The memos she decided to burn once she saw who really wrote them

After Glennon Doyle left her marriage and began building a new life with Abby Wambach, she went looking for every rule she'd absorbed about how to be a successful woman, wife, mother, and Christian. She started calling these rules memos, instructions she'd been issued so early and so consistently that she'd mistaken them for universal truth, rather than one particular culture's arbitrary expectations.

One memo she burned: that selflessness is the pinnacle of womanhood. She'd believed the most loving thing a woman could do was lose herself in service to everyone else, and had done exactly that until she was, in her words, exhausted, anxious, and lost. Another memo: that responsible motherhood means martyrdom, disappearing slowly in your children's name. She replaced it with a different aim, showing her children how to be fully alive, rather than showing them how to quietly die for someone else's sake. A third: that a successful marriage is one that lasts until death, even if one or both people are dying inside it, emotionally, the whole time.

Doyle's argument is that this process of naming and discarding memos isn't optional if a person actually wants a truer life, because destruction is inseparable from construction. You cannot build something honest on top of a belief you've never bothered to examine. She puts it starkly, we are alive only to the degree we're willing to be annihilated, meaning that becoming a truer version of yourself always costs you the version you already were.

This is the hard part of the idea. Doyle doesn't pretend that burning an old memo feels like liberation in the moment. She describes it as launching yourself into an abyss between the life you're living and the truer one that, until now, has only existed inside you. It's tempting to stay in the good enough life instead, since good enough is at least familiar. But Doyle argues that good enough is exactly what produces people who drink too much, or grow quietly bitter, or reach the end of a life wondering what they might have built if they'd been braver. The memos she rewrote for herself, she's careful to say, aren't universal replacements, they're just hers, written in sand, revisable the moment a truer idea for herself arrives.

Pick one rule you've been living by that you never actually chose, something about being a good parent, partner, or worker that just got handed to you. Ask honestly who that rule actually benefits, you, or just everyone else's comfort. Then write the truer version, the one that matches what you actually know now, even if nobody else has signed off on it. Make the change visible somehow, tell someone, alter one real behavior, so you can't quietly slip back into the old memo out of habit. That gap is not a mistake. It's where the truer life gets built.