For the fourth episode of The Thrive Global Podcast, in partnership with iHeartRadio, Thrive Global founder and CEO Arianna Huffington sat down with a true force of nature. Glennon Doyle Melton’s ability to connect, to create intimacy, and her fearless honesty about both the highs and lows of her own life, her marriage, and her relationships have created a devoted following.
This is why the online community she founded, Momastery, reaches millions of people each week, and why her two books, “Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing your Messy, Beautiful Life,” and her 2016 memoir, “Love Warrior,” became huge bestsellers. She’s also an activist, a person of faith, and the founder of Together Rising, a nonprofit that’s raised over $7 million for vulnerable women and children.
For those who don’t know her story, after becoming sober, getting married, having children, and having what she thought had been a solid 14-year marriage, which she’d been chronicling throughout, she found out her husband had been having affairs all along. That revelation, and the aftermath was the subject of “Love Warrior.” Then a few months before publication she announced that, in fact, she and her husband Craig were separating.
This past November, she announced her engagement to former professional soccer player Abby Wambach. The two were married in May.
“We are doing this co-parenting blended family thing in a really beautiful way,” Melton said. “None of it’s easy, but it’s all worth it.”
And you can tell she means it.
“I’ve had two major rock bottoms,” Melton said.
The first was a personal one. After two decades of struggling with alcohol addiction and an eating disorder, Melton learned she was pregnant on Mother’s Day.
“I found myself sitting on a bathroom floor holding a positive pregnancy test, hungover,” Melton said. “I just remember thinking, ‘This could be the moment. This could be an invitation to kind of put that identity away, that bad girl, alcoholic, bulimic identity away and try to grab hold of a truer, better identity.’”
She describes the moment as an “eviction notice from life.” But one that also had opportunity.
“We don’t get eviction notices in our lives unless they’re also invitations to a better life. We don’t get identities ripped from us unless there’s a truer identity that we were meant to take hold of,” Melton said. “It was easy to see at that point, because my identity was addict. It was easy to believe that there was a better identity out there for me.”
Then one day in therapy Melton’s then-husband told her that he’d been unfaithful throughout their entire marriage. And in that moment: a second eviction notice.
The first was a “good call.” This one was harder.
“But the second one was so sad and so terrifying because I liked my life,” Melton said. “All of these things that I was, mother and wife, they were good things and they made people proud of me and they made me proud of myself, but they still weren’t true enough, right?”
Why?
“Because you can only put your identity in something that cannot be taken from you and doesn’t change.”
Download the podcast here to learn how you can thrive more like Glennon, and be sure to stay tuned for more episodes of The Thrive Global Podcast, featuring business mogul Mark Cuban, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and Jennifer Aniston.
Listen to The Thrive Global Podcast Episode – Episode #4: Glennon Doyle Melton on iHeartRadio
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Originally published at journal.thriveglobal.com