Rising Strong

And, and again, one of the kinda hidden upsides with this is we can actually maybe start developing a language to talk about these things when a lot of couples won't touch this topic with a 10-foot pole unless they have to.

Brene Brown's very first book, uh, before she kinda hit the mainstream with Gifts of Imperfection and Rising Strong: Atlas of the Heart, her very first book, I love the title, um, was, you know, I Thought It Was Just Me But It's Not.

And so even today, um, I think just the questions that we all ask, you know, when we're feeling something we don't know that we should or we don't know where we are, we feel lost and stuck in recovery, it is, it's advantageous to, to say, you know, "Is this just me? What is happening?" Um, yeah.

It's, I don't, I don't still know how to be married.

You are not-- It's called You Are Not Your Pain, and it was a eight-week meditation course which started to really, uh, give me pain relief, which I never thought it would.

And I started reading Re- I read Brené Brown's Rising Strong, which I found just profound, but I was also reading other books.

There was the other amazing book I wrote-- I read called Teach Us to Sit Still, and this was this really overachieving, intense guy writing about his meditation experience and chronic pain.

And there were just whole paragraphs in that book that were me, where I just learnt that I would ramp things up all the time, constantly ramp things up.

And on the drive back, I'm still like hurting and stressing and freaking out and shaming myself for feeling it and trying to put all the blame on her to make me feel better.

I remembered a book that one of my sisters had gifted me a few months before, and it was called Rising Strong by Brene Brown.

And I knew about Brene at the time, like, oh, she's a researcher, she talks about vulnerability.

And I was, again, in my late 20s and a dude, and I was like, not for me.