Entering the Arena

Daring Greatly

How's this for a conversation stopper: "I'm reading the most fascinating book about shame and vulnerability."

Head cocked to the side, eyes narrowed, skepticism emanates from her eyeballs.  "Hmm.  Really."

"Yeah.  It's by Brené Brown.  She's a shame and vulnerability researcher.  It is amazing.  Absolutely transformative."

"Huh.  That's, uh, interesting."

"More than interesting.  Mind-blowing.  Life-changing."

Silence.

"Huh."

Subject change.  

And so it goes.  This is the reaction that people have when I tell them that I am reading a fascinating book written by a shame and vulnerability researcher.  Brené Brown's book Daring Greatly:  How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead does just what it promises:  it transforms.  It also can seriously freak you out in the best possible way.

My friend Sandy and I read this together.  (We started to call her our new friend Brené.  Then our BFF Brené.  Then just NeNe for short, because, you know, we are now tight).

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Here is our adorable and brilliant new friend.

Thank goodness I had Sandy as my intrepid reading partner, because this is a humdinger of a book that needs some serious discussion and processing.  We both found that we had to read it slowly, and over time, in order to emotionally integrate all that we were learning and discovering.  And sometimes, it would hit so close to home that anxiety would creep in.  So we would put it aside. Think a bit.  Talk some.  Breathe.  And resume.

Brown, I mean NeNe, begins with this quote by Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,

because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. . . "  (emphasis mine)

She argues that the notion of stepping into the arena is the essence of vulnerability, and that despite what society teaches us, vulnerability is not weakness.  Vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage.  Being fully engaged, exposed, daring greatly, means taking emotional risks.  Some bigs ones.  Like Showing Up.  Being Seen.  And, to quote Brené, "getting your ass kicked on occasion." (Metaphorically speaking, of course.  But she's Texan, so maybe not.)

Do yourself a favor.  Before you read on, go see NeNe for yourself.

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Wow.  It's amazing that something so seemingly simple can be so transformative.

When it comes down to it, I think that Daring Greatly is a research-based, non-fiction, secular book about God's amazing grace.  It's about showing yourself grace and giving others grace.  Understanding brokenness (vulnerability) and admitting shame helps allow people to receive and accept grace for themselves, and enables them to show grace and empathy to others.  To me, this is true wholehearted living.  To me, this is also the promise of the Christian life.

The following are the truths I have gleaned from Daring Greatly. . . .

We live in a culture that is fueled by scarcity. . . the syndrome of "never enough."  Never enough time, money, sleep, status, beauty, power, influence, talent. . . take your pick.  This is a culture that allows shame to run rampant.

Shame is the swampland of the soul.  We all experience shame, but no one wants to discuss it.  Shame is the feeling that we are not _______ enough.  Fill in your own blank.  Your first instinct may be to say you don't experience shame, but I would recommend thinking hard about that.  You likely are not a sociopath, and sociopaths are the only people who truly don't experience shame.  So. . . admit it.  You experience shame.  Now, that wasn't so bad, was it?

Shame and guilt are not the same thing.   Shame is saying you are bad.  Guilt says that you did something bad.  Big difference.  We all have heaped both guilt and shame on others and ourselves.  Guilt can cause positive behavioral change.  Shame cannot.

While shame is positively correlated with addiction, aggression, suicide, anxiety, and depression, shame cannot exist in the presence of belonging and connection.  Empathy is the antidote to shame.

We create armor to protect us from shame and vulnerability.  My particular armor are perfectionism and what Jason calls "borrowing trouble".  NeNe calls this foreboding joy. I am way too proficient in foreboding joy.  I have a postdoctoral degree in foreboding joy.   Declaring a personal jihad on foreboding joy may be the struggle of my life.

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People who are have the most effective shame resilience, from a research perspective, are those who are living life with their whole hearts.  A wholehearted life.  Living a wholehearted life starts with the idea that we are worthy. . . worthy of connection, love, and belonging.  And the wholehearted allow themselves and others to be vulnerable. . . especially and most importantly their children.  

And finally. . . .Vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity, innovation, and change.  You say you don't "do" vulnerability?  Well, then,  no creativity.  No innovation.  No change.  No kidding.

In January, I found myself in a funk fueled by postpartum hormones, sleep deprivation, a return to work, and the demands of parenting.  I decided something needed to change.  I needed to change.  So I chose a word for the year.

Transformation.

And for me, transformation comes always comes through reading, writing, and prayer.  So I started writing about what I read, and this little blog was born.  But I showed no one.  I told my shame voices to simmer down and forced myself to be vulnerable and keep writing.  After a long while, showed it to my husband.  And then to Susan.  And then to Sandy.   And then I wrote a review of Carry On, Warrior, and sent it to the author.  And Glennon read it and responded.  Favorably, even!  And I got emboldened and showed my little Facebook world that I was writing.   Little did I know that I was building my own arena.  I find that this arena makes me feel vulnerable, but it also makes me feel creative, innovative, and alive.  I like it here.

 Show up and be seen.  Get yourself in the arena. . . I'll meet you there.

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Whose house is it, anyway?

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First things first.  I never ever ever ever ever ever ever wanted to build a house.  EVER.  EVER.  EVER. When I was a kid,  my parents built a house.  They sold this idea to my sister and me as an exciting opportunity to pick everything out ourselves, which initially sounded fun.  But little did I know that picking everything out meant PICKING EVERYTHING OUT.  I remember our weekends became mind-numbing marathons of frequenting lumber yards and lighting showrooms and bathroom fixture warehouses and carpet stores and kitchen cabinet suppliers.  And that was just to get IDEAS.  When it was time to make decisions, we would go back to the aforementioned places again.  And then we would go again.  And again.  And again. Bonus of this?  My sister and I knew the locations of all of the chairs, bathrooms, and candy vending machines in all of these exotic locales.  And at the end of the process, I had a sweet window seat in my bedroom.  But I also learned that building a house?   NOT FOR ME. Fast forward ten-ish years.   I marry a man with a gift for design whose lifelong dream is to build a house on a vast expanse of land.  Sorry, sucker.  Before we marry, I state unequivocally that I will not build a house with him. Building a house is a deal breaker.  That dream of his will have to DIE.  He smiled and married me anyway.

Fast forward yet again.  I am great with child.  The fourth child.  We are looking at houses to accommodate this passel of children and cannot find anything that works and does not break the bank.  My dear husband starts calculating and reveals to me, with what I imagine is fear and trembling, that for the cost of buying something that we don't want, we could actually build what we DO want.

Hmmm.  I shot him a lethal glance and said nothing.  But I started to think.

The baby came.  We went on vacation.  I discovered Houzz.com.  I played around with creating idea books.  I realized that a lot of the picking and choosing and deciding legwork could happen online.  No endless weekends at cabinet stores. Hmmm.

Shortly thereafter came a shocking change of heart.

I wanted to build a house.

I wanted to build a house for this crazy group of boys that live with me.  And frankly, no one was more amazed by this turn of events than me.  I think those postpartum hormones made me temporarily lose my mind.

And so, we are building a house on a beautiful farm.  Rather, I should say, we are ten months into the infuriating process of preparing and planning and sifting through bureaucratic minefields that are the prerequisite to building a house.  Despite these headaches, I am calm.  Mostly because I haven't had to pick anything out yet.

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About a month into this process, I determined that I needed to learn a bit about architecture and design, so I read A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.  This is a fascinating book about the science and design surrounding spaces in which humans instinctively feel comfortable.  I shared this with my thoughtful, creative architect (who looks so much like the archetypal architect that we have dubbed him  Smooth Jazz).  He looked at me longand hard and said,

"No.  No Pattern Language.  House.  You need to read House."

So I did. Tracy Kidder's House is a fascinating work of literary non-fiction that chronicles the story of a finance-conscious couple building their first home, an architect driven to make his mark on the residential scene and determined that his creative vision will be realized, and a group of four carpenters who are more devoted to craftsmanship and structural integrity than the profitability of their company.  Interesting bedfellows, these three.

Kidder's detailed, nuanced description of the  tension between these  stakeholders in this most personal of projects was fascinating.  Each party had its own agenda, whether it be aesthetics, quality of materials, time, or the bottom line.   They all consistently asked themselves and each other what the house wanted in relationship to their often divergent agendas.  The house became The House, an entity unto itself, with an integrity that needed to be preserved.  It was almost as if it had an opinion that needed to be considered.  Kidder has a unique gift of transforming a topic that seems banal into a philosophical consideration of high art and psychological analyses, that are woven together like a gripping novel.  House reaffirms in me anew that people's stories, no matter how pedestrian they may seem at the outset, are powerful.  Their perspectives matter.

Kidder hangs the stories of the architect, the homeowner, and the carpenters on this essential question:  "Whose house is it?"  Who rightfully owns the House?  Does money trump all?  Or craftsmanship?  Or design? Is the true owner the architect, who carefully listened to the needs of the homebuyers, who designed a space in which to live which is in harmony with the surrounding land, and had carefully planned everything from rooflines to balustrades?  Or is it the carpenters, who made the roof joists "tight," irrespective of the fact that NO ONE will ever see them, and hid their initials in out of the way places?  Or is it the homebuyer, who shepherded the process, who put up the money, but had very little skin in the game of design and creation?  WHOSE HOUSE IS IT?

The answer, surely, is not any one of these folks.  It is all of them.  Together.   Collaborative creation of anything brings forth these types of questions, I suppose.  It brings out our most vulnerable selves and emphasizes who we are and what we value.  As the book concluded, I was left feeling wistful, since only one of these heavily invested parties actually gets to reside in their creation. So in our  case. . . who will own our house?  Smooth Jazz?  Our fabulous contractor?  Us?

The real answer is all of the above and none of the above.

Because the true owner of our house will be The Bank.  The bank will own our house for a long long long long long long time.