Braving the Wilderness

Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown was loaned to me by a staff member at my school. I intended to politely thumb through it and ended up reading the whole thing. It's a fast-paced nonfiction text that I suppose would fall under the "self-help" genre, but it's probably a bit more than that. The "wilderness" in the title is the fraught cultural environment that we all inhabit during these social-media-driven times. It's hard not to like Brown. She's a big-hearted Texan researcher with a complicated background, and she authentically  desires human kinship and understanding. Her book reads like a TED Talk, and sometimes New-Age feel goodery, but I liked the message.

The reason the staff member loaned me Braving the Wilderness was that one of the chapters ("People Are Hard to Hate Close Up. Move In.") reminded her of a graduation speech I gave a few years ago. In my speech, I discussed how true dialogue only happens face-to-face, never on social media. Brown agrees. As I scroll through my Bookface feed, I am constantly bombarded by second-person, straw-man, if-then attacks. (A recent meme berated "me" for not supporting queer people of color, and thus promoting rainbow capitalism and police brutality.) This hostility is one of the great problems of our times, and if Brené Brown wants to use her growing cultural influence to promote peace and harmony, then more power to her.