📝 on vulnerability

The fear of embarrassment is a powerful disincentive. We’re social creatures with a deep-seated fear of feeling out-of-place or being made fun of—and in the awkward and anxious years of high school, facing the dual urges to somehow fit in and ‘find ourselves’ all at once, that fear runs deeper. We want to put ourselves ‘out there’, but that fear holds us back. Revealing something personal, something deeply tied to our identity, is an intensely vulnerable experience—and therefore a profoundly scary one.

And that fear comes from a place of reason. It’s easy to be dismissed, and to dismiss others, for being open or being themselves. Whether it’s making fun of someone for acting differently from everyone else, or putting someone down for being too emotional or too sensitive, we all judge and are judged. So we learn to live and act in a box, just doing things that seem normal enough to not put us in any risk. We learn not to be vulnerable.

At the same time, though, everyone can relate to the feeling of finding something we’re passionate about — something that gets you going in the morning, whether it’s an interesting class, a video game, a new hobby, even working out. But so often, it feels like being openly passionate about something runs in opposition to cool, calm personas that so many of us craft, and that can feel impossible to deal with.

To quickly shift to a personal anecdote: In my junior year, unbeknownst to me, the first school-wide literary magazine in my STEM-oriented school—EDEN—was founded. Early publications were small-scale, but as the magazine became more established, it quickly began attracting dozens of submissions for each new, bimonthly release. Nervously flipping through a journal of writing I’d kept on-and-off for the past few years, I decided to submit a poem to EDEN’s winter publication. Anxiety turned to excitement, though, when it was accepted. It was given to an editorial team to make suggestions, type-set meticulously, and I was welcomed into the fold: my photo and interview responses published on EDEN’s Instagram and website. I was ‘out there’—and as people from across the school read the piece and thoughtfully responded to it, I felt a wave of relief and gratitude.

But that initial step—submitting the piece, being vulnerable—was so, so hard to take, because vulnerability is still scary. Those poems felt like extensions of myself, like representations of my innermost thoughts and feelings, and sharing that felt like opening myself up. But thanks to the actions I took, people now knew me in this new context. Suddenly, I was connecting with people through poetry, talking with an earnestness and a passion that I never had before. Because of that step, I was asked to deliver an original poem at my class’ Junior Ring ceremony, and I’m so grateful to have had that experience.

And that passion originally came from vulnerability. I wouldn’t have gotten to the place that I am now with poetry and prose, expressing myself openly as a writer, if I hadn’t taken that leap of faith in the first place. Even as I started writing, too, the feeling and motivation that started those poems came from a place of vulnerability, of being open with myself in a way that I’m usually not. 

We try so hard to stop ourselves from opening up—we dismiss things as cliché, as overdone, as basic. We take our insecurities out on other people by making fun of them for being themselves, or being different. We live as jaded, meta-ironic shells of ourselves, because we’ve learned it’s easier than opening yourself up to feeling the intensity of it all.

But none of that sounds like any fun. I’ll take a life full of highs and lows, a life where I can let myself truly feel, where I can share passion and beauty with the people I love, where I can be vulnerable. To me, anything less feels like missing out.

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