STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
Glennon Doyle on Acceptance, Gratitude & Forgiveness
Life is brutal. But it’s also beautiful. Brutiful.
—Glennon Doyle
Author and speaker
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About the Giant
Glennon Doyle
Glennon Doyle is an American author and speaker known for memoirs including Carry On, Warrior, Love Warrior, and Untamed. Her writing frequently explores vulnerability, recovery, relationships, identity, and the tension between pain and beauty. In Carry On, Warrior she popularized the word “brutiful,” combining brutal and beautiful to describe the way both can coexist within an honest human life.
The Idea Behind the Words
We often divide experiences into categories: good or bad, beautiful or painful, something to celebrate or something to endure. Doyle’s word “brutiful” makes room for experiences that refuse that separation.
A difficult season can contain tenderness. A loss can reveal love. Parenting can be exhausting and astonishing in the same hour. Growth can hurt while still carrying us somewhere meaningful.
Recognizing beauty inside difficulty does not require calling suffering good. It simply refuses to let pain erase everything else that is also true.
The reverse matters too. A beautiful life is not invalidated because it contains struggle. We do not have to wait until every problem disappears before allowing gratitude, humor, connection, or joy.
Maturity often means becoming able to hold more than one truth at once.
Putting the Idea to Work
When something is difficult, notice the temptation to describe the entire experience with one word: terrible, ruined, hopeless.
Then ask what else is present without minimizing the pain. Is there love? Support? Learning? Humor? A moment of beauty?
The goal is not forced positivity. It is a fuller accounting of reality.
Something to Reflect On
What part of your life feels brutal right now? Without denying that difficulty, what is also beautiful, meaningful, or worth protecting within it?
Something Worth Remembering
Life can be painful and beautiful simultaneously, and acknowledging both gives us a fuller relationship with reality.
Source & Attribution
Carry On, Warrior (2013); Doyle’s “brutiful” formulation
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