The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

10th Anniversary Note-Introduction Summary

Chapters 1-3 Summary

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-15

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Guidepost 4: Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark”

Gratitude and joy are major paired traits that Brown has come across in her research. Everyone in her research pool who was joyful also actively practiced gratitude by speaking or writing about what they were grateful for.

While Brown’s subjects defined happiness as attached to external circumstances, joy is related to spirit and gratitude. Joy can even elicit fear and vulnerability because fully giving in to it means acknowledging that it will not last. We might also superstitiously fear that feeling gratitude and joy might invite their inverse to take place. However, Brown maintains that “the dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It’s our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows” (109). Indeed, if we do not allow ourselves to be grateful and joyful, we are missing out on two vital ingredients that will help us get through darkness when it inevitably comes.

Brown states that another myth that gets in the way of joy is the fear of scarcity, or believing that we or our lives are not enough. In contrast, a belief in sufficiency and knowing that we are enough are the boons of an ordinary life. According to Brown, a daily practice of active gratitude for ordinary blessings is essential to wholehearted living.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Guidepost 5: Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith: Letting Go of the Need for Certainty”

Brown finds that a need for certainty halts the intuitive voice. Intuition can be defined as a “rapid-fire, unconscious associating process” where the brain makes an observation and matches it with existing memories and experiences (115). Our intuition may tell us exactly what we need to know, or it may tell us that we need more time and information to make the right decision.

According to Brown, we may seek certainty by fielding out our decisions to others or making snap judgments. In both instances, we are courting reassurance by ignoring our need for time to consider in favor of shortening the period of uncertainty. Rather than constituting a single way of knowing, intuition is an “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” (117).

In Brown’s estimation, those who have faith are comfortable with uncertainty and the fact that they may be in the dark about some things. They can participate in their lives wholeheartedly because they can believe without seeing.

Chapter 9 Summary: “Guidepost 6: Cultivating Creativity: Letting Go of Comparison”

Brown recalls her early childhood growing up in a quirky stucco house in New Orleans. Her mother sewed, cooked, and made art, and Brown was always eager to take part in these creative endeavors. The family moved to a generic suburb outside of Houston when Brown was roughly nine, and their priorities shifted; her father increasingly focused on his career, mass-produced goods replaced the homemade items her mother once made, and Brown became caught up in comparing herself to her new classmates.

Brown thinks that comparison and conformity are intertwined and considers both antithetical to creativity. She defines comparison as “that stifling combination of fitting in and being better than” (122). We want to outdo members of our group by their own metrics. This is an exhausting endeavor that leaves us little time for important things like creativity and being authentic.

While the world divides people into creatives and noncreatives, Brown merely sees people who use their creativity and those who do not. Creativity helps us cultivate meaning, which is an important way of making sense of our experience. It also expresses our originality and “helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared” (126).

Chapters 7-9 Analysis

Chapters 7-9 address our discomfort with uncertainty as an obstacle to wholehearted living. Brown argues that many of us try to banish uncertainty much as we do shame, in the same mistaken belief that we can control our experience. Brown believes that to live wholeheartedly, we need to allow ourselves to feel the full spectrum of human emotion, ranging from the deepest joy to the most searing pain. In fact, she suggests that these emotions are often intertwined rather than discrete, meaning that we cannot avoid the “bad” ones without avoiding the good as well. The experience of joy can be equally vulnerable to that of pain, as many people grow fearful around this stroke of good fortune, knowing that it cannot last. They seek to put parameters around joy, not fully allowing themselves to feel and be transformed by it. This is an attempt to minimize loss when the good feeling inevitably goes away. However, not accepting joy means that we do not have rich memories of it bolstering us during difficult times. While such loss-averse people would rather live in a world where they can be assured of positive outcomes before they make themselves vulnerable, living wholeheartedly requires “believing without seeing” and therefore risking disappointment to pursue a life of the highest fulfilment (119). This continues to develop Brown’s argument about the gifts and challenges of living vulnerably.

Themes of Reconciling Wholehearted Living with the American Dream and The Challenge of Being Oneself in a Conformist World intertwine in Brown’s discussion of embracing the unpredictability of creative living as opposed to the tried-and-tested metric of keeping up with our peers. She vividly describes how her life became spiritually poorer when her family traded the small pink stucco house in New Orleans and pursuit of craft-making for the larger residence in Texas that was identical to that of the neighbors. The identikit home was accompanied by identikit aspirations, as Brown’s parents sought to match and then outdo their peers in a competition dictated by the values of middle-class society. Through this anecdote, Brown argues that as we replace our own dreams with society’s we may feel more in control, but we fundamentally lose sight of ourselves and the pursuits that truly bring us to life. By contrast, engaging in creativity opens us to more of those fleeting moments of joy that make us vulnerable as well as helps us entertain the faith and mystery that connect us with the wholeness of our spiritual being. The more we do this, the more we are immune to the conformist, materialist messages of society and the media.

It is important to Brown’s thesis that she return to the theme of tension between social expectation and personal fulfillment. She shows how this tension underlies the difficulty many individuals experience in attempting to live wholeheartedly. Brown’s attention to these difficulties shows the reader that she has a realistic understanding of how countercultural her ideals are. At the same time, she renders her argument more accessible by stressing that creativity is not a quality one either has or doesn’t: Like much of what Brown discusses, it is an ongoing and at times difficult choice.