The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown (second half)

[flamingsword]

Because of the quoted research in the book, I have like five more books I need to read, but now during the delta variant I may need to finally get the app to check out ebooks. Longish post behind the cut.

I have a tendency to survey everyone around me. Ironically, since doing this research, surveying has become a red flag for me - it tells me I’m feeling vulnerable about making a decision.

Ouch. Because I do this, and for the same reason. I don't trust myself without a second opinion a lot of the time. I have a lot of anxiety around blame, and am used to absorbing the unclaimed blame of others around me. In some ways I am really not fair to myself.

Intuition is not a single way of knowing - it’s our ability to hold space for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we’ve developed knowledge and insight, including instinct, experience, faith, and reason.

See, I can get behind this definition, because by this metric I do have it. My ability to reason and to train my instincts through experience leads to some things that look like snap decisions being made but are really just reasoning happening quickly at the unconscious level.

”The opposite of play is not work - the opposite of play is depression.” - Dr. Stuart Brown

I don’t play very often. It it possibly one of the biggest places I could stand to improve my life, and I know it is a source of some of my disconnection from myself. I used to be really playful and experimental about a wide range of things, but somewhere along the way I got blamed for too many things that were me trying to lighten a mood, or me trying to verbally play with someone and them taking it as malicious teasing. And I just decided to cut off that part of myself instead of asking people to tolerate me and talk about their boundaries out loud.

I define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity

I thought I was doing really well at being a calm person, but this recent fight has kinda burned that down. Maybe not even the fight so much as the one-two punch of getting my anxiety triggered by someone being judgmental and then getting all of my last few abandonment triggers stomped on by getting dumped. I normally do pretty well with things that used to be triggers, I can now smell overripe pears and nail polish and it doesn’t phase me. But I’m still not sure what to do about wanting to be friends with someone who won’t ask me to explain myself or tell me when I’m fucking up until she’s ready to dump me entirely. And it’s not as fresh as it was, but it’s still in the sharp, stinging phase.

Parents and teachers scream, “Calm down!” and, “Sit still!” rather than actually modeling the behaviors they want to see. So instead of becoming practices that we want to cultivate, calm gives way to anxiety, and the idea of stillness makes us feel jumpy.

My association with stillness and calm were more resentful, because when I was a kid they were always things that were forced on me. It didn’t make me jumpy or afraid to meditate, it made me pissed off. I am mostly better than this now, after the two months where I meditated every day and then the few months after that where I did gratitude meditations every week. But before I found a type of meditation that worked for my brain, I despaired of ever making myself be able to sit through ten minutes of quiet.

So I’m glad I got out of some of this stuff, but I’m still trying to form a game plan to tackle the positive growth that I need to do. I’ve mostly gotten out of my own way with the habits that kept me in pain and self doubt and the cycle of unworthiness and hustling for belonging. But now I need to develop or redevelop some of the real estate in my head that had those negative habits on it and put in active practices towards becoming someone that I love being.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

this was all very thought-provoking. thank you for posting. and i wish you well on your self-inspection.