The Gifts of Imperfection

Courage, compassion, and connection improve with practice. Following the humiliating experience of hustling to impress hostile spectators while giving a talk at a large elementary school’s PTO meeting only to find herself met with scorn, Brown felt mired in shame. However, she knew that shame thrives on secrecy and shared her story with her younger sister Ashley. Ashley turned out to be the perfect confidante because she did not respond in any of the ways that exacerbates shame. She did not judge Brown, lavish sympathy on her, seek to blame someone else, or minimize her pain by either dismissing the situation or trying to override it with her own personal humiliation story. Even more crucially, she did not try to fix the problem. While these are all common responses to an expression of shame, Brown states that none of them are rooted in true compassion, a quality that Ashley demonstrated by acknowledging that the situation must have felt awful and admitting that she once found herself in a similar predicament. The result was that Brown “felt totally exposed and completely loved and accepted at the same time” (17).