Books |
The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
Brené Brown
By
Published: Jan 22, 2019
Category:
Psychology
My mother never said, “But what about the extra point questions?” She didn’t have to. School was my way out of our split-level, middle class condition, and that meant fantastic grades weren’t optional. An A- wasn’t a passing grade. I would have to be perfect in order for others to decide I was good enough.
And I was perfect, so long as there was a test and a grade. Then Real Life began. Imperfection descended immediately. Decades later, at Vanity Fair, Tina Brown asked me why my first drafts were so terrific. I didn’t tell her the truth: They weren’t first drafts. I did confess that I feared if I disappointed her, she’d never think well of me again. She didn’t comment, but I think she understood. That is, I think she too was afflicted by perfectionism.
This week, I had to go to the DMV to “enhance” my license so I don’t have to bring my passport with me to the airport. You do need to bring your passport to the DMV. Idiot me, I brought my expired passport and had to go home for the valid one. And then I waited.
Fortunately, I had a book. Any book would do, but this one, in just 192 pages, was just what I needed. “The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are” is ideal for people who are anxious, perfectionist, worried about what other people think, overstressed, overworked, disconnected, lonely and unhappy. Which is to say: me. And, no doubt, many of you. It offers no answers; it isn’t a “how to” or “self help” book. That would be pointless; self-acceptance is a process, not a travel-by-numbers destination. But if you’re ready to be challenged and break your patterns of self-sabotage — if you’re willing to do the hard work of letting go of the self you’ll never be and accepting and loving the self you are — you’ll find hope and encouragement here. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Brené Brown is a professor, mother and wife. As a researcher, “I had dedicated my career to studying difficult emotions like shame, fear, and vulnerability. I had written academic pieces on shame, developed a shame-resilience curriculum for mental health and addictions professionals, and written a book about shame resilience called I Thought It Was Just Me.”
In 2006, she had completed a great many interviews and assembled the data. She got quite a surprise:
I heard stories about the power of embracing imperfection and vulnerability. I learned about the inextricable connection between joy and gratitude, and how things that I take for granted, like rest and play, are as vital to our health as nutrition and exercise. These research participants trusted themselves, and they talked about authenticity and love and belonging in a way that was completely new to me.
I realized that the patterns generally fell into one of two columns; for simplicity sake, I first labeled these Do and Don’t. The Do column was brimming with words like worthiness, rest, play, trust, faith, intuition, hope, authenticity, love, belonging, joy, gratitude, and creativity. The Don’t column was dripping with words like perfection, numbing, certainty, exhaustion, self-sufficiency, being cool, fitting in, judgment, and scarcity.
And then she got a bigger surprise: She was a poster child for the “don’t” column:
I thought I’d find that Wholehearted people were just like me and doing all of the same things I was doing: working hard, following the rules, doing it until I got it right, always trying to know myself better, raising my kids exactly by the books… After studying tough topics like shame for a decade, I truly believed that I deserved confirmation that I was “living right.” But here’s the tough lesson that I learned that day (and every day since):
How much we know and understand ourselves is critically important, but there is something that is even more essential to living a Wholehearted life: loving ourselves.
Knowledge is important, but only if we’re being kind and gentle with ourselves as we work to discover who we are. Wholeheartedness is as much about embracing our tenderness and vulnerability as it is about developing knowledge and claiming power.
The goal: to feel you’re “good enough,” right now. Especially if you’re a parent:
It was clear from the data that we cannot give our children what we don’t have. Where we are on our journey of living and loving with our whole hearts is a much stronger indicator of parenting success than anything we can learn from how-to books.
Kim, my coach, pushed this book on me. Week after week, I tell her more truth than I’ve ever told anyone, and week after week, as little troubles fall away and I see a little more sky, we keep coming back to one issue: my unchanging feeling of never being “enough.” Sometimes I say that at my age it’s too late to change. Maybe it’s hard-wired, I say. But Kim is in the change-and-possibility business. And she knows how committed I am to sending my daughter into the world without trauma and low self-esteem. So we press on.
Brené Brown also took her unhappiness to a therapist. A wise move — as she explains, you need to be able to tell your story to someone who can listen without judging. Or worse, someone who says “Wait ‘till you hear what happened to me.” It’s clear to me that if I weren’t checking in with a fair witness every week, this book would be just a lot of words.
At the DMV, I could have been a stew of self-loathing. Another unforced error! You are well on the way to dementia, old man! It’s getting harder for people to put up with you! But the book made sense. By the time I finished it, they were about to call my number. I thanked the clerk for a good experience. It was really nice — I’m tempted to say: joyous — to feel so chill.
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