I think it's likely safe to say that Austin Channing Brown's "Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-Possession" isn't written with me in mind.

While nearly every writer wants to have as wide a reach as possible, it's also true that nearly every book has its target audience.

I'd venture to say that I am not the target reader for "Full of Myself."

Yet, here we are.

Now then, I could generalize myself as a middle-class white male. This description for the most part fits, though my indigenous ancestors (Choctaw, great-grandmother full-blooded) at least influence who I am and how I live.

That's not it, though.

It's the fact that I'm an adult male with multiple disabilities - spina bifida, double amputations, hydrocephalus, and a two-time cancer survivor. While I think I would have loved "Full of Myself" anyway, I think it's this body that I live in that allowed me to so richly connect with Brown's astute and piercing social insights presented alongside aching vulnerability and disciplined grasp for self-possession.

"Full of Myself" feels particularly vital precisely because of the time that we live in - a time in which anything related to DEI has become taboo and a time in which daring to challenge authority is met with a literal smackdown.

I can't help but think that if Brown had just focused on one or the other - social insight or self-discovery memoir - "Full of Myself" would have felt incomplete. Brown wisely leans into her self-possession precisely by owning her intelligence, wisdom, tenderness, and Black womanhood.

One can practically feel the soul-level fatigue in these pages, a fatigue born not out of disavowing her work but of realizing that her work must include herself. If she is to save democracy, she must simultaneously save herself.

From its earliest pages as Brown is let go from her position in DEI for a predominantly white church that appears committed to DEI until they actually have to practice DEI, "Full of Myself" brings to life Brown's experiences with the institutional and cultural structures that limit who Black women can be and where they fit in society (if they are allowed to fit). The early pages of "Full of Myself" are uncomfortable, as they should be, and my guess is Brown has already prepared herself for a new wave of haters either challenging her tone or her perceptions or her ideas or her, well, facts.

While I may not be comfortable with all of Brown's truths, they are her truths and they are universal truths and they are emotionally resonant and powerfully written here.

As "Full of Myself" blossoms, alongside Brown's own blossoming, it becomes a different sort of literary manifestation. She brings social justice to herself and to her body and to a sense of both justice and joy.

God, it's just so beautiful.

To reveal much more about "Full of Myself" is to ruin the gift of Austin Channing Brown's writing. We were largely introduced to her with her remarkable "I'm Still Here." With "Full of Myself," Brown owns herself with glorious revelation and soul-bursting exhilaration alongside the realities, often harsh, of what it means to live as a human being.

To say that I resonated with these truths would likely be an understatement, though my own experience is obviously much different as a person with significant disabilities who is too different, too weird, too disabled, too untouchable, and often times simply too much for this world that I live in.

I took away many truths and teachings from "Full of Myself," but perhaps most of all I was reminded that in this world that devalues everything I am the most radical act of social justice I can offer is to become full of myself.

Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic