Facing Vulnerability

I write. I always have. I learned the best way to feel better is to write about my feelings or ideas. I learned this from my mom, who always wrote. I remember watching her lose herself in her writing. It was one of the few times that her face looked so relaxed, fulfilled, free of pain. She wrote for herself. It was from her modelling without her even knowing that I was watching, that I learned the importance of writing in my life. From the beginning, the words tumbled out of my pen naturally and awkwardly, but they were raw and real. They were for me only. As the years passed, I wrote more. I found I needed it and it soothed me, giving me a sense of release. Gradually, it became more of a yearning, a way for me to get my ideas out, which transformed into a calling. It began to fulfill me and light a fire in order to use my passion for writing to get what I really wanted to say out into the universe. It organized my thoughts and propelled them into clarity. I began to notice other writing, whether it was on the walls or in books, or even in people’s words. The words that I noticed from others began to enfold in my brain and inspire me causing me to question myself. Who were these authors? How did they become? Why can’t I? Why not now?

These questions continually floated to the forefront of my mind treading in the shallows of the realization that I, in fact, was a writer too. It fulfilled me and so I wrote more and it beckoned me into deeper waters without me even knowing it. The waters became deeper and darker, more unknown and uncomfortable. Still I moved forward until my writing flooded out of my journal and into the world. This was scary and it became an invisible wave pulling and leading me somewhere I had never been before. I almost turned back to the shallow waters of writing only meant for my eyes but I didn’t. I kept swimming towards the invisible waves that tossed me around. They were shifty, stifling, and unstable but they moved me and that was all I needed. It was vulnerability that did that for me. I soon realized that facing vulnerability was the only way to go if I wanted to get my writing out into the world, into the unknown. At least the unknown was somewhere.

Vulnerability is scary but it is also very exhilarating. For me, it is that frenzy between scary, excitement, shame, passion, comfort and extreme discomfort. It has become the very thing that drives my work and my life now. It has been the very thing that has made me happy because it is a sense of fulfillment that transforms into accomplishment. It pushes me to go further, try harder, fail, but then get stronger because of it. I have come to realize that the invitation of vulnerability rather than the avoidance has been what has finally pushed me to take action on my dreams.

I have also realized that vulnerability needs friends. It needs supportive people who can give you feedback. This feedback fuels ideas to push you to reflect on your work and ask questions to gain traction. This is so important. We are vulnerable because we are often afraid of what others will think. Yet who are we writing for? We are writing for ourselves but aren’t we also writing for others to read it? That is why we are vulnerable. We need a group of people to shine a different lens on our work, to feed the learning back to us, and to motivate us to be more precise and clear. We will also run into critics who do not appreciate our work as much. This is also inevitable and will challenge us to rewrite the story that we tell ourselves about their opinions. Rather than telling ourselves that we think that nobody likes our work and that we should just give up, we listen, we learn, and we make a choice on how we take the next step. We need their feedback too. They teach us resiliency. They drive us to take another look and perhaps absorb their ideas or toss them aside. It is our choice when we are the authors but they will make us stronger and change us in some way.

Writing can be done for ourselves and only ourselves. That may be what you choose to do as an author. This will also fulfill us and help us to sort through the layers of our thinking. However, vulnerability will surface in other places beyond our writing. It will nudge it’s way in to everything that we do. It will knock on the door of our work, our learning, our sports, our artistic talents, and our mindset. What will we do? Will we spend all of our energy pushing it out and avoiding it or will we open the door and let it challenge us? The choice is ours alone, it always has been.