Vulnerability Feels Like...

"Love & War Tuesdays"

Tuesday's blog is reserved for discussions about acknowledging our desire for love, positioning ourselves for love to find us, risking vulnerability to nurture and maintain love and surviving love lost to find the strength to love again.

I do NOT suffer disappointment well.  At all.  I never have, even as a child.  I mean...who does, really?  My feelings get so hurt and I feel this tremendous regret for ever deciding to pull back the protective barrier that I pretty much keep in place to avoid exposing all the soft, precious, fearful and hopeful parts of me.  I know exactly where this all started, too!  While other children in my neighborhood were carefree and wrapped in security and protection, I was learning that if I was to survive the chaos in my home, I had to stay ready so I would not have to get ready.  That meant arms length distance for you and you and you.  Don't get too close, please and thank you!  Always go for the sure thing.  Have a back up plan for the back up plan.  Avoid taking any risks and if I must do so, a calculated risk is best (does a calculated risk even count as a risk?).  Depend on me and me alone.   

Because to me, vulnerability can feel like…free falling in a dream that doesn't end and leaves you breathless, worried and scared as you wait to hit the hard bottom. 

The thing is, though to live that way was absolutely exhausting for me.  And lonely.  And unfulfilling.  And all the other things that come with being overly cautious every single day of your life.  I guess you can say that kind of living really isn't living at all.  While people around me could easily have imagined all was well in my world I knew when things were still and quiet and I was left with my thoughts, I really desired more for my life.  I desired to be free, secure and connected and that could only come with my choosing to risk something to get something.  Like Erica and Tina say, "…if you wanna get what you never got, gotta do something that you never done!"  In order to have what I wanted I had to be willing and able to be what most of us at some point hate to be.  V U L N E R A B L E.  I had to have the courage to show up and be seen.  And I was scared out of my mind without a clue of how to make that happen in my life.    

See that?  That is what vulnerability feels like...

And so the work begins.  Unlearning what I have been taught about risking vulnerability is a slow and difficult process.  Changing my thinking and interrupting the messages I absorbed as a little girl takes every bit of strength I have when I am ready to put that protective wall up again.  But the more I practice being vulnerable, the better I get at it.  Whether it is finding my voice and advocating as a young leader in my workplace, risking failure with a new venture I have been afraid to undertake (this blog!), acknowledging the end of a friendship does indeed matter to me and it makes me incredibly sad, facing my mortality after experiencing the traumatic and unexpected death of a colleague or becoming interdependent in love in my 40's…its still a task.

It feels good to say I am getting better at giving myself permission to be vulnerable.  Of course there are times when it takes everything within me to not take 3 steps backwards as I am trying to take 2 steps forward.  But my mother didn't raise no punk, dammit!  And it is absolutely, positively, without a doubt worth the effort!  The pleasure that washes over my soul when I push myself to do what is necessary to have what I want is worth the fear and angst.  I now believe that when I risk vulnerability with people capable and worthy of meeting me where I am (and let's be clear...we can't go risking vulnerability all willy nilly with just any-old-body), it is highly likely these same people will risk the same with me.  I have accepted that I am literally not going to die if I risk vulnerability and suffer disappointment.  Instead, I will mourn and yet live on to risk vulnerability again and again.  And that is when the real living begins, right?  When we are able to put our all on the table with no guarantee that we will get anything at all in return?  That's living!  When we can lift the shades on our lives so others can have a clear view of who we are, what we need and what we can offer in return?  That's living!   
I.  Can.  Have.  What.  I.  Want!  And now with practice, to me vulnerability is beginning to feel like I am running barefoot through a lush, green field of flowers on the brightest, most warm and sunny day, as a slight warm breeze caresses my body, with air that is clear and I have energy enough to run and run and run and run and run and run and run… *without using my inhaler!* 

When was the last time you risked vulnerability to have what you want?

Brene' Brown has plenty to offer about the value of vulnerability in our lives.  Take a moment to familiarize yourself with her TEDTALK on "The Power of Vulnerability" by clicking on this link:  Vulnerability According to Brene'  
*she is amazing, by the way*