, and the unseen order, meaning the truer, more beautiful version of it that a person can still sense pressing underneath. She points to Martin Luther King Jr.'s line about having a dream and Gloria Steinem's line that dreaming is a form of planning as evidence that big change tends to start as somebody's imagined, not-yet-real picture.

Clare eventually wrote a story about a woman who stopped abandoning herself and started therapy. Sasha wrote hers and left it on her husband's pillow; three tense weeks later, he suggested a marriage retreat. Danielle wrote back that she couldn't imagine an easier story, or a happier one, but she couldn't imagine a truer or more beautiful one than the heartbreaking one she was actually living with her sons. Doyle's point isn't that imagination guarantees an easy outcome. It's that naming the truest, most beautiful version of a situation, not the compliant one, not the conventionally right one, gives a person something to build toward instead of just something to escape.

Start by simply admitting, out loud if you can manage it, the specific thing about your life that feels not-right, even if it seems ungrateful to say. Then swap the question you've been asking. Instead of what should I do, try what is the truest, most beautiful version of this I can picture. Write the answer down, even if it's only a paragraph, because imagination tends to need a page before it can become a life. Then take the risk of showing that unfinished, unguaranteed vision to one person you trust. But naming the truest, most beautiful version of things is how you stop merely escaping a life and start building one.