52. Braving The Wilderness - Brene Brown (📱)

Reading Notes:

Dr. Angelou said: 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.

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.

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.

There were more than twenty speakers at that big leadership conference, and you were the highest-rated speaker. In your jeans and clogs. Given that, how do you figure that anyone belongs there more than you? You will always belong anywhere you show up as yourself and talk about yourself and your work in a real way.” 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.

We feel love and we know pain. We feel hope and we know struggle. We see beauty and we survive trauma.