Confession. I am not a Brenè Brown devotee. I cringe when I hear her name and didn’t fully understand why until today.

So many people, including Oprah, adore her. If Oprah likes her I should be more open to the experience, right? Turns out I have my own thoughts, perspectives, experiences and a clinical license to support my intuition.

Yesterday I listened to twenty minutes of her Super Soul interview. I’ve read parts of her books and squirmed through her Ted-talks, finally realizing my aversion: we have different definitions of the words Fear, Brave, Survival, Courage and Vulnerability.

This is life. None of us get out alive. The struggle is real. Our struggles are just different. Bravery and vulnerability look very different for anyone who is not a white, cis gendered, able bodied, heteronormative, privileged American person.

Part of our long-standing divisions are likely the result of our inability to see ourselves and each other. I see you. And your pain. But I wonder, can you see us, our struggles and our strength? I didn’t see my own strengths until now because all I’d ever done was compare myself to you and attempt to fit myself into the mold your ancestors established. The same mold we endorse and perpetuate every time we fail to step outside and question it. I’m questioning it. You’re not qualified to speak for me. It doesn’t mean we can’t look for common ground; we could probably learn from each other. Our fears and strengths are opposite sides of the same coin. About time we rewrote the script.

Heads or Tails

The voices of authority on subjects like Fear, Bravery, Resilience, Vulnerability, Confidence are not voices the majority of the population can relate to and yet we’re subject to considering them as our experts. We willingly join their fan or book clubs as part of playing nice, wanting to belong, to reconnect as a primal function of healing from trauma, believing they must know something we don’t; they’re right, good, best. We’re dumb, helpless, lazy, wrong because we aren’t them. They bare all the markings of culturally dominant success. I still don’t own a chair. The resilience of the masses remains historically invisible in the grand shadow of the ruling class. The inherent strength of the exploited masses wasn’t considered valuable until socially sanctioned experts grabbed hold of the word resilience and figured out how to profit from it. I refuse to buy their t-shirts, tote bags and mugs on the principles of self-respect.

Taking advice from Brenè and people like her make me feel like I’m betraying my own wisdom.~

5 thoughts on “#bebrave”

    • Thanks for understanding. I recently read a book by Dr. Tressie Cottom called Thick, so good! She talks about voices of authority and her experiences in trying to gain credibility as a professional expert as a black female writer, sociologist and academic. There are so many points of view waiting in the shadows of a singular light. Which is a bummer because we know the Light is infinite. There’s room for everyone.

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  2. Excellent reflection. Yes, you’re right, the voices who are heard aren’t representative because the sorts of people who get a platform generally are only drawn from a narrow proportion of the population – and usually white, male, middle class is the most overrepresented point of view out there.

    Just thinking how the same sort of thing also happens in Australia in Indigenous affairs. They’re always making white, middle class, mostly male power groups to “help” the Indigenous solve their problems. They’re not letting the Indigenous have their own group to do that – well, I mean they’re not financing those groups much and they have the back seat compared to the “expert” committees. I get why you’re riled, and you know what, I’m riled too, This is such a common thing, everywhere.

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    • And once we’re given the space and freedom to speak it can take a minute to reflect on what we actually want to say. Learning to reconnect with our own thoughts and feelings after repressing them for so long takes time.
      And then more time still for our perspectives to be heard and effect change. But it’s all worth it.

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