The Gifts of Imperfection – Brene Brown

The Book That Started It All

I was in a pickle!

There I was, sitting in the chair at the therapist’s office. I had just moved from New York to Texas and felt like I’d left everything behind. I left family and friends, I left my job, I left our neighborhood, I left my childhood behind. If you’d asked me then, I’d have probably told you I left myself in Buffalo.

But I was in Texas. My husband and my dog were in Texas. All my stuff (except my piano – a story for another time) was in Texas. For a few months, I felt like two halves of a tree struck by lightning and tied together with twine. I tried to grow roots but all I found was ash.

That’s when things started to fall apart. There, in that chair in my therapist’s office, everything came rushing out of my heart as if Arwen once again sang to the waters of the Misty Mountains. Each childhood fear, each trauma, each patriarchal dismissal, each time I was “too sensitive”, each time I was “too much”, each time I was not enough, galloped from my lips and dove into the ground like icicles until I found myself in a fortress quite like Elsa’s.

And weirdly enough, I actually did eventually find myself singing that damn song that echoed across the radio waves for months. But I didn’t really begin to let it go until I read a very special book. A book I purchased in January of 2018 at the behest of my therapist and my best friend alike. Enter *the crowd goes silent in anticipation* BRENÉ BROWN! *and the crowd goes wild*

Ok, I know, I know. The whole world is bonkers for Brené. But seriously, a woman who studied shame, is ruthlessly honest about it, and delightfully comical while doing so? A comedy gem of 2019, Amy Poehler’s Wine Country (on the Netflix), tells the truth: of course we all have obsessive love and a zillion questions for Brené. But Brené has boundaries! So instead of trying to have one on one conversations with millions of people every single day for the rest of her entire life, she wrote us a bunch of seriously awesome books to answer the most pressing of our questions.

I highly recommend The Gifts of Imperfection as a starting point. I’m going to say this a lot in this section of the blog, but I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it: this book changed my life. The deep gratitude I feel for the life I have wouldn’t be a thing. And for that, I will be forever thankful to Brené.

I needed to read about courage and compassion. Compassion for others and for myself. I needed to learn about gratitude and what it really looks like. I needed to learn what it feels like to really let go of anxiety. I needed to learn all of it. And of course, I haven’t learned it all yet – but I’m trying. AND rereading.

Hope you enjoy the book! Let me know what you think of it!