We Can Do Hard Things · Treat Media and Glennon Doyle

Our Most Hilarious Episode EVER: Embarrassing Stories Comic Relief!

March 31, 2026·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

Amanda accidentally insults her accountant's dog, only to learn it's named Jeeves.

1. We Can Do Hard Things hosts Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle (Sister), and Abby Wambach share their most mortifying personal stories alongside listener voicemail confessions, framing the episode as 'comic relief' and an experiment in shame reduction through laughter. 2. Glennon is a memoirist and podcast host; Amanda is her sister and co-host; Abby Wambach is a former US soccer star and co-host; the episode is introduced as a follow-up to an episode with author Jenny Lawson about the power of sharing humiliating moments. 3. The episode's core premise, borrowed from Brené Brown, is that normalization is the antidote to shame: when embarrassing stories are shared publicly, listeners realize they are not alone, reducing the shame attached to those moments. 4. Amanda opens with the most recent story: trash-talking a dog's name ('the most pretentious, WASPy name I've ever heard') to her accountant, who then pulls her own dog named Jeeves onto the Zoom screen. 5. Glennon describes her favorite teaching memory: third-grade student Oscar, a recent immigrant with barely any English, gave her a Valentine's Day gift—a heavy gold 'Number One Sex Machine' chain borrowed from his gang-involved older brother—and asked if she would wear it; she wore it through the school. 6. Amanda describes spending three hours roaming a five-level parking garage with a dolly loaded with a client's sensitive legal documents, unable to find her car or explain the situation to the general counsel—who eventually emerged from the elevator to find her still in the garage. 7. Abby describes pooping her pants as a 14-year-old on her cul-de-sac, throwing the evidence in an open wicker basket in her shared bedroom (no plastic liner), and her cousin confronting her the same day. 8. Amanda describes being unable to make it half a mile home from high school in traffic, deciding to simply pee in full while waving to classmates through the car window of the family's beat-up Cressida. 9. Glennon describes waking up in her ex-boyfriend Jeeves's bed the morning after she first slept over to find she had urinated in his bed while drunk, gathering all his sheets and walking across campus in heels at midday; his fraternity called her 'Puddles' for a year. 10. Glennon tells her most embarrassing story ever: forgetting to flush the toilet on vacation with Jeeves's 'very fancy' family, and his teenage brother discovering the evidence and announcing it to the whole assembled family; Jeeves declined to take the blame. 11. Amanda delivers a feminist etymology lesson: 'mortification' comes from the Latin for 'put to death,' medieval Christians used it for self-denial and self-flagellation to repent for bodily sins, and women's shame about natural bodily functions is structurally identical. 12. A listener voicemail describes being 19 and drunk at a Metropolitan Opera Guild internship, reading a subway advertisement ('someone on this train has lupus'), concluding she was the only one on the train and therefore must have lupus, and leaving voicemails for coworkers and her roommate's mother announcing her diagnosis. 13. Listener Michaela describes confidently reading toast responses at an Army ball from her program, screaming 'moment of silence' aloud at the toast to fallen comrades—not realizing it was a stage direction—and feeling approximately 1,500 people turn to stare. 14. Multiple stories involve forgotten car locations: Amanda searching a garage for three hours, Glennon once calling her ex-husband Craig to report her car stolen—only to realize she had driven a different car to the mall. 15. Glennon describes taking her son Bobby to urgent care and insisting he was in the system, escalating until the clerk announced to the whole line that his birthday was wrong—which is why they couldn't find him. 16. The format alternates between hosts' own stories and listener voicemails, building on each story with recognition, laughter, and cross-references to other episodes (Jenny Lawson ep 100, Brené Brown). 17. The episode is warm and rollicking—hosts frequently dissolve into laughter, cut off each other's punchlines, and connect stories to each other's histories. 18. Glennon acknowledges throughout that her difficulty with bodily functions and body shame connects to her anorexia recovery, framing the episode as personally therapeutic as well as funny. 19. Listeners who find relief in shared humiliation and communal laughter, especially around bodily functions and social awkwardness, will find this episode cathartic. 20. Listeners who are squeamish about bathroom humor or who prefer the show's more serious episodes on mental health and relationships may want to skip this installment.

As heard by us

The most mortifying stories turn out to be the most universal -- which is the whole point of telling them.

Mortification as medicine is a real argument, and this episode backs it up. The hosts spend an hour on their most embarrassing personal memories alongside listener voicemail confessions -- the kind that produced, by their own account, genuine cry-laughing solidarity.

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Why you'd press play

Proof that the story you most want to keep secret is the one most worth telling.

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