Aspiring to Become Hootless

Recently, I have been wanting a particular thing to happen in my life. And I mean REALLY wanting it. My mindfulness practice continuously teaches me that grasping after desires creates suffering, whereas trusting events to unfold in their own way, at their own pace, generates ease. When we can relax into our life, as it is, we feel more peace and contentment. But this practice of letting go of hoped-for results is no easy task, particularly in the outcomes-obsessed present-day United States. I therefore am consistently on the lookout for tips about approaching life with open palms (i.e. not trying to control everything!). Happily, an acupuncturist  just introduced me to a new concept: becoming hootless.

Hale Dwoskin describes hootlessness as follows:

Hootlessness is when you do not give a hoot whether you achieve a particular goal or not. Contrary to popular belief, you do not attain your goals when you desire them strongly enough. In fact, if you honestly examine your past experiences, you'll discover that most of the goals you've achieved are the ones that you let go of wanting--even if not by choice...When you allow yourself to release to the point where you are hootless about getting your goal, two things may happen. Either you'll find that you abandon the goal altogether and feel lighter because of it, or you'll be much more likely to achieve the goal than you were when you wanted it...The more hootless you feel, the freer you are to enjoy whatever you have in this moment without the usual fear of loss or disappointment.

What hootlessness amounts to in my book is a deep trust in our ability to handle whatever arises in our lives. In short, fear does not run the show, wholeheartedness does. This does not mean NOT having goals. It means relating to our goals in ways that allow us to be present to our lives, the people in it, and our environment. Hootlessness also allows us to approach life more flexibly instead of with a ton of rigid expectations, rules, and regulations. As Dwoskin points out, our wanting mind is often seeking approval, control, security, or separation. When we are able to name what we want and release our hopes and fears about how we are going to get there, space appears and we experience more freedom.

I appreciate Dwoskin's attention to language when we set goals. In his words,

'I allow myself to...,' 'I can...,' or, 'I open myself to...' are good ways to begin a goal in courageousness. 'I have...' is a good way to begin a goal in acceptance. 'I am...' is a good way to begin a goal in peace. These ways of starting a goal statement enable the mind to use its creativity to generate possibilities of how the goal can happen.

Here are a few of his courage-based goal statements that I find particularly useful for clients and myself:

• * I allow myself to feel like I have all the time in the world. (This one challenges the scarcity model dominating U.S. culture.)
• * I allow myself to have a loving relationship that supports me in my freedom and aliveness. (This one frames the setting of boundaries with others as an act of self-care.)
• * I allow myself to love and accept (or forgive myself), no matter what. (Hooray for self-compassion!)
• * I allow myself to be at peace, relaxed in the knowing that all is well and everything is unfolding as it's supposed to be. (Enough said.)

When I follow Dwoskin's advice by being honest with myself about past experiences, I see that desperation and attachment to outcomes were not a central feature of realizing the goals that have been deeply meaningful in my life. For example, during my second year of graduate school, I grew increasingly uncertain about pursuing a doctorate degree, largely because my department did not feel like a good fit for me and my renegade goals. I spoke with my advisor about whether or not to again apply for a fellowship I had unsuccessfully sought the previous year. It would pay for the rest of my schooling and allow me to focus more intently on my studies. She asked if I would choose to stay in the program if I received the fellowship, and I was quick to say "Yes." However, I already had a plan B in place and no longer felt I needed the fellowship to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish vocationally. Lo and behold, I approached the application process much more calmly than I had the year before and had the presence of mind to do a little research about the professors who selected the award recipients so that I better knew my audience. I felt like the essay I submitted authentically represented my academic vision and let go of the outcome. Needless to say, I got the fellowship and ultimately completed the program and my dissertation in ways that honored who I was as well as my commitments to social justice and arts-based research.

In contrast, when I decided to leave academia to pursue becoming a therapist, I did not initially have a job. Increasingly desperate to land work that would pay my bills, I accepted an offer for a position that had a good salary but that was in an organization with which I did not share several core values. Afraid of ongoing unemployment and its financial consequences, I pulled myself out of another job search in which I was a finalist to accept the offer. That second organization had felt like home during the interview process. Less than a year after I took the first job, I was fired. The job was a terrible fit for me, and I had taken several vocal stands against one of the projects the organization was pursuing on ethical grounds. Being fired was a humiliating experience, and, years later, I am still healing from the shame of it.

I do not mean to be polyannaish about hootlessness. Sometimes we've got to do what we've got to do to get by, even if several red flags are smacking us in the face while we do so. But we oftentimes give in to our deepest fears when our wanting mind takes over. We then go about our lives in ways that create a lot of unnecessary suffering. That suffering can be a great teacher, to be sure. Being fired from that job was what my supervisor would call "another fucking growth opportunity" that helped me realize a depth of clarity about my path that I might not have attained without the experience. Going forward, however, I can approach my wants with more awareness about the ties that bind me and, to the best of my ability, release them.

Aspiring to become hootless is akin to what Pema Chodron deems experiencing hopelessness: "giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death." Embracing the uncertainty of life and inevitability of death while pursuing our goals is damn hard. But the benefits of doing so certainly outweigh the costs. The late John O'Donohue captures the fruits of becoming hootless with his beautiful poetry:

May I have the courage today

To live the life that I would love,

To postpone my dream no longer

But do at last what I came here for

And waste my heart on fear no more

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,

Clear in work,

Gracious in awareness,

Courageous in thought,

Generous in love.

Going Home

Describing Bowenian family systems theory, James Bitter wrote,

Bowen taught individuals or couples about triangulation* and then expected them to go back to their family-of-origin to extricate themselves emotionally from these triangular patterns. The purpose of going home again is not to confront family members, or even to establish peace and harmony, but to encourage clients to come to know others in their family as they are.

I recently returned to my childhood town for my twentieth high school reunion. Although this event did not directly involve my family-of-origin, it did involve a kind of "going home again." While I looked forward to discovering the shapes of my classmates' lives, I also entered into that space with a fair amount of trepidation. After all, high school had been a challenging time for me despite my efforts to put on a happy face much of the time. As I performed the role of a high-achieving, engaged student from a "stable family," most of my peers had no idea that I begged my parents to let me leave our huge, competitive, suburban high school or that I struggled with the significant anxiety and depression that accompany perfectionism. I worried that I would face limited and limiting perceptions about who I am, thus feeling like a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of the person I consider myself to have become during the past twenty years. I imagine I was not alone in carrying this fear into the event.

How grateful I was, then, to encounter warm hugs, smiles, and heaps of curiosity about where we each had been during the last two decades. I learned of meandering career pathways, children born and children lost, and relationships that came together and fell apart. For the most part, we weren't there to prove something to each other but, rather, to reconnect with a significant part of our life history and those who contributed to it.

I have learned the hard way that trying to reject our experience is a recipe for suffering. We derive peace and contentment from developing a coherent life story that includes its many chapters, not just the ones we like best or that feel comfortable. As May Benatar eloquently stated,

So many of us have accepted, wholesale, someone else's version of our lives. If you have been told forever that your childhood was idyllic, you might be tempted to go along and not validate some of your own memories, or even your weak suspicions that things were not always perfect...It is truly amazing how much fog, depression, confusion and anxiety begins to lift when the story one narrates starts to be one's own. It needn't be a pretty story or even a wholly accurate story -- just one's own.

The people I encountered at my twenty-year high school reunion reminded me that being the author of our own stories directly and positively correlates with our well-being. I like to joke that I genuinely took back my own narrative in a parking lot a few years back when my dad asked, "You always wanted to be a [MD] doctor, right?" I responded, "No, Dad. I always wanted to be a writer, and I AM a doctor [of the PhD kind]." I needed years to know myself as I am so that I could assume roles I freely chose, such as writer, therapist, and recovering perfectionist instead of professor, striver, and stressball. That work allowed me to enter into my high school reunion speaking as the author of my own story and so feeling less scared than I otherwise would of my peers' projections of me. To the best of my ability, I listened to others' narratives about their own becoming, without assumptions or judgments obstructing my hearing. I am thankful for feeling heard in just this way by so many people that night.

My classmates also reinforced my sense that our ability to trust our experience as it unfolds is essential to feeling freedom and joy. Letting go of limiting beliefs (e.g., my childhood was idyllic) and roles (e.g., the good girl and the high achiever) that we learned from people and contexts outside of ourselves clears the path for such trust to take root. In the poetic words of Kaveri Patel:

Someone is Dying

That someone is me.

Not a 6 month to one year prognosis from a terminal illness, but a letting go of all I have ever known.

I used to believe that fear would save me. Worry just enough, and maybe even sprinkle just a little extra anxiety to convince myself I can control future events.

I know nothing. Except for this moment. Beginner’s Mind, my mind is like an empty page. The words cannot be written, the colors cannot

be painted until the moment arrives.

And when it does, I will know who to be, what to say, what to do. I am on the right path. I wish to let go of all my preconceived notions of what will happen. The only thing I wish to hold onto is trust in this practice.

Good bye old mind. I do not hate you. I do not wish for you to die sooner than you must. You brought me here. I will collect ashes from your pyre, let them scatter with the wind and float on the river.

You will join the earth, as I am born again.

* For those unfamiliar with triangulation and curious about what it is, Bitter did a great job summarizing Bowen's theory: "Bowen (1976) notes that anxiety can easily develop within intimate relationships. Under stressful situations, two people may recruit a third person into the relationship to reduce the anxiety and gain stability. This is called triangulation. Although triangulation may lessen the emotional tension between the two people, the underlying conflict is not addressed and, in the long run, the situation worsens."

Living from the Inside Out (aka Healing Self-Doubt)

Lately I have been paying attention to how much I quote other authors on this blog. I could attribute this behavior to my academic training, during which we learned both to avoid plagiarism and to honor our forebears and contemporaries by citing their work. I do like to give credit where credit is due, but I would be leaving out a large chunk of the story if I ended it there. A fuller picture of my quotation devotion involves self-doubt. My own healing has sprung from acknowledging and investigating, with tenderness and patience, a tendency (a compulsion, really) to live from the outside in. From early childhood to the present, I have taken in countless messages, from multiple individuals and contexts, that the external world decides the value of my being. These external missives have infiltrated a lot of inner space and, after enough time, have started to feel like my own voice. The unsolicited advice and commentary include statements like,

"You can do better. I'm disappointed with your performance."

"Don't look, dress, or talk that way. What will other people think?"

"Your way of thinking doesn't make any sense. There's no room for it here."

"Don't get too big for your britches!" (Old school, I know, but I love the saying.)

"If you would just follow our rules, your life would be easier."

I am going to venture a guess--without quoting a published author, mind you--that I am not alone in having doubted my ability to look inward for validation, insight, and clarity. The problem with living from the outside in is that we leave our sense of well-being to whichever way the wind is blowing, thereby creating opportunities for that wind to knock us right off our feet. We give up our power to nourish ourselves and determine our own sense of accomplishment and happiness.

Searching my outer landscape for answers has become such an automatic, unconscious habit that unlearning it has required disciplined practice and, more importantly, kindness. Although I now have internal and external resources to interrupt the taking in of messages that are not helpful to me, I did not start out that way. So when I think of the four year old who learned that defeating her peers in musical chairs won her a delicious individual-sized cake, I do not want to beat her upside the head for taking away from that experience the following lessons: the quality of her performance before an outside audience determined her worth, and there was simply not enough cake for everyone to have some. I do want to tell her that who she is matters more than what she does and that definitions of success can include more than winning prizes and approval from the people in charge. I also want to relay to her that despite the scarcity model all around her, she is sufficient as she is and can encourage others to believe in their own sufficiency, too.

Things get a little more dicey when I look back on an older self, but compassion remains more helpful to realizing an aspiration of living from the inside out than criticism, disappointment, or blame. In the realm of my quoteaholism, for example, I can choose to listen inwardly and find that below the shame I feel about my ongoing urge to prove I know enough to publish written words lies piles of self-doubt. Intimately studying their contours, I come to understand that I did not emerge from the womb this way. I learned to master self-doubt as I focused my attention on the workings of the external world and tried to belong to it, with little access to outside voices reinforcing a message about the intrinsic value we all share. Taking in this bigger picture, I can recommit to the aspiration to remember others' and my own inherent preciousness. I can then practice going inward for answers, having decided not to reject my own experience, and seek counsel from others who share the intention to honor everyone's dignity, including our own. Slowly by slowly, I can become less reliant on external "experts" as I carve a life's path, trusting my body's insights, the ability to pause, and learned skillfulness as guides. Replacing old beliefs with new ones, I can determine that the words sought from within are worthy of sharing with the outside world. We are interconnected after all, so the authenticity of the words turns out to matter more than the source.

On the relationship between gratitude and joy

In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown introduced the concept of foreboding joy:

In a culture of deep scarcity--of never feeling safe, certain, and sure enough--joy can feel like a setup...We're always waiting for the other shoe to drop...Some of us...scramble to the bleakest, worst-case scenario when joy rears its vulnerable head, while others never even see joy, preferring to stay in an unmoving state of perpetual disappointment...Both of these ends of the continuum tell the same story: Softening into the joyful moments of our lives requires vulnerability...We're trying to beat vulnerability to the punch. We don't want to be blindsided by hurt. We don't want to be caught off-guard, so we literally practice being devastated or never move from self-elected disappointment....When we spend our  lives (knowingly or unknowingly) pushing away vulnerability, we can't hold space open for the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure of joy.

Alas, we once again have come up against the reality that our controlling self, which is trying its hardest to protect us, prevents us from experiencing joy more fully. In the case of foreboding joy, Brown offers a lovely solution: gratitude. In her words:

For those welcoming the experience, the shudder of vulnerability that accompanies joy is an invitation to practice gratitude, to acknowledge how truly grateful we are for the person, the beauty, the connection, or simply the moment before us...Yes, softening into joy is uncomfortable. Yes, it's scary. Yes, it's vulnerable. But every time we allow ourselves to lean into joy and give in to those moments, we build resilience and we cultivate hope. The joy becomes part of who we are, and when bad things happen--and they do happen--we are stronger.

A brief video appearing on Upworthy powerfully shows the human experience of increasing happiness via gratitude. I highly recommend taking the time to watch this 7-minute video since words cannot do justice to the sight and sound of the "experiment" featured in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHv6vTKD6lg

That said, one story in Daring Greatly brings to life this connection between joy and gratitude:

A man in his early sixties told me, "I used to think the best way to go through life was to expect the worst. That way, if it happened, you were prepared, and if it didn't happen, you were pleasantly surprised. Then I was in a car accident and my wife was killed. Needless to say, expecting the worst didn't prepare me well at all. And worse, I still grieve for all of those wonderful moments we shared and that I didn't fully enjoy. My commitment to her is to fully enjoy every moment now. I just wish she was here, now that I know how to do that."

Another powerful way into both recognizing the inherent vulnerability of being human and feeling gratitude for our lives is a Hawaiian healing practice called ho'oponopono, which I learned from Tara Brach. Although seemingly simple, this practice invites us to believe some thoughts we may very well resist. More specifically, it asks us to acknowledge and show compassion toward our pain and fear. It also asks us to view ourselves as worthy of being cherished. The practice involves saying to ourselves the following phrases:

I'm sorry.

I love you.

Thank you.

When I work with clients, I recommend saying these words even when we do not yet believe them because they begin to rewire the brain's neural pathways. In other words, we begin to interrupt the scarcity and fear driving foreboding joy with the compassion, love, and gratitude that feed sympathetic joy. For those of us who have deep circuits of negativity and fear, creating alternative pathways can be a slow, long process. The good news is that our frustration about unlearning the core beliefs that do not serve us well (e.g., "I am undeserving"; "I am inadequate"; "I am a terrible person") provides yet another opportunity to practice ho'oponopono! Compassion, dignity, and gratitude are within us and so accessible whenever we have the presence to turn toward them. Moreover, turning toward them strengthens the aspiration and actuality of healing ourselves.

The Possibilities Engendered by Opening and Softening

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

Once upon a time, a very wise woman said to me, "The primary goal of open systems is to understand. Closed systems, on the other hand, aim to protect." These words profoundly changed my life. As usual, I'm starting from the end of the story and need to back up.

For starters, what are open and closed systems? I like Ludwig von Bertalanffy's portrayal of an open system as a system that permits interactions between its internal parts and the surrounding environment. Ultimately, this exchange allows the system's components, and so the larger system itself, to be transformed. In contrast, closed systems establish and maintain isolation from their environments. Because "no material enters or leaves it," a closed system is easier to predict and control. Importantly, von Bertalanffy concludes, "Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components." Every living organism is essentially an open system.

Perhaps you see where I'm going here. In my line of work, the distinction between open and closed systems seems to capture a lot of what is ailing clients and the spaces in which we live and work. Given that we human beings are open systems, things tend to go awry when we block interactions with each other and the environment, such as when we do not allow external resources to come to our aid or cut off our connection with others.

When I meet someone and discover how hard she works to keep most everything locked inside, or encounter a family system and learn of its many secrets, or inquire into organizational practices and find out that transparency is virtually non-existent and decision-making lies in the province of a select few, my closed system alert goes off. Usually a bit more digging reveals that these closed systems are trying very hard to protect themselves from perceived invaders, and fear is driving the show.

Unfortunately, the achieved safety of closed systems is more often than not a mirage, created from stories of enemies, scarcity, and powerlessness that may feel real but are not actually true. What is more, a natural effect of closing a system that aspires to be open is that it hardens into a fragile, shriveled cast of its original self and severs its connections with the surrounding environment, including the living beings residing there.

The words opening this entry changed my life because I had recently awakened to the idea that love is synonymous with understanding. When love is about listening with an awake heart and embodying the present moment, we can perceive others as they are, rather than as projections of who we want or think them to be. Such understanding is not possible when we seek to isolate ourselves or throw on layers of armor in the service of protection. To borrow from Thich Nhat Hanh, "When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace, and love."

Acceptance, joy, peace, and love. Most people I know want to experience more of these in their lives. I also imagine that most people do not associate these states of being with feeling under siege, diving behind a barrier for cover, or withdrawing into turtle-like shells. Softening and opening to what is actually happening are actions that keep us vital and able to sustain nurturing relationships, not only with others but also ourselves. They also are scary as hell if we have devoted a great deal of energy and time to thickening our shields and sharpening our weapons. So we often need to give ourselves permission to start slowly and keep practicing these courageous acts with patience and kindness. At least I did and still do.

Please do not mistake me as saying that all dangers are a figment of our imagination. Living in an unsafe environment for a prolonged period of time seriously undermines our systems' ability to function and thrive. Moreover, our fight, flight, and freeze responses to aversive environmental stimuli are natural and help us to survive when we are in actual danger.

What I am arguing is that we often could stand to pause when we feel fear or discomfort. If we realize we are confronting false alarms and external forces beyond our control, we could soothe the "inner iguana" living in the ancient part of our brain so that we could return to the present moment and reinhabit it, with awareness and kindness. As Rick Hanson wrote,

Keep helping your body feel less alarmed...continually softening and opening the body, breathing fully and letting go, sensing strength and resolve inside. Alarms may clang, but your awareness and intentions are much larger--like the sky dwarfing clouds. In effect, alarms and fears are held in a space of fearlessness. You see this zig-zaggy, up-and-down world clearly--and you are at peace with it. Try to return to this open-hearted fearlessness again and again throughout your day.

Softening and opening in the face of fear amount to honoring the open systems we are and strengthening them (contrary to the popular idea that softening means weakening). As we soften and open, we stay connected and interact with the world in ways that promote our growth and well-being. We also deepen our understanding of this world and those in it, thereby enlarging the pathway to acceptance, joy, peace, and love.

Charles Bukowski gets the final word with his poem "Bluebird":

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you. there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? you want to screw up the works? you want to blow my book sales in Europe? there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

Stop shoulding all over yourself!

A favorite moment in a women's support group of which I was a part involved one of the members imploring another, "Stop shoulding all over yourself!" Those "shoulds" sure do like to creep around, crawling through the openings of our conscious and unconscious minds and oftentimes spilling right out of our mouths. And they come in slightly masked forms to do so. Sometimes they sound like, "I have to..." or, "I need to..." or, "I'm supposed to..." One of the most harmful ones I have heard sounds something like, "I should be different than I am."

Lately, I have been imagining those shoulds as cords of belief that became attached to us along the paths of our lives. Perhaps they came from our caregivers or further back in the ancestral chain, such as our great great great grandfather. Or maybe they became attached to us during interactions with our peers or teachers at school, in the middle of a religious sermon, or after watching a movie.

The cords themselves are not a problem, but how we relate to them sure can be. They can trip us, entangle us, choke us. In so doing, they keep us from realizing an internal spaciousness that allows for greater peace, joy, and freedom. If we let them. And there is the rub. I like to ask others and myself, "Is it possible to turn this 'I should' into 'I want to...' or 'I choose to...'?" That inquiry oftentimes helps to clarify what expectations are at play so that I can more freely decide how to live the daily moments of my life and wake up from the limited and limiting belief that a "right" and "wrong" pathway exists.

Importantly, I do not wheel and deal in a lot of the "choice" talk dominating the scene these days. When choice is attached to the idea of "free markets" and based on a model of scarcity--in which there are clear winners and losers--fear and shame often result, as do greater inequities between the haves and have-nots. I like Lynne Twist's depiction of scarcity as "the great lie":

We spend most of the hours and days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of...Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack...This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.*

How many of us spend our days living inside the story, "This ______ is supposed to be better than it is!?" Major inequities exist and warrant our close attention and action, yes. What I am suggesting is that bringing a sense of curiosity and wonder to our thoughts about what is supposed to be different allows us to perceive the nuances of situations--how many factors are at play and how many of those factors are impermanent and beyond our control. When we can distinguish what is real (our beliefs and feelings about a situation) from what is true (the situation's many moving parts), we can start to let go of the "shoulds" that are dragging us around and jump more fully into this moment and the next one, even when those moments are messy, hard, and without easy remedies. This life, after all, is made up of 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. We cannot get rid of the inevitable pain of life, but we can choose to more fully experience the present moment. Whereas those pesky shoulds reinforce a sense of separation, leaping into now helps to maintain our sense of connection with others, the world around us, and ourselves.

At the women's support group mentioned above, the facilitators shared Isabel Bauche's poem "I Choose" as an alternative to "I Should":

I Choose... to live by choice, not by chance; to make changes, not excuses; to be motivated, not manipulated; to be useful, not used; to excel, not compete. I choose self-esteem, not self-pity; I choose to listen to my inner voice, not the random opinions of others.

We also handed out Pamla Ashlay-McPherson's commentary on this poem. I particularly like her interpretation of "I choose to be motivated, not manipulated":

Yes, it is easier to allow someone to lead you around in life. To tell you what to do, to say and be. At times the path of least resistance is the one where someone else forges the way through and all you have to do is follow. How many people have followed their great leaders into death because they allowed themselves to be manipulated into believing the leader's truth. They never took the time, energy or even interest in learning their own truth. People who walk in their own truth are motivated by it. Those who do not are manipulated by the truth of others.

I wonder how much creative energy would be freed up if more of us stopped shoulding all over ourselves and comparing our situations to others'. What if, instead, we recognized, "Everyone is flawed and strange; most people [including ourselves!] are valiant, too"?**

* I borrowed this quote from pp. 25-26 of Brene Brown's Daring Greatly. ** This quote comes from p. 18 of Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree.