At Texas Monthly, Sarah Hepola profiles researcher and author Brené Brown, whose popularity has grown as people struggle to find connection cooped up inside for weeks on end, and writes about how the virus has demonstrated the myriad ways in which we as humans are vulnerable.
I wanted to know why her message was resounding with so many. There was, of course, the obvious answer: the quarantine heightened the demand for her wisdom on human connection. But I sensed she was speaking to something deeper, to unseen and powerful forces coursing beneath the surface.
The pandemic, for most of us, has been catastrophic and mundane at once. We’ve tracked the escalating death counts, but our days are an accumulation of microsadnesses: the eighth grade graduation canceled, the morning coffee run halted, the long-awaited vacation delayed. Brown had noticed how many were hesitant to grieve the small things because others had it so much worse.Kessler cautioned against comparing our losses. He could win many a grief contest, but what would be the point? “The worst loss is always yours,” he said.
Brown has called the coronavirus a lesson in collective vulnerability. Mother Nature has laid us bare. We’ve been quarantined in our homes with our broken habits for weeks on end, and it has revealed our lives and our country and our planet to be more troubled than we’d imagined. The illusion of safety and happiness had been easier once. But that was just a story we were telling ourselves. The virus has narrative control now.
Maybe that’s why so many people are turning to Brown. Her career has been an attempt to crack the code on vulnerability, but the code has proven uncrackable. Instead, all her data points in the same direction—that we must embrace the struggle. Yes, the struggle is scary and ugly and painful. But the good news is that the struggle might be where we find one another again, see ourselves in the eyes of others, start building the kinds of lives that don’t require hiding. The definition of spirituality that emerged from Brown’s research is that we are inextricably linked by something greater than us. As she says, “Some of us call it God. Some of us call it the human spirit. And some of us call it fishing.”
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