Braving The Wilderness

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• 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.”
• Maya Angelou. I was introduced to her work thirty-two years ago when I was studying poetry in college. I read her poem “Still I Rise” and everything shifted for me. It contained such power and beauty.
• My parents didn’t say one word. Not a single word. The silence cut into me like a knife to the heart. They were ashamed of me and for me. My dad had been captain of the football team. My mom had been head of her drill team. I was nothing. My parents, especially my father, valued being cool and fitting in above all else. I was not cool. I didn’t fit in. And now, for the first time, I didn’t belong to my family either.
• But let me tell you what it meant to me. I don’t know if this was true or it was the story I told myself in that silence, but that became the day I no longer belonged in my family—the most primal and important of all of our social groups. Had my parents consoled me or told me I was brave for trying—or, better yet and what I really wanted in that moment, had they taken my side and told me how terrible it was and how I deserved to be picked—this story wouldn’t be one that defined my life and shaped its trajectory. But it did.
• I had to go to iTunes to remember the name of the tryout song, and when I played the preview, I just started sobbing. I didn’t break down because I hadn’t made the drill team, I wept for the girl that I couldn’t comfort back then. The girl who didn’t understand what was happening or why. I wept for the parents who were so ill equipped to deal with my pain and vulnerability. Parents who just didn’t have the skills to speak up and comfort me or, at the very least, run an interception on the story of not belonging with them or to them. These are the moments that, when left unspoken and unresolved, send us into our adult lives searching desperately for belonging and settling for fitting in.
• Even in the context of suffering—poverty, violence, human rights violations—not belonging in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That’s because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit, and our sense of self-worth. It broke all three for me. And when those things break, there are only three outcomes, something I’ve borne witness to in my life and in my work: 1. You live in constant pain and seek relief by numbing it and/or inflicting it on others; 2. You deny your pain, and your denial ensures that you pass it on to those around you and down to your children; or 3. You find the courage to own the pain and develop a level of empathy and compassion for yourself and others that allows you to spot hurt in the world in a unique 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.
• As I look back, I realize I probably owe my career to not belonging. First as a child, then as a teenager, I found my primary coping mechanism for not belonging in studying people. I was a seeker of pattern and connection. I knew if I could recognize patterns in people’s behaviors and connect those patterns to what people were feeling and doing, I could find my way. I used my pattern recognition skills to anticipate what people wanted, what they thought, or what they were doing. I learned how to say the right thing or show up in the right way. I became an expert fitter-in, a chameleon. And a very lonely stranger to myself.
• Never underestimate the power of being seen—it’s exhausting to keep working against yourself when someone truly sees you and loves you. Some days his love felt like a gift. Other days I hated his guts for it.
• I’ll never forget telling a school therapist that I just didn’t think it was going to work out. Her response? “It may not. He likes you way more than you like you.”
• Through my thirties, I traded one type of self-destruction for another: I gave up partying for perfectionism. I still wrestled with being an outsider—even in my work—but what changed was my response to not seeing my number on the poster board. Rather than suffering in silence and shame, I started to talk about my fears and my hurt. I started questioning what was important to me and why. Was living in lockstep really how I wanted to spend my life? No. When I was told I couldn’t do a qualitative dissertation, I did it anyway. When they tried to convince me not to study shame, I did it anyway. When they told me I couldn’t be a professor and write books that people might actually want to read, I did it anyway.
• After dinner, as Murdoch and I were walking back to the hotel, he stopped on the corner and called to me as I kept walking, “Where are you, Brené?” When I gave him a smart-ass answer—“On the corner of Michigan and Chicago”—I knew I was feeling vulnerable. And as Murdoch proceeded to explain how “not present” I was at dinner—Polite and friendly? Yes. Present? No.—I knew right away what was happening. I looked at Murdoch and admitted, “I’m doing that thing I do when I’m afraid. I’m floating above my life, watching it and studying it, rather than living it.” Murdoch nodded. “I know. But you need to find a way to stop and bring yourself back here. This is a big deal. I don’t want you to miss it. Don’t study this moment. Be in it.”
• What do you do when you’ve spent the majority of your life moving to try to fit in, and all of a sudden Maya Angelou is singing to you and telling you not to be moved? You learn how to plant your damn feet is what you do. You bend and stretch and grow, but you commit to not moving from who you are. Or, at the very least, you start trying.
• You will always belong anywhere you show up as yourself and talk about yourself and your work in a real way.”
• Sometimes parents will get angry because I won’t prescribe antibiotics for their child. The first thing they say is, ‘Every other pediatrician does it. I’ll just go to someone else.’ It’s not easy to hear this, but I always fall back on the thought: It’s okay if I’m alone on this. That’s not what I believe is best for this child. Period.”
• ANGELOU: More and more. I mean, I belong to myself. I’m very proud of that. I am very concerned about how I look at Maya. I like Maya very much. I like the humor and courage very much. And when I find myself acting in a way that isn’t…that doesn’t please me—then I have to deal with that.
• 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.
• They want to be a part of something—to experience real connection with others—but not at the cost of their authenticity, freedom, or power.
• Reluctant to choose between being loyal to a group and being loyal to themselves, but lacking that deeper spiritual connection to shared humanity, they were far more aware of the pressure to “fit in” and conform. Connection to a larger humanity gives people more freedom to express their individuality without fear of jeopardizing belonging. This is the spirit, which now seems missing, of saying, “Yes, we are different in many ways, but under it all we’re deeply connected.”
• Charles Feltman. Feltman describes trust as “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions,” and he describes distrust as deciding that “what is important to me is not safe with this person in this situation (or any situation).”
• As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups. We all live with the results: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life. —BILL BISHOP
• Bishop’s book tells the story of how 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. He writes, “As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.”
• All I could think about then was Veronica Roth’s dystopian novel Divergent, in which people choose factions based on their personalities. The axiom was: “Faction before blood. More than family, our factions are where we belong.” Now that’s scary. But what’s even scarier is that it’s starting to edge closer to our reality than the nightmarish fiction it was conceived to be.
• He explains that as members of a social species, we don’t derive strength from our rugged individualism, but rather from our collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together. Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. He explains, “To grow to adulthood as a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it’s to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favor this outcome.”
• He explains, “Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hunger.”
• Cacioppo explains that loneliness is not just a “sad” condition—it’s a dangerous one. The brains of social species have evolved to respond to the feeling of being pushed to the social perimeter—being on the outside—by going into self-preservation mode. When we feel isolated, disconnected, and lonely, we try to protect ourselves. In that mode, we want to connect, but our brain is attempting to override connection with self-protection. That means less empathy, more defensiveness, more numbing, and less sleeping.
• Unchecked loneliness fuels continued loneliness by keeping us afraid to reach out.
• In a meta-analysis of studies on loneliness, researchers Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton found the following: Living with air pollution increases your odds of dying early by 5 percent. Living with obesity, 20 percent. Excessive drinking, 30 percent. And living with loneliness? It increases our odds of dying early by 45 percent.
• Fear of vulnerability. Fear of getting hurt. Fear of the pain of disconnection. Fear of criticism and failure. Fear of conflict. Fear of not measuring up. Fear.
• These are conversations that need to happen; this is discomfort that must be felt. Still, as much as it’s time to confront these and other issues, we have to acknowledge that our lack of tolerance for vulnerable, tough conversations is driving our self-sorting and disconnection.
• True belonging has no bunkers. We have to step out from behind the barricades of self-preservation and brave the wild.
• High lonesome can be a beautiful and powerful place if we can own our pain and share it instead of inflicting pain on others. And if we can find a way to feel hurt rather than spread hurt, we can change.
• 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
• As the larger world engages in what feels like a complete collapse of moral judgment and productive communication, the women and men I interviewed who had the strongest sense of true belonging stayed zoomed in. They didn’t ignore what was happening in the world, nor did they stop advocating for their beliefs. They did, however, commit to assessing their lives and forming their opinions of people based on their actual, in-person experiences. 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.
• What if what we experience close up is real, and what we hear on the news and from the mouths of politicians who are jockeying for power needs to be questioned? It is not easy to hate people close up.
• 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.
• When we deny ourselves the right to be angry, we deny our pain. There are a lot of coded shame messages in the rhetoric of “Why so hostile?” “Don’t get hysterical,” “I’m sensing so much anger!” and “Don’t take it so personally.” All of these responses are normally code for Your emotion or opinion is making me uncomfortable or Suck it up and stay quiet.
• We pay for hate with our lives, and that’s too big a price to pay.
• Is there tension and vulnerability in supporting both the police and the activists? Hell, yes. It’s the wilderness. But most of the criticism comes from people who are intent on forcing these false either/or dichotomies and shaming us for not hating the right people. It’s definitely messier taking a nuanced stance, but it’s also critically important to true belonging.
  • #[[Nuance]]
• “When you love a place like we love Penn [State], you fight to make it better, to own our problems and fix them. You don’t pretend that everything’s okay. That’s not loyalty or love, that’s fear.”
• “I don’t want that. Thick skin doesn’t work anymore. I want to be transparent and translucent. For that to work, I won’t own other people’s shortcomings and criticisms. I won’t put what you say about me on my load.”
• I will not be a mystery to my daughter. She will know me and I will share my stories with her—the stories of failure, shame, and accomplishment. She will know she’s not alone in that wilderness.
• Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. —HARRY G. FRANKFURT
• It’s helpful to think of lying as a defiance of the truth and bullshitting as a wholesale dismissal of the truth.
• It is crazy to me that so many of us feel we need to have fact-based opinions on everything from what’s happening in Sudan and Vietnam to the effects of climate change in the Netherlands and immigration policy in California.
• I can’t remember a time in the last year when someone asked me about an issue and I didn’t weigh in with an opinion. Even if I didn’t know enough about it to be insightful or even conversational, I would lean in to ideological debates based on what I guessed “my people” think about it. I also can’t remember a time over the past year when I asked someone about an issue and had a person reply, “I actually don’t know much about what’s happening there, please tell me about it.”
• We don’t even bother being curious anymore because somewhere, someone on “our side” has a position. In a fitting-in culture—at home, at work, or in our larger community—curiosity is seen as weakness and asking questions equates to antagonism rather than being valued as learning.
• 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. It’s like we just collectively shrug our shoulders and say, “Whatever. It’s too hard to get to the truth, so if I say it’s true, that’s good enough.”
• Normally, we use the “with me or against me” during times of significant emotional stress. Our intentions may not be to manipulate, but to force the point that we’re in a situation where neutrality is dangerous. I actually agree with this point. 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.”
• When we’re bullshitting, we aren’t interested in the truth as a shared starting point. This makes arguing slippery and it makes us more susceptible to mirroring the BS behavior, which is: The truth doesn’t matter, what I think matters. It’s helpful to keep in mind 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.”
  • Easier to say no than yes.
• In highly charged discussions, we can feel shame about not having an informed opinion and these feelings of “not enough” can lead us to bullshitting our way through a conversation. We can also believe we’re responding from real data and have no idea that there’s nothing to back up what we’re saying. Additionally, we can get so caught up in our own pain and fear that truth and fact play second fiddle to emotional pleas for understanding or agreement.
• Despite my beliefs, my family started supporting the gun lobby while many of my friends and colleagues began vilifying all gun ownership. I quickly realized that I’d have no ideological home or community on this issue. I didn’t have the language of “the wilderness” to describe how alone I felt about this. But it definitely was, and is, the wild.
• “I know that this is a hard and heartbreaking issue, but I don’t think you’re hearing me. I’m not going to participate in a debate where this issue is reduced to You either support guns or you don’t. It’s too important. If you want to have a longer conversation about it, I’m happy to do that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the same issues piss us off and scare us.”
• I felt alone in the wilderness, but it was okay. I may not have been liked, and that didn’t feel so great, but I was in my integrity.
• When all that binds us is what we believe rather than who we are, changing our mind or challenging the collective ideology is risky.
• The foundation of courage is vulnerability—the ability to navigate uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. It takes courage to open ourselves up to joy.
• All too often our so-called strength comes from fear, not love; instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open….How can we give and accept care with strong-back, soft-front compassion, moving past fear into a place of genuine tenderness? I believe it comes about when we can be truly transparent, seeing the world clearly—and letting the world see into us. —ROSHI JOAN HALIFAX
• As we were leaving I said, “I’m wiped, but I guess it’s off to the meet-and-greet.” She looked at me and said, “I’m going to my room to rest before tonight. Why don’t you do the same?” I told her that sounded great, but I felt bad saying no. I’ll never forget what she said back to me. “Tonight we will exhale and teach. Now it’s time to inhale. There is the in-breath and there is the out-breath, and it’s easy to believe that we must exhale all the time, without ever inhaling. But the inhale is absolutely essential if you want to continue to exhale.”
• In her interview with Bill Moyers, Dr. Angelou said, “I belong to myself. I am very proud of that. I am very concerned about how I look at Maya. I like Maya very much.” Our work is to get to the place where we like ourselves and are concerned when we judge ourselves too harshly or allow others to silence us. The wilderness demands this level of self-love and self-respect.
• But put one foot in front of the other enough times, stay the course long enough to actually tunnel into the wilderness, and you’ll be shocked how many people already live out there—thriving, dancing, creating, celebrating, belonging. It is not a barren wasteland. It is not unprotected territory. It is not void of human flourishing. The wilderness is where all the creatives and prophets and system-buckers and risk-takers have always lived, and it is stunningly vibrant. The walk out there is hard, but the authenticity out there is life.
  • “No man knows my heart.”
• Most of the time we approach life with an armored front for two reasons: 1) We’re not comfortable with emotions and we equate vulnerability with weakness, and/or 2) Our experiences of trauma have taught us that vulnerability is actually dangerous.
• True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.
• 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.
• Given my personal history and my work, I’ve always parented with the belief that love and belonging are the ground zero of wholehearted parenting. If they know they are loved and lovable, if they know how to love, and if they know that no matter what, they belong at home, everything else will work out. However, as they got older and peer groups became more important, it was easier than I imagined to slip back into subtly teaching them how to fit in or do whatever it takes to find a crew. My own fear set a default of “Well, what is everyone else wearing?” or “Why weren’t you invited to the sleepover—what’s wrong?” I have to stay constantly mindful to practice what I believe as a parent and not let fear take over when my kids are hurting.