Slipping out of the cage of judgement

Judgement is just another cage we live in so we don't have to feel, know, and imagine. Judgement is self-abandonment. You are not here to waste your time deciding whether my life is true and beautiful enough for you. You are here to decide if you life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you. And if they are not and you dare to admit they are not, you must decide if you have the guts, the right – perhaps even the duty – to burn to the ground that which is not true and beautiful enough and get started building what is.
~Glennon Doyle, Untamed

Where do I begin? Ever since I began reading Untamed last week, I've been desperate for people to talk about it with. I've shared with my husband, my girls, my boy, my six-feet-apart running partner. And I will undoubtedly be sharing with you because it seems that on every single page there is something that wakes me up, that nudges my heart, that whispers in my ear, or, sometimes, makes me uncomfortable.
Doyle and I have something in common. Like me, she discovered well into her marriage and three kids later, that her husband had been unfaithful. He was a sex addict. Her book, Love Warrior, which I did not love (only later, after she announced that she left her first marriage and married a woman, could I see that the book's second half felt inauthentic to me because it was), details her discovery, her healing, her lessons.
But Doyle is a teacher and I, a good student. She points to the things that I have learned far too well to pretend isn't there.
Take her thoughts about judgement (quote above), which I know so many of us struggle with here (and, if you're like me, continue to struggle with). 
What I wish for all of us is to learn the lesson that Doyle has learned (and continues to – she's honest about her work-in-progress status, though aren't we all works-in-progress?). That other people's judgement of us says more about their fears than about us. And, perhaps more importantly, that our judgement of others is really a chance to reflect back on ourselves. 
On its surface, it seems self-explanatory. But I sat with this thought. I took stock of the ways in which I continue to want other people to like me, to admire me (her daughter's admission that a classmate doesn't like prompts Doyle to respond, "that's a fact, not a problem", which I aim to make my new mantra). And within that desire to be liked and admired is still me outsourcing my value.
I don't want that for myself any more and I don't want it for you either. Betrayal lays it all bare, doesn't it? Our knee-jerk reaction is often what's most revealing. Not just the shock and sadness and anger but the belief beneath that: I'm not enough. 
That belief underscored everything I did. Maybe not consciously but it was always there. I was the dutiful wife, the heavily-invested mother, the volunteer, the writer, the exerciser, the pet-owner, the responsible daughter, the always-there friend. God forbid I let anyone down because that would openly reveal what I secretly believed about myself. I was not enough. My husband had cheated because there was something wrong with me. I was selfish, self-absorbed, vain. 
I still struggle. Those messages, delivered to me via our culture and straight into my ear from my alcoholic mother's mouth, my alcoholic grandmother's mouth, were more true to me than any of the conflicting messages I got. But Doyle urges us to go deeper, to what she calls our "Knowing". My Knowing was so buried beneath these messages that I could barely hear my own deep voice.
And though I'm loathe to acknowledge that any good can come of infidelity, it did crack me open enough that I began to listen for that deep voice of my own. I peeled away others' judgement of me (or did my best to render it irrelevant) and listened.
I am, of course, a work-in-progress. I still struggle with those words. Selfish. Self-centred. Those were my mother's weapons of choice. Used against me any time I wanted something that she didn't think I deserved. Any time I sought for myself...something.
But she was only parroting what our culture tells women in particular. As Doyle points out, "selfless" is the highest compliment we can give a woman. An erasing of the self. A vanishing. To make ourselves so small and insignificant that our very self is sacrificed.
Well, screw that, I say. My grown-up self works hard to push back on that. It isn't others' judgement that hurts so much, it's what we internalize. Or, as my former therapist used to tell me, it isn't what others say to us but what we say to ourselves that hurts. If we didn't somehow believe what others were saying, it wouldn't hurt. 
Behind judgement – our own and others – is fear. That we're doing this wrong. That we're wrong. 
Let's break the bars of that particular cage, or at least stretch them wide enough that we can slip between them. Let's pay attention to when we're judging others and ourselves. Let's remember that behind that judgement is fear, that it is getting in the way of feeling, of knowing, of imagining. And then, let's do our best to squeeze out of that cage and into something better.