Glennon Doyle Melton on becoming a 'Love Warrior'

Glennon Doyle Melton has always lived two lives.

"I just always felt that there were two of me. There was the real me, and then there was my representative that I sent out into the world who stuck to the script. That voice that when someone says, 'How are you?", and you're really not good, it says 'fine,'" she explains.

Melton is the author of "Love Warrior," a powerful memoir about battling bulimia, confronting alcoholism, dealing with her husband's infidelity — and coming through it all stronger. She first found an audience with her blog, Momastery, on which she shares brutally honest dispatches on parenting, her marriage and her mental health.

Now 40, she can trace her feelings of division back to high school, when she was suffering from an eating disorder and had spent time in a psychiatric ward.

"The week I got out of the mental hospital, I was sitting in a homecoming parade with my homecoming court sash, waving to people. My superlative was 'Leading Leader.' I remember thinking: Where the hell do people want to follow me to? I just got out of the mental hospital.

"There was this divide between my internal self that felt so broken and so sad, and my outer self, which looked perfect," she said.

Melton joined MPR News host Kerri Miller to talk about "Love Warrior," the importance of forgiveness and how she still can't escape society's emphasis on beauty.

On her need to share the truth, warts and all

I think we are made to be truth tellers. There's a part of us that is desperate to reveal the depths of who we are. That's what art is for. What I figured out is if you don't have a place to tell the truth, to say "I'm not fine," when you're not fine, if you can't use your words for it, you'll find something else to say "I'm not fine" with.

For me, that was booze, that was food. I know for a lot of people it was shopping, for some people it's sex. If we can't use our words to say 'I'm not fine,' when you're not fine, it comes out sideways.

One the most revolutionary thing a woman can do

We need to get really still. We need to block out every voice coming at us from well-meaning people and institutions, and we need to look inside and listen to what we want and what we need.

And then we need to do the next right thing. We do not need to ask permission first, and we do not need to explain ourselves later. The most revolutionary thing a woman can do is the next right thing, and not explain herself.

On living without shame

Maybe the blessing of being so full of shame for the first half of life is that you use it all up. I have none left. It is all gone. I am utterly shameless and it is an amazing way to live. I think what has made me shameless is being a person who hears women's stories all day.

Since I write so honestly, I get boxes of letters every week and more emails than I can imagine from women, and they tell me their real stories. The blessing is that I know that there is nothing new under the sun. There is no pain, no mistake, no horrible thing I've done or felt that isn't just utterly universal.

There's no mistake that you have made up. Thousands have done it before, millions will do it after you.

On the difference between guilt and shame

Shame is thinking that you are somehow unique, that you are special, that your particular pain and particular anger and your particular mistakes are different or outside the rest of the human experience, so you have to hide them.

Guilt is knowing you screwed up. So what? Next. I forgive myself.

The difference between shame and guilt is knowing that every single mistake you make is human, and all you can do is forgive yourself and try again. Don't let it take you out of the game.

On processing pain and finding forgiveness

The thing about pain is that it demands to be felt. You can tap out of it, like I did with booze, but I just handed it to my people instead. So I didn't feel it, but my sister did and my parents did.

And my husband refused to deal with his pain, so he passed it to me and our kids. But in a very real way, we are exactly the same. So that was forgiveness for me, knowing that his mistakes were not outside of my realm of possibility, that I was capable of everything that he was capable of. But forgiveness does not mean that you stay tied to that person forever.

You can be a woman who forgives her husband, and divorces him.

On how it feels impossible to shake society's standards of beauty

I feel like there is still that poison in me: It's the cultural poison that tells a woman she has to be beautiful to be valid, and for some reason, I just can't get rid of it. It's still there.

There was a moment after I found out about my husband's infidelity, I immediately took myself to the hair salon and had them chop off all my hair. I think that was a moment of: "I followed all the rules, I was as pretty as I could be, I was a good wife and a good mom, and none of it worked. Screw it. I'm not going to follow the rules anymore."

And that was kind of awesome and fierce and I felt really great for about 8 hours until I looked in the mirror.

...

I think I'll spend the rest of my life trying to detox from these rules telling us we have to look a certain way and that our bodies are currency. I am trying so hard to raise my girls differently, but it's like: "Can you just listen to what I'm saying and not look at me?"