That was no big deal. I'm often awake by 4am anyway, so deciding to get up just a little earlier to help a friend catch a flight (and save some carbon) was a no brainer. What it did mean, though, was that I had a lot of time to kill in the city between the early flight and the later one. It was a good opportunity to do my once-yearly Halifax errands, but because the first flight was so early, there were several hours when nothing was open yet.
I decided I would find a quiet parking lot and settle down and try to recoup a few zzzzs. I had a pillow and a blanket, so I tipped the passenger seat all the way back, got as comfy as I could and tried to snooze.
I was tired, but I couldn't fall asleep. Instead, I sat there, thinking.
What I thought about was vulnerability.
I've been thinking about vulnerability a lot lately – in the context of privilege and racialization (inspired by articles like this one), in the context of global peace and conflict, in the context of interpersonal relationships.
But I have been avoiding thinking about vulnerability in terms of me. I have a life-long habit of trying to keep my vulnerability at arms-length by looking at it through a telescope, at the safe distance of theory.
Sitting in that parking lot, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly sinking deep, deep, deep into my own vulnerability – acknowledging how easily hurt I am, and how frightened I feel of intimacy and rejection, of humiliation and shame, of saying or doing the "wrong" thing and getting laughed at or called out.
You call that a spiritual epiphany?
I posted on social media (the best way to share how you're feeling at 5am without disturbing anyone who isn't already awake) that I thought I had had a spiritual epiphany.That might seem like a pretty grand way to describe getting weepy in a parking lot, but that's how it felt.
It's not that I'd never felt vulnerable before, it's that I'd never felt open to feeling vulnerable before.
Always before, feeling vulnerable has felt like I'm about to fly into a million pieces, like my very survival is hanging in the balance. And that feeling is often followed by me lashing out against the person, thought or event that has stirred up my vulnerability, whether internal or external, by saying or thinking something really intolerant.
But in that parking lot, I sat and felt vulnerable, and I found that I could tolerate it. I felt relaxed and open in a way I haven't ever felt before. I felt sad, sure. And scared. And sad. (Like, really, really, really sad.)
As Franny Glass says in Franny and Zooey (my favourite book and the one from which I stole the title of this blog post*), "I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life." The fantastic part was that I didn't feel like I was going to disintegrate and I didn't flip the channel to anger or donuts or something else, anything else, to try to escape feeling vulnerable.
Micro/Macro
That felt monumental to me. My difficulties with bearing vulnerability have been the source of a lot of unhappiness in my life. My fear of vulnerability has often kept my heart closed. And while I've gotten pretty good at keeping my vulnerability shut down, when the pressure becomes too much to bear, I have at times been prompted me to say terrible things or hold hateful attitudes toward other people, things or experiences, as a way of comforting myself and giving myself some relief from my terror of my own vulnerability.This has had the unfortunate result of increasing the level of disconnection in my life. Which in turn makes me feel more afraid of being vulnerable.
I think I can see that same dynamic playing out in our culture at large. We have vilified vulnerability. We have made it shameful to need help, to struggle, to show weakness or even tenderness. We have divided ourselves from one another in little silos of apparent strength.
Disconnection flourishes and the solutions presented are: more stuff, more entertainment, more distractions.
It seems to me that all that buried vulnerability is pressure cooking away at both a personal and cultural level, bubbling up as selfishness, narcissism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, rape, violence, class conflict, ethnic conflict, war, genocide, etc.
No one wants to blink first.
We're scared of what might happen if we do.
We have been taught to expect that other people will reject, judge and/or exploit our vulnerability. We have been taught that help will not be available. Sometimes that is the way it is. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Hope
For a couple of weeks now, I've been grappling with all of this. Accessing my vulnerability in that parking lot felt liberating. Trying to maintain access to it has been uncomfortable, to say the least. And not very successful, either. I've shut myself down more times than a hospital ward with chronic C. difficile. Then this weekend, I was at the West Dublin Market, hanging out with many friends and loved ones.A dear friend I hadn't seen in a few weeks gave me a hug and suggested we hang on for a few extra breaths in each others arms.
There, there it was. That little catch and shudder through my chest, back and shoulders, the release of feeling safe in the arms of someone who loves me and is not afraid to hold me and all of my fault lines.
It's in moments like that one that I think there's hope that more of us, more of the time, can learn to celebrate our own and others' vulnerability and hold ourselves and each other in it. These are the moments that liberate us. I encourage you to seek them out and to help create them for others.
*The original line I adapted for my title is "...a perfectly communicable little vision of truth (lamb-chop division)"
