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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brené Brown
Read between
February 14 - February 15, 2024
New worlds are important, but you can’t just describe them. Give us the stories that make up that universe. No matter how wild and weird the new world might be, we’ll see ourselves in the stories.
Oprah. Her advice is tacked to the wall in my study: “Do not think you can be brave with your life and your work and never disappoint anyone. It doesn’t work that way.”
Sometimes the most dangerous thing for kids is the silence that allows them to construct their own stories—stories that almost always cast them as alone and unworthy of love and belonging.
Anne Lamott quoted an observation from one of her sober friends that sums up that kind of running away perfectly: “By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.”
After fifteen years of this work, I can confidently say that stories of pain and courage almost always include two things: praying and cussing. Sometimes at the exact same time.
You will always belong anywhere you show up as yourself and talk about yourself and your work in a real way.”
Maya Angelou had said. I kissed Steve, ran into the study, grabbed my laptop, and Googled her quote. Carrying my laptop back to the couch, I read it to Steve: You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.
Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
Being ourselves means sometimes having to find the courage to stand alone, totally alone. Even as I wrote this, I still thought of belonging as requiring something external to us—something we secured by, yes, showing up in a real way, but needing an experience that always involved others. So as I dug deeper into true belonging, it became clear that it’s not something we achieve or accomplish with others; it’s something we carry in our heart. Once we belong thoroughly to ourselves and believe thoroughly in ourselves, true belonging is ours.
Over and over, participants talked about their concern that the only thing that binds us together now is shared fear and disdain, not common humanity, shared trust, respect, or love.
Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion.
TRUSTING OTHERS Boundaries—You respect my boundaries, and when you’re not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. You’re willing to say no. Reliability—You do what you say you’ll do. This means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise and are able to deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities. Accountability—You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. Vault—You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. I need to know that my confidences are kept, and that you’re not sharing with me any information about
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True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.
we’ve geographically, politically, and even spiritually sorted ourselves into like-minded groups in which we silence dissent, grow more extreme in our thinking, and consume only facts that support our beliefs—making it even easier to ignore evidence that our positions are wrong.
In the case of the United States, our three greatest fault lines—cracks that have grown and deepened due to willful neglect and a collective lack of courage—are race, gender, and class.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. —JAMES A. BALDWIN
We see politicians making laws that their own resources will exempt them from having to follow, and behaving in ways that would cost most of us our jobs, our families, and our dignity.
They worked against the trap that most of us have fallen into: I can hate large groups of strangers, because the members of those groups who I happen to know and like are the rare exceptions.
Pain will subside only when we acknowledge it and care for it. Addressing it with love and compassion would take only a minuscule percentage of the energy it takes to fight it, but approaching pain head-on is terrifying. Most of us were not taught how to recognize pain, name it, and be with it. Our families and culture believed that the vulnerability that it takes to acknowledge pain was weakness, so we were taught anger, rage, and denial instead. But what we know now is that when we deny our emotion, it owns us. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain.
Maiese defines dehumanization as “the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment.”
it’s the case that we can care about citizens and the police, shouldn’t the rallying cry just be All Lives Matter? No. Because the humanity wasn’t stripped from all lives the way it was stripped from the lives of black citizens. In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves.
All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery.
“There’s an unspoken message that the only stories worth telling are the stories that end up in history books. This is not true. Every story matters.
my son and daughter-in-law gave me storyworth at christmas so that i could write up stories for my grandson
The first insight is the difference between lying and bullshitting that’s explained in the quote that opens this chapter: It’s helpful to think of lying as a defiance of the truth and bullshitting as a wholesale dismissal of the truth.
Second, it’s advantageous to recognize how we often rely on bullshitting when we feel compelled to talk about things we don’t understand.
Last, Frankfurt argues that the contemporary spread of bullshit also has a deeper source: our being skeptical and denying that we can ever know the truth of how things truly are. He argues that when we give up on believing that there are actual truths that can be known and shared observable knowledge, we give up on the notion of objective inquiry.
One of my live-by quotes is from Elie Wiesel. “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Alberto Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle or what’s sometimes known as Brandolini’s law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
Civility is claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs, and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process….[Civility]
For my dad and the people we hunted with, the sentiment around automatic weapons and the big guns that people treat like toys today was simple: “You want to shoot those kinds of guns? Great! Enlist and serve.”
I watched the NRA go from being an organization that I associated with safety programs, merit badges, and charity skeet tournaments to something I didn’t recognize. Why were they positioning themselves as the people who represented families like ours while not putting any limits or parameters around responsible gun ownership?
Of all of the lobbying organizations I’ve studied over the past twenty years, not one of them has done a better job using fear and false dichotomies than the NRA.
But the more we’re willing to seek out moments of collective joy and show up for experiences of collective pain—for real, in person, not online—the more difficult it becomes to deny our human connection, even with people we may disagree with.
I’ve never doubted the power of music as the most powerful form of collective joy.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes, “Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional….Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
Based on studies across diverse fields, Pinker concludes that there is no substitute for in-person interactions. They are proven to bolster our immune system, send positive hormones surging through our bloodstream and brain, and help us live longer. Pinker adds, “I call this building your village, and building it is a matter of life or death.”
Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.
Belonging is being somewhere where you want to be, and they want you. Fitting in is being somewhere where you want to be, but they don’t care one way or the other. • Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else. • If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in.
