If you have a secret, and it's embarrassing to you, when you tell that story - you own it. It becomes yours, and no one can use it against you.
Interpretation
Sharing your embarrassing secrets empowers you by taking control of them.
This quote emphasizes the power of vulnerability and honesty. When you openly share a secret that embarrasses you, you transform that secret into a part of your narrative, thus diminishing its power over you. It reinforces the idea that owning your story allows you to reclaim your identity and shield yourself from potential judgment by others.
In practice
During a TED Talk about the power of vulnerability, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of owning one's narrative.
A belief in feminism is a belief in personal freedom - the freedom to live a life free of fear of violence, to select a fulfilling career and be compensated fairly, to choose when to start a family, to marry whom you love. I want everyone, regardless of gender, to live a life free of restriction or fear, able to pursue their own personal brand of happiness and fulfillment.
Real success and accomplishment, at whatever it is you are passionate about, requires real work. Real sacrifice. Real disappointment. Real failure. And it requires the ability to scrape your sorry ass up off the floor, stumble to your feet, wipe the rivulets of watery drool from your face, and do it again, like an obstinate toddler running against the wall with his head in a bucket.
I think people sleepwalk through their lives, and for me, I wanted to embrace everything. And that meant the agonizing pain and the transcendence, and you can't have one without the other.
I've said this before, and I'm sure there are people who disagree, but I feel like one of the reasons there aren't a lot more women in stand-up - and there are many more now; it's not parity, but it's getting there - is that women are not socialized to look stupid or silly. They're socialized to be pretty and precious.
For someone to say that marriage is only about procreation is a joke. I didn't marry my husband to have children. I married my husband because I love my husband.
Nothing really worth having is easy to get. The hard-fought battles, the goals won with sacrifice, are the ones that matter.
Together we have travelled a long road to be where we are today. This has been a road of struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression.
Someone said on social media that I was the son of Satan for being open about my sexuality. I told my mother, and she laughed and said, 'Well, what the hell does that make me?'
Continuously, we have to fight to defeat the primitive tendency towards the glorification of arms, the adulation of force, born of the illusion that injustice can be perpetuated by the capacity to kill, or that disputes are necessarily best resolved by resort to violent means.
I was six years old before I realized that there was something wrong with me... But I did have this crooked left leg, and my left foot was turned inward.
It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war." Defeat is worse." I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home.
Look how fears have presented themselves, so have supports and encouragements; yea, when I have started, even as it were at nothing else but my shadow, yet God, as being very tender of me, hath suffered me to be molested, but would with one Scripture or another, strengthen me against all; insomuch that I have often said, Were it awful, I could pray for greater trouble, for the greater comfort's sake.
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