During my Love Warrior book tour, thousands of readers showed up across the country, expecting me to do what I always did: tell the truth about my life. But for the first time in a decade, they didn’t yet know the truth of my life. I had shared that Craig and I were divorcing, but I had not told them that I had fallen in love with Abby.

I had a choice to make: I could reveal my new relationship before I felt ready, or I could stand in front of my readers and hide the most important thing happening in my life. The first option felt terrifying and also the clear way, because of my One Thing. My One Thing is my sobriety. For me, sobriety is not just about stopping something; it’s about beginning a particular way of life. This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only one self. Dividing into two selves—the shown self and the hidden self—that is brokenness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and I let the world adjust.

I will never promise to be this way or that way, I will only promise to show up, as I am, wherever I am. That’s it, and that’s all. People will like me or not, but being liked is not my One Thing; integrity is. So I must live and tell my truth. Folks will come around or quit coming around. Either way: lovely. Anything or anyone I could lose by telling the truth was never mine anyway. I’m willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.

So I decided to tell the world that I was in love with Abby. The night before I made my announcement, one of my teammates said, “Here we go. Tomorrow is the bloodbath.” I understood the trepidation. I knew that folks would be surprised and that they’d have a whole lot of questions and feelings.

Some would say with admiration, “I respect the hell out of you. What gave you the guts to do that?” Others would say with disdain, “I respected the hell out of you. What gave you the right to do that?”

I knew my answer would be the same, either way:

I left my husband to build a life with Abby for the same reason I left booze to become a mother eighteen years ago. Because suddenly I was able to imagine a truer, more beautiful existence for myself than the one I was living. And my way of life is to dare to imagine the truest, most beautiful life, family, and world—and to then conjure up the courage to make real what I have imagined.

In my thirties, I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It’s the inevitable, excruciating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave, openhearted life—and I’ll pay it.

There is another kind of pain that comes not from losing beautiful things but from never even trying for them.

I’ve felt that kind of pain in my life. I recognize it on others’ faces. I see the longing in the eyes of a woman who is next to her lover but feels totally alone. I see the rage in the eyes of a woman who is not happy but smiles anyway. I see the resignation in the eyes of a woman who is slowly dying for her children instead of living for them. And I hear it. I hear it in the bitterness of a woman who describes faking it so she can get up and finish folding the laundry. I hear it in the desperate tone of a woman who has something to say but has never said it. In the cynicism of a woman who has accepted the injustice she could help change if she were braver. It’s the pain of a woman who has slowly abandoned herself.

I’m forty-four years old now, and I’ll be damned if I’ll choose that kind of pain ever again.

I left my husband and I am building a life with Abby because I’m a grown-ass woman now and I do what the fuck I want. I mean this with deep respect and love—and with the desire that you, too, will do what the fuck you want with your own singular precious life.

The truth is that it matters not at all what you think of my life—but it matters supremely what you think of your own. Judgment is just another cage we live in so we don’t have to feel, know, and imagine. Judgment 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 your 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.

That is what I want to model now, because that is what I want for all of us. I want us all to grow so comfortable in our own feelings, our own Knowing, our own imagination that we become more committed to our own joy, freedom, and integrity than we are to manipulating what others think of us. I want us to refuse to betray ourselves. Because what the world needs right now in order to evolve is to watch one woman at a time live her truest, most beautiful life without asking for permission or offering explanation.

So the next morning, I woke up, poured myself some coffee, opened my computer, and took a long, deep breath. Then I posted—to a million people—a picture of Abby and me snuggling on our front-porch swing, her strumming a guitar, both of us looking directly into the camera. We looked certain. Content. Settled. Relieved. I wrote that Abby and I were in love and planned to build a life together, along with the kids and their father. I didn’t write much more than that. I was careful not to apologize or explain or justify. I just let it stand. Then I walked away and reminded myself that I was responsible for telling the truth but not for anyone’s reaction to it. I’d done my part.

My sister called me an hour later, and her voice was trembling. “Sissy,” she said. “You won’t believe what’s happening. Please sit down and read what our people are saying. What they’re doing. How this community is showing up for you and Abby.”

I logged on and saw thousands of gorgeous, kind, gracious, intelligent, spacious, gentle, nuanced comments. They were from a community of people who understood that they did not have to understand me to love me. It was not a bloodbath. It was more of a baptism. They seemed to say, “Welcome to the world, Glennon. We’ve got you.”

That night, a friend called and said, “Glennon, here’s what I’ve been thinking about all day: You made this community for other women. But maybe it was actually for you. All this time you’ve been creating the net that one day you’d need to fall into.”

May we all live in communities where every person’s truest Self is both held and free.