You Are Your Best Thing
Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
Categories
Nonfiction, Self Help, Psychology, Memoir, Mental Health, Audiobook, Essays, Social Justice, Race, Anti Racist
Content Type
Book
Binding
Audio CD
Year
2021
Publisher
Random House Audio
Language
English
ASIN
0593451910
ISBN
0593451910
ISBN13
9780593451915
File Download
PDF | EPUB
You Are Your Best Thing Plot Summary
Introduction
Imagine sitting across from someone who looks at you with genuine eyes and tells you: "You are your best thing." In that moment, a profound truth emerges - that despite all external judgments and societal pressures, the most valuable resource you possess is yourself. This simple yet powerful affirmation forms the foundation of what vulnerability and shame resilience truly mean, especially within the context of the Black experience in America. The essays in this collection take us on a journey through the complex terrain of racial trauma, shame, and the courageous path toward healing. Each contributor shares their intimate story of confronting shame in a society that has often weaponized Blackness itself as something to be ashamed of. Through their raw, honest accounts, we witness the transformative power of vulnerability - not as weakness, but as a radical act of courage and self-reclamation. These stories invite us to understand how shame resilience becomes a pathway to liberation, how embracing our full humanity despite systems that deny it becomes an act of resistance, and ultimately, how recognizing that "you are your best thing" might be the most revolutionary stance one can take in a world that suggests otherwise.
Chapter 1: Confronting Racial Trauma: Stories of Shame and Healing
Jason Reynolds was thirteen when his grandfather's leg was amputated. Above the knee. The surgery marked the beginning of a series of losses - his grandfather's eventual death, the end of bimonthly family journeys to the South, and the unraveling of a childhood connection to his ancestral land. Through these journeys, Reynolds had come to know a different side of his grandfather - not just the city man he knew in Washington D.C., but a farmer who walked the rows, sprinkled seeds, and steered a tractor in South Carolina. Years later, when Reynolds was twenty-two, his mother underwent a potentially fatal surgery for complications related to cancer treatment. That same day, he was scheduled to sign his first book publishing contract. The young Reynolds faced an impossible choice between being with his vulnerable mother and seizing a professional opportunity that seemed like his only shot at success. "Black boys don't get this kind of shot often," he told his mother. "This is my purpose. My dream." With her blessing, he left the hospital for the signing. The shame of that decision haunted Reynolds for over a decade. When he finally discussed it with his mother years later, her response was profound: "Baby, you gotta forgive yourself." She reminded him that she had raised him to pursue his dreams, but also that she had taught him "like my daddy taught me - family first." When Reynolds tried to apologize again, she asked: "Why be ashamed of what you've atoned for?" Through his story, Reynolds illuminates how shame operates differently in Black communities, where opportunities for advancement often feel scarce and fleeting. The pressure to seize rare professional opportunities collides with deep family values, creating impossible binaries and deep internal conflict. His mother's wisdom reveals that healing from shame doesn't mean erasing past actions but recognizing growth and atonement. In acknowledging the complexity of these choices, Reynolds shows us that confronting racial trauma requires understanding both personal responsibility and the systemic forces that create these painful dilemmas in the first place.
Chapter 2: Finding Joy in Adversity: Reclaiming Black Humanity
"Our horror movie collection currently tops three hundred DVDs," begins Austin Channing Brown, introducing us to her family's peculiar relationship with terror. While horror films provide momentary, controlled fear, Brown reveals a deeper, more persistent anxiety that exists for Black Americans - what she calls "foreboding joy." This phenomenon, described by Brené Brown as the fear that joy won't last or that we're inviting disaster by feeling too happy, takes on a unique character in the Black experience. For Brown, foreboding joy isn't merely psychological but evidenced by lived reality. When her toddler son pulls the hood of his fleece jacket over his head, she's struck by his resemblance to Trayvon Martin. Her mind immediately races: "Will I lose you before you have a chance to become an adult? Will this racist country take you from me?" Unlike general anxiety about losing joy, Brown's fear is grounded in the documented pattern of racism stealing Black lives and dreams. Similarly, Brown describes how other Black women in her community have stopped walking in their neighborhoods since Ahmaud Arbery's death, worry about driving through known sundown towns, and fear letting their children play outside. These aren't irrational anxieties but responses to observable patterns of racial violence that threaten Black joy and existence. Yet Brown doesn't end her story in fear. She describes how Black communities have developed resilience through spirituality and community, often expressed in phrases like "This joy I have, the world didn't give it to me, and the world can't take it away." This isn't denial of pain but a determination that "pain cannot permanently drown out joy." Black joy persists through love, cultural connection, creativity, and resistance. In reclaiming joy amid adversity, Brown illuminates how Black Americans navigate a society structured to steal not just lives but happiness itself. This resilience isn't simply personal strength but a communal practice passed through generations - a radical insistence on humanity and joy that refuses to be diminished by systemic oppression. As Brown states, "Joy is an act of resistance," revealing how finding and protecting spaces for Black joy becomes essential to reclaiming full humanity in a dehumanizing world.
Chapter 3: Vulnerability as Strength: Breaking Generational Patterns
"I don't know a time I haven't felt guilty or ashamed," confesses Tanya Denise Fields. Her story begins in a shitty apartment in the South Bronx, where she awakens with scratches around her neck, a bruised throat, and eyes swollen from crying. Her partner had nearly killed her in front of her children. The scene represents a culmination of shame that had colored every decision in her life - shame about her dark skin, broad nose, big lips, developing body, and later her fat body with its "rolls, saggy titties, hanging belly, and stretch marks." In that police precinct, being questioned by a dismissive white cop who couldn't be bothered to look her in her "Black-ass face," Fields reached a breaking point. "What had shame gotten me?" she asked herself. "Shame doesn't course-correct or compel folks to make better choices." She realized shame was "a liar, a thief, a murderer of dreams and vision." It was an abuser, just like her partner. That night, Fields had a family meeting with her six children. They packed what they could carry, loaded up her fifteen-year-old Honda Odyssey, and drove to a homeless shelter. During the following months in transitional housing, she felt shame trying to creep back in. To fight it, she publicly disclosed her experience of intimate partner violence on social media, rejecting the expectation that successful Black women couldn't be victims and survivors. Fields realized that language matters critically in this journey. She rejected the concept of "deserving" as transactional - requiring one to perform or earn things. Instead, she embraced the idea that "joy, happiness, health, safety, love, and abundant community are inherent" human needs, not rewards for good behavior. Through West African spirituality, therapy, radical Black feminist ideology, and community support, she "labored and rebirthed" herself. Fields' story illuminates how vulnerability becomes strength when it allows us to confront and reject shame narratives imposed by systems of oppression. By embracing radical joy as her birthright rather than something to be earned, she breaks generational patterns of trauma and creates a new inheritance for her children. Her journey demonstrates that vulnerability isn't weakness but the courage to reject harmful narratives and claim one's inherent worth - a revolutionary act of self-reclamation that creates ripples of healing across generations.
Chapter 4: Unlearning Shame: The Journey to Self-Acceptance
"I do not want to be killed by a white doctor in America. I think I will be killed by a white doctor in America." With this stark declaration, Kiese Makeba Laymon introduces us to his complex relationship with vulnerability, mental health, and the medical system. Throughout his Mississippi childhood, the word "crazy" bounced around every Black space he called home - sometimes as a pejorative, sometimes as an emblem of abundance. Yet when it came to his own mental health struggles, Laymon avoided medical care, fearing doctors would treat him "like a nigger." Laymon recounts experiencing panic attacks in his classroom and finally seeking medical help. Despite dressing formally and adopting what he calls a "James Baldwin/Nina Simone accent" to appear respectable, doctors dismissed his symptoms. When tests showed concerning results, they were quickly minimized. It wasn't until Laymon searched his symptoms online that he realized he'd been having panic attacks. "I couldn't understand why the doctors looked at my tucked-in shirts, heard my fake accent, and still refused to do anything other than treat me like a nigger," he writes. This mistrust stems from earlier trauma. When Laymon was kicked out of Millsaps College for taking a library book without checking it out, the administration labeled him as having "a problem with white people" and mandated therapy before readmission. His desire to not be treated "like a nigger" at his own college was pathologized as mental illness requiring professional intervention. Refusing this mandated therapy became "the most self-loving decision I have ever made," Laymon reflects. Years later, Laymon consulted Dr. Imani Walker, who helped him understand that his experiences with "depression" and "anxiety" and "chronic fatigue" were conditions engineered by a society designed to ail Black folk. Through this realization, Laymon began writing "Ode and Apology" pieces to body parts he'd neglected, including his head - which he seldom thought of as part of his body. Laymon's narrative reveals how systemic racism distorts Black people's relationship with vulnerability and care-seeking. When vulnerability is weaponized against you - when expressing pain leads to punishment rather than compassion - protecting oneself becomes necessary survival. His journey toward self-acceptance requires recognizing that shame about mental health struggles isn't personal failure but the product of systems designed to deny Black humanity. In unlearning this shame, Laymon reclaims his right to care for all parts of himself, including his mind - a profound act of resistance against a society that treats Black pain as either invisible or dangerous.
Chapter 5: Building Resilience: Community, Connection and Love
Prentis Hemphill grew up in a household that could "as easily erupt in laughter and hugs and teasing as it could in violence." As a child from a Black Southern family in Texas with Louisiana roots, they learned that family business stayed within the family home - not only as a matter of decorum but as a rule about safety. This safety, Hemphill explains, was "contingent on you being less yourself," and therefore became about shame. Shame became a central organizing force in Hemphill's life. When sent to a predominantly white school across town, they experienced profound isolation. The rare occasion when they invited a friend over became traumatic when a cockroach flew across the room despite Hemphill's desperate efforts to eliminate every insect beforehand. "This is why you don't let people over, this is why you don't let them in," they learned, internalizing the message that vulnerability meant exposure and rejection. As Hemphill grew older, their queerness and gender expression "refused to iron out into something more respectable," further complicating their sense of belonging. When their family discovered their queerness, they felt Hemphill had "chosen [their] identity over them" and had "forced them to carry shame for [their] unruliness." For a period, Hemphill was expelled from home, taking with them "a mountain of shame." The turning point came through Hemphill's work in healing justice, first as a therapist and later as the Healing Justice director for Black Lives Matter Global Network. Through somatic practice, they discovered a contraction in their chest - a constant tension protecting them from revealing themselves. The fear that "I wouldn't know myself if I let this tension go" reflected how deeply shame had become embedded in their identity. Hemphill's journey reveals that healing requires addressing both personal and collective trauma. "Healing Black trauma is one of the most worthwhile endeavors we all can undertake," they write, explaining that it requires "the remaking of all social relations and an examination of our structures." Individual healing cannot be separated from collective liberation. Through building communities of trust and resilience, Hemphill demonstrates how vulnerability becomes the foundation for connection and healing. Their story shows that resilience isn't about individual strength but about creating systems of mutual care and support that allow people to be fully human. By transforming shame into connection, Hemphill illustrates how vulnerability - when met with compassion rather than judgment - becomes the pathway to both personal healing and collective liberation.
Chapter 6: Identity and Belonging: Navigating Multiple Worlds
"My name is Luvvie. Last name: Ajayi Jones. The Jones part is new." With this simple introduction, Luvvie Ajayi Jones begins her exploration of names, identity, and belonging across multiple worlds. Born Ifeoluwa Ajayi in Nigeria, her journey through different names parallels her journey through different identities and phases of life. When her family moved to the United States when she was nine, young Ife immediately sensed her difference. On her first day of school in Chicago, faced with introducing herself to a classroom of strangers, she instinctively protected her given name - Ifeoluwa (Ee-feh-oh-loo-wah) - knowing it would be a "tongue twister" and "too peculiar" for her new environment. Instead, she introduced herself as "Lovette," a nickname her aunt sometimes used. "Having teachers look at my first name on their roll call list, then frown or say, 'Whew, okay, this one is hard' affirmed my decision," Luvvie writes. She began arriving early on the first day of every school year to ask teachers to cross out Ifeoluwa and replace it with Lovette. At home, she remained Ife, "eating her jollof rice and pounded yam with egusi stew," while at school, she sometimes brought sandwiches "when I got tired of the kids asking, 'What's that?'" This pattern continued until college, where she found community among others with similar stories. When she started blogging after graduation, she adopted "Luvvie" as her professional name. Later, when her blog began winning awards and she was being interviewed, she officially introduced herself as "Luvvie Ajayi," dropping Lovette entirely. "The woman who can say 'I am a writer!' with an exclamation point, not a question mark... She was here and ready to stand in it," Luvvie explains. After marrying, she wrestled with whether to add her husband's surname professionally. When seeing two versions of her book cover - one with Luvvie Ajayi, one with Luvvie Ajayi Jones - she chose the latter because it felt complete, reflecting her current self while maintaining connection to her roots through Ajayi. "I couldn't drop Ajayi, though. Across the years, as my name has shifted, that has remained steady. That has anchored me." Ajayi Jones's narrative illuminates the complex negotiations of identity that immigrants and people of color navigate daily. Her story demonstrates how names become vessels for both protection and expression, how the choice to reveal or conceal parts of oneself reflects broader strategies for belonging while maintaining authenticity. Through each name change, she finds ways to honor both her heritage and her evolution, showing that identity isn't fixed but a dynamic conversation between past and present, between self-protection and self-expansion, between the worlds we come from and the worlds we create.
Chapter 7: Transforming Pain: From Survival to Liberation
In December 2012, a month after her mother's death, Sonya Renee Taylor sat in her friend Sean's kitchen, contemplating the complex grief of losing her mother to alcoholism. For years, Taylor had been "screwing Kwasi to abandon myself, like my mother had abandoned me." Now, she was turning to Sean - "methadone instead of heroin" - seeking physical connection to numb her overwhelming pain. The following days revealed Taylor's desperate search for anything to fill the emptiness left by her mother's death. After visiting Sean, she found herself driving in circles around Washington D.C., looking for Kwasi despite his having stopped answering her calls. "I performed this ritual of circle and investigation, identification and elimination no fewer than ten times," she writes, before finally breaking down, screaming "FUUUUCKKKKKK YOUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!" to "an entity that was both me and Kwasi and God and no one." In this moment of crisis, Taylor's therapist, Dr. Byron, called. Unlike previous therapists, Dr. Byron had earned Taylor's trust through consistent support. When Taylor admitted she had been stalking Kwasi, Dr. Byron gently asked, "What is it that you want from Kwasi?" Taylor realized she wanted "him to do the impossible. I wanted him to fill the hole." As she broke down sobbing, Dr. Byron simply said, "I know, dear. I know. You miss your mommy." For fifteen minutes, Taylor howled and cursed "a world devoid of Terry," her mother. Then, suddenly, laughter replaced her tears as she recognized the absurdity of her behavior. "I must sound full-blown crazy," she told Dr. Byron. "I have really been lurking around D.C. like a stalker tonight." Dr. Byron responded with wisdom: "No, you are not, Sonya. You are simply in this new moment. Grief was here. Now, in this moment, there is laughter. You can welcome both." This revelation marked a turning point in Taylor's grief journey. She realized she was "learning how to be with both. How to be with all of me—the whole." As she drove home that night, she noticed her gas gauge and thought, "No worries. I would make it home—my gas tank was full." Taylor's story illuminates the transformative potential of authentic vulnerability when met with compassionate witness. Her journey from destructive coping mechanisms to emotional integration demonstrates how pain, when acknowledged rather than avoided, can become a pathway to liberation. The metaphor of her gas tank being full represents her realization that she contained within herself the resources needed for healing - that she could hold grief and joy, pain and laughter, emptiness and fullness simultaneously. Through this acceptance of her whole self, Taylor shows us that true liberation comes not from escaping pain but from transforming our relationship to it, allowing it to become part of our wholeness rather than defining us.
Summary
The essays in this collection reveal a profound truth: vulnerability, when embraced rather than avoided, becomes the pathway to authentic liberation and wholehearted living. Through stories of confronting racial trauma, reclaiming joy amid adversity, breaking generational patterns, unlearning shame, building resilience through community, navigating multiple identities, and transforming pain, these writers demonstrate that true strength isn't found in armor but in the courage to be seen in one's full humanity. What emerges from these powerful narratives is a roadmap for healing that centers Black humanity while acknowledging systemic realities. First, recognize that shame is often a tool of oppression rather than a reflection of personal failure. Second, build communities of trust where vulnerability can be safely practiced and witnessed. Finally, embrace the paradox that accepting our wounds rather than hiding them is what allows us to reclaim our inherent wholeness. As Tarana Burke writes in her letter to her future self, "We tell the world they don't have to be anything but themselves to be worthy, and then we work until the stress is about to kill us to prove our worth." The liberation these essays point toward is the freedom to live by our own wisdom - to truly believe that you are, indeed, your best thing.
Best Quote
“Dangerous is the woman who can give herself what she used to seek from others. Limitless is the woman who dares to name herself. The way I see it, shame cannot oppress what acceptance has already claimed for sovereignty.” ― Tarana Burke, You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
Review Summary
Strengths: The review highlights the book's profound impact on the reader's soul and its importance, suggesting it is a must-own rather than just a library checkout. The essays are described as vivid, moving, and honest, with the reader expressing a desire to explore more works by the contributing authors. The book's exploration of Black experiences with "shame resilience" is noted as a significant and necessary perspective. Weaknesses: Not explicitly mentioned. Overall Sentiment: Enthusiastic Key Takeaway: The book is a powerful collection of essays that deeply resonate with the reader, offering an essential exploration of Black humanity and experiences with shame resilience, particularly in the context of recent social justice movements. The reader finds the book so valuable that they wish to own multiple copies for both preservation and active engagement.
About Author
Brené Brown
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You Are Your Best Thing
by Brené Brown
Table of Contents
You Are Your Best Thing
By Brené Brown
