Brené Brown wrote “I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t)” before she became Brené Brown. Long before the TED talk that broke the internet, before vulnerability became a word everyone used without understanding what it costs to actually practice it.
This is her first book. It’s Rawer. Unpolished. And written for women drowning in the quiet, relentless belief that they’re not enough and that if people really saw them, really knew them, they’d turn away.
The title alone breaks you open: that secret terror you carry that you’re failing, faking, barely holding it together while everyone else seems fine; you think it’s just you. That you’re uniquely broken. Uniquely inadequate. The only one who hasn’t figured out how to be a person yet.
But it isn’t just you. It’s all of us. Performing. Pretending. Terrified someone will see through the act.
And shame – that crushing, suffocating voice that says you are not enough; it thrives on that isolation. It grows in the silence. It feeds on the belief that your struggle is yours alone.
Brown spent years researching shame, trying to understand why it has such a vicious grip on women specifically. And what she discovered was this: shame dies when we stop hiding it. When we speak it out loud to someone who doesn’t flinch, doesn’t judge, doesn’t try to fix us – just says, quietly, me too.
This book is about that journey. From ‘what will people think?’ to ‘I am enough’. From curating a life that looks acceptable to risking one that feels real. From drowning in shame to learning how to breathe through it.
This book feels like sitting across from someone who’s been where you are and made it through. And Brown doesn’t write from above her struggles; she writes from inside them. She shares her own shame, her perfectionism, her terror of being ordinary, her journey toward believing she’s worthy even when she’s messy.
And she gives you tools. How to identify shame triggers. How to practice empathy instead of judgment. How to build communities where vulnerability isn’t punished but honored.
Read this if you’re exhausted from pretending. If you’re terrified people will discover you’re not as together as you seem. If you’ve spent your entire life asking ‘what will people think?’ and you’re ready – finally, desperately ready – to start asking ‘what do I think? What do I need? What do I want?’
Brené Brown won’t make shame disappear. But she’ll show you how to stop letting it have the last word.
And she’ll remind you, over and over, until you start to believe it: you’re not the only one struggling.
You just thought you were.