Cleaning Stalls

In her life-changing book, Untamed, author Glennon Doyle begins a chapter with a quote from one of her previously-published books.  The attribution she writes under the quote is "Some horseshit I wrote in an earlier book."  

I know exactly what she means.  Some of you may be familiar with my only previously-published book, Circling Back Home: A Plainswoman's Journey.  I wrote that book over the course of ten years, fitting in writing between having and raising babies, working outside and inside my home, doing what I could to market and support a horse business I owned with my then-husband, Shawn.  And the writing reflects not only the length of time it took to compose the essays, but also the prolonged denial I lived in during that long period.  Even more so, the year-long editing process of the book, after it was finished and contracted, for me reflects the volatility of my marriage, and my own patterns of sublimating my truth in order to keep peace. 

When someone reads my book, or comments on it now, I want to say, "That's not me anymore.  Someone else wrote that book."  That isn't entirely true, but I often feel the horseshit I wrote in some of those essays completely covers up who I really was during that time.  More to the point, recognizing the horseshit has been a part of my growth into who I am now - in some ways very much the same person as that author, and in some ways not even recognizeable.

Anyone who has stalled a horse in a barn knows that cleaning those stalls involves a constant responsibility to shovel horseshit, scrape up horseshit, cart out horseshit.  In this blog, I'm cleaning stalls.

In some of these blog posts, I'll write directly about the essays I wrote in Circling, and tell the truth between the lines, behind the pages.  I'll go back and look at the ways I thought then, and hopefully remove a few piles of shit in order to gain more clarity now.  I'll tell you the parts of the essays I left out, was asked to leave out, edited out in the name of peacekeeping.  I've decided to be more of a peacemaker instead of a peacekeeper these days, and you can't make real peace until you wash away the shit and tell the bare truth. 

But the horseshit goes beyond my marriage.  It's part of a culture, part of our society.  I was raised in it, taught to value it, measured by my ability to put up with it.  Talking about those patterns is as much a part of the cleaning process as going back to look at my previous writing. 

It's an ongoing process, as cleaning always is.  Just when you think you have everything scraped and shoveled, more shit happens.  And sometimes, in really dirty barns, cleaning and scraping one layer only leads to more underneath, so you have to circle back and do more. 

I'm discovering a lot - about narcissism, about emotional abuse, about unhealthy attachment styles, and about how society - and particularly, ranching culture - measures the worth of women.  Most importantly, I'm seeing the horseshit in the demeaning ways we raise our daughters, and in the crippling lies we tell our sons.  It's all horseshit.  It's going to take a lot of cleaning.  I hope you'll join me, read these posts, comment on and challenge my ideas, and use your own voices to share yours.  Cleaning stalls is always a lot of work, but it goes more quickly when we use many hands to wield the shovels.