Present Over Perfect

Present Over Perfect Plot Summary

Introduction

The afternoon sun streamed through the hotel window in Dallas as I stared at the ceiling, utterly exhausted. In that moment of clarity, I whispered to myself, "If anyone else wants to live this life I've created, they're more than welcome to try. But I'm done. I need a new way to live." At thirty-six, with a husband of eleven years and two young boys, I had constructed a life that looked successful on the outside but was crushing me on the inside. I was finishing a book, traveling for speaking engagements, and maintaining a pace that left me physically ill and emotionally depleted. The muscles in my neck felt like stone, dark circles shadowed my eyes, and my once-open heart had retreated deep inside my chest for protection. This is the story of my winding, messy journey from exhaustion to peace, from isolation to connection, from hustling to sacred presence. It's a journey that began at a lake, where the rhythms of nature taught me to listen to the longings of my soul again. Through silent retreats, spiritual direction, and painful self-examination, I discovered that what I really wanted wasn't more achievement or approval, but the very things I had been sacrificing all along: connection, meaning, peace. This transformation wasn't about better time management or having cleaners come more often. It was about love, worth, God, and discovering what it means to be grounded in something more substantial than accomplishment. I invite you to join me on this journey of remaking life from the inside out, because it has been the greatest, most challenging, and most rewarding sea-change of my adult life.

Chapter 1: The Breaking Point: When Productivity Becomes a Prison

I've always been the bearer of what my husband calls "a Catholic imagination." This might seem strange since I didn't grow up Catholic, but my earliest loves—and my greatest loves to this day—were stories, meals, and water. In many ways, I'm not an "in my head" person at all. I'm a blood and guts and body person, a dirt and berries and trees person. I experience life through tactile sensations, not abstract ideas floating above. For most of my life, I pulled a little red wagon filled with responsibilities. As I went along, I filled it so full that I could hardly keep pulling. That red wagon was my life, and the weight of pulling it was destroying me. I was frequently sick. I slept poorly and not enough. I got migraines and vertigo. My neck and shoulders felt like rock instead of tissue. The circles under my eyes looked like bruises. My ability to taste and connect and feel deeply had been badly compromised. Yet I kept adding more to that wagon, believing somehow that if I pulled hard enough, I would find what I was looking for. I remember standing on my porch one evening, watching a storm roll in. The sky had turned yellow, and we monitored the weather hour by hour as thunderstorms and tornados passed just south of us. My family was sleeping hard those nights, all of us feverish, tossing and turning. The days started too early, with all of us stumbling toward coffee and breakfast. And then as wild and chaotic as the morning was, just as swiftly, they were gone, and the house was silent, and I became a writer again: coffee, candle, laptop. What I was beginning to realize was that the frantic pace wasn't just outside of me—it was inside me too. The roar of pressure and pushing and relentless motion had always been there. I'd always been outrunning something, from my earliest memories, escaping into something—a story or a city or a meal or an experience. The journey of these years has been toward quiet—toward creating quiet around me, but more than that, toward creating quiet within me, which is much more difficult, and much more profound.

Chapter 2: Dethroning the Idols of Success and Approval

Busyness is an illness of the spirit, as Eugene Peterson once said. I come from a long line of hard workers—sheet metal workers, farmers, people for whom work is an estimable thing, something to respect and be grateful for. I got my first summer job when I was eleven, riding my bike two miles to a windsurfer shop down by the marina, where I decorated window displays and rearranged stickers and sunglasses while the owner and his twenty-something friends slept off hangovers. Throughout high school, I took AP classes, volunteered at church, and worked at the Gap and a local deli. In college, I worked in the library and at a summer camp. Work has been a through line in my life, one that taught me about structure, discipline, and responsibility. But at some point, good clean work became something else: an impossible standard to meet, a frantic way of living, a practice of ignoring my body and spirit to prove myself as the hardest of hard workers. One Saturday at a pool party with my oldest friends, we had the same conversation we always have: we should get together more. It's just so busy, everyone's so busy. Kids, school, work is insane. Piano and hockey. In-laws and baby showers and moving houses. And then someone buttoned up that conversation the same way we always do: "But what are you going to do?" That question haunted me on the drive home. Who's the boss, if not us? Who's forcing us to live this way? Years ago, Aaron and I were talking with a pastor of a fast-growing church. He was telling the story of how the church had exploded, how they couldn't stop the growth, how it was utterly out of their control. A more seasoned pastor pushed him gently: "You've built this, and it's okay to say that. You've intentionally and strategically built a very large church. It's okay to say that." The young pastor kept protesting. "We had nothing to do with it," he insisted. "Well, not nothing," said the older pastor. "You kept putting up more chairs." That conversation happened more than a decade ago, but I realized that I had been putting up more and more chairs in my own life. If I work in such a way that I don't have enough energy for my marriage, I need to take down some chairs. If I say yes to so many work things that my kids only get to see tired mommy, I need to take down some chairs. We have more authority, and therefore, more responsibility than we think. We decide where the time goes.

Chapter 3: The Practice of Presence: Learning to Be Still

I've always had what I call crazy brain—a mind that runs and spins, that remembers obscure details and whirs in the middle of the night. My mind is quick and clicking, which was a gift in a classroom, but it also runs ahead of me quite often, catastrophizing, over-analyzing, spinning out. As Anne Lamott says, my mind is a bad neighborhood. During a family trip to Hawaii, we heard that the snorkeling at Tunnels Beach was extraordinary. Henry and Aaron put on their masks and snorkels and went exploring first, while Mac and I sat at the edge of the water, letting the gentle waves knock us down. Henry came running back. "Mom, it's amazing! You have to come with me!" And so while Aaron played with Mac, my darling eight-year-old boy took me by the hand and we swam out through the tunnels, fins propelling us silently and smoothly. I knew, even while it was happening, that this was one of those moments that a mother keeps with her forever. I told myself to remember absolutely every single thing about it, to stay in it and soak up every second. And at the very same time, I felt a dagger of such aggressive hatred for myself that I couldn't concentrate. All I could think about was how deeply I hated myself. I was holding my son's hand as he led me through the water, snorkeling at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. And I was choking on my self-loathing. That day at Tunnels Beach became a turning point. I realized that my ongoing chaos, my lifelong preference for busyness and ear-splitting volume, was a way to drown out that inner vein of self-hatred. I began to peer into the darkness, that plunging sense of inadequacy. It's always been there. Now I practice each morning by picturing a heart—like a red cartoon heart. And I train my mind on the reality of God's unconditional love for me. When my mind wanders, I gently pull it back to the heart. Over time, that deep pool of unworthiness has receded. I used to be most anxious when I was alone and still—essentially, I had a hollow core, and that emptiness became deafening in the stillness. Now I find that the stillness is where I feel safe and grounded.

Chapter 4: Reclaiming Connection: Relationships Over Achievements

I had a conversation with a fascinating man on a ferry. He told me a story that started with love and creativity and good intentions. He was passionate about traveling and speaking, loved spreading his message to people all over the world, and the heart of it was love: loving people wherever he met them, giving them the best of his energy and attentiveness. But then he told me the next part of the story, which is that he became so deeply skilled at making people feel loved in an instant, and along the way he lost the ability to demonstrate actual, real love to the woman and the children who were waiting at home. Making someone feel loved in an instant is so much easier than showing someone your love over and over, day in and day out. He had become a master at quick, intense, emotional connection, and with each experience of it, he found himself less able to connect in the daily, trudging, one-after-the-other kinds of ways. He is alone now, not living with the woman who was his wife, not living with his children. That quick love cost him enduring love, and it wasn't worth it. This is a common story, isn't it? The pastor loves to solve other people's problems, but doesn't come home with enough energy for his family's everyday problems. The writer becomes addicted to blog comments and likes, while her family longs for her to close the laptop and look them in the eye. There was a moment several months ago when Aaron was frustrated with me about something, and the kids were wild and grumpy. And these are the words I heard coming out of my own mouth: "Everybody else likes me better than you three do." That's what you call a wake-up call. That's a change-your-life, start-right-now moment. Because I was on the path that man on the ferry was on. It's easy to be liked by strangers. It's very hard to be loved and connected to the people in your home when you're always bringing them your most exhausted self. It seems to me that one of the great hazards is quick love, which is actually charm. Being truly known and seen and taken care of by a small tribe is better than being adored by strangers who think they know you. We know that's true. But many of us, functionally, have gotten that math wrong in one season or another.

Chapter 5: The Courage to Disappoint: Finding Your 'No'

The word that changed everything for me, of course, is no. I'd been saying yes and yes and yes, indiscriminately, haphazardly, resentfully for years. And I realized all at once that I'd spent all my yeses, and in order to find peace and health in my life, I needed to learn to say no. People love it when you say yes, and they get used to it—they start to figure out who the people are who will always say yes, always come through, always make it happen. If you are one of these people, it does cause a little freakout when you begin saying no. People are not generally down with this right away. That's okay. You may know that yes is an important word for me. I have a yes sweatshirt, yes earrings, a yes tote bag, even a yes tattoo. Yes matters to me on a deep level—saying a broad and brave yes to this beautiful world, to love and challenge and hard laughter and dancing and trying and failing. Yes is totally my jam. But you can't have yes without no. If you're not careful with your yeses, you start to say no to some very important things without even realizing it. In my rampant yes-yes-yes-ing, I said no, without intending to, to rest, to peace, to groundedness, to listening, to deep and slow connection. Some people are very uncomfortable with the idea of disappointing anyone. They think that if you are kind, you'll never disappoint anyone. They think that if you try hard enough, if you manage your time well enough, if you're selfless enough, prayerful enough, godly enough, you'll never disappoint anyone. I fear these people are headed for a rude awakening. I know this, because I was one of those people. This is what I know for sure: along the way you will disappoint someone. You will not meet someone's needs or expectations. You will not be able to fulfill their request. What you need along the way: a sense of God's deep, unconditional love, and a strong sense of your own purpose. Without those two, you'll need from people what is only God's to give, and you'll give up on your larger purpose in order to fulfill smaller purposes or other people's purposes.

Chapter 6: From Proving to Being: Embracing Your Essential Self

When you decide, finally, to stop running on the fuel of anxiety, desire to prove, fear, shame, deep inadequacy—when you decide to walk away from that fuel for a while, there's nothing but confusion and silence. You're on the side of the road, empty tank, no idea what will propel you forward. It's disorienting, freeing, terrifying. For a while, you just sit, contentedly, and contentment is the most foreign concept you know. But you learn it, shocking as it is, day by day, hour by hour. You sit in your own skin, being just your own plain self. And it's okay. And it's changing everything. Many years ago, at breakfast with a mentor, I articulated, as best I could at that time, my greatest dream for my life. She was a great question-asker, and she kept pushing me for greater and greater specificity. And then what? What would that look like? Exactly how? This is what I told her: I want to marry someone who feels like a partner, a true peer. I want to have little boys, and live in a house with a blue room where I write, and when I look out the window in the backyard, my boys will be playing soccer. When I'm done writing, I'll go down to the kitchen to stir something on the stove—a huge pot of red sauce, maybe, for the people who will gather around our table later—and while I stir, I'll talk on the phone with one of the pastors at our church. I didn't move forward on this plan at all. I kept working at our church and then another, in an obsessive, workaholic way, letting work shadow over absolutely everything. Then I did become a writer, but the writing life quickly became the traveling-and-speaking life, almost accidentally—the obvious next step to everyone but me. On paper, it looked like I was living that very dream from that conversation all those years ago. Unless the paper was my travel schedule. I wasn't standing at my stove very often, or hosting people around our table. I wasn't in town long enough to make a meaningful contribution at my church. As I've stripped things out of my life—constant traveling, overworking, compulsive activity—I'm finding that my senses are attuned so much more deeply than they've been in years. Music is reaching me with a depth I can't remember since my adolescence, and poetry and nature, too. What I didn't know is that this midlife season would feel so much like recovering an essential self, not like discovering a new one. Hold close to your essential self. Get to know it, the way you get to know everything in the world about someone you're in love with, the way you know your child, their every freckle and preference and which cry means what. This self—this fragile and strong, creative, flip-flop and ponytail self—she's been here all along, but I left her behind, almost lost her when I started to believe that constant motion would keep me safe.

Chapter 7: Living in Time: Creating Sacred Rhythms

One of the reasons I believe in God is because I can see so clearly his loving and hilarious hand, guiding us to the unlikeliest of places to find the healing we've been searching for all along. Why am I a writer, of all possible things? I hate silence, stillness, introspection. When's lunch? My lifelong love affair with stories and words has brought me to stillness, proving once again that God has both a sense of humor and a sense of outrageous grace. I've always stayed up later than I should, wringing the last moments out of the day, pouring the last glass of wine from the bottle, reading one more chapter, having just one more conversation. One year in my twenties, one of my New Year's resolutions was to stop sleeping in my clothes. I had a terrible habit of just falling into bed, jeans and all, and I was determined to stop that, because it seemed highly adolescent. Years ago, Aaron and I were talking about work and time and calling, hoping to hold each one of them in their appropriate place, hoping to be honest about which ones matter more than the others. Being good at something feels great. Playing ninja turtles with two little boys for hours on end is sometimes less great. It's so easy to hop on a plane or say yes to one more meeting or project, to get that little buzz of being good at something, or the pleasure bump of making someone happy, or whatever it is that drives you. I'm also learning to leave sort of a sacred margin at the beginning and end of the day, to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier, letting the transitions between sleeping and waking and the reverse be a little gentler. Like so many things, I'm bringing the lake way of living into the rest of the year. At home, I never think to begin and end my days outside, but at the lake, it seems so natural to walk straight out to the porch with my coffee in hand, and also so fitting to end the day there, watching the blue sky fade to pink, watching the last beachgoers straggle back to their cars. When I begin the day in quiet on the porch, it connects me to God through prayer, and it connects me to God through his creation. There's something wonderful and healthy and healing about being outside, something my own life is crying out for. Being outside reminds me of life and God and growth, and the energy and motion of nature, all things I forget so easily when I spend my life too much indoors, too much in a world of laptops and laundry and lists.

Summary

This journey from hustle to peace, from proving to being, is about discovering a new way to live. It's about leaving behind the identity of someone who can handle it all, who never disappoints, who is defined by what they accomplish. It's about recovering the essential self—that fragile and strong, creative, whimsical person who has been there all along, waiting to be rediscovered beneath the layers of expectation and exhaustion. What I've learned is that the love we're looking for isn't found in achievement or approval. It's found in the silence, in the groundedness, in the sacred risky act of being exactly who you are—nothing more, nothing less. In that still, holy space, the love you've been frantically hunting for all along blooms within your ribs. And you realize that it has been there all along, like a whisper, the very Spirit of God himself. The good news is that there is a path back to your essential self, back to presence over perfection. It isn't easy, and it isn't linear, but it is possible. By peeling away the layers of expectation, by learning to say no, by practicing silence and presence, by tending to your body and your soul, you can find your way back to a life that feels whole, connected, and deeply peaceful. It begins with the courage to admit what isn't working, the willingness to disappoint when necessary, and the faith to believe that you are already loved, exactly as you are. This is the journey that awaits—not toward some distant dream of perfection, but toward the present moment, where life in all its messy beauty unfolds.

About Author

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Brené Brown

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