Full of Myself Quotes

“And so often, this is also what it means to be a Black woman in America: working during the day to put food on the table and then protesting all night to make America do better. It means splitting ourselves in half. This is what it’s like to save ourselves.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“So many times, my consensus building was viewed as a lack of confidence. Coleading was interpreted as an inability to handle the pressure. And when I asked one question too many in an interdepartmental meeting, I was told by my supervisor to “fake it till you make it, because that’s what a leader does.” I wasn’t incompetent. I was connected. And thank the ancestors, because when I was let go, those connections showed up for me.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“I am left wondering if what the world has wanted from us since we were young is to be dispossessed of ourselves—to need nothing, to want nothing, to be nothing, except malleable tools in an antiblack system of exploitation.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“all the women. in me. are tired.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“In every workplace I have occupied, white people have gotten away with being rude because they were in a hurry, or mean because they were going through a lot, or aggressive because their anger was evidence that they cared deeply. On the other hand, Black women must walk on eggshells.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“I imagine they found me to be quite mean. And I love that for myself.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“Black people, especially Black women, are told we have an attitude problem when what we actually have is insider information.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“Racism is mean, is malevolent. And I intended to match its energy. I chose a publishing house that had no problems when I wrote “White people can be exhausting” as my opening sentence. I wrote the book I needed.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“Trying to drop into my body to figure out what I want to do next, as opposed to what I think the white people around me are expecting I might do. “Double consciousness,” as W.E.B. Du Bois called it, is a beast.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“It never occurred to them to wonder what book a Black woman—including its author—might need.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“One person sleeps and another person marches. One person watches the kids and another person cooks. One person hosts the meeting and another person eats. One person posts bail and another person holds the family. We don’t just march together, fight together, write together, meet together. We also look out for one another and our physical needs.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“Witnessing isn’t passive. It is an act of meeting the moment, of being present to the pain, of knowing it could be any one of us next.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“One day I would read Audre Lorde and recognize that my silence had not saved me. One day I would read Audre Lorde and tears would stream down my face as I recognized the importance of my own anger. One day I would read Audre Lorde and step into myself.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“I didn’t magically grow wings—my friends became my wings.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“I can’t walk into one more organization where I pretend that I’m not an absolute gift to them. I can’t walk into one more workplace that expects to gain from my presence but doesn’t want to deal with my realities. I am no one’s site for excavation.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“But my heart healed, and it turned out the church’s letting me go taught me a terrible lesson because once I knew that I could survive, no one could threaten me with being fired ever again.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“Regardless of my position, my tenure, or my salary, I cannot escape the expectation that the only line of my job description that truly matters is “other duties as assigned.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“No one is allowed to make rich, powerful, white men feel bad about themselves and their decisions. I was definitely going to lose my job, not because I had done anything wrong that weekend; I don’t think I spoke one word that day. But my diversity and inclusion work at the church had raised expectations of the pastor and the leadership staff.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“Under those watchful eyes, it dawned on me that my best would never be good enough. My best was not what they were looking for. They were looking for their best wrapped in my body. Their definition of good. Their definition of right. Their definition of leadership. I could see it so clearly, and had no desire to reach it.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“My body is hot from all the energy I’m expending to force myself to be still.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“And, even though my father-in-law wanted to embrace the protections of his civil rights, he knew he needed to look around first. He was not all the way free either. Not yet. And so we laughed. I am convinced this is how some of our most brutal stories survive, even if they aren’t actually funny. They survive because ensconced in laughter is the only way our bodies can bear them. The poet and artist Morgan Harper Nichols says that if we had to re-feel the weight of the trauma within our stories, many of them would remain buried, never to be passed on. But our ability to focus on personality or a weird quirk or a turn of phrase—anything to make us all laugh—means the story gets to live on.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“I learned at a young age that being “full of myself” was a bad thing. But I have decided that I want to be full of myself: my ideas, my opinions, my curiosities, my needs, my emotions, my self.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“What I am still endeavoring to name in this book is something subtler, something I experienced before being fired from that job: the emotional and physical posture Black women are expected to adopt as we move through the world. In its most simple terms, I call this posture “an emptying.” It wants us, Black women, to be emptied of ourselves.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“This isn’t about my performance at all. This is about wanting me gone so they can hire a volunteer, family member, or friend. The newest darling they’ve fallen in love with. Someone who’s a better “culture fit.” They aren’t assessing my work, they’re building a case. And I know it because there are only two things in the world I’m good at, and one of them is speaking.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“Except I know. I know this isn’t a real conversation. There are a few things I’ve learned in my two years here, and one of them is that decisions are never made in the room.”
― Austin Channing Brown, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession

“What if the work resisted restraint because it was not meant to be restrained? What if she had very nearly everything she needed for the book to take shape, except for the courage to let it find its own shape? She stopped wrestling with the work so she could dance with it instead. I watched the wheels turn right in front of me, and I saw in Austin a mind simultaneously at work and play. I saw a writer doing their job and a woman remembering who the hell she was and what she wanted.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession