Vulnerability Isn't a Glitch, It's a Guide

You don't need to heal it or evolve beyond it. You just need to notice it. It's showing you what matters to you.

I didn’t know a friend could betray you, until one day it happened.

I think it was the fourth grade, but childhood blends. We’d meet on our bikes in the chill of an early summer morning and ride in search of thrills. Sometimes it was a game of home run derby. Sometimes we’d get dessert before lunch at a nearby bread shop. Sometimes we started trouble, like the day we locked a bunch of bigger kids in an old garage until they got free and chased us home.

It was like that every day of a summertime whose beginning we couldn’t remember and whose ending we couldn’t fathom. It was a given. Until one morning, it wasn’t.

I showed up at his front door as usual, but another kid from our class was already there, and something was off. I can’t remember the specifics, but the gist of it was exceedingly memorable: I wasn’t welcome. The next day, when that kid was gone, I was welcome again, but the solidity of things was gone with him.

I realize now, it was never really there in the first place.

Vulnerability Is a Guide

We often think of vulnerability as either an action or an emotion. In Loveable, I described vulnerability as an act of authenticity:

…revealing your true self feels dangerous. Philosopher-theologian Peter Rollins tells a parable that illustrates the peril…

A panic-stricken man contacted a psychoanalyst because he was tormented by a peculiar malady: he thought he was seed on the ground. The psychoanalyst treated him five times a week for several years, until both agreed he was cured—he finally knew who he really was. Several weeks later, though, the psychoanalyst got a frantic call from the man, who cried, “Doctor, new neighbors have moved in next door! And they have chickens!” Confused, the psychoanalyst asked, “But you know you’re not seed, right?” To which the man responded, “Of course I know I’m not seed. But do the chickens know?”

It’s dangerous to announce ourselves, because there are chickens out there who won’t treat us like we’re worthy. We run the risk of getting pecked to pieces.

Vulnerability as an emotion, then, is the feeling of getting pecked to pieces.

However, vulnerability isn’t just an action or an emotion—it’s also the human condition.

For instance, at some point in life—for me, a summer morning around my fourth grade year—we all become aware how much we long for belonging. We know deep in our bones that a safe and steady togetherness is the most precious of things, and yet we have no control over the people we hope to belong to.

To have little power over big precious things is to be vulnerable.

Your lover’s affection. Your child’s safety. Your boss’s opinions. Your friend’s decisions. Your parent’s approval. Your reader’s loyalty. Your fellow motorist’s distractibility. Your grandparent’s diagnosis. The cost of groceries. Life matters to us, and we are, in countless ways, at its whim.

Vulnerability, though, isn’t a glitch, it’s a guide.

It’s not weakness. It doesn’t need to be healed. You can’t evolve beyond it. You just need to notice it, because it’s showing you what matters to you.

How do you know who you really love? You feel vulnerable when they really see you. How do you know what you really want to write? You feel vulnerable when you sit down to write it. How do you know you actually love the life you’re living? You feel vulnerable about everything that might end it.

Surrendering to Vulnerability

A couple weeks ago, my oldest son called us in a panic. It seemed he’d severed the top of his middle finger when a ceramic bowl shattered during dishwashing. We were a hundred miles away. There was nothing we could do.

He wrapped it in a tourniquet, called an Uber, and went to the emergency room. We waited.

That’s vulnerability.

The practice in such moments is to simply be in them without doing anything to them. To feel the fullness of those moments. To make yourself present to even this stretch of being human. To watch your mind trying to solve the problem, adorably oblivious to the fact that it’s wasting its time, because thoughts can’t reattach a finger. To discover that you can open up, even to this. That you can receive even this. That you can survive even this. That you can, in the midst of it, become more aware than ever of the things you treasure, and how little control you have over them.

Vulnerability will never feel like the safest way to live, but it starts to feel like the sanest way to live, because it’s in alignment with the reality of our humanity.

If I could go back in time and come alongside my younger self, as he walks slowly home from his friend’s house, wiping tears from his eyes, I wouldn’t try to talk him out of his vulnerability. Rather, I’d say, “You don’t become fully human when you find relationships that never hurt you. You become fully human when you can find your okayness in the midst of relationships that inevitably hurt you.”

He looks at me like I’m nuts. I can’t blame him. It’ll be decades before he can, every once in a while, feel both totally vulnerable and totally okay all at once.

“Hey,” I ask, “what do you say we head over to the bread shop and get one of those donut pockets with the chocolate pudding in the middle?”

Light replaces liquid in his eyes. Now I’m speaking his language. We turn toward the store.

I’m not taking him there for the sugar, though. I’m taking him there for the chance to walk with him for a while, whispering the whole way, “You’re okay, and everything’s going to be okay.”

Indeed, forty years later, that’s what I’m still doing.

And, at long last, he’s starting to believe me.

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Speaking of vulnerability (as an action), I was asked this question during a panel discussion with

Russell Nohelty

and

Elin Petronella

for

Christin Thieme

’s Content Spark Summit, right here on Substack:

Many creators are hesitant about vulnerability. How has it played a role in strengthening your community connection? What advice do you have?

It was a great discussion, and I know it will be invaluable to those who identify as creatives as well as to those who don’t, because we’re all trying to find that spark within us to animate what we do with our next moment, and to find our people.

Not to mention, if you register now you can view the whole Summit for free for the first 24 hours!