Untamed

Part 2 begins with an epigraph featuring the poem “Dropping Keys” by the fourteenth century Persian lyric poet Hafiz. The poem describes how a small woman builds cages for those around her while a wise woman drops keys “for the / Beautiful / Rowdy / Prisoners” (43).

Doyle recounts getting sober at the age of twenty-six after becoming pregnant with her son. She celebrates the significance of this time when she writes, “Sobriety was the field in which I began to remember my wild” (45). She recalls how she “began building the kind of life a woman is supposed to build” as “a good wife, mother, daughter, Christian, citizen, writer, woman” (45). Despite these positive changes, Doyle remembers feeling a restlessness that “felt powerful enough to destroy every bit of the lovely life I’d built” (45). Doyle retreats inside herself and conceals these strong feelings until the she can no longer hide them. This moment of change comes when she meets Abby.

Upon meeting Abby, Doyle is able to see herself more clearly and feels reconnected to her untamed child self who “was wild until I was tamed by shame” (46). She lists the ways in which she has been shamed into shrinking herself to fit the restrictive labels thrust upon young women. Doyle proclaims that she “finally unlocked and unleashed her,” her true, untamed self by building a life of her own and learning to trust her emotions, intuition, imagination, and courage (47). She calls these “the keys to freedom” and asks the reader and herself directly whether we will “be brave enough set ourselves free” (47).

Doyle organizes the remainder of Part 2 into the four keys to freedom. She starts with “Key One: Feel It All” where she details her sixth day of sobriety (49). She explains the connections she forged in the recovery meetings she attended as “they were the first people I trusted with all of me, because they were the first people I ever heard tell the whole truth” (49). After a brief encounter with another attendee who tells her that “feelings are for feeling,” Doyle slowly begins to learn how to feel again. She learns to embrace all feelings, no matter how uncomfortable or painful. She describes how, over her eighteen years of sobriety, she has learned that “I can feel everything and survive” and “I can use pain to become” (51). She comments on how consumer culture distracts and numbs people from facing their pains, while spiritual and religious leaders reiterate the necessity of pain to evolve and grow as humans. Doyle urges her readers to embrace pain to make way for evolution and becoming. 

Doyle transitions to “Key Two: Be Still and Know” and returns to her moments of indecision over whether to leave her unhappy marriage. Doyle recollects her attempts to decide whether to dissolve her marriage by consulting the Internet. Bombarded with conflicting responses, Doyle realizes the artificiality of society’s expectations for women and commits to making her decision on her own “as a free woman, from my soul, not my training” (56). Unsure of her next steps, Doyle receives a card from a friend that features the message to “Be Still and Know” (56). Inspired by this message, she spends ten minutes each day sitting in her closet and breathing. Soon, Doyle stretches out each moment of stillness and moves deeper into self-contemplation and senses what she calls “a Knowing” (58). Doyle expresses that, “The Knowing feels like warm liquid gold filling my veins and solidifying just enough to make me feel steady, certain” (58). Soon, Doyle begins implementing this connection to her Knowing outside of the safety of her closet. She wonders what to call the Knowing and acknowledges how the Knowing extends beyond the label of God. She emphasizes the importance of experiencing the Knowing, no matter the label. Doyle ends this section by breaking down how to access the Knowing in short, actionable steps that will be repeated for the rest of one’s life.

Doyle begins her exploration of “Key Three: Dare to Imagine” by returning to the moment she learned she was pregnant at twenty-six. Despite acknowledging her undeniable struggles with bulimia and alcoholism, Doyle imagines herself “as a sober, thriving mother” (63). Doyle feels this same sense of imagination and clarity when she first sees Abby fourteen years later. She feels a strong pull towards the truth that, “There is a life meant for you that is truer than the one you’re living. But in order to have it, you will have to forge it yourself” (64). Doyle discusses the evolution of her faith away from Christianity and towards “the warm liquid gold swelling and pressing inside me” (64). She further elaborates on her views of faith by defining the seen and unseen orders of faith. Doyle defines the seen order as reality and the unseen order as “the vision we carry in our imagination about a truer, more beautiful world” (65). Doyle aligns the unseen order with the work of visionaries and revolutionaries who attempt “to bring forth something that has never existed” (66).

Doyle states her purpose “is to listen deeply to women” (66). She connects these women to Tabitha the cheetah and describes how “they are stalking the periphery of their lives, feeling discontent” (67). She examines the ways in which women can begin to live the lives of their imaginations, and chronicles the lives of some of the women who write to her in search of guidance. She credits the success of these women to their willingness to honor their discontent and “not dismiss it, bury it, deflect it, deny it” (70).

The last key is “Key Four: Build and Burn” (73). Doyle details the ways in which one life must first be destroyed to make way for a new life. Doyle uses the symbol of a memo to describe the messages women receive “about how to become a successful woman and build a strong family, career, and faith” (74). Doyle discusses the need to leave these memos behind and “live as a woman who never got the world’s memos” (75). After listing the various memos she previously honored and has now burned on selflessness, motherhood, family, marriage, and America, she addresses the creation of a new memo on her faith, no longer “a public allegiance to a set of outer beliefs, but a private surrender to the inner Knowing” (76). Doyle commits herself to embracing her continued evolution as a human.