Jen Hatmaker
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Anonymous
| Overall in “Books” tells the real story. |
Anonymous
| Mark’s wife, Anna is a total fraud. It is broadly known that she cheated on her ex husband for years yet paints herself as the victim in the divorce. I know them both from college and she was always insufferable. |
Anonymous
Mark and his new wife are total clout chasers. They both cheated on their previous spouses yet act like they’re models for divorce and co parenting. It is gross. |
Anonymous
This is TEAAA. Had no idea who these people were and bow down the rabbit hole. Do we know what happened with Mark and Kristen custody? New wife’s voice is excruciating. |
Anonymous
| In preparation to launch her new book, Jen is writing on substack. Today she has an essay about being tired of her own bullshit. She is honest about her bullshit when it comes to the last few years of her marriage. When is she going to be honest about her life today? |
Anonymous
I thought this too from the jump. Self awareness and The Jen Hatmaker Project have never been close friends. |
Anonymous
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Can anyone copy paste an excerpt from the Substack article?
I can't believe the pity I have for Kristen for having to deal with Mark and Anna together. I absolutely would not take ANY advice on any topic from them. They have a Hatmaker-level lack of self-awareness. |
Anonymous
| Jen is basically admitting that Fierce Free and Full of Fire was just a bunch of shit. Her manifesto. But, yeah, we can trust her now. |
Anonymous
| Tbh Kristen is pretty insufferable so perhaps these people deserve eachother. Leaving your kids to move across the country for another woman is pretty bad imo |
Anonymous
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Anyone who still “trusts” Jen is like someone who “trusts” the Kardashians.
You know it’s bullshit but you’re just desperate for escapism. Jen is still one of the bigger names in the reformed Christian circles as much as those circles are shrinking. |
Anonymous
I was speaking at a huge event a few years ago. To be honest, I can’t even remember what or where it was, because the most lasting memory was the one I am about to tell you. I was deep in the bowels of the backstage labyrinth with the person assigned to “handle me.” This is either a great assignment or a shitty one, depends. In this case, my person had been in my community for years, so we were instantly connected. She was a few years younger than me, very petite, super athletic, cute as a button. In that candid, unprotected way people who’ve chosen recovery seem to have, she told me in frank terms the story of her alcoholism. She walked me through the lengths she went to hide it, nurture it, prioritize it, manage it. She described all the ways addicts bargain with their substance: spreadsheets, rules, only weekends, only wine. It’s a deal with the devil, for sure. After breaking all her self-imposed boundaries endless times, she described the final straw. It involved putting her young children in danger. It culminated with telling her parents an over-the-top, outrageous made up story on family vacation so she could leave her young children and party all night with an internet stranger. It all blew up in a blaze of mayhem, as these things often do. She described all this with clear-eyed candor. But I’ll never forget what she said: “I came home, emptied my house of booze, and went to my first meeting. I joined a sober online community and ended it,” at which point she said plainly, “I finally got sick of my own bullshit.” This is the only thing I remember from the entire trip, not even the city. It was so honest, not an ounce of defense or a hint of excuse. She had nothing to prop up anymore. She was no longer concerned with optics. She’d been to her own fiery hell and come back, and her freedom was plain to see. Her sobriety was written all over her. I am still thinking about it years later. God, the lengths we go to protect our own bullshit. We cherish it so much. We choose it even when it is breaking our hearts, or our people, or our bodies. We lie about our relationships. We lie about our own destructive patterns. We lie about our complicity. We lie about our harmful subcultures. We lie about our churches. We lie about our addictions. We lie about our behaviors. We lie about our marriages. We lie about our desires. We lie about parenting. We lie about how great we are. We lie about how hurt we are. We are so obsessed with wanting the version we are displaying. That is what we want. We want that marriage. We want that family. We want that woman who has her shit together. Sometimes we want the very thing that is utterly breaking us, or breaking other people, and we refuse to part with it, even as it destroys everything. The amount of secrets and private suffering women are walking around with is staggering. I know how it works, because I’m not just a spokeswoman for denial, I’m a user. In my case, my secret was being unhappy in my marriage. Not just unhappy; disconnected, resentful, lonely, complicit. There was no more sex. There was no more joy. We were in a death spiral the final two years. Most of that confusing disintegration became clear upon discovery of the betrayal timeline, but I did nothing to interrupt its trajectory. I didn’t rattle the cages with urgency. I didn’t radically alter my responses. I didn’t engage in a meaningful, truthful way. Instead, I fantasized about some moral, acceptable ending to my marriage so I might have happiness again before I died. I daydreamed about love with another imaginary person. I kept our misery secret from everyone who loved us until the end was already inevitable. Most importantly, I didn’t even tell myself the full truth. I guess I wasn’t sick enough of our bullshit. I ignored plain evidence of breach and demise (and contributed to the spiral by withdrawal) while I let the edges of my imagination invent a different life. Everything in my inner knowing was clear, but I refused my own guidance. I said no thank you, that is not the truth I am interested in facing. So I will just carry on with this broken marriage and relegate the possibility of happiness to my private imagination when it gets a few seconds alone without my micromanagement. Beloved readers, is any of this feeling familiar? Does any of this put a pit in your stomach? Does your own secret pain or truth live tightly coiled inside your soul? In the most candid, honest version of yourself, what would you admit? Even to yourself. Forget solutions for now. Don’t fixate on consequences or next steps yet. If you were to just very plainly tell yourself the truth, not protecting your own bullshit, what would it be? As long as you are lying to yourself, there is no hope for freedom. When we know what we know, but we refuse to face what we know, we lock ourselves up. Now of course, I am not dense enough to suggest that truth telling isn’t consequential, wouldn’t mean enormous change, even painful sacrifices - not the least of which might be your image - but if you never get sick enough of your own bullshit, then what you have is what you will always have, unless someone else sinks the ship first, like mine. Does the fact that even with my story, even with betrayal and trauma and total collapse, I am still grateful and whole now? Isn’t that insane? Can you imagine if I’d had the courage to choose it myself and diminish the agony?? My point is this: living a lie is not better than living the truth, even if the path from A to B includes loss or change. My life and family and marriage and body was broken to the ground, and I am still better off now than I was before. The peace of freedom and honesty is that intense. Something else interesting I’ve noticed is that once I told myself the truth (after it all crashed so what else could I do?), it became so much easier to tell the truth to others, even you. The manic dance was over, and the truth was all of a sudden less scary. There was nothing left to protect. I am suuuuper honest in Awake about my own faults and flaws, my own bad tendencies and patterns, and Sydney asked if I was anxious about including them now that you are about to read it. Why would I want to expose my own bullshit? I guess I finally got sick enough of it. Tell yourself the truth, beloved community. Say it in the quiet safety of your own soul. Admit it with full candor. Let it be what it already is. Don’t defend it anymore. Stop polishing it up for public viewing. You are halfway through your life. These are your days and years, and you’ll not get one, not a single one back. What people think of you is not as consequential as what you think of you. You are the architect of the second half of your life. Build it with truth. It is the most powerful tool at your disposal. |
Anonymous
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This is ironic on so many levels. It is well written. Well, except for "beloved community" (gag). Like it could have really been something, really led somewhere. But it just led to more lies, just a different carefully curated version of herself that needs to be propped up. Still appears to be lying about her romantic relationship. Instead of the cast of a "an impossibly dear church community" she is surrounded by re-decorating, a terrifying bird, the shrilling of everything, and a weak echo of Ophrah-esque boss girl empowerment, just to name a few. She just chose different bullshit to prop up. Except the first round of bullshit was at least more charming. |
Anonymous
| As much as she annoys me, I find this to be very well-written. |
Anonymous
How much could he have if he lives in another state? She bugs me but I will give her credit that she could really go after him online (the affair with Dooce and then moving away from his kids and then trying to be a relationship expert) but she hasn't. Which is a lot of restraint for someone who overshares as much as she does. Mark and his new wife are obnoxious enough that I kind of wish she would because she could finally be putting her mean girl energy towards something deserving. |
Anonymous
Agreed. This is maybe some of her best writing and it does make me want to read her book. But it's confusing that she can have this level of self-awareness about her marriage but so little about how she presents her relationship with Tyler online. It feels like she is doing the exact same thing with a new person, writing an idealized version of a dude who by all accounts seems to be an attention-seeking fame whore and commitment phobe. Brandon is a douche but at least he commits and marries up. I don't trust a 50something lifelong batchelor who never had kids suddenly becoming a committed life partner. |