On Vulnerability

"The question, then, is not only how to uncover our fundamental tenderness and warmth but also how to abide there with the fragile, often bittersweet vulnerability. How can we relax and open to the uncertainty of it?"

From this article by Pema Chodron, in which she discusses how loss and heartbreak opens us up to warmth, but then how we snap our hearts shut soon after. In the days following 9/11, this was the feeling of vulnerability that prompted most people to treat each other with tenderness. Shortly thereafter, just days, really, that tenderness faded, and we all went back to being gruff, protected, sheltered. Hiding our softest parts.

We all have them, these tender spaces that very few people are allowed to see. Babies are born with them, even called soft spots, so delicate that you can see their hearts beating through their downy hair. The body itself wisely closes that soft space as the baby grows, and our heart buries itself deep into our chests.

As 2014 ends and a new year begins, February looms. February, the most bittersweet month on the calendar, mercifully short. The month I met my love, and the month I lost him thirteen years later (almost to the day we met, on the day of our first date). I have felt crabbish and small these last few months, thinking daily of Dane and Life After.

I can feel myself shrinking a bit. I have had a hard time looking strangers in the eye. I have had a hard time being open and vulnerable. More often as I write this blog, this blog that is supposed to be the purest expression of myself (by my own design, as much as I can, as honest and authentic as I can be), I have had to stop or delete altogether blogs written for an audience by some version of the self I would like to project.

I don't want that to be me in my work anymore. I assume there is an audience of some kind reading out there because I get your comments and analytic reports. I cannot write for an audience, though. I have to write for me and know that on some level it might resonate with someone. Being authentic and vulnerable here has been harder of late.

This is the time, Chodron says, that we should turn to each other. The time we feel the most vulnerable and anxious and scared is the best time to recognize that these are universal feelings that everyone has felt or is feeling or will feel. Instead of feeling connected, though, we get angry and withdraw or blame something/one else. We shrink into anger instead of expanding into love.

I don't want to be that person. I want to be open and vulnerable and trust that the people I meet will not hurt me (intentionally). I don't know how to do that except to just do that, but transparency goes against my nature, or at least the vision of myself.

" For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." 1 Corinthians 13: 12 (KJV)

But then also...

"Ignorance is regarding the impermanent and permanent, the impure as pure, the painful as pleasant, and the non-Self as the Self." Sutra 5, Book Two The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali

So I think I know who I am but maybe not so much, and this darkly clouded glass is ignorance and confusion. Chodron says that pain is an illuminating experience in the most spiritual sense of the word if we can manage to seize the opportunity to stay with the tendency towards warmth and light as the pain starts to fade.

All this to say, simply, I want to fall in love again, but I don't know if I am capable of letting myself be that open to another human.

That was hard to say. It took 653 words to get there. It's what I was referring to in this earlier post but literally could not type the words yet.

But as I think about falling in love again, I feel myself closing up. I referred to myself as "not a hugger" multiple times in settings when, in fact, I actually could have easily been a hugger and people wanted to hug me, but I threw up the barrier as much as if I had stacked bricks.

I don't know if I have the capacity to let go that much anymore. But I know I don't want to be alone.

What do you do when you want to do a thing you don't feel you can do?

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Courage. Shine On.

The word "courage" comes from the Latin cors, which means heart. So to be a courageous person is to do something with your whole heart. All in. Makes things pretty vulnerable, sometimes, when you throw your shoulders back and let your light shine on.

Or admit you're wrong (courage).

Or tell someone you love them (courage).

Or do something new (courage).

Or sometimes just get out of bed every day (courage).

I am suffering a lack of courage these days, which may sound odd, given that we are still in the midst of a major transition, and I am embarking upon adventures that are new to me, but it's true. As the very definition of an introvert, I am at my most courageous when I let people in. I can chat for hours about dumb stuff, make people feel like they really got to know me, but it's only a precious few people that get beyond the hard candy shell to my soft, gooey center.

Yuck. Oddly misplaced delicious candy metaphor. Sorry.

I thought I would have the courage to share what I wanted to share in this post, but I have sat on it for several days and just don't have it yet. Kind of like the time it took me 30 minutes (a lifetime!) to ask my mom if we could go bra shopping for the first time (in my defense, she should have known I needed one, but in her defense, I have a teenage girl that I am not so keen on having grow up either. So there's that). I think I maybe need a little more time.

So why post this?

To remind myself in the future that even though I stopped myself from being courageous, I still have it in me.

To remind other people maybe that courage doesn't have to roar. Sometimes it whispers, "I will."

I will.

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