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Brené Brown’s Advice for When You Feel Like Shutting Down
Acknowledge that this is supposed to suck
I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing right now. I mean, I do in the sense that I know how to wake up, make my bed, brush my teeth, and pour my coffee. But then I look at my planner and see a sea of unfamiliarity: Zoom meetings in lieu of sitting around a table. Online courses rather than classrooms. FaceTime dinner dates instead of shared appetizers at my favorite local restaurants. I’m trying to get used to this new way of existing, but I’ve been struggling to settle in.
The other day, I listened to the first episode of Brené Brown’s new podcast Unlocking Us, and she summed up what I’ve been feeling — what we’re all feeling right now — with a single acronym: FFT. It stands for “Fucking First Time” and refers to anything we do for the first time: start a job at a new company, learn a new skill, or cope with a global pandemic.
An FFT is hard by nature — it’s our fucking first time. Bad feelings are normal whenever we do something we’ve never done before. But we often forget that. As Brown points out, for a lot of us who are at least middle-aged (which she defines as “38 to death”) and have a certain amount of privilege, we’ve organized our lives so that we’re rarely forced to experience FFTs. Unless tragedy strikes or we…
