Courage: The Gifts of Imperfection

Brene Brown's 'The Gifts of Imperfection' is a book about courage, and I keep coming back to it. The recommendations it makes line up with so much of what I've picked up along the way: through treatment, through therapy, through hospital stays, from a whole cast of doctors. Even my dermatologist steered me toward reading like this once, after he found out I was dealing with depression (I never told him the actual diagnosis).

There were stretches, especially early in treatment, when I'd walk out of a session or an appointment and go straight to buy a book, because something in it had made me feel like a person who was actually alive. These days I can mostly hold onto the idea that I'm not meant to be measured against other people. When that comparison creeps in, I recognize it for the nonsense it is.

A lot of the books and handouts I've collected, in groups across different towns and cities, in IOP (Intensive Outpatient Program), are the kind people might dismiss with a wave: 'oh, that's for monks and spiritual types.' If I'd never been diagnosed with a mental health condition, I probably would have glanced at Brene's book, thought something like 'that's nice, I basically know who I am, and I'll get around to embracing that eventually, maybe not today, but sometime before I die,' and then set it back on the shelf and moved on.

One line of hers rearranged something in my head. She writes that courage originally meant 'to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.' The meaning drifted over the centuries, and now we treat courage as a synonym for heroism. Heroes matter, she says, and we need them. But somewhere along the way we lost the thread: that speaking plainly and openly about who we are, what we feel, and what we've lived through (the good and the bad both) is itself the definition of courage.

Her version lands differently than the picture that first comes to mind. When someone says courage, I see a firefighter, or a figure like Martin Luther King Jr., people who act on behalf of others whether or not they're frightened, whether or not they get hurt. They aren't performing for an audience or chasing approval. That's the raw kind of courage.

Here's where it connects. Anyone fighting a mental health condition, or even making the attempt to fight it, carries an enormous amount of that same courage. People knock us down for it constantly. You catch it in the media, on social media, from friends, from family, in all the ordinary corners of a day. Letting other people's opinions about mental health settle into your own head is the easy path. Standing up for yourself instead takes something.

There's a strange accusation built into all of it: a person with a mental health condition, or anyone wrestling with something society hasn't labeled 'normal,' gets told they aren't who they're supposed to be. But we're the ones living inside these bodies. We know who we are. For the most part we know what we need, how to look after ourselves, how we have to think to stay okay. Getting to know your own illness through trial and error, learning to live with it one day at a time, that process is courage. Taking care of yourself takes courage, and taking care of yourself means actually paying attention to you. Most people never manage it.

Accepting a mental health condition is a way of defying the norm, and that defiance takes nerve. Brown describes courage as stepping out in public naked (not literally, though that would certainly qualify), exposing yourself, becoming vulnerable. A mental health condition drags you into that exposure over and over, a thousand times over.

You can spot courage in small places every day. Asking for help when you're embarrassed to ask. Telling someone you like them. Raising your hand to speak up in a class. As Brown puts it: 'Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver. And our world could stand to be a little kinder and braver.'