vulnerability
this is about internalized trauma responses
Recently I’ve struggled with vulnerability, and this morning when I woke up I stayed in bed soaking in the sunlight from my apartment window before my best friend called. I was trying to make sense of it on the phone with her, “Why do we feel disgusting when we share a fact about ourselves?” I asked, after narrating a story about being haunted for weeks from conversations where I offered up an extra scooping of information about myself, and instantly felt white hot hate fill my body.
I noticed it happen in my writing most of all, which is the one place I come to be my most vulnerable, unfiltered version : I didn’t want to say things, and I didn’t want to feel things. I didn’t want people to know anything about me. I didn’t want my crush to google me, and read about my frankly ridiculous feelings for him, even though I wouldn’t have really cared at all before. I would’ve shamelessly rambled on about how when he talks to me, my brain freezes, and I feel like he can see in my eyes how much I like him. Now, I hate the idea of giving up the power that rests above vulnerability.
Brene Brown would disagree, and insist that there is actually power in vulnerability, and she has a whole podcast and Ted Talk about it. Taylor Swift would argue that her music is laced with just that : the free expression of embarrassing emotion. Emma Chamberlain would say : put weird facts about yourself into every conversation, and build an internet empire off of it. Expose yourself shamelessly because it’s cool. It’s authentic.
I’ve always been brave in my writing, if not so much my real life, but I stopped wanting to be. I just didn’t write truthfully and recklessly like every creative writing class will teach you on the first day to do. For most of my life, I placed being nice above all else, even my own feelings. I just liked making other people feel good, and comfortable, and in the instance I was slightly rude or unfriendly, I replayed those conversations in my head for longer than I should have, wishing they had gone differently. I thought niceness equaled likeability, and if other people liked me, I had permission to like myself.
But then, like a ribbon that ties the last decade together, friends and boys constantly reinstilled that I wasn’t interesting enough or pretty enough or worthy enough to hold onto, and found ways to carve exits from my life. I could be really kind, but it hurt to be repeatedly reminded that niceness would not be enough to keep the people I really loved from leaving me.
